ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with digging into a spiritualist periodical archive. However, let me begin with a cinematic consideration. Traditional literary and cinematic stories in which a haunting takes place return to the connections of a person in the present with a subject long dead (a ghost), who needs to see about some unfinished business. It then becomes the duty of the living to discover that open wound of history. The living, seeking to oust this crossover of their time with the temporality of the dead, must effectively become researchers, scouring any manner of archive for clues about the wrongs that must be set right in order for the past to stop advancing simultaneously and devastatingly with the course of their own livelihood. We find an example of this in the film The Haunting in Connecticut (2009, dir. Peter Cornwell), which revisits one of the most widely circulated ‘true’ haunted house stories in US media in the late twentieth century: the allegations by the Snedeker family, who, upon moving into a rented property in Southington, Connecticut in 1986, were assailed by ghosts and demons alike. They later discovered that the house had been used as a funeral parlour long before their arrival.
