Caron Lipman, Co-habiting with Ghosts: Knowledge, Experience, Belief and the Domestic Uncanny. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2014, 248 pages, £60.00 hardcover. ISBN 9781409467724.

It is no secret that ghosts sell. Rival historical cities across the UK try to out-boast one another in terms of the number of phantoms per square mile. These are ghosts residing “somewhere elsewhere” (page 11); interesting curiosities that we can voyeuristically visit before retreating back to the safety of the home. When ghosts enter the domestic sphere, however, their uninvited uncanny presence is more problematic. The fiercely protected privacy of the concept of “home” is ridden blithely over by ghosts and their hauntings, disrupting a space we prefer to imagine is ours to control. The home for Caron Lipman, therefore, is the ideal space in which to explore the strange—yet, as she reveals, not so strange—relationship between people and ghosts.

Lipman reminds us that academics have largely learnt not to talk about such things. However, this is changing and in publishing this book she joins a growing group of social scientists who are talking about ghosts and the otherworldly. Co-habiting with Ghosts therefore adds to an emergent body of literature which is moving beyond the worn-out question “are ghosts real?”, and asking instead, what impact does experiencing “a ghost” (whatever that may or may not be) have for people in our rational modern world? Lipman is not attempting to explain away ghosts as many academics do, but rather takes the more difficult path of adopting a critical approach to trying to understand and make sense of them within the personal, social and spatial contexts they occur.

In the opening chapter, Lipman takes us on a trip through existing literature on place, ghosts, hauntings, the self, the social and the domestic. Much of this focuses on the work of key geographers, including Doreen Massey, Tim Edensor, Yi-Fu Tuan and Ben Anderson. However, it is not just geographers that Lipman introduces; historians and anthropologists are also included in this whistle-stop tour, offering rich and fertile ground in which to plant and nurture her own empirical evidence. She then introduces her qualitative empirical study with thirteen households across England and Wales, covering a range of outwardly very mundane settings including inner-city apartments, suburban semis, council properties and rural cottages. The book is subsequently divided into three parts: ‘Spaces and Times of the Haunted Home’; ‘Strategies of Cohabitation’; and ‘Belief, Knowledge and Experience’.

Part 1 explores how the uncanny is encountered as part of the background spatial and temporal texture of everyday domestic life. Ghosts become part of the everyday; they are intricately entangled in the rhythms and materialities of the home. This leads to Part 2, which explores in more depth the strategies of cohabitation that Lipman observed. Lipman reveals how people draw on the same cultural references and norms which they would in wider life in order to give their uncanny experiences a more coherent framework of meaning. For example, ghosts are assumed to operate according to certain codes of human morality, coincidentally much in line with the moral codes of the participants; ghosts are gendered and ascribed particularly “masculine” or “feminine” traits, such as anger or gentleness; the geographies of the home are ordered and rationalised in such a way as to instil “distance” between the living inhabitants and the ghosts; notions of “public” and “private” are drawn upon with people suggesting ghosts can demonstrate a respect for privacy. All these strategies offer a level of control and containment to keep the uncanny home more habitable.

Set against this fascinating backdrop of accommodation and distancing, Part 3 explores in more detail the meaning-making processes which result from domestic hauntings. Here it seems that despite the challenge such encounters pose to existing belief systems, it does not always require a redefinition of them. If an anomalous experience cannot easily be accommodated within an individual’s existing worldview, they may instead choose to allow the concrete knowledge of the experience to sit alongside a rational belief system which would appear to deny it. Experience, therefore, always hovers over explanation: “Even though I know I don’t know – I’m absolutely sure” (page 142).

Through the painstaking relaying of people’s experiences, emotions and affects, Lipman shows how—just like life in general—cohabiting with ghosts is something which we comprehend and make sense of with reference to previous understandings and experiences. She manages to weave an informative and illuminating path through people’s carefully orchestrated attempts to define, explain and make tangible the inexplicable and intangible. This is a book then about “the familiarity of the strange as well as the strangeness of the familiar” (page 1). Ordinary social relationships and cultural norms become a framing context for very unordinary encounters in the home, writing themselves through the narratives and experiences her participants share with her. Lipman demonstrates how through giving space, place and presence to ghosts and their hauntings they are granted “their own oblique but central presence” (page 2) in a renegotiated “privacy” of the home. And this is what is so beautifully refreshing about Lipman’s approach. Ghosts may indeed be “the strangest kind of stranger” (page 15); but she shows how their extraordinary presence is incorporated in very ordinary ways and becomes an intrinsic part of people’s everyday domestic geographies.

Lipman writes in an engaging style. She describes how, as a strategy for cohabitation, her participants often appear to adopt “a necessary playfulness, at least a bemused shrug” (page 197). This is an approach which academics themselves often find hard, yet which Lipman has grasped beautifully, making this a convincing, informative and entertaining read. Overall there is something rather magical about the way in which this book makes the extraordinary and the inexplicable very ordinary and acceptable. By the end of Part 3 I certainly felt I understood a lot more about the experience of domestic haunting, and about the tactics employed by people on the earthly plane to accommodate interruptions from the other side. The data provided is incredibly rich, and has the potential to significantly enhance our understanding of these lived experiences. However, it is not until the concluding chapter that Lipman finally starts to make some links to how her study enhances current understanding about the home and the uncanny, and the personal and social relationships woven between the two. In a book of this length, with clear sub-sections, there is room to accommodate an iterative presentation of data and conceptual theory building, rather than leaving all the conceptual reflection to the final chapter. There is insufficient room in just one chapter to do this justice and Lipman leaves hanging many of the ideas from the literature she introduced in Chapter 1. It therefore seems there is a missed opportunity in Co-habiting with Ghosts. The rich and fertile ground which we ploughed over in the first chapter was hardly returned to again and readers are left to reach their own interpretations and conclusions if they were seeking a clearer connecting narrative.

Lipman suggests her book offers “a number of insights into the experience of living in haunted homes. In turn, these insights contribute to our wider understandings of home and place, the material and immaterial, and the complex situating of selves and others” (page 28). Co-habiting with Ghosts certainly does offer excellent insights into the experience of living in haunted homes; and these do indeed have import on other sociological concepts and understandings. However, sadly, I feel the book fails to fully address the latter; simply because having offered these fabulous empirical insights, she never fully returns to spell out what this has added to the conceptual and theoretical ideas she was grappling with in the introductory chapter. As a researcher sympathetic to the topic I can draw these things out, but for readers who are less willing to accept this as a legitimate area of social science enquiry, these links should have been spelled out perhaps a bit more clearly. Whilst the book is rich in empirical evidence, therefore, it is limited in how far it manages to translate this into concrete conceptual advances. Nonetheless, it undoubtedly sets out an incredibly useful and much welcomed springboard for work in this field.

The book also leaves some other tantalising questions to ponder. The language of ownership used by the participants in Lipman’s study and by the author herself is interesting. These ghosts are referred to as “their ghosts”; which leaves me wondering, do ghosts belong to people? Can one assume or even imply ownership of a ghost? Do the ghosts belong to the home? Or do the ghosts belong to the bodies of the former people they are attached to? I was struck also in the final chapter, during Lipman’s discussion of the construction and adjustment of haunted narratives, that this would have offered an interesting opportunity for some self-reflection as researcher. How are participants constructing their narratives for her? Would they be told differently if their audience was the sceptic psychologist Richard Wiseman, or the “psychic detective” Tony Stockwell? The narratives are performative and socially aware, and some more focused reflection on this in relation to Lipman’s role as researcher, and former journalist, would have been interesting. Another interesting area hinted at by Lipman is the fact that many people will experience hauntings or encounter ghosts in their home but prefer not to label it as such, because of a reluctance to open a space for a potential otherworldly agency. The relationships experienced in these “denied” hauntings would be a fascinating area to explore as well. How do people’s processes of rationalisation and meaning making differ between those who label it as “haunting” and those who don’t? How do strategies of containment differ between households that acknowledge haunting and those that deny it? In short, by stepping away from the “repetitive and unresolved question of whether ghosts actually exist” (page 24), this book opens up a range of fascinating research questions about the place of the uncanny and otherworldly in our predominantly rationalised and disenchanted modern world.

Co-habiting with Ghosts gives convincing and well-argued space, place and presence to ghosts and their hauntings. The book also offers something of value to social science more generally. In Lipman’s exploration of people’s quest for coherence and meaning following ghostly encounters, she sheds useful light on the ways we do this in broader life contexts as well. In particular, it nicely portrays the tension (and harmony) between “home” as a private place of retreat, and “home” as a contested co-constructed space with permeable borders. As Lipman concludes, these hauntings may be “indeterminate” and “elusive”, nonetheless, they have real effect. Sharing your home with the uncanny is a cooperative endeavour in home-making, between the living and the deceased, which for many is actually a relatively “normal”, part of our sociological landscape; Lipman’s voice is a welcome contribution to this expanding debate and it is high time more social scientists take such a bold step into this unknown world.