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This is the first in our 2025 Haunted Heritage blog series. See all the entries in the series here.

If you’re looking for a spooky story to read leading up to Halloween, M.R. James is one of the best ghost story writers out there. ‘A View from the Hill’, published in 1925, has stuck with me more so than other of James’ stories. Perhaps this is in part because I recognize myself in the protagonist; a researcher who has the chance to see into the past, for better and worse. In the story he borrows an antique field-glass (i.e. binoculars) while on a walk with his friend, and from the eponymous hill sees the old Abbey (torn down during the English Reformation), and bodies hanging from the gibbet on nearby Gallows Hill. Reading this story disturbed me, but go read the story, or watch the 2005 adaptation before continuing if you’d like to avoid spoilers. The borrowed binoculars are filled with the exhumed bones of the dead, made by a deceased antiquarian to attempt to peer into the past “through dead men’s eyes” (James, pg. 560). After sighting the gibbet, and being told by his friend that they no longer exist, the protagonist climbs Gallows Hill on his own but cannot find the structure. It appears to have indeed long since rotted away. On Gallows Hill he meets with misfortune: “I was convinced that there was someone looking down on me from above—and not with any pleasant intent” he later tells his friend (James, pg 550). 

Haunted Heritage - on the blog

Throughout October the Heritage Saskatchewan blog will be dedicated to exploring ideas of haunting, spectres and ghosts, and heritage. We have invited people from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds to write about hauntology, the weird and the eerie experienced when researching heritage, and ghosts. In his book The Spectres of Marx, Jacques Derrida sparked interest in and coined the term "hauntology" (a portmanteau/pun on "ontology" that works in English but is clearer in French), referring to a study of the ghostly, liminal and "of what lingers" (Hall, np.). Hauntology, very broadly described, is a way to understand and research the past while paying attention to elements that are persistent and disruptive of the present. Being haunted, or experiencing a ghost is different from "remembering," which is something we choose to do and are able to dictate the parameters, inclusions, and limits. "Haunting" however is involuntary and happens to us; it is an experience that happens to us externally, from the other-than-human and unexpected (Edensor, pg. 837). Although she does not describe it this way, Candace Savage’s books Geography of Blood and Strangers in the House are hauntological; Savage experiences the collapsing of past and present and feels called by a force beyond her to seek justice for histories covered up by the dominant historical narrative. 

I also felt observed, as though the people who appeared in the newspapers were looking back at me, wondering what I was doing with their story.

As for myself, my first heritage job was reading archival newspapers for a project led not by historians but by social workers. It was fun, though dark; my task was to find mentions of the House of Industry and Refuge in 19th century newspapers from Kitchener, Ontario including the social context of that site. My supervisor, Dr. Sandy Hoy, treated the work differently than my history professors had instructed me, chiefly she was concerned for my wellbeing while reading the archives, and didn’t expect me to have an emotional detachment from the subjects of my research. In fact, she seemed to assume I would be affected by frequent horrible stories of my late 19th century neighbours. It made the work weightier and more present, a reminder that these were real people who lost babies, felt post-partum depression, were too old or infirmed to work, or were orphaned, and taken to the House of Industry and Refuge, not always for their own benefit. I also felt observed, as though the people who appeared in the newspapers were looking back at me, wondering what I was doing with their story.

In a public history class many years later my professor, Dr. David Dean, a public historian, described the sensation of the ghosts of those you are researching in the archive are watching over your shoulder. Meaning, as a researcher, you have a responsibility to the people you research. In his recent book he says “there is, of course, a heavy obligation in speaking for the dead, and ethics in telling tales out of school as it were, sharing stories belonging to others who may never have wanted them to be told” (Dean, pg. 50). This was the feeling I’d had in the archive as well. History and heritage have the potential to be voyeuristic.

Here’s a quick story. Once, several years ago, my 90 year-old grandmother was upset after coming home from her writing group. My grandmother lives in a small town just outside a major city. Six generations of my ancestors lived and died in that area, so my grandmother’s roots, local knowledge, and sense of place run deep. In her writing group someone, a recent retiree from the city, had found a salacious local history tidbit and was researching it in the local archive, how fun! The writing group was intrigued and impressed. My grandmother though was angry and distressed; the salacious story was about one of her ancestors and this stranger had no right to dig it up from where it had been buried! As far as research is concerned, there are a number of ethical questions this situation might raise, like who owns local history? When is long enough to tell our dark histories? Do we have the right to be forgotten? 

Despite Dean’s caution about history, he also says “in speaking for the dead, whatever right we have to do so, it is our reflectiveness, our honesty, and our truthfulness that makes it okay” (pg. 50). What strikes me about my grandmother’s situation is how my grandmother is haunted by her own ancestors, their actions influencing not only how she understands and relates to her community in the present, but how she sees herself in that community. In addition, mark how this stranger approached it as gossip and intrigue without care for the community and the lasting effects of that history. This was what made my social research project feel different than either my grandmother’s experience or the researcher in James’ ghost story. It was centered on care and justice. 

Hauntology

Hauntology is often tied to justice, and to a feeling of the uncanny in the present; what does this spectre of the past (literal or metaphorical) demand of us in the present? What am I called to do? In another important book on the subject of hauntology, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, scholar Avery Gordon says her interest in the approach was in order to find a way of researching and writing that could communicate the “the damage and the haunting of the historical alternatives and thus richly conjure, describe, narrate, and explain the liens, the costs, the forfeits, and the losses of modern systems of abusive power in their immediacy and worldly significance" (pg. xvii).

In M.R. James’ ghost story, the antiquarian who made the ghostly binoculars is described by a local as “intent … in rummaging and ransacking out all the ’istry of the neighbourhood” (pg. 553). James, himself a historian, seems to be asking about the responsibility of researching the past and how to do so with care and respect. The protagonist in James’ story respectfully buries the binoculars, which presumably ends the haunting and lets the ghosts rest; in the story the haunting and apparitions prompt the rematriation of their bodies (exhumed for scientific inquiry) in order to right an injustice. 

Haunting, as a mode of engagement or inquiry, questions the either/or of many empirical ways of knowing; ghosts are "neither soul nor body" (Derrida, pg. 5), i.e. not dead, not living. Past, present and future muddle together in ways that open new possibilities. In the case of Savage’s Geography of Blood this results in re-evaluation and re-presentation of history, positive new relationships and understanding. The historian in M.R. James’ story sees both past and present at once, overlapped as if time is not a solid thing one can stand in and be sure of, but a bit leaky and fluid, but the way he came to that knowledge, the stolen bodies of the dead, was without care, and the dead demanded justice. 

Join us as we explore the hauntings and hauntological experiences of our authors this month, and perhaps you’ll recall a few of your own along the way. The present may not be as stable as we’d like it to be, and ghosts are frequently escaping the past. The question for us is, are we open to hearing them, and how will we respond?

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David Siebert is the Communications - Research Manager for Heritage Saskatchewan. 

References

Dean, D. M. (2025). Performing public history: Case studies in historical storytelling. Routledge. 

Derrida, J. (2006). Specters of Marx (P. Kamuf, Trans.). Routledge. 

Edensor, T. (2005). The ghosts of industrial ruins: Ordering and disordering memory in excessive space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23(6), 829–849. https://doi.org/10.1068/d58j 

Gordon, A. (2011). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. University of Minnesota Press. 

Hall, L. (2025, April 11). On what lingers: Hauntology and memory. The Phenomenological Society. https://thephenomenologicalsociety.substack.com/p/on-what-lingers-hauntology-and-memory 

James, M. R. (2010). The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James. Project Gutenburg. https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/james-viewfromahill/james-viewfromahill-00-h.html