Editors Note: This is an archived blog post from 24/11/2012.

Everyone is invited to come and listen to stories about ghosts…

Thursday 29^th November 2012, 5pm (to last about an hour and a half)

The association room, Chetham’s School of Music, Long Millgate Manchester M3 1SB (near the cathedral/printworks/Victoria Station)

The ghost is just a sign, that tells you that a haunting is taking place

Ghosts are everywhere. From spaces associated with traumatic events to the imagined presence of the dead, ghosts pervade. We are haunted by the things that we overlook– by individual and collective memories and by people that we have known or used to be or might have been. Ghosts indicate a disturbance, a disruption and a collision of tenses. Regardless of the means by which they are brought into being – through technology, artwork, ritual, séance, imagination, literature, music, memorialisation, photographs, voice – they are made present in practice and apprehension. How can we account for these interruptions and apparitions? Why is it through these liminal agents, these ‘not-quite’ entities that difficult pasts emerge at a whisper? And, what of the age old love of the ghost story? How have perceptions of the ghost changed over time and what is the significance of this? What do ghosts look and feel like? In what ways have people come to terms with the ghostly? And are these presences benign or hostile?

Three short talks followed by discussion which will be recorded live featuring:

Sasha Handley – The Apparition of Mrs Veal and other stories (Ghosts and what they meant in the early modern era)

Stephen McNeilly – Swedenborg’s Summerhouse: voices from the past (Philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg’s visionary experiences)

Stephen Gordon – “I know not why the corpses of the dead should wander” (Zombies in the medieval period: some considerations)

Other performances to be confirmed

PLACES ARE LIMITED SO PLEASE EMAIL rosy.rickett@manchester.ac.uk to book