Dark histories and haunted heritage: supernatural storytelling in nineteenth- and twenty-first-century Portsmouth

Drawing upon Portsmouth as a study of historical and contemporary supernatural storytelling, this chapter divides into two sections. Firstly, it explores how the study of urban ghost lore can provide an alternative, localised understanding of urban spaces and places, and how those stories served to alter the meaning of local geographies. It also examines how ghost stories connected communities to imagined pasts and collective memories, retaining ideas of a boisterous and sometimes violent history that the town’s civic leaders sought to erase through its drive towards urban modernisation. The second half of the chapter then builds on these ideas about altered understandings of urban places, providing a brief outline of some of the scholarly and creative innovations being conducted in contemporary Portsmouth by the Supernatural Cities project. In doing so, this chapter seeks to reflect on why supernatural storytelling was and remains an important and adaptive urban cultural practice.