Exhuming Ravenhood


Matthew Horrigan, Simon Fraser University

Movieworkers well know BC Housing's prohibition against "ground disturbing activity" at səmiq̓ʷəʔelə, the former Riverview psychiatric hospital. Here, I dig up Ravenhood, the proxy that police procedural Da Vinci's Inquest fabulated for Riverview, and ask: What value does haunting make? This project intersects sociologies of place and media production with aesthetics and art criticism, moving from a ghost criminology that articulates how movie business mines trauma stories, into a reflexive critique. Existing metasociological justifications for ghost criminology do little to account for hedonic attractions that researchers, like other spectators, have to hauntings, attractions that certain "true crime" venues like CBC’s Uncover have moved ahead in discussing. Examining how products of BC's film and television industry have mobilized local reputations, I argue that movies here have extracted a form of trauma capital, creating value by alienating images of decay. I further contend that, connecting scholarly investigations with media cultures, ghost criminology is a fraught but essential turn amid research on sites of violence. Both critical to acknowledge, and insistently confounding, haunting, which I define as the sense that a place will generate a retellable story, drives scholarship even while conditioning it.

This paper will be presented at the following session: