ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on ways of seeing the derelict psychiatric asylum and its stigmatised past. It examines how former asylum use is remembered in the specific context of derelict asylum sites. The chapter draws inspiration from work on psychogeography and spectral geographies. In its contemporary form psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge to develop creative understandings of places. Despite its name, it has attracted limited attention within the discipline of geography. Visual imagery, blogs and internet forum discussions in the UK, Canada, USA and New Zealand are examined in order to reveal complex and nuanced understandings of the derelict asylum. These materials speak to the identification of places that, while simultaneously sites of play, danger and discovery, are also locations where particular images of the psychiatric asylum are recovered. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relevance of these virtual narratives for the framing of collective memories of the psychiatric asylum.
