![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-ghosts\/files\/2017\/05\/converse-300x201-300x201.jpg\")
<\/p>\nGhost stories and perception of haunting at UVM and in the Burlington area influence how people interact with places\u00a0that are supposedly haunted, causing people to assign meaning to these spaces that\u00a0are reproduced over time. This theme is not exclusive to the Burlington community; it is something that exists across cultures around the world.<\/p>\n
Reported hauntings are strongly correlated with an experience\u00a0of trauma in a place, and the Burlington area is no exception. Whether it is\u00a0the death of a husband, suicide, or a historically stressful space, trauma and use of a space is heavily implicated in the existence of hauntings.<\/p>\n
Our findings also exemplified that the use and perception of place influences whether students\u00a0believe in a ghost story of their experience with a haunting. In numerous interviews, both archived and contemporary, we discovered that building renovations either stirred or stopped hauntings, and the spread of ghost stories. For example,\u00a0as the building of Converse aged, it became the “spooky” “old” “castle-y” building on campus, making a haunting seem possible. However, many noted\u00a0the older infrastructure of the building- such as the pipes- and used the idea of a haunting to “poke fun” at this.<\/p>\n
How much a place is frequented by faculty or students impacts the amount of activity found or reported there. In the 1970s and 1980s, the residents\u00a0of Converse Hall actively engaged with Henry, throwing him parties. As more residences halls opened, more student recreational space was added, and campus culture changed with modernity,\u00a0the engagement with hauntings and ghost stories diminished.<\/p>\n In both our scholarly framework and our contemporary research, we found that people who believe in ghosts don’t tend to come face-to-face with them, but instead experience their presence through unexplained disruptions within the space as well as in their bodies that occur. Perceptions of these disruptions (random banging on walls, flickering of lights, flushing of toilets when no one else is around, bad chills, cold spots, fear) are essential in determining whether a person believes in ghosts or not. The debate isn’t whether or not these things are occurring, it is over what is causing them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ghost stories and perception of haunting at UVM and in the Burlington area influence how people interact with places\u00a0that are supposedly haunted, causing people to assign meaning to these spaces that\u00a0are reproduced over time. This theme is not exclusive to the Burlington community; it is something that exists across cultures around the world. Reported hauntings … Continue reading Conclusion<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2922,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-14","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-ghosts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-ghosts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-ghosts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-ghosts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2922"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-ghosts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-ghosts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/14\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":286,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-ghosts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/14\/revisions\/286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-ghosts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-ghosts\/files\/2017\/05\/grassemount-1973.jpg\")