ABSTRACT
Analysing the localities of hauntings through history offers a detailed insight into alternate readings of landscapes as well as the memories and meanings past cultures attributed to them. Ghosts appearing at certain places took on the role of mediating between spatiality and temporality. Before the Reformations in the sixteenth century, ghosts were often associated with improper burials, injustice, premature death, and sin. In Protestant theology, it was considered impossible for the souls of the dead to return to the living. Additionally, concepts of the sacrality of space had changed. However, haunted places still played a crucial role in post-Reformation Europe when it came to structuring daily life. It was believed that violent deaths such as infanticides, suicides, or deaths in war inscribed themselves into landscapes and were made visible by the apparition of spirits. This belief did not contradict Protestant theology as long as the entities were not identified as the souls of the dead but rather as diabolical spectres. This was based on the argument that the devil liked to remember sinful acts and therefore lingered at places where violence had occurred. Haunted places were also invariably interconnected with anxieties about proper burial in cemeteries. Spirits marked the buried remains of the sinful dead or appeared whenever graves were disturbed. Conversely, early modern women and men understood haunted places as an indication of unjustly buried remains. Moreover, as people believed that spirits and ghosts guarded treasures, these entities allegedly revealed valuable goods hidden in the ground where the spirits appeared. As far as the lived religion concerning ghosts and landscapes is concerned, it is more fruitful to think in terms of continuity and change than radical incisions.
