Attunement is a sensitivity to ghosts and the ways in which we inspire them.

A ghost is, in its purest form, an agency discarnate. Something irrational, noumenal—a form of self brought to a limit, as if division by zero had an answer. But we rarely encounter ghosts in this pure form. A core tenet of historically informed ghost hunting is that ghosts are burdened with a surplus of identity.

Ghosts are not themselves draped in silver-toned light or crouched in groaning attics, waiting for us; rather, from out of the social discourse which has already framed the space of our imagination, we lend them form. They are mannered like us and their apparitional aspects have a mirror-like quality, precisely because they are alloyed with our own identities. We seek them out hoping that beneath their weird mannequin guises we’ll find a spirit beyond our ken.

The challenge is to distinguish between trans-dimensional ghosts who break into our world and trans-psychological ghosts, whom we project onto our world. The latter ignes fatui are the price we pay for the possibility of encountering the former, transcendent ghosts. Thus to be attuned to ghosts requires that we welcome them in their otherness and, conversely, engage in reflexive sociological analysis. But how do we welcome a ghost, a spectral monad wearing the psychic raiment of a lost memory?

Historically informed ghost hunting is rooted in the practice of hospitality. In this context hospitality means being available to the uncanny, an aesthetic sensitivity and suspension of disbelief that are together necessary conditions for ghosts to appear. An encounter with the uncanny gives rise to unreasonable feelings, unexpected sonorities between objects, dark and bright passing moods—it elicits more than fear. It is an arrest of prosaic terms, in which normative behaviors are defamiliarized and the ground of agency, whether belonging to you or the voice beyond, is occluded. In that eerie disjointedness, a ghost may co-inhabit the world, consummated through our belief.

For all the participants in a hunt, an element of self-enchantment is at play; the whole enterprise is playful, prompted by the question, What if ghosts are real? A side effect of treating the question seriously, of being available to the uncanny, is that ghosts are real, for a time. We accept at face value the reality of the impossible entity posited in the medium’s trance. In those spans, quotidian acts like speaking out loud (to an invisible force) are sublime. We are addressed to a spirit, tacitly suppressing the impulse to commute spectral data to sensory glitches. Our speaking-out-loud can rebound without conclusion, and it mostly does. To be haunted means to hear or see or feel something more than our own voices dissipating into the woodwork; attunement is the capacity to hear or see or feel something after we’ve accounted for the noise of our being present.