Review of Elizabeth Taylor, 'Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American Campuses': (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.) Paper and cloth. P. ix + 241. ISBN 978-1-57806-944-1. Unjacketed Cloth. $US 50-00. ISBN 978-1-57806-995-8. Paper. $US 20-00.

Abstract

This somewhat unexpected volume, one by an associate professor of English at Bingham University, may indeed be said to be 'the first in depth study of Ghost Stories from American universities'. The volume treats an important and highly topical issue, namely how young adults (17-21) react to spatial and social change/ loss of safety at a peculiarly significant time in their lives, especially when they are exposed to institutional places old buildings, ones with disturbing/ traumatic human histories, suicides there and stories of excitement, mystery and danger. As well, and, despite new friends at hand, they are without their hitherto comforting support systems, and so, perforce, the more easily respond to the vibrations that lingering in those locations. What gives the study such intriguing insights is that writer and her informants - and these come from a score of named Universities - are all in the 'system', the former with years of responsible 'residential assistant' experience, and as having already published several 'single-motif' special pieces in this field. These focused on: sensory evidence; ghostly warnings; troubling encounters; desperate lovers, spectral Indians, etc. This material, now thoroughly integrated, is nicely rounded out with a meticulous 'Index of Tale Types and Motifs', the bulk falling between the standard E 230 and E 765 categories... and, interestingly, several of these have not been found by me in the better known (Australian) ghost lore collections. The writer's study covers a period of more than forty years, from the mid-1960's to 2006, and so it moves into the realms of electronic messages, he treatment however combining the social, psychological and the cultural. As well it records very faithfully so many students' explanations as to the significance of these/ such spectral phenomena.