Harnessing the Shadows: Ghosts, Vampires, and Undying Relationships to Our Past

Vampires, and ghosts, and us–oh my! In the spirit world of the Halloween season, Drs. Pirok and Parker invite you to embrace the shadows that represent our deepest fears in the stately and hauntingly beautiful Mansion on Forsyth Park. Dr. Pirok will examine the relationship between the Southern Gothic literary tradition and the development of Savannah’s ghost tourism, a development that has earned Savannah the claim of being “the most haunted city” in the country. She will explore how our streets are not haunted by individual specters but, by and large, by a mythical vision of Savannah’s own past. Dr. Parker will further trace how mythical recollections of an antebellum South, replete with its own tormented history, contribute to the post-emancipation stereotyping of Black people as vampiric predators. Together they will invite you to reconsider how stories of hauntings, vampires, and things undying shape our images of the past, our experiences of the present, and our apparitions of the future.https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/moveable-feast/1001/thumbnail.jp