“There are things going bump in the night all over this town”: Gothic Tourism, Haunted London, and the Geographies of Haunted Space

Edwards, Alicia (2022) “There are things going bump in the night all over this town”: Gothic Tourism, Haunted London, and the Geographies of Haunted Space. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

London, with its historical legacy as a haunted space that dates back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, remains a top destination for global and domestic ghost tourists. Despite London’s thriving supernatural status and its consistent popularity with ghost tourists, there has yet to be a sustained study of, or dedicated edited volume on, the phenomenon of London ghost tourism and its history to date. My project represents an attempt to fill this lacuna. Using the eighteenth-century aesthetics of associationism as a point of departure, this thesis deploys a mixed or hybrid methodology to achieve three objectives: first, to provide original research by means of case studies on sites of hauntings, ghost tourism practices, and/or the use of ghosts in heritage; secondly, to offer an overview of London ghost tourism trends from the nineteenth century to the present day; and thirdly, to introduce select spatial and cultural theories to situate how haunted space and its associated tourism practices achieve a certain kind of “in-placeness”. In total, this study offers a thorough exploration of London ghost tourism practice from the nineteenth century to the present-day and argues that ghosts and hauntings are inextricably tied to place, alter our relationship to the urban landscape, and allow us, as either ‘armchair’ or in-person tourists, to navigate the liminal realm of real and imagined Gothic space. To achieve these objectives, each chapter situates a particular aspect of ghost tourism within the relevant London tradition—imaginative literary tours, walking tours, multimedia virtual tours, and so forth—and, then, deploys the methodology best suited to the phenomena under consideration. This interdisciplinary approach aims to provide an original theory of how Gothic and/or ghost tours engage with the supernatural in a way that is distinctive, imaginative, and sui generis.