Ghosts express the meaning of the sites they haunt.

A ghost may begin its journey as a kind of rumor. The social process by which this rumor fuses with local circumstances is complicated, but knowable. Artists, children playing at recess, historians, promoters, and countless others channel the social truth of a ghost, helping to attach it to a specific place. In some rare cases, the provenance of a ghost may be traced back to a known medium; in most cases, it emerges from out of our shared ghost-lore, which has evolved over generations. A core principle of historically informed ghost hunting is that to be investigated, a ghost must first be located within a sociocultural neighborhood.

A corollary to this principle is that we share space with ghosts. They haunt crossroads, seaside forts, abandoned homes, and remote hotels—any space whose communal significance is unstable or sunken. They do not occupy these spaces in the normal sense, but abide in them as a kind of potential. Ghosts are difficult to signify because, in part, they seem to exist outside of time in a spiritual stasis while also unfolding in time as a sequence of gestures (a haunting). A ghost is, in this way, like an algorithm or a mathematical function that may be meaningful in use, but whose existence as an independent object is ontologically fraught. The manner in which a ghost abides is a mystery; the character of its haunting is highly site dependent.