From ghost tours of historic battlefields to haunted pub crawls, cemetery sleepovers, bigfoot treks, UFO vigils, and ghost hunting weekends, dark tourism is big business. Paranormal tourism draws inspiration from diverse factors, including both local history and popular culture. It can give visitors new ways to understand a community’s past or its culture. However, issues of representation, historical distortion, indigenous erasure, and reinforcement of damaging sexual and gender stereotypes can cast a long shadow over even the quaintest small-town ghost tour. But what of locations and lore made famous by fiction or film? Some municipalities embrace notoriety, endorsing tours and installing commemorative plaques. Others work to dispel their paranormal reputations. A college newspaper in the 1970s published a hoax story claiming Lawrence, Kansas’s Stull Cemetery is a gateway to Hell. Stull cemetery became the site of raucous parties and frequent vandalism which distressed the families of the deceased buried there, a situation later exacerbated by the television series Supernatural in 2010. This paper considers three iconic horror film location - the so-called “Exorcist Steps” in Washington D.C. (The Exorcist, 1973), Point Pleasant, West Virginia (The Mothman Prophecies, 2002), and Burkittsville, Maryland (The Blair Witch Project, 1999) - to better understand how each has handled the consequences that have stemmed from having local legends, folklore or fakelore amplified onto an international stage via popular culture.
About the presenterRebecca Stone Gordon
M.S. in Audio Technology & Communications. M.A. in Public Anthropology (Biological Anthropology & Archaeology) in progress/pandemic paused. When not engaging in vocational or avocational pursuits related to horror literature & film, I’m a volunteer at the Smithsonian in the Anthropology Department. My publications include essays on the TV show Supernatural and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
I see dead people.