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Haunted Real Estate
A Feminist Re-visitation of the US Victorian Landscape
Acknowledgments
Haunted Real Estate. A Feminist Re-Visitation of the US Victorian Landscape started in the Fall 2017 Semester as a research on the Winchester Mystery House during the Colloquium I Seminar at the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture Program at Columbia University. I would like to first thank Felicity D. Scott, advisor of this thesis, for her excellent guidance and generosity throughout the whole process. This immense gratefulness extends to the whole CCCP core, especially Mark Wasiuta, and to Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, and my CCCP fellows: I cannot think of a more enriching context. It was a pleasure to start shaping the content with Andres Jaque in our continuous conversations in the Summer of 2018. This project had at home an indispensable interlocutor with Lluis Alexandre Casanovas Blanco. The content of the First Act of this thesis results from long hours of reading at Avery Library, and archival research at Houghton Library in Harvard University. The research on the Winchester Mystery House was possible thanks to Janan Boehme at the Winchester Mystery House and Cate Mills at History San Jose. The Epilogue derives from visits throughout the Hudson River and conversations held between September 2018 and April 2019 with Richard Ellis, Riley Hooker, Joseph Lombardi, and Tony Oursler who shared with me their unique approach to haunting. Thank you to Marta Cruañas for accompanying me and filming these excursions. Most of these trips have been possible thanks to the Buell Center Fellowship 2018. The project that gave rise to these results received the support of a fellowship from ”la Caixa” Foundation (ID 100010434). The fellowship code is LCF/ BQ/AA16/11580056
Paula Vilaplana de Miguel
Table of Contents FOREWORD: IN THREE PARTS ACT ONE: THE HOUSE THAT GHOSTS BUILT (AND MEDIUMS PERFORMED)
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|Screening Teleplasms. Trance and New Media in the Spiritualist Séance |The Medium-Cabinet-Ghost Ensemble |Modern Architectures for Sanitizing VictorianExcrescences
ACT TWO: WINCHESTERLAND. THE CRAFT OF THE HAUNTED HOUSE INDUSTRIAL ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX
|Terror is Building |Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Hauntings |The Craft of the Haunted House Industrial Entertainment Complex. A Guided Tour
EPILOGUE: Haunted Resistances
architectures of haunting, reflecting on the intersections between gender, real estate, and the occult that such spaces articulate. This thesis takes the form of a multimedia research project, combining visual and textual productions to address the different stages of the spectral occupation of North American houses, from the radical spirits of the nineteenth-century séance rooms to the speechless spectral bodies of contemporary paranormal attractions, stressing the specificities of these venues as disciplinary |Ghost Trouble. The birth of the Victorian case-studies first, then delving into their curatorial strategies as mediated experiences, Haunted House to finally explore contemporary materials that One of the publicity images for the blockbuster perform as resistances before this pervasive film Winchester (The House that ghosts built, imagery. By paralleling the media construction 2018) shows a female figure partially defaced, of these houses in popular culture with historical her head mutilated by the sudden emergence of accounts, we will expose how the transitional a house, a montage that collapses domestic and haunting of the house takes place. We will female psychological interiority [1]. The woman also uncover the agents implied in this change represents Sarah Pardee Winchester, heiress of and the significance of assimilating Victorian the Winchester Rifle Company, and the building, architecture to haunting as both a pleasurable the Winchester Mansion, a 160-room Victorian and morbid spectacle. And we will inevitably extravaganza also known as the Winchester wonder: is another form of haunting possible? Mystery House, located in San Jose, near San Francisco. The ingredients that compose the Winchester formula speak with some eloquence |Ghosts that rap, talk, and seep. about the logic of what I will call the Haunted House’s Entertainment Industrial Complex, and Empowerment and Spiritualism the commercial portrait of Sarah Winchester “While not all feminists were Spiritualists, disfigured by the house stands as a powerful all Spiritualists advocated women’s rights.” [2] synthesis of the problematic cohabitation of women and ghosts in the Victorian home. In 1848 the Fox Sisters revolutionized the The mixture of spirits, disrupted women, and modest town of Hydesville, near Rochester in Victorian dwellings is indeed a very successful New York, when they claimed the ability to formula that has kept the house afloat as a communicate with the ghost of a peddler that business for almost a century. But what makes once inhabited the place. The week following this place so appealing, and what does its this news, three hundred people queued outside success tell about the long-lasting association of their house to witness the manifestations. As the ghosts and Victorian houses, so often haunted girls asked questions to the spirit, he responded by the presence of female specters? with different sequences of rapping to provide Drawing on recent studies in film, either a negative or affirmative response. Soon economic theory, sociology, and gender, other beats would echo throughout the region
Foreword: In three parts
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Haunted Real Estate. Architectural Strategies for a Feminist Revisitation of the US Victorian Landscape explores the architectural dimension of Victorian
as the Fox sisters toured the country giving public demonstrations of their transmissions with the afterworld: mediumship proved to be contagious. This episode marks the emergence of
Spiritualism in the US, a product of Christianity in combination with Harmonialism and spirit communication. This movement rapidly spread throughout the country in response to a nineteenth-century society affected by the devastating effects of the Revolutionary War first, then the epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and tuberculosis [3]. Quakers, Shakers, Harmonialists, Adventists, Millerists, Mormons, and a multitude of other religious practices had spread along the Hudson River with the construction of the Eerie Canal in 1821, but it is Spiritualism that assembled the most significant mass, counting eleven million converts by the 1870s [4]. It is not only the belief in spirit communication that spread with Spiritualism but also the dream of a profound social and political reform. The historian Anne Braude suggests that the spatial and temporal coincidences in the appearance of the Suffragist and Spiritualist movements are not fortuitous given their geographical proximity —Seneca Falls and Hydesville— and the presence of characters endorsing both groups [5]. Following this thread, it seems necessary to read the channeling of ghosts in the Spiritualist practice as a politically engaged practice intersecting with social, civic, and sexual claims which situate women in a central position of the political debate. Submission and naiveté —these two qualities often attributed to female subjects— had traditionally tied women to the house preventing them from playing an active public role [6]. With the advent of Spiritualism, these reverted to favorable conditions: passivity allowed for the reception of alien spirits, while candor ensured women’s honesty, making them incapable of deception. In Spiritualist performances, mediums entered passive states of awareness during which they were no longer responsible for their words or acts since the spirits they impersonate were. Through trance lectures, mediums conveyed messages of otherworldly voices to discuss topics that included but were not limited to property laws, divorce, sexual rights, or female labor [7]. Spiritualist and trance lecturer Julia
Schlesinger called for women’s economic independence, Juliet Stillman discussed dress reform, and Victoria Woodhull lectured about sexual education for teenagers and advocated for licensed prostitution—she would later become the first woman to run for President of the US in 1872 with the Equal Rights Party [8]. Following the Rochester rappings, séances became a popular pastime during which the living and the dead shared the space of the Victorian parlor amidst a cheerful atmosphere. Turn-of-the-century psychic mediums developed a varied repertoire of mediumistic practices to deploy in the séance room, such as automatic writing, Spiritual painting, musical performances, as well as different forms of materializations. Not only did women acquire a new role within the house through this practice, but the house itself was reconfigured to operate as the privileged site for the mystic spectacle: a new building pattern of enlarged living rooms popularized in the nineteenth century favored the suitability of the private parlor as a semi-public venue and its capacity to host an audience. Any Victorian home could comfortably accommodate a Spiritualist séance: only a spacious room with dim light and a few furnishings were necessary —provided the psychic medium attended, too[9]. The first ghost of the Spiritualist wave appeared in a household taking three women as his vessel, and hence, these two elements, domestic sceneries and female bodies, would articulate the most radical claims of the movement putting domestic claims on the radar. The Victorian house was no longer a hermetic, private territory but a subversive arena that ghosts shaped, and female mediums performed.
[1] The Spierig Brothers, Winchester (2018; Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate, 2018), DVD. [2] Ann Braude, Radical Spirits. Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-century America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 3. [3] John J. Guthrie, Phillip Charles Lucas, and Gary Monroe, Cassadaga: The South’s Oldest Spiritualist Community (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), 8. [4] Mitch Horowitz, Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation (New York: Bantam Books, 2009), 57. [5] Anne Braude makes the connection between these two movements arguing that the Rochester Rappings take place shortly after the Declaration of Rights and Sentiment in Seneca in 1848 and that figures such as the Quaker abolitionist Amy Post are related to both movements. See: Ann Braude, Radical Spirits. Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-century America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013). [6] Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenthcentury America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 36. [7] Ibid, 47. Molly McGarry expands on the claims female mediums raised: “Spiritualists called for more than guarantees of property protection, suffrage, or citizenship. Spiritualists constructed a unique politics of the body, claiming sexual rights — especially “voluntary motherhood” — and focusing on dress, diet, and health.” [8] Victoria Woodhull, president of the American Association of Spiritualists, founded and lead the Cosmo-political Party along with the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. [9] Simone Natale, “The Medium on the Stage: Trance and Performance in Nineteenth-century Spiritualism,” Early Popular Visual Culture 9, no. 3 (2011).
|Haunted Real Estate: a feminist revisitation of the US Victorian landscape *Haunted Real Estate: A Feminist Re-visitation of the US Victorian Landscape acknowledges that the phenomenon of haunting is neither uniquely Western nor exclusively related to the Spiritualist movement. Spiritualism, as many have noted, builds on previous histories of witchcraft, hoodoo, divination, and other cultural precedents. Haunting is a multifaceted phenomenon that has developed differently throughout the United States territory, too. Due to the hyper-abundant and multiple forms of haunting this work centers on a very determined timeframe and location: the birth and expansion of Spiritualism in the United States between 1848 and 1924.
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In addition to attending to haunting as such, Haunted Real Estate analyzes the role architecture plays in supporting, framing, and disseminating the tension between gender and the occult enmeshed in Victorian domesticity, exploring the way the house operates and transforms to become the core of the Haunted House industrial Entertainment Complex and the way it facilitates certain narratives that have permeated popular culture to our day, and that we often consume uncritically.To this end, my project exploits the transmedia potential of haunted houses in three acts, building a constellation of documents of different nature ranging from drawings and models, to film sequences, in addition to the written historical and theoretical text that constitutes the basis of the production. A first act, The House that Ghosts Built (and Mediums Performed), delves into the tropes linking women to Victorian supernatural imagery from a historical and critical perspective, seeking alternative methodological and visual systems through which to revisit the epistemology of the haunted house. This section analyzes the configuration of the spaces in which spiritualist practice was performed, stressing their specificities and describing the furniture or apparatus that facilitate the transformation of the parlor into a semi-public technological room, often controlled by female operators. I will focus on the evolution of a particular device, the mediumistic cabinet,
that will permit me to establish a nexus between architecture and other visual histories, and ultimately relate this connection to the transition between the Victorian and the Modern styles in Architecture. This first act insists on the gendered performative qualities of the séance room, revisited in connection with further feminist performers and artists, from Carolee Schneeman to Noami Uman, a relationship that situates the Spiritualist séance in a genealogy of dissident art practices, claims born of which are still valid today. A second act, Winchesterland:
Dissecting the Haunted House Industrial Entertainment Complex reflects on haunted
houses as fabricated curatorial artifacts. Today, the US counts more than two thousand listed haunted attractions, including houses populated by an army of ghosts that solidifies the association between Victorian domestic architecture and the feminine channeling of spirits. These constitute a nation-wide network of historical locations that work in conjunction with the entertainment industry to compose a tendentious fictionalization of the history of haunting in the United States. Focusing on the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose as the paradigm of this pervasive industry, this section explores the technologies this specific venue puts in place and the discourses it conveys, speculating on new strategies to re-haunt this location with alternative narratives and methodologies. In addition to these two acts, Haunted Resistances, conceived as a visual epilogue, tracks the residues of the Spiritualist tradition throughout the Hudson River, its primary focus of expansion in the United States. From 1 Laveta Place in Nyack —declared haunted as a matter of law—to the Octagon House in Irvington this section looks at places and individuals that challenge the stereotypes associated with the presence of ghosts within the domestic realm and experience alternative forms of supernatural cohabitation in their everyday practices.
Ultimately, Haunted Real Estate aims to rethink the visual representations of the haunted house. Given that dominant discourses and aesthetics of objectivity do not suffice to convey an experience affected by the social, sexual, and environmental conditions, this thesis wants to discuss alternative formats, strategies, and media which can be developed to convey a multi-layered experience of haunting, raising the question of potential modes of inclusion of these histories in contemporary architectural discourses. Furthermore, my use of the term Real Estate underscores the inscription of these houses —and the resulting haunting of museums, séance stages, or properties for sale— as key products of a broader market economy where their value increases in relation with their spectacular capacities. Following Silvia Federici’s rewriting of witch hunting, now paralleled to the rising of capitalism, it seems crucial to frame haunted houses not only as cultural artifacts but to also attend their economic dimension and to read them as political devices that draw a calculated narrative regarding the inclusion of women in labor and property structures [10]. If ghosts, as Derrida points out, are always-already present, spatiotemporal hinges that connect absence and presence allowing for new reconfigurations, what can we learn from the ghosts of the US Victorian domestic landscape? [11]
[10] Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2014). [11] Jacques Derrida and Peggy Kamuf, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011).
Archival Sources DIGITAL ARCHIVES
- Victorian Popular Culture, Adam Mathiew Digital Archive - The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualism and Occult Periodicals
MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS -Brian, Denis, Eric John Dingwall, and Hudson
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Hoagland. Denis Brian Collection on Margery Crandon, 1974-1979, 1974. Houghton Library, Harvard University - Harry Houdini Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University - Playbills and Posters concerning Magic, Houghton Library, Harvard University - History San Jose, San Jose CA - California Room, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, San Jose CA
SPIRITUALIST PRESS - Banner of Light - Herald of Progress - Carrier Dove - Shekinah - The Tribune - Home Journal
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