Making Sense of the Paranormal: The Interactional Construction of Unexplained Experiences 3030884066, 9783030884062

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Making Sense of the Paranormal The Interactional Construction of Unexplained Experiences Rachael Ironside Robin Wooffitt

Making Sense of the Paranormal

Rachael Ironside • Robin Wooffitt

Making Sense of the Paranormal The Interactional Construction of Unexplained Experiences

Rachael Ironside School of Creative and Cultural Business Robert Gordon University Aberdeen, UK

Robin Wooffitt Department of Sociology University of York York, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-88406-2    ISBN 978-3-030-88407-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88407-9 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and ­transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Some of the arguments and analyses presented in this book have been reported in previously published journals in discourse and communication. We would therefore like to thank the publisher and editors of Discourse Studies for permission to use materials from ‘The Transgressive That: Making the World Uncanny’ (vol. 17(6), pp. 703–723). We would also like to thank the publisher and editor of Journal of Pragmatics for permission to use materials from ‘Discovering Strange Events in Empty Spaces: The Role of Multimodal Practice and the Interpretation of Paranormal Events’ (vol. 120, pp. 88–100). Additionally, we would like to acknowledge that data excerpts throughout this book have been previously published in Rachael Ironside’s doctoral thesis available through the White Rose eTheses Online repository; some excerpts in Chapter 5 of this book have also appeared in Text & Talk journal in ‘Feeling Spirits: Sharing Subjective Paranormal Experience Through Embodied Talk and Action’ (vol. 38(6), pp. 705–728) and Chapter 10, ‘The Self and the Supernatural’ in The Routledge International Handbook of Interactionism. We also acknowledge that data excerpts from ‘Telling the Moment: Seeing a UFO’ (vol. 24(2), pp. 239–258) in Narrative Inquiry have been used in our analysis. Finally, we would also like to thank Sally Wiggins for permission to use extracts from her corpus of mealtime interactions. v

Contents

1 Language, Embodiment and Anomalous Experience  1 2 The (Absent) Body in Research on Paranormal Phenomena 27 3 Talk, Bodies and Tools in Interaction with Spirits 53 4 What Is That? 69 5 Embodied Sense Making 93 6 Experiencing the (Anomalous) Moment123 Appendix141 Index143

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1 Language, Embodiment and Anomalous Experience

This book is a study of how people make sense of experiences so that they may come to be seen as anomalous, mysterious, paranormal or uncanny: moments in which we seem to encounter events or phenomena that challenge both orthodox scientific understandings of the world and many common-sense assumptions about the nature of reality. We are referring to experiences such as contact with spirits of the dead, apparently telepathic communication between people that seems to occur independently of the known senses and observations of unidentified objects and lights in the sky. We focus on one class of experience: ostensible encounters with spirits that occur as part of paranormal research group investigations. However, we argue that our findings can be generalised to a range of encounters with uncanny events. We use ‘uncanny’ here in the sense that Freud relied on in his analysis of the psychodynamic conditions that underpin unusual or disturbing experiences (Freud 1958[1919]). He took it as the opposite of the German work heimlich, which means, broadly, of the home or of a place. The antonym, unheimilich—for which the English translation is uncanny—therefore refers to things that are not of the home; they are physically, ontologically or epistemologically out of place. Uncanny © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Ironside, R. Wooffitt, Making Sense of the Paranormal, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88407-9_1

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events, then, are those in which something seems to have transgressed our understanding of how the world should be. Our empirical focus in this book is to explore how people react to experiences as they occur such that they are taken to have uncanny properties: for example, what do they say to others who might be present? How are ambiguous events interpreted, and their sense and importance negotiated in the moment? How do they describe what they are experiencing or seeing? To avoid repetition, we will use ‘anomalous’, ‘paranormal’ and ‘uncanny’ interchangeably. It is important to be clear, though, that we are agnostic as to the ultimate reality of anomalous experiences or phenomena. It is not our objective to support claims of, for example, post-­mortem communication with spirits and to prove the spirit world exists. Neither do we want to debunk reports and explain away claimed experiences by reference to misperception, wish-fulfilment or some deficit of cognitive reasoning. We are focused on how people react in words and gestures to experiences, which, to them, seem at least potentially mysterious. We explore how, through vocalised and embodied reactions, events in the environment come to have a paranormal or uncanny status conferred upon them. In this, our position parallels a perspective on scientific controversies. Researchers working in the sociology of scientific knowledge have had a long-standing interest in scientific controversies or in research in frontier areas of science. Initially, it was assumed that the sociologist’s task was to explain how it was that communities of scientists had at one point endorsed theories or empirical claims that subsequently came to be rejected or seen as false. Underlying this position was that arguments and theories which had prevailed were taken to have been successful because they more accurately captured the objective properties of the natural order, be that physical, chemical or biological. In this perspective, the sociological objective was simply to identify the social and cultural conditions that had led scientists in the past to make false claims. During the latter part of the 1960s and early part of the 1970s, the view emerged that sociology could and should ask more challenging questions. First, it was argued that it was necessary to study ongoing or ‘live’ controversies, and not retrospectively examine controversies that, according to conventional scientific wisdom, had been settled decisively.

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This was because emergence of a subsequent scientific consensus obscured the nature and dimensions of scientific debate out of which that consensus eventually emerged (Collins 1975; Collins and Pinch 1982; Gilbert and Mulkay 1984). There was also a strong argument in favour of a theoretical perspective in which the sociologist was required to suspend common sense, culturally available or scientifically accepted versions of what was true or false, to expose and investigate the ways in which knowledge claims were socially produced, negotiated, ratified or contested (Bloor 1976). This was a controversial position, both within the scientific community and amongst other sociologists working in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). Some scientists felt that by suspending a commitment to objective reality, sociologists were being anti-science (e.g., Koertge 1998; Sokal and Bricmont 1998). However, some of the most influential studies of scientific research have been undertaken from this perspective (e.g., see Collins’ work on gravity wave detection, Collins 1998, 1999, 2010). Our approach to anomalous experiences parallels that taken by sociologists of science to scientific knowledge. They were interested in how scientists themselves came to see the world as having certain physical properties, but they did not try to arbitrate on whether the scientists were right or not. Similarly, we are interested in how people come to see an event or an experience as having distinctly mysterious qualities. Language is central to our project, because while we cannot observe what a person feels or thinks at the point they encounter something unusual, we can observe what they do publicly: what they say and what they do. Here is an example. The brief exchange that follows comes from recordings of conversations between Air Traffic Controllers and pilots of passenger aeroplanes about a series of bright flying objects the pilots had seen as they were flying over South-West Ireland in 2017. Throughout the exchanges, there is the sense that the pilots are deeply puzzled by the brightly lit objects. It is reported that they flew up past one aeroplane, thereby ruling out natural phenomena such as meteorites or debris from space burning up as it enters the atmosphere. And at another point, what sounds like a co-pilot can be heard offering an assessment of the speed of the objects that would rule out all but the most advanced technology. Their comments address the potentially anomalous nature of the lights.

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At one point in the recording, after one pilot (Pilot A) had reported seeing these unusual lights, the pilot of another flight (Pilot B) reported that he had also witnessed something unusual. Here is a simplified transcript of that exchange. Pilot B: Virgin seventy-six also saw that in our, er, eleven o’clock position, err, two bright lights ATC: Virgin that’s copied thank you Pilot A: Glad that wasn’t just me Pilot B: No er, yeah, very interesting that one

The pilots can hear each other, and the last two utterances, intended for each other as much as the Air Traffic Controller, are significant. Pilot A’s ‘Glad that wasn’t just me’ acknowledges that someone else had seen what he had seen. But his turn also displays relief, and his understanding that what they had both witnessed were not normal aerial phenomena. In addition, it confirms that it was not just he who had witnessed it, which means that, whatever it was, it was not misperception, lights reflecting on his cockpit windows and so on. It was something out there in the world. Pilot B’s turn reaffirms his contemporaneous sighting, and his phrase ‘very interesting that one’ acknowledges the anomalous quality of the lights. Moreover, the phrase ‘that one’ clearly does not refer to his assessment of one particular light, or one specific observation of the lights; rather, it is hearable as an assessment of an experience. (At the time of writing, the audio file of this exchange is posted on a site called The War Zone, available at https://www.thedrive.com/the-­war-­zone/24849/ listen-­as-­multiple-­airline-­pilots-­report-­very-­high-­speed-­unidentified-­ objects-­over-­ireland.) In this example, we do not know the pilots’ thoughts about their experiences nor do we know what the unusual lights really were. What we have are their utterances about the events they had witnessed, produced in the moment during their routine contacts with Air Traffic Control, and it is clear that their talk performs social actions. The pilots are tacitly negotiating the possible uncanny status of the events they had seen and their objective reality, independent of the perspective of any one witness.

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In their exchanges, they were establishing a provisional consensus understanding of a jointly shared anomalous experience. We do not treat language as merely reflecting a world ‘out there’, but as a vehicle through which common understandings of reality are claimed, accepted and negotiated (or contested, revised and rejected). This perspective draws from the later work of Wittgenstein (1953). He argued that language is not a logical system for the representation of objective reality, and urged instead that to understand how language is used we must prioritise the social contexts in which, and for which, we produce descriptions, accounts and claims (see also, Austin 1962, on speech acts). The focus on the constitutive nature of language has informed several social science approaches. It is central to ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967) and the study of how the sense of social action is accomplished through language-based tacit, practical reasoning skills and competencies. It informs varieties of discourse analysis (Gilbert and Mulkay 1984; Potter and Wetherell 1987) and discursive psychology (Edwards 1997; Edwards and Potter 1992). Although there are nuanced differences in these various empirical traditions (see Wooffitt 2005, for an overview of various perspectives), they all share an interest in the way that everyday language can be used to constitute social reality in specific contexts. It is a site in which interpretations of the world can be proposed, defended, negotiated or resisted. By interpretation we are not here referring to explicit claims, such as ‘I heard a noise and I think it was a spirit’. The interpretive practices we examine are much more subtle and woven through everyday speech acts, such as referring to something. Our argument is that the very act of noticing or referring to something in the environment has a constitutive or world-building implication. It is not that an event occurs, and it is noticed for the thing it is and then described or referred to accordingly. Rather, our argument is that ‘what the event is’ is to a significant degree made available through talk. To illustrate the constitutive feature of talk, consider the following transcript, which is taken from one of Sacks’ lectures (Sacks 1992). It comes from a recording of a naturally occurring conversation between two teenage boys.

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A: Corliss, the g-this chick I’m hanging around with now she’s real nice she’s got a real good personality, she’s not—y’know she’s just a real cute kid. B: mm hm A: And last night we went to the Mardi Gras together and we were both well we were both pooped because I- I ran in the track meet yesterday. And she- she’s in the girl’s tumbling team. I mean she doesn’t like it she’s just on it for the credits. (From Sacks 1992, vol. I: 44)

We will focus on two discourse activities in this short conversational exchange: there is a reference (in this case, to a person) and a report (of this person’s participation in an athletic activity). At the start of his first turn, speaker A refers to ‘Corliss, the g-this chick I’m hanging around with’. We take it that the word beginning with ‘g’, but which is then abandoned, was in fact ‘girl’. This self-repair (Schegloff et al. 1977) exposes word selection procedures in operation: ‘girl’ is initiated, and then replaced with ‘chick’. These two forms of reference have very different inferential consequences. ‘This chick’ establishes a sexually desirable or ‘cool’ quality to the speaker’s friend that reference to ‘this girl’ does not. This apparently minor moment of word selection and subsequent word substitution thereby performs delicate interpersonal work; he is portraying that he is the kind of person who goes out with ‘chicks’, and perhaps, more important, that he is the kind of person ‘chicks’ go out with. Speaker A goes on to report how Corliss is in a tumbling team. However, he extends that utterance to offer an instrumental reason for her participation in the tumbling team: ‘I mean she doesn’t like it she’s just on it for the credits’. This establishes that tumbling is not a reflection of her personality but is motivated by specific goals which are not related to the activity. By offering an instrumental motivation for her participation in tumbling, the speaker displays his orientation to the possibility that being a member of the tumbling team may be interpreted by his co-interactant as somehow ‘uncool’. (Note that he does not offer a similarly instrumental reason for his participation in track athletics; there is clearly a tacit ranking of the credibility of various sports activities in

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operation here.) His utterance thereby addresses and seeks to circumscribe the kinds of inferences about Corliss that his co-interactant might make. This short sequence of conversation is rich in interpretation, but none of it is explicit. It is embedded in mundane communicative practices such as word selection and turn design. Interpretation is implicit, drawing on seen but unnoticed cultural assumptions and tacit knowledge.

Social Science and Anomalous Experiences It is the objective of this book to explore the ways that anomalous experiences are ‘symbolically mediated through language and communication … inextricably enmeshed in the fabric of interpersonal actions in social settings’ (Murray and Wooffitt 2010: 1). In recent years there has been an increasing interest in paranormal experiences across the social sciences and humanities. In various ways, our approach to the language-based negotiation and interpretation of anomalous experiences as they occur develops various themes from this literature, and hopefully extends the range of empirical perspectives that can be developed in the study of anomalous experiences in contemporary cultures. Scholars from a range of disciplines use as their data people’s personal reports of their experiences. Depending on disciplinary tradition these reports may be known as memorates (Bullard 2010: 296; McClenon 2000), personal experience narratives or PENS (Clarke 2013), or plain old accounts (Waskul and Waskul 2016; Wooffitt 1992). Sometimes a more collective term is used: for example, MacKian describes, ‘[l]istening to the voices of the people I interviewed’ (MacKian 2012: 81). Research on anomalous phenomena using descriptions of personal experiences can be found in narrative analysis (Singleton 2002), folklore (Brunvand 1981; Hufford 1982), sociology (Hay 1987; Ohashi et al. 2013; Wooffitt 1991), psychology (Bartholomew and Howard 1998; Wilde and Murray 2010), anthropology (Hunter and Luke 2014; Young and Goulet 1994), psychoanalysis (Devereux 1953; Totten 2003) and psychical research and parapsychology (Gurney et al. 1886; Rhine 1981; Stevenson 1970).

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These kinds of studies have provided important information about the interpersonal, cultural and social features of reported anomalous events. But they tell us very little about how a particular moment in a person’s life comes to be interpreted as something extraordinary: something that can be reported as a paranormal event. The heavy reliance on retrospective accounts, such as those generated in interviews or made available in written form, needs to be balanced with analysis of actual moments in which people are confronted with events that seem to challenge common sense and scientific understanding of the world. We recognise that obtaining this kind of data is hugely problematic, as spontaneous experiences are, by their nature, unlikely to happen in the presence of a social scientist who just happens to be equipped with appropriate recording equipment. However, there are ways around this problem. Advances in mobile phone technology mean that many people can record and document their lives. People post massive volumes of recorded material onto social media sites such as YouTube. In this vast amount of material are recordings of events that seem to be, or are presented as, anomalous, supernatural, paranormal or spiritual. Of course, researchers need to be mindful of the possibility of hoaxes and editing, but it is possible to identify with some degree of confidence clips that are posted because the people recording the events were genuinely puzzled as to what exactly they were witnessing (and recording). For example, Woods and Wooffitt (2014) examined a video posted on YouTube of unusual lights in the night sky over the northwest of the United States. The video footage was accompanied by audio recording of the discussion of three people, one of whom was filming the lights. It is clear that the behaviour of the lights perplexed and excited them. Analysis showed how, through their reactions to the lights and their reactions to each other’s assessments, they arrived at a conclusion that this was something genuinely anomalous: a craft displaying capabilities beyond those of terrestrial aircraft. The status of this event as a tellable moment (Norrick 2005), its status as a candidate anomalous experience, emerged from their interactions with each other. The analyses in the following chapters focus mainly on video and audio recorded sessions of paranormal research groups as they conducted investigations of reputedly haunted sites. These recording were not made for

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the purpose of this (or any other) academic research project. As we explain later, the investigations were filmed simply to provide a record of the investigations for its members. Our academic interest in these materials developed some time after they had been collected. It is therefore serendipitous good fortune that they captured numerous moments when participants respond to unusual sounds or sensations and try to make sense of them. These were, then, naturally occurring events, in that they were not sought out to provide data for research but occurred in the routine activities of the group and were caught on camera. A key theme of many contemporary social science writings on paranormal experiences is the importance of physical places. The settings in which unusual or ghostly events occur are central to Waskul and Waskul’s (2016) ethnography of hauntings and spirit encounters. But they did not merely explore haunted houses, as their approach was more expansive and took account of the everyday landscapes out of which ghostly legends developed. Lepselter’s examination of UFO narratives in the United States is equally enriched by the way she conveys the peculiar resonances and melancholies of local geographies (Lepselter 2016). Holloway’s work on the ‘enchanted space’ of the séance room brings a more bounded understanding of the role of space in understanding anomalous experiences (Holloway 2006). A similarly narrower view of place is also present in studies of the performative representations of paranormal phenomena in art (Armstrong 2013; Sparkes 2013). But the physical dimensions of anomalous phenomena are not confined to spaces and places: there are bodies involved too. Drawing from psychoanalytic concepts such as the dynamic unconscious and transference, Pile has focused on the implications of telepathy for the relationship between social researcher and the research participant. Examining the ‘variable geometry’ (Pile 2012: 56) of unconscious communication, he explores affect and the physical embodiment of anomalous communication between people (Pile 2010; see also, Campbell and Pile 2010, 2015). We want to develop the focus on the embodied physical dimension of anomalous experiences. However, we don’t want to rely on a theoretically articulated view of the body and affect of the kind that is found in many sociological writings on embodiment (e.g., Blackman 2012), as these

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conceptually dense accounts often overlook the empirically grounded role of bodies in interaction (Reed and Wooffitt 2021). In the recordings of the paranormal group investigations, the body is central. People are spatially positioned with respect to others present; there are physical objects involved in the investigations, such as Gauss meters and other technical apparatus, and these may be handled, scrutinised and rearranged; participants move their heads towards the apparent source of unusual sounds; they touch their bodies as if in response to a spiritual contact; and they lay claim to interior bodily sensations and affective responses to their environment. We want to investigate how, at the moment when something odd seems to be happening, bodies and bodily sensations are invoked, managed and negotiated in interaction, and thereby become physical sites in which sense making occurs and on the basis of which claims to social reality are made (Shilling 2007). In the following chapters we will describe some features in the ways people make sense of ongoing moments that seem to suggest anomalous forces or entities. Our analysis explores patterns in the way people respond, verbally and physically, and thereby make sense of ostensibly paranormal events as they occur in the moment.

Our Analytical Approach The exchange between the pilots demonstrates that language is central to how an experience is witnessed, described and presented to others. And we have argued that the body, too, is important as individuals respond to, experience and share their sensations and feelings in the moment. To capture the interplay of talk and embodied action we have used Conversation Analytic techniques in our empirical analyses. Conversation Analysis (CA) emerged as an approach to studying naturally occurring interaction in the early 1960s. Until this point the study of talk and interaction had largely been viewed by social scientists as a reflection of macro-social processes, rather than an area worthy of serious scientific investigation. Earlier research focused on unobservable phenomena such as class and deviance, with talk featuring as a way in which these processes unfold (Hutchby and Wooffitt 2008). However, at this

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time two key areas of social science research were emerging which had a strong influence on the foundations of the CA approach. Firstly, Erving Goffman had started to present his work on the everyday interactions of individuals and how they present themselves (Goffman 1959), something he later coined the ‘interaction order’ (Goffman 1983). Goffman was interested in the production of talk (Goffman 1981) but also had a particular interest in the interactional features present during the presentation and management of the self (Goffman 1959, 1968), the social organisation of experience (Goffman 1974) and rules of social conduct (Goffman 1963). Secondly, Harold Garfinkel was developing a different approach to the study of everyday interaction, with a particular focus on how individuals accounted for their actions, an approach he called ethnomethodology. Garfinkel took the perspective that individuals were tacitly knowledgeable of their actions, and that it is this common-­sense knowledge that should be studied (Hutchby and Wooffitt 2008: 31). Famously, to study this, Garfinkel (1967: 44) used ‘breaching experiments’ to disrupt the natural order of ordinary routines, to examine how individuals coped with this deviation. For example, he took the common routine of asking an individual, ‘How are you?’, and invited his students to deviate from the expected answer of, ‘Okay’ or ‘Fine’. Instead, the experimenters would follow the question with further enquiry, adding complexity and confusion to a question that would ordinarily result in a straightforward response. He observed that this often resulted in embarrassment and a loss of control on the part of the questioner, thereby establishing that everyday actions are routinely produced and maintained, and depend on ‘common sense’ or tacit knowledge. The approach of Goffman and Garfinkel to the study of orderliness of sense-making processes marked a significant step in the recognition of mundane social action as a legitimate topic for social scientific inquiry. Yet their analytic observations, brilliantly insightful as they were, were idiosyncratic, reflecting their distinctive intellectual cast of mind. When Harvey Sacks, with colleagues Gail Jefferson and Emanuel Schegloff, began to develop the mode of analysis that later came to be known of CA, a distinctive characteristic was the emergence of a robust and generic set of empirical procedures.

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The development of CA first emerged when Harvey Sacks received a fellowship at the Centre for the Scientific Study of Suicide, Los Angeles, in 1963–1964 (Ten Have 1999: 6). It was here that he was given access to audio recordings of telephone calls made to the Suicide Prevention Centre. It is from these that Sacks was presented with his first puzzle, one that would influence his continuing interest in conversational order. The puzzle initially seemed simple: one of the priorities of the staff at the Suicide Prevention Centre was to gain the name of the individual calling; however, this was often not achieved. Sacks became interested not in why this occurred, but when it became apparent within the conversation that the staff member was not going to gain the name of the caller. From this initial interest, he realised that certain tacit strategies were used by the callers to avoid giving their name, and that these strategies appeared to be organised and structured within conversation. One example of this in the recorded data involved the use of the utterance ‘I can’t hear you’ to fill the space where callers would ordinarily be required to give their name, and therefore move the conversation forward (Sacks 1992: 16). It was this interactional function that interested Sacks and led him to develop the transformational view that language use was not simply a mechanism to transfer common-sense knowledge, but was a site in which orderly interpersonal actions were produced (Wooffitt 2005: 8). The methodological principles of Conversation Analysis were therefore rooted in the concept that talk-in-interaction is systematically organised and is produced methodically (Hutchby and Wooffitt 2008: 23). Through his research Sacks (1984) argued that talk is social action, and expressed concern that the study of talk-in-interaction has often been subsumed by the ‘big issues’ that dominated social science research. As such, Sacks called for the study of everyday talk which he suggests ‘may give an enormous understanding of the way humans do things and the kinds of objects they use to construct and order their affairs’ (Sacks 1984: 24). Furthermore, Sacks maintained that it was essential for talk-in-­ interaction to be analysed from naturally occurring data sets and through the process of ‘unmotivated looking’ (Sacks 1984). Thus, rather than focusing on the content of talk, or trying to determine the psychology or individual intention which supposedly underlines speech production, Conversation Analysis instead examines how turns are designed to

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perform actions, how are they responsive to prior turns and what sorts of interactional environments do they constitute for subsequent turns. Since the start, CA research has been based on the examination of audio recordings of everyday, naturally occurring conversations, sometimes from institutional settings, such as group therapy. From these early empirical investigations Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson produced analyses of basic practices of talk in social action that have proved foundational in the discipline, such as turn-taking (Sacks et al. 1974), repair and trouble management (Schegloff et al. 1977) and action sequences (Schegloff and Sacks 1973). In addition to her groundbreaking work on topics such as trouble telling, laughter and the organisation of overlapping talk, Jefferson also developed the fully comprehensive symbolic model of verbal transcription that is now used in CA, and which has been adopted by scholars researching in the dynamics of interaction in disciplines such as discursive psychology (Hepburn 2004), linguistics (Clift 2006) and speech therapy (Wilkinson 2014). Despite the initial focus on the structures of actions in ordinary conversation, CA has been used extensively to examine the formal interactional features of talk in a range of institutional contexts including courtrooms (Atkinson and Drew 1979), classrooms (McHoul 1978), news reporting (Clayman 2010) and medical consultations (Heath and Hindmarsh 2002; Heritage and Maynard 2006). All of these studies have identified features in talk that are relevant to their specific institutional settings. As the study of CA developed and the use of video technology in everyday life became more prominent, researchers also started to examine interaction beyond talk. By using video recordings, researchers have examined how the body is used alongside talk to achieve certain functions in different settings. Early studies examine the role of movement in establishing recipient gaze during conversation (Goodwin 1981) and how this influences when and who speaks next (Heath 1984). Researchers have also looked at how individuals communicate co-participation and frame interactional spaces in different settings such as casual groups (Kendon 1990), police interrogations (LeBaron and Streeck 1997) and meeting strangers in the street (Mondada 2009) through shifts in body position. An extensive body of work has also started to emerge around the relationship between space, bodies and talk and how this influences

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collaborative action and the ways that objects are seen and understood. In particular, work carried out by the Work, Interaction and Technology Research Centre at King’s College London has contributed significant findings to the study of situated activity and social interaction. They have for instance observed how the presence of others at an art gallery can influence which exhibits visitors decide to view (Vom Lehn et al. 2001; Svensson et al. 2009), and how they choose to see them (Vom Lehn 2006). The role of gesture has also received significant attention in recent years demonstrating the important role that gesture plays alongside talk in highlighting features of the local environment (Hindmarsh et al. 1998), developing a ‘way of seeing’ objects (Heath et al. 2002; Vom Lehn 2006) and illustrating abstract ideas or concepts (Haviland 2000; LeBaron and Streeck 2000; McNeill et al. 1993). The embodied role of gesture during interaction is considered important to the production of activity, and how experiences are communicated and shared with others. Conversation Analytic studies focus on the ‘ordinary’ and mundane settings of everyday life and institutional contexts and offer a valuable perspective into the ways in which social activity is produced. These studies suggest that talk and interaction are constructed routinely and socially, and in doing so achieve certain functions, whether that be performing a specific collaborative task or making sense of an experience or object. By examining data in this way, we can better understand the ways that individuals interact with and make sense of certain activities. In addition, although many of these studies examine occasions where physical objects are the point of focus or discussion, some do not. McNeill et al.’s (1993) study of ‘abstract deixis’ or the practice of pointing at nothing, for instance, illustrates the role of gesture in highlighting and communicating abstract ideas. As such, CA does not rely on having to observe the events in the world that people themselves claim to observe. Rather, it provides an empirically rigorous methodology by which to study the ways in which people themselves interact with respect to possibly anomalous events in their environment. It permits investigation of how they make sense of what is happening. It allows us, therefore, to remove ourselves from the requirement to arrive at an ontological verdict on whether something really happened or not, or was objectively paranormal or not.

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The study of the discourse of the paranormal from a CA perspective has been relatively minimal to date. However, some key studies have explored the verbal practices involved in presenting accounts of the supernatural. In his exploration of verbal accounts of paranormal experiences, Wooffitt (1991, 1992) describes a range of descriptive practices by which people reporting personal anomalous experiences perform a range of inferential and interactional tasks that, in various ways, work to establish their credibility as rational reporters, and the objective status of the events being reported. For example, he observed that as people come to the first mention of the paranormal event, they use a device he called ‘I was just doing X when Y’, where the ‘X’ component is a mundane action or state at the time that the paranormal event, the ‘Y’ component, was first noticed or observed. Here’s an example, from an interview with a person (‘S’) reporting the first of a series of encounters with an aggressive spirit. (From Wooffitt 1991: 269–270; modified transcription) 1  S:  2   3   4   5  

anyway I got to the kitchen door an’ as I—I had the teapot in my hand like this and I walked through the kitchen door— as I was going through the doorway           X I was just (.) jammed against the doorpost (.) like this    Y with the teapot sti(h)ll stu(h)ck out in front of me

Arguing against psychological explanations that people are merely reporting their memories of what they were doing at the time of the extraordinary event, Wooffitt shows how ostensibly trivial utterances such as ‘as I was going through the doorway’ work rhetorically. They provide the basis of a contrast structure, by which the ‘normal’ first part contrasts with, and thereby highlights, the strangeness of the extraordinary event. The way that the paranormal is depicted as intruding into routine activities demonstrates that the reporter was not actively seeking to experience something strange. Through this and other communicative practices, reporters discursively, but tacitly, build a case for their credibility and the objectivity of the event being reported. Other studies have subsequently confirmed Wooffitt’s argument that descriptions of paranormal experiences are designed to address possible

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sceptical alternative explanations for the experience reported. For example, Childs and Murray’s (2010) analysis of the discourse of amateur paranormal investigators identified a range of descriptive practices by which their interviewees implicitly made claims to logical thinking and rational thought process, psychological attributes essential in inoculating them against sceptical claims based on attributions of faulty reasoning or cognitive deficiency (see also, Avery and Antaki 1997; Castro 2010; Stockbridge and Wooffitt 2019). These studies suggest that when describing paranormal or unusual experiences individuals are aware of possible sceptical challenges and tacitly construct their accounts to minimise alternative, non-paranormal explanations and interpretations. By understanding the ways that people build their accounts of their experiences, we are better able to understand the delicate ways that individuals negotiate and make sense of ostensibly uncanny phenomena. Conversation Analysis allows us to develop a unique contribution to the study of paranormal experiences. It allows us to overcome some of the challenges associated with studying paranormal events, namely their spontaneous, subjective and ethereal nature, by focusing on what is observable and present, that is, the social activity taking place. It also allows us to examine the interactional processes that inform how people experience and report these events. Whilst this does not necessarily bring us closer to a conclusion as to the reality of the paranormal, it does allow us to explore how people make sense of experiences that may have profound sociological, cultural and psychological impacts.

The Data In the chapters that follow we will be describing some features in the ways that people make sense of uncanny events. To do so, we will be drawing upon data collected from video recordings of paranormal investigation groups between 2006 and 2010. By definition, paranormal investigation groups form part of a subculture who dedicate time researching, visiting and collecting evidence of paranormal activity in reputedly haunted locations. Since the early 2000s, the number of paranormal investigation groups has grown considerably, a rise often attributed to the

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prevalence of popular paranormal television (Hill 2011) and the growth of a spiritual quest culture (Eaton 2015; Ironside 2018). While the investigatory approach of paranormal groups differs along a continuum of spiritual and scientific methods (Eaton 2015; Ironside 2016), they are united by a common purpose—to experience, witness and record claims of paranormal phenomena. The paranormal investigations we examine in this book are a collection of video recordings made by the first author, Rachael Ironside. They were collected during her involvement in various paranormal investigations between 2006 and 2010 in both the northeast of Scotland and Yorkshire. Her involvement in these groups took place before commencing a doctoral research degree in which this data formed the basis of the analysis. As such, the data were not collected for the purpose of academic research, but rather for the purpose of sharing findings from the investigations with the paranormal group and wider public. The data contains footage or a variety of activities typical on paranormal investigations including séances, Ouija board sessions and the use of a variety of equipment associated with spiritual and scientific practice. The Ouija board constitutes a physical board inscribed with letters and numbers, usually in a circular or half-moon set up. On the board is a planchette or glass. Participants place a finger on the glass and pose questions to the spirits. The spirits’ responses are registered by movement of the glass or planchette as it spells out words or indicates numbers. A Gauss meter is a form of electro-magnetic field reader. The device alerts participants to electro-magnetic fluctuations in the environment (believed by some investigators to be a sign of spiritual presence) by emitting a high-pitched buzzing sound which increases and decreases in volume, depending on the strength of the field. Like the Gauss meter, the K2 meter also measures electro-magnetic fluctuations. Instead of emitting a sound, the strength of the field is indicated through a series of lights that illuminate. The Spirit Box scans FM and AM radio frequencies to create white noise. This device is used by investigators to communicate with spirits by capturing what is known as Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP), purported to be spirit voices transmitted through white noise. In the corpus, investigations were undertaken by groups varying from three participants up to ten. Investigations took place in a number of

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reputedly haunted locations and were conducted during the night. Consequently the footage is predominantly filmed using night vision cameras. The data we present in this book form selections of moments from within this footage in which the groups taking part in these activities display through talk or action that they are experiencing an ostensibly paranormal event. Due to the use of night vision cameras, which do not provide footage from which clear still images can be extracted for use in publication, we have primarily relied on transcriptions of the audio track and descriptions of gesture and body movement. Our reason for focusing on this data is that it presents a rare opportunity to explore paranormal experience occurring in the moment, and in the world beyond the confines of the parapsychology laboratory. As a result, while we cannot validate the paranormal claims made in the footage we can observe and study the interactions that take place around them. These observable moments of natural reactions and interactions between people, objects, the environment and the uncanny phenomena in question are rich sources of data for Conversation Analysis. Our transcripts are an essential resource in analysing how talk and action lead to collective understandings and interpretations of uncanny events. We draw upon an adapted version of the transcription system developed by Gail Jefferson. Transcription conventions in CA are more detailed than conventional orthographic transcription common to qualitative analysis of interview or focus group data. This is because in CA, it is assumed that no interactional events can be dismissed as unimportant or irrelevant, however trivial they appear. False starts to words, minor gaps between words and turns and even the simple act of drawing breath can have real consequences for the way in which interaction unfolds. As this book is not exclusively intended for the CA community, but also for a wider social science audience, we are only using a limited range of the Jefferson system. To those unfamiliar with CA, the transcripts can be quite daunting. To familiarise those new to CA with these transcription conventions, here is a short exchange from a paranormal investigation. (A full account of the transcription symbols we will be using can be found in the Appendix.) 91 92 93 94

A: A:

Great hh. [Ummm okay would you be able- would you be[(All group members look towards centre and put fingers on planchette) able to to touch me Gurt- I’m not afraid

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In this transcript the speaker is identified anonymously with a letter, ‘A’, and their speech is transcribed, including non-lexical sounds, such as the short breathy laugh/exhalation, which is captured by ‘hh.’ in the transcript. Speech that is cut off is indicated by the use of a hyphen, as in ‘would you be able-’, a turn which the speaker abandons but then restarts. At the same time as A says ‘Ummm’ the participants orient their bodies to the Ouija board in front of them and each places a finger on the planchette. In CA, square brackets are used to indicate where one turn begins in relation to an ongoing turn. We are using square brackets in bold to indicate where an embodied action occurs in relation to an ongoing verbal action. Identifying precisely when talk or embodied action occurs and what happens next is an important focus of CA transcription. All lines in the transcripts are numbered; in most cases, we will focus on a short section of a transcript, hence the numbers may not start at 1, as in this case. In the analytic chapters that follow, we examine data from the paranormal group investigations to identify how people come to interpret anomalies in their environment as having uncanny or other-worldly qualities; how language is used to recruit others to a particular understanding of ongoing events; how physical objects and spaces are made relevant to the interaction; and the ways in which reports of private bodily sensations are incorporated into moment-by-moment reactions to events in the groups’ environment. Throughout, our empirical focus is to describe the socially organised practices of embodied and verbal actions through which the groups’ members collaboratively constitute their social reality in that moment. In our concluding chapter, we step back from the detail of empirical analysis and try to situate the wider relevance of the approach to anomalies and social interaction that we have developed in our research. We begin, though, by describing how the body has been overlooked in research on a variety of paranormal or anomalous phenomena.

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Haviland, J.B. 2000. Pointing, Gesture Spaces, and Mental Maps. Language and Gesture 2: 13–46. Hay, D. 1987. Exploring Inner Space. London: Penguin. Heath, C. 1984. Participation in the Medical Consultation: The Co-Ordination of Verbal and Nonverbal Behaviour Between the Doctor and Patient. Sociology of Health and Illness 6 (3): 311–388. Heath, C., and J. Hindmarsh. 2002. Analysing Interaction. In Qualitative Research in Action, ed. T. May, 99–121. London: Sage. Heath, C., P. Luff, D. Vom Lehn, J. Hindmarsh, and J. Cleverly. 2002. Crafting Participation: Designing Ecologies, Configuring Experience. Visual Communication 1 (1): 9–33. Hepburn, A. 2004. Crying: Notes on Description, Transcription, and Interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction 37 (3): 251–290. Heritage, J., and D.W. Maynard, eds. 2006. Communication in Medical Care: Interaction Between Primary Care Physicians and Patients. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hill, A. 2011. Paranormal Media: Audiences, Spirits and Magic in Popular Culture. Oxfordshire: Routledge. Hindmarsh, J., M. Fraser, C. Heath, S. Benford, and C. Greenhalgh 1998. Fragmented Interaction: Establishing Mutual Orientation in Virtual Environments. In Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 217–226. ACM. Holloway, J. 2006. Enchanted Spaces: The Séance, Affect, and Geographies of Religion. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96 (1): 182–187. Hufford, D. 1982. The Terror that Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hunter, J., and D. Luke. 2014. Talking with the Spirits: Ethnographies from Between the Worlds. Daily Grail Publishing. Hutchby, I., and R. Wooffitt. 2008. Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ironside, R. 2016. Interactional Dynamics and the Production of Collective Experience: The Case of Paranormal Research Groups. Doctoral Dissertation, University of York. https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/13209/1/FINAL%20 THESIS_Rachael%20Ironside_May%202016_.pdf. ———. 2018. The Allure of Dark Tourism: Legend Tripping and Ghost Seeking in Dark Places. In The Supernatural in Society, Culture and History, ed. D. Waskul and M. Eaton, 95–115. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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Kendon, A. 1990. Conducting interaction: Patterns of Behavior in Focused. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Archive. Koertge, N. 1998. A House on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lebaron, C., and J. Streeck. 1997. Built Space and the Interactional Framing of Experience During a Murder Interrogation. Human Studies 20: 1–25. ———. 2000. Gestures, Knowledge, and the World. In Language and Gesture, ed. D. McNeill, 118–138. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lepselter, S. 2016. The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. MacKian, S. 2012. Everyday Spirituality: Social and Spatial Worlds of Enchantment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McClenon, J. 2000. Content Analysis of an Anomalous Memorate Collection: Testing Hypotheses Regarding Universal Features. Sociology of Religion 61 (2): 155–159. McHoul, A. 1978. The Organization of Turns at Formal Talk in the Classroom. Language in Society 7 (2): 183–213. McNeill, D., J. Cassell, and E.T. Levy. 1993. Abstract Deixis. Semiotica 95 (1–2): 5–20. Mondada, L. 2009. Emergent Focused Interactions in Public Places: A Systematic Analysis of the Multimodal Achievement of a Common Interactional Space. Journal of Pragmatics 41 (10): 1977–1997. Murray, C.D., and R. Wooffitt. 2010. Anomalous Experience and Qualitative Research: An Introduction to the Special Issue. Qualitative Research in Psychology 7 (1): 1–4. Norrick, N.R. 2005. The Dark Side of Tellability. Narrative Inquiry 15 (2): 323–343. Ohashi, Y., R. Wooffitt, C. Jackson, and Y. Nixon. 2013. Discourse, Culture, and Extraordinary Experiences: Observations from a Comparative, Qualitative Analysis of Japanese and UK English Accounts of Paranormal Phenomena. Western Journal of Communication 77 (4): 466–488. Pile, S. 2010. Intimate Distance: The Unconscious Dimensions of the Rapport Between Researcher and Researched. The Professional Geographer 62 (4): 483–495. ———. 2012. Distant Feelings: Telepathy and the Problem of Affect Transfer Over Distance. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1): 44–59. Potter, J., and M. Wetherell. 1987. Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage.

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Reed, D., and R. Wooffitt 2021. Embodiment, Relationality and Epistemics: Observations from Alexander Technique Training in Music Master Classes. Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385211007761. Rhine, L.E. 1981. The Invisible Picture: A Study of Psychic Experiences. North Carolina: McFarland. Sacks, H. 1984. Notes on Methodology. In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. J.M. Atkinson and J. Heritage, 21–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1992. Lectures on Conversation, Volumes I and II. Ed. G. Jefferson and E. A. Schegloff. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Sacks, H., E.A. Schegloff, and G. Jefferson. 1974. A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation. Language: 696–735. Schegloff, E., and H. Sacks. 1973. Opening Up Closings. Semiotica 8 (4): 289–327. Schegloff, E.A., G. Jefferson, and H. Sacks. 1977. The Preference for Self-­ Correction in the Organization of Repair in Conversation. Language 53 (2): 361–382. Shilling, C. 2007. Sociology and the Body: Classical Traditions and New Agendas. The Sociological Review 55 (1): 1–18. Singleton, A. 2002. The Importance of Narrative in Negotiating Otherworldly Experiences: The Case of Speaking in Tongues. Narrative Inquiry 12 (2): 351–373. Sokal, A.D., and J. Bricmont. 1998. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. New York: Picador. Sparkes, S. 2013. The Ghost Project: Manifesting Ghosts Through Visual Art and Creative Research. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures, ed. O. Jenzen and S.R. Munt, 377–390. Farnham: Ashgate. Stevenson, I. 1970. Characteristics of Cases of the Reincarnation Type in Turkey and Their Comparison with Cases in Two Other Cultures. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 11: 1–17. Stockbridge, G., and R. Wooffitt. 2019. Coincidence by Design. Qualitative Research 19 (4): 437–454. Svensson, M.S., P. Luff, and C. Heath. 2009. Embedding Instruction in Practice: Contingency and Collaboration During Surgical Training. Sociology of Health and Illness 31 (6): 889–906. Ten Have, P. 1999. A Doing Conversation Analysis: A Practical Guide. London and Thousand Oaks: Sage.

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2 The (Absent) Body in Research on Paranormal Phenomena

In the previous chapter we outlined our intention to analyse the ways in which participants’ bodies are centrally involved in the ways they make sense of events during paranormal investigations. Our argument is that sense-making practices are embodied interactional practices, just as much as they are verbal, and in this and subsequent chapters we outline some key features of the body as a site for, and tool in, interpretations of events on a moment-by-moment basis. The body is a relatively recent focus of sociological attention. For most of the discipline’s history the body was largely ignored in favour of the mind and its attributes in relation to institutions and macro social processes. Sociology has explored the self, identity, knowledge, ideas and ideologies more than embodiment, gesture and gaze. Yet, as many have argued, the body was implicit in these core sociological concerns. A social class actor misguided by false class consciousness is not an incorporeal form, but is an embodied actor; the concept of the looking glass self proposes that our sense of identity emerges from our interpretations of others’ interpretations of us, and these are displayed through gestures as much as they are through spoken words; and it is hard to imagine how a sociology of the family could be complete without an understanding of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Ironside, R. Wooffitt, Making Sense of the Paranormal, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88407-9_2

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the embodied affections, intimacies or aggressions that constitute everyday familial relationships. The body was always there, central to sociological concerns, yet never quite catching the gaze of the discipline; in Crossley’s words, the body was an absent presence (Crossley 2012). This is also true of research on anomalous experiences. The earliest formal investigations of paranormal claims were conducted by members of the Society for Psychical Research, which was founded in 1882 as a response to claims of contact with the dead associated with spiritualism and secular mediumship (Broughton 1991; Gauld 1968). Mediumship at the time was associated with a range of physical events, which, it was claimed, demonstrated the presence of spirits; many of these centred around, or involved, the body. In her historical account of the emergence of mediumship in England, Oppenheim describes the range of physical events which occur at séances. Some [mediums] specialized in particular effects, whereas others offered a broad repertoire of manifestations. That repertoire might include the materialization of entire spirit bodies—‘full form materialization’—in addition to the more commonplace rapping, table tilting, and the emergence of spirit hands. Reports of seances also told of furniture cavorting around the room, objects floating in the air, mediums levitating, musical instruments playing tunes by themselves, bells ringing, tambourines jangling, strange breezes blowing, weird lights glowing, alluring fragrances and ethereal music wafting through the air. From the bodies of some mediums a strange foamy, frothy or filmy substance, dubbed ectoplasm, might be seen to condense. (Oppenheim 1985: 8)

It could be argued that the core phenomena offered to demonstrate the authenticity of mediumship and the objective reality of spirits were embodied. Participants in séances felt the gentle caress of spirit hands upon their own. Ectoplasm would extrude from mediums’ bodies and form into physical spirit entities, capable (it was claimed) of interacting with the living bodies of people attending the séance. The medium Daniel Dunglas Home was reported to be able to levitate, hold hot coals without injury or pain and even stretch his body, thereby increasing his height (Lamont 2005). Given the clear centrality of embodied phenomenon to

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the phenomena that largely led to the formal study of paranormal claims, it is difficult to grasp how psychical research, and later, parapsychology, came to overlook the body. But the body was overlooked; as in sociology, in research on anomalous experiences the body has been an absent presence. This is not a minor matter. In the first part of this chapter, we explain why the body’s absent presence in research on anomalous experiences is significant. We do this by examining three areas of research: Ian Stevenson’s pioneering work on evidence for reincarnation; the ganzfeld studies of extrasensory perception in experimental parapsychology and the occurrence and impact of anomalous communications in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. In each case, we show the way the body is central to the phenomena under study, and how research on these experiences may be enriched by explicit attention to their embodied qualities. In this way we identify key features to explore in our analysis of embodied interactions in the paranormal group data.

Ian Stevenson and the Evidence for Reincarnation In this section we discuss Ian Stevenson’s decades-long investigation of evidence that a person’s personality, can, after they die, be reborn in another body. Trained as a psychiatrist, Stevenson worked at the University of Virginia School of Medicine (eventually going on to establish the Division of Perceptual Studies, founded specifically to study paranormal phenomena). He began collecting evidence that seemed to suggest the personality of a deceased person could be reborn in another body in 1953 (Stevenson 1970), and published numerous papers and books presenting his evidence and his interpretations. Towards the end of his career, he wrote two monographs. The first, titled Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (Stevenson 1997a), was, in his words, a ‘medical monograph’ (Stevenson 1997b: xiii), an exhaustive catalogue of his accumulated evidence for reincarnation (over 2000 pages across two volumes). At the same time, he

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published a shorter companion volume which excluded much of the extensive documentation, and instead focused on summary reports of hundreds of case studies (though some photographic evidence was included). It is this second volume, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (Stevenson 1997b), that we draw on to discuss his work on evidence for reincarnation. Although not unknown in the west, most of the cases that Stevenson and his colleagues investigated came from parts of the world where belief in reincarnation was a cultural tradition or core religious belief, such as regions of Turkey, Lebanon, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar (Burma, as it was then known) and West Africa. His commitment to investigating cases of possible reincarnation was quite extraordinary. He spent years travelling the world, interviewing children who claimed to be reincarnated personalities, and their families; he also attempted to locate and interview friends and family of the person now ostensibly reincarnated in a new body. In addition to interviews with relevant people, he collected more objective kinds of evidence, such as pathologists’ reports on bodies of people who had died in violent circumstances and whose personality seemed to continue in a reincarnated form. A striking feature of his data was that most cases involved children who claimed to remember a previous life. From the age of about two, up to until they were about eight, these children would speak of the past lives as if they were entirely real. So convinced were they of their prior existence that they would often find it difficult to distinguish between their current life and the one they claimed to have had previously. They would draw a distinction between their current parents and their parents before. They would describe their previously adult lives: which village or town they lived in, their family home, their husbands or wives and their children. Children would often recall the way that their previous life had ended. In fact A few children enact in their play the mode of death in the previous life, especially if it ended in suicide. One child who remembered a life that ended in suicidal hanging had the macabre habit of walking around with a piece of rope attached around his neck. Two children who remembered drowning themselves used to play at drowning. (Stevenson 1997b: 8)

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In many cases, the child would request that they visit the town or village where, in their previous life, they had lived. Parents would report that during these visits, the child seemed to know people and places they had not previously encountered, and about which they should have had no knowledge. For Stevenson, birth marks and defects on the body of the child were an important source of evidence about the reality of reincarnation. He reasoned that any correspondence between marks on the body of young children and marks on, or injuries to, the deceased person before their death (and which reflect the circumstances of their death) might be suggestive of the objective reality of some form of paranormal process, whereby a non-corporeal personality could manifest in another body. He was not interested in the mundane kinds of birth marks that most people have, but in those that were unusual or conspicuous: ‘hairless areas of puckered, scar-like tissue, often raised above surrounding tissues or depressed below them; a few are of decreased pigmentation. Some are bleeding or oozing when the baby is born’ (Stevenson 1997b: 3). He was also interested in more severe forms of bodily impairment, such as disabilities, and missing digits and limbs. Stevenson even considered the possibility that, were the reality of reincarnation confirmed by the evidence, that it would offer an account for why some people but not others are born with unusual marks on their body or are born with bodily defects. Furthermore, it would explain why these appeared on, or afflicted, that part of the body, as opposed to elsewhere. In his abridged account of the evidence for reincarnation, Stevenson provides hundreds of cases of birth marks and birth defects which were attributed to a previous personality. Here is an example that illustrates the evidential significance of birthmarks (and Stevenson’s pursuit of objective scientific evidence). Metin Köybaşi was born in the village of Hatun Köy, near Iskenderun, Turkey, on June 11, 1963. Even before his birth, he had provisionally identified, on the basis of dreams his parents had had, as the reincarnation of a relative (Haşim Köybasi), who had been killed some 5 months before, during a postelection riot in the village.

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At his birth Metin was found to have a birthmark on the right side of the front of his neck. It was a small area of increased pigmentation. No informant told me to what wound this birthmark corresponded, and I did not know until I examined the postmortem report on Haşim Köybasi. This showed that the bullet which killed Haşim had entered his head behind the left ear and almost exited on the right side of the front of the neck. It did not, however, fully penetrate the skin; as sometimes happens, the resistance of the skin stopped the bullet before it exited. The pathologist had made a small incision and extracted the bullet. The birthmark therefore corresponded to the pathologist’s postmortem wound. Like many other children … Metin showed powerful attitudes of vengefulness toward the man who had shot Haşim. He once tried to take his father’s gun and shoot this person, but was fortunately restrained. (Stevenson 1997b: 43–44)

Ostensibly, claims of reincarnation concern the non-corporeal personality, its continued existence despite the demise of the physical body, and processes which allow a return in the form of a new baby’s body. Stevenson’s work, however, focuses on the evidence provided by the body. His examination of correspondences between birth marks and defects on the living, and the various marks on the body of the deceased, provides evidence suggestive of paranormal processes which pose radical challenges to mainstream western scientific assumption of the material basis of consciousness and mind. But even if we take a sceptical view of the evidence compiled by Stevenson, the body is still relevant. Stevenson acknowledges that his cases come from countries and cultures in which there is acceptance of reincarnation. In these cultures, bodies of newborn babies may be inspected for signs of reincarnation. Indeed, he observes that in one interview a village elder lamented the fact the newer generation of parents no longer know how to inspect babies’ bodies for signs of a reincarnated personality. So, in a culture in which parents may be predisposed to observe the body as a site on which evidence of reincarnation may be inscribed in embodied form, we may conclude that claims to reincarnation are a result of self-fulfilling prophecy which arises from culturally informed expectations and beliefs. In both the sceptical and more convinced perspective, the body is central to our understanding reports of reincarnation.

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The role of the body requires more attention. Stevenson’s data were primarily interviews with the child, the parents, and friends and family of the deceased person, and medical evidence. What was missing was an investigation of the child’s body in everyday life. Given that the parents may have been raised in a culture predisposing them to believe in reincarnation, and in which the evidence for that process was to be found on the body, how did they interact with their child in the routine of family life? Were their expectations manifest in the way they held their child, or comported the body as they taught her how to tie laces or hold eating implements or a toothbrush? Were suspicions of reincarnation reflected in their gaze? How do parents talk to a child when there are grounds to believe that their child expresses the personality and memories of another? What are the intersecting verbal and embodied interactions through which the idea of ‘their’ child is negotiated, confirmed or resisted? How can parents see the child as their own when the body bears the wounds of another? If the sceptical view has merit, it seems obvious that these are the everyday moments out of which will emerge the confirmation that reincarnation has occurred. And for those who are persuaded by Stevenson’s evidence, then it is in these everyday embodied and verbal practices that the impact of reincarnation will be most keenly felt.

 he Ganzfeld Experiment T and Extrasensory Perception Parapsychology is the study of experiences such as telepathy and clairvoyance that suggest anomalous interaction between people and their environment. They are said to be anomalous in that they seem to occur outside the known sensorimotor channels of communication. Although it emerged from early investigation of mediumship and spontaneous cases of apparitional phenomena (Gurney et al. 1886), since the 1930s, parapsychology has adopted a distinctly scientific approach, reflecting the way that the parent discipline of psychology modelled itself on the methods of the natural sciences. The dominant methodological paradigm is the laboratory-based experiment, usually with members of the public as

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participants. The experimental orientation of the discipline can be seen in pretty much all serious introductions to or overviews of the field (e.g., Broughton 1991; Cardeña et  al. 2015; Edge et  al. 1986; Irwin 1997; Radin 1997). One of the key contemporary methodologies is the ganzfeld procedure; the description which follows is based on the procedure developed in a series of experiments conducted at the University of Edinburgh’s Koestler Parapsychology Unit during the 1990s (Honorton et al. 1990; Morris et al. 1995). The discussion that follows comes from a Conversation Analytic study of experimenter-subject interaction from the Edinburgh ganzfeld experiments (Wooffitt 2007; Wooffitt and Allistone 2008; Wooffitt and Holt 2010, 2011). During the experiment, a sender is shown a video clip randomly selected from a large database, and their task is to focus on an aspect of that clip and mentally project it to the participant in a different part of the building. After the sending period the participant is shown four video clips: the target and three others. On the basis of the images and sensations experienced during the sending phase, she or he has to nominate which clip they think the sender was trying to project. By chance, the participant will select the right clip 25% of the time, thereby giving the experimenters a secure baseline from which to assess the statistical significance of above chance rates of correct identification, if they occur. In the ganzfeld experiment research participants are placed in an environment that minimises sensory input. The theory is that psi (the term used in parapsychology to refer to the generic extrasensory capacity that may underpin all parapsychological phenomena) may be a weak form of signal transmission, and therefore the brain will be better able to detect that signal if is it in a state of reduced activity. To ensure the participant is relaxed and in a mild state of sensory deprivation, before the experiment they are played a relaxation tape through headphones. Through the actual sending period they are played white noise to further reduce sensory input. They are alone in a room, seated in a comfortable chair, reclining, sometimes prone. The room is illuminated by a soft red light, and translucent goggles (that resemble halved ping pong balls) are placed across the participant’s eyes to ensure there is a diffuse and homogenous

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light distribution over the retina. (An internet search for images related to ‘ganzfeld’ will illustrate the unusual conditions of a typical experiment.) Immediately we can see the role of the body: the participant’s body is isolated, separated from other bodies. They are in an unfamiliar environment, a room in a university building. The head is adorned with headphones and the translucent goggles, both of which are intended to induce a relaxed state in the mind and the body. Their bodies are positioned to facilitate relaxation. The experiment rests on a series of bodily regimes; and the participant’s experience of the experiment (which typically lasts over an hour) is entirely determined by the way their body is isolated from other bodies, positioned, illuminated and deprived of normal external stimuli. This was significant to the experiment in two ways, neither of which was systemically addressed in the published accounts of the experimental results. During the sending period, the participant is required to describe aloud the images, thoughts and experiences that impinged upon their consciousness. This introspective report is important to the experimenter; it was argued that if psi was a real but unusual form of communication, the reported imagery could provide clues as to how psi manifests in consciousness and interacts with other cognitive functions. The participants’ verbal reports of their experience during the sending period, called the mentations, are recorded. Analysis of the recordings reveals that on occasions the participants reflect on their own bodily states as a way of trying to make sense of the imagery and sensations they experience. Here is an extract from the start of one of the mentation reports. Extract 2.1 From Wooffitt and Holt 2011: 59. ‘P’ is the participant 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

P:

the first thing I notice is um for a start that my body doesn’t feel (1.3) quite as though I’m sitting in a chair it- it’s as though my arms feel this uh they were the other way up than they were to start off with and bu- I’m I’m not sort’ve sitting in the same position (1.5) that almost as though it e- the feeling that you might get if you’re sort’ve drifting in space (20.3) there seems to be some sort’ve impression of um: (1.3) I mean maybe it’s the it’s the noise that’s reminding me of the sea but s’rt’ve sitting on a- a- a- a- cliff on on on the top of a hill an-( 1.3) not so much hearing the sea as j’st s’rt’ve staring out at a big expanse of of of sea

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The participant is fully aware that they are taking part in an experiment to test for extrasensory communication and that someone is trying mentally to project images into their consciousness. They have been told that the imagery they experience during the sending period is invaluable because it might reveal how psi works. So, they are predisposed to consider their inner experience as potentially originating not in their own mind, but in the mind of someone else. It is unsurprising, therefore, that participants try to reason as to the source of their experiences, and the body is a key resource in that reasoning process. Here the participant reports a sense of dissociation between his inner experience and the position he knows his body to be in. This acknowledges the possibility that his internal mental sensations may be informed by something other than his objective bodily circumstances. Later he reports hearing the sound of the sea (lines 9 to 12). However, this is rationalised by reference to the white noise he is hearing through the headphones. In this case, a phenomenon of consciousness is explained in non-paranormal terms. In this short series of reports, then, the body is invoked both to facilitate a potential paranormal interpretation and to account for a sensation in rational, non-paranormal terms. During the mentation report, the experimenter listens (through headphones) and takes notes of what the participant said. At the end of the sending period, when the mentation report is complete, the experimenter engages via the headphones with the participants. At this point they go through the mentation review. This allows the experimenter to check the accuracy of their record of the mention, but it also provides the participant the opportunity to expand on and provide more details of their imagery during the sending period. The review consists of a series of stepwise phases: the experimenter reads out one item from their record, the participant confirms it (often by not saying anything) or corrects it and the experimenter moves on to the next item from their record. Sometimes the participants expand upon their imagery. When this occurs, the experimenter would usually receipt this expansion with ‘okay’ and invariably this marks the end of that expansion sequence, and they move on to the next item from the experimenter’s record. On occasion, the experimenter receipts the expansion with ‘mm hm’. When this happens, the participants speak again, thereby demonstrating

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that they hear the experimenter’s ‘mm hm’ as signalling that their prior expansion was somehow incomplete. In their subsequent talk in various ways, participants now cast doubt on the imagery they had just reported. In these doubt-marked expansion sequences (Wooffitt 2007) the body might be invoked to find a non-paranormal explanation for internal imagery. In the following case, in line 1 the experimenter (‘E’) receipts the confirmation of prior imagery (not shown in this transcript) and moves into the next item reported by the participant: imagery of a chair in a pyramid. Extract 2.2 From Wooffitt 2007: 485–486 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

E: P:

E: P:

E: P:

°˙(n)hh° °o:kay,° (tk).˙hh and then I think the final thing you said was uh:: (.) ˙h something like a chair (.) >in< in a pyramid? °(n)hh° yeah, >saw the< (.) the triangle thing again and then (.) °.˙h° >something< which reminded me of like, (.) um, (0.5) ˙h an upright chair like um:, (1.5) °(n)hhh° (.) um:? >°so-°< like a black chair, (1.4) m:hm (0.5) not like the one I’m sitting on or °anything° jus:::t °uh:° (3.5) >I don’t know,< it was >sort of< °uhm:(h)° (2.1) >like a s-< like a sort of padded chai(hh)r or something °˙h° >it was just< from the side that I saw it, so >it was like< an ell shape (.) °.˙h° [that = [°mhm° = suggested a chair:

Here the experimenter reports the last imagery from the mentation, an image of a ‘chair in a pyramid’. The participant expands upon this imagery, describing how this imagery relates to prior imagery, and then clarifying the image by reference to a physical chair. There is a gap of 1.5 seconds (line 6) then he says ‘>°so-°< like a black chair’, which summarises the prior turn. There is evidence that at this point, the participant has completed the turn: he does not say any more, and his last turn components did not project further talk was coming. When the experimenter acknowledges this expansion turn, he does not use ‘okay’ but says instead ‘m:hm’ (line 9). Sounds such as ‘mm hm’ and ‘uh huh’ might seem minor (and they are often omitted from social science research papers that use interview

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transcripts), but they do important work in interaction. They can be used by a speaker to display that they are passing on an opportunity to take a turn as there is an expectation that the speaker has more to say, or should say more (Jefferson 1984; Schegloff 1982). This is what happens in this extract: following the ‘mm hm’ expansion receipt, the participant resumes his expansion. But in this post-‘mm hm’ turn, his stance and tone are markedly different. He is now clearly circumspect about what the imagery actually was, and hesitant of his own confidence in what he had just moments before reported without hesitation or equivocation. There is an explicit doubt marker, ‘I don’t know’. The post-expansion turn is marked by perturbations and hesitations (such as intra-turn gaps and word stretching). But most relevant, he begins with a report of what the imagery is not like, and to do this he invokes his knowledge of his own body’s circumstances at that moment. Why does this matter? The design of the ganzfeld rests on the participant’s decision as to which video clip he or she thinks the sender was projecting. That decision is informed by their imagery during the sending phase. The participant’s uncertainty (displayed here as an interactional contingency, a response to one form of turn receipt over another) will impact on their decision during the judging phase. The success rate of the experiment may be influenced by the participant’s reasoning about their imagery and sensations, and the circumstances of their body at that moment are a key resource in that reasoning. The ganzfeld experimental methodology is important in parapsychology because it seems to offer replicable demonstration of extrasensory communication (Bem and Honorton 1994; Bierman 1995; Broughton and Alexander 1995; Hyman and Honorton 1986; Morris et al. 1995; Parker et al. 1998). But the relevant scientific literature on the ganzfeld studies, from both advocate and sceptic, does not address the role of the body in the research process. Yet the ganzfeld, like many classic social psychology experiments, is a form of participatory theatre (Brannigan 2004). While the participants in the ganzfeld were not deliberately misled about the purpose of the experiment (as happened, e.g., in Milgram’s obedience studies), they were required to play a part, to take on the role of experimental subject. And that role involved their physical isolation from other bodies, the manipulation of their body and the various

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procedures employed to prepare their bodies for the experiment. That series of embodied conditions offered a set of resources by which the participants could reason about their experiences, and that reasoning would then inform their choices in the crucial judging phase of the experiment. The scientific value of the ganzfeld methodology in determining the objective reality of psi is inextricably linked to the bodies of the participants in those experiments.

Psychoanalysis and the Porous Self It may seem odd that in a discussion of the body and anomalous experiences we turn to psychoanalysis, as it is taken to be concerned with mental health and the unconscious mind. However, anomalous forms of communication have been observed in psychoanalytic therapy since Freud, and the body is implicit in the way that psychoanalysis has addressed these ostensibly paranormal communications throughout its history. Sometimes, the body is explicitly tied to moments between patient and therapist that in other contexts would be classed as telepathic experiences. The key issue here is the relationship between the intersubjectivity of the patient and the therapist. There is evidence that these independent subjectivities may influence each other through means we do not yet understand. The implication of these interacting intersubjectivities is that our assumptions about self as an independent entity—a subjectivity residing in a physically discrete body—may be less secure than we think. Stolorow has argued that relatively recent psychoanalytic approaches, which emphasise the interaction between patient and therapist, suggest that psychological phenomena, including even unconscious conflicts and defenses, are understood as properties of an intersubjective system...taking form at the interface of interacting subjectivities. Inexorably, we are led to question the very concept of an isolated mind or psyche. (Stolorow 1991: 176)

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This is an exciting proposal. But if we are to move beyond thinking of the mind in isolation from other minds, then we have to acknowledge the physical form in which that isolation is taken to manifest: as a property of the brain, in a head. This is so obvious that it is easily overlooked. Our sense of self is, for most people, associated with the play of consciousness upon the world, an awareness that seems to be behind the eyes. The body, particularly the head, is the absent presence in proposals to treat the mind as a radically intersubjective and relational phenomenon. Historical studies of research into the unconscious mind have shown that there is a long-standing link between unusual forms of communication and phenomena now recognised as dissociative states (Crabtree 1993; Ellenberger 1970). Mesmer used the term rapport to capture the mysterious intimacies between therapist and patient in therapeutic consultations. Freud developed the concept of transference to capture affective relationships with his patient which seemed inexplicable in terms of normal means of communication. There is wide recognition that there is a relationship between paranormal communication and transference. Luckhurst argued that the concept of transference makes no sense without the concept of telepathy (Luckhurst 2002). Similarly, the text on the cover of an edited collection on psychoanalysis and the paranormal asks: ‘What is the medium through which counter-transference, projective identification, unconscious communication all happen—if not telepathy?’ (Totton 2003). When Freud began his therapeutic work, he would sit facing the patient, body facing body. But he later changed his practices, instead sitting behind the patient and out of sight. Although ostensibly this was designed to facilitate a more scientific and detached analysis of the patient’s free association (Campbell and Pile 2015), it would suggest that Freud recognised the embodied dimensions of the mysterious phenomena he tried to capture with the concept of transference, despite his ambivalence on the topic of telepathy (Campbell and Pile 2010; Massicotte 2014; Thurschwell 1999). Since Freud, there has been occasional investigation of telepathy-like experiences in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Early work was brought together in a collection in 1953 that included Freud’s writings on anomalous (or ‘occult’) phenomena (Devereux 1953). In 1956 the eminent psychoanalyst Michael Balint wrote of his experiences of telepathy in clinical

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settings (Balint 1956). Strean and Nelson (1962) argued that telepathic events in clinical practice conformed to same psychodynamic laws as unconscious mental activity. Weiler (1967) proposed that most psychotherapists have experienced psi-like events in therapy, and on the basis of his own data, he argued that the unconscious minds of two individuals can become aligned in a way not yet accounted for by Newtonian physics, a position supported by, among other psychoanalysts, Altman (2007), Cambray (2011), De Peyer (2016), Ehrenwald (1956), Eshel (2016), Major and Miller (1981), Meerloo (1968) and Rosenbaum (2011). There has been even greater interest in telepathy in what has come to be known as relational psychoanalysis, which has become a popular psychoanalytic approach since the 1980s. Here, the analytic focus is less on the therapist’s objective examination of the patient’s unconscious processes; indeed, some core Freudian theories are rejected (Wooffitt 2017). Instead, psychoanalytic therapy is viewed as the ‘science of the intersubjective’ (Stolorow and Atwood 1984: 41). The interplay and relationality of the patient’s and analyst’s subjective worlds are taken to be central in understanding what happens in therapy. Intersubjectivity in therapy is said to be an emergent property, independent of, and not reducible to, the combined subjectivities of the individual patient and analyst, and which is an independent agency (Altman 2002; Benjamin 2004; Ogden 2004). In short, it is argued that in therapy ‘the minds of analysand and analyst [are] essentially permeable to each other, with their confluence generating a “third subjectivity”, an intersubjectivity, distinctly different from the forms of subjectivity either brings, by itself, to the analytic encounter’ (Mitchell and Aron 1999: 460). The idea that minds are ‘essentially permeable’ leads us to Stolorow’s conclusion that ‘we are led to question the very concept of an isolated mind or psyche’ (Stolorow 1991: 176). And if minds are permeable, so too are the bodies that house them. In the relational psychoanalytic literature, there is an openness to the reality of telepathy in therapy (Burton 2012; De Peyer 2014, 2016; Wooffitt 2019) and a willingness to think critically about the view of the person as a separate entity bounded by the skin, apparently contained within the body. The embodied dimension to the permeability of minds is often reflected in the focus on embodied affect: how changes in sense of self are

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tied to intensely felt emotion and affect arising from the emergent intersubjectivity of the therapeutic session (Cimino and Correale 2005; Schneider and Grady 2014; Schwartz-Salant 1988; Silverman 1988). Reflecting on her own experience as group analyst, Roseneil draws attention to the role of the body in moments of connectedness: In thinking about the most puzzling, moving and mutative moments in my experiences as both member and conductor of group analytic groups— the moments when affect passes through people like electricity, when the atmosphere palpably changes, when members are able to grasp another’s psychic reality despite the inadequacy of language to represent its depth and complexity—it is not for concepts of individual and society that I reach, [but the language of ] relationality, of process, permeability, and trans-subjectivity. (Roseneil 2013: 207; emphasis added)

We are not making a case for the objective existence of telepathy in psychoanalytic therapy. But any assessment of that case has to take account of the body in moments that stand as evidence for the permeable and trans-subjective mind. Experiences that suggest anomalous communication are not merely forms of as yet unexplained information exchange; they are moments in which minds and bodies resonate with each other (Miller 2015), in which enigmatic intimacies are felt across the body (Pile 2012) and in which ‘the dialogue of the unconsciouses’ (Bass 2015) seems to manifest in corporeal form.

 he Body in Paranormal Group Investigations: T Some Preliminary Remarks In the previous sections we have outlined how the body has been an absent presence in the study or experience of paranormal phenomena, in the field, in the laboratory and in the therapeutic hour. The body is implicated in the phenomena being investigated and the way those phenomena are studied. We have emphasised that the body can be a resource by which people make sense of their experience and can inform their reflections on whether or not paranormal phenomena are occurring. We have

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shown that it is important not merely to recognise that the body is relevant, but that it is necessary to observe the body in naturally occurring interaction and to explore how the body intersects with the organisation of sense making in talk. To illustrate the kinds of empirical issues that we can explore in the embodied interactions in paranormal group investigations, we will briefly examine the sequence of events represented in the following extract. This comes from a paranormal investigation conducted by three participants, and they are using an Ouija board to communicate with spirits. By this stage in the investigation, the planchette has moved several times and has spelled out the word ‘Munthob’, which the participants take to be a name, a self-identification by the spirit presumed to be moving the planchette. In addition to the Ouija board, this group was also using a Gauss meter. The extract begins as two of the participants say ‘Munthob’ in overlap, nearly at the same time. Extract 2.3 Munthob 78–90 (throughout, to title the extracts, we use the words used by the original investigation group to refer to the event/investigation; line numbers to indicate where in a master transcript this sequence was taken) 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

B: A: C: B:

C: B:

H[ello Munthob [Munthob [(Gauss can be heard increasing in the background) [(B and A look at each other. B bites bottom lip) Its defini[tely Mu[nthorb [hhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Jesus [(B and A look at C) [(B Leans in towards table, closes eyes and exhales. A and C look at B) [You alright [(B's eyes squinting still leaning forwards) [Yeh, I think my eyes watering (3.0) Jesus:: [(B turns head to left and closes eyes briefly)

Immediately after ‘Munthob’ is said aloud, the Gauss meter starts to generate an increasingly loud noise. Participants A and B look towards each other, and C states, ‘It’s definitely Munthorb’ (line 82; C pronounces the name with a clear ‘r’ sound at the end), proposing that the spirit, in

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response to the use of its name, had manipulated the local environment in a way registered by the change in the meter’s volume. At this point B exhales heavily, and exclaims ‘Jesus’ whilst leaning towards the table and closing her eyes (lines 83 and 85). This attracts the attention of the other participants, A and C, who both turn their heads towards B. Following this activity, participant C asks if B is ‘alright’ (line 87) and B, still with her eyes squinted and leaning forwards, comments that her eyes are watering (line 89). This is a crucial moment in the investigation, as the spirit seems to be interacting with the group. A candidate spirit name has been identified, and then, seemingly in response to the articulation of that name, the output of the Gauss meter begins to increase. And it is here that B’s body becomes the focal point for group activities. She bites her bottom lip, leans forward and closes her eyes, in reaction her eyes also become teary, which is another bodily response. The earlier lengthy exhalation is also an embodied action, as it is a direct transfer of air from inside to outside the body. The leaning forward and the closed eyes then become the focus for A and C’s attention, and C’s explicit inquiry ‘you alright’ (line 87). This short sequence of talk and actions illustrates key issues in the use of the body in paranormal investigations. There is, first, the way that embodied actions are responsive to, and collaborate in, sequential organisation of talk. For example, in lines 78 and 79, B and C respond to the movement of the planchette over the letters of the Ouija which spelled out the name ‘Munthob’. B’s ‘Hello Munthob’ is launched fractionally before C’s ‘Munthob’. Though similar in design, these two utterances entail different implications as to what kinds of actions come next. One of the most noticeable things about conversation is that certain classes of utterances conventionally come in pairs. Examples of paired action sequences are: Greeting-greeting Question-answer Invitation-acceptance/refusal Offer-acceptance/refusal Throughout his early work developing Conversation Analysis, Harvey Sacks developed a formal account of the properties of what, at that time,

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he was calling adjacency pairs (Sacks 1992, Vol. 2: 521–532). They are ordered, that is, there is a recognisable difference between first parts and second parts of the pair, and in which given first pair parts require particular second parts (or a particular range of seconds). In other words, an invitation is the first part of the ‘invitation-response’ adjacency pair, and we recognise that invitations should be followed by a specific range of responses, mainly acceptances or declinations. An initial invitation should typically not be followed by an initial greeting, for instance. A basic norm of paired actions sequences was described by Schegloff and Sacks: given the recognisable production of a first pair part, on its first possible completion its speaker should stop and a next speaker should start and produce a second pair part from the pair type the first is recognisably a member of. (Schegloff and Sacks 1973: 295)

This structural property of paired actions is not a statement of empirical invariance; rather it points to the expectations that are attendant upon the production of first parts. There is a normative character to paired actions. That is, the production of a first part proposes that a relevant second part is conditionally relevant (Schegloff 1972). B’s ‘Hello Munthob’ is the first part of a greeting sequence. It exhibits confidence that there is a co-present spirit, named Munthob, and makes return greeting conditionally relevant. In paranormal investigations such as these, it is not expected that the spirits will interact verbally with the participants (hence the communicative resource of the Ouija board). Consequently, spirit communication is produced by other means, such as interfering with gadgets such as the Gauss meter. So, while the first part of a greeting sequence sets up a conditionally relevant spirit response, it is understood that that response will come through non-verbal communications. Participants will, then, be monitoring their environment for other events that might constitute the now relevant spirit response. However, A’s turn ‘Munthob’ (line 79) is more ambiguous. It may be the first part of a summons-answer sequence (as in ‘Mike’—‘What?). This would convey an equivalent degree of epistemic certainty as to the presence of the spirit. However, this turn may be doing different actions.

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The questioning intonation (indicated by the arrows) may be the initiation of an identification confirmation sequence, as in ‘are you Munthob?’, which invites confirmation or disconfirmation of the name. Alternatively, it may be that here A is simply clarifying the name produced from the board by saying it aloud (it is an unusual name). That is, it may be a form of confirmation check. Either way, there is epistemic ambiguity, and possible epistemic variance operating over these two turns. B’s turn is unambiguously premised on the assumption that it is known that there is a co-present spirit called Munthob, and that by implication, they were responsible for the increase in volume from the Gauss meter. A’s turn, however, is less epistemically certain; while it may be the first part of a summons-answer sequence, which conveys a degree of certainty about a spirit presence, it may also be heard as a more circumspect turn, either clarifying the name of the spirit or initiating a check on the name. As a consequence, there is also a sequential ambiguity about the subsequent trajectory of the interaction: is a return greeting relevant (in which case, the participants will be motivated to attend to the environment to detect any event that could be taken as the conditionally relevant second greeting); or is the response to the confirmation check now relevant? Or is the response the answer to the summons? The turns by B and A (lines 78 and 79) propose a different understanding of the group’s social reality at that moment. One proposes the presence and interactional responsiveness of an identified spirit entity; the other seeks to determine the spirit’s identity. It is at this moment that the body— specifically, B’s body—is recruited as a resource to resolve these competing understandings. At the same time as the sound of the Gauss meter increases, A and B look at each other, and B bites her bottom lip. For B, this is a public demonstration of excitement or apprehension in response to the meter. It signals that the sound is taken to mean something significant to the group. It also prohibits speech, so it also marks B’s temporary withdrawal from verbal participation. It is at this point that C takes the opportunity to participate. Her turn, ‘It’s definitely Munthob’, is an epistemic upgrade on A’s prior turn. Instead of questioning Munthob’s identity, she accepts Munthob’s presence and attributes the increase in meter output to the spirit. Prior to the first possible place in C’s turn where turn transition is normatively appropriate (Sacks et al. 1974), B begins to exhale, loudly and at length. At the end of this extended exhalation she says ‘Jesus’. This

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exclamation is a response cry (Goffman 1978), a form of ‘self-talk’ (Goffman 1978: 787) that, on first inspection, appears to be an asocial act, much as saying ‘ow’ when pricked is a direct expression of immediate pain. However, Goffman argues that response cries are in fact sensitive to the interactional and normative environment in which they occur. It is plain, then, that self-talk, in a central sense, is situational in character, not merely situated; its occurrence strikes directly at our sense of the orientation of the speaker to the situation as a whole. Self-talk … is a threat to intersubjectivity: it warns others that they might be wrong in assuming a jointly-maintained base of ready mutual intelligibility among all persons present. (Goffman 1978 791: emphasis added)

B’s exhalation and ‘Jesus’ establish that in that moment that her subjective reality is distinct from the intersubjective reality of the others, that something has happened to her, and not to the others. In the context of her greeting to Munthob, her breathing and her utterance propose that she has experienced internal sensations that constituted the actions of the spirit made conditionally relevant in her prior turn. Through talk and embodied action, she claims privileged experience of the spirit’s interactional agency, at precisely the moment that C has lodged her authority with the declarative statement: ‘It’s definitely Munthob’. As she begins to exhale B leans forward and closes her eyes. The repositioning of her body is a physical display of her responsiveness to an unseen influence in content, inferably the spirit. The closing of her eyes has two functions. In conjunction with the leaning body, the closed eyes invite the attention of the others. She is now the corporeal canvas on which the spirit’s otherwise unseen agency can be observed. Moreover, she is the only one to display her experience of these sensations, thereby establishing primary rights (Heritage 2014) on the agency of the spirit. There is another way that the leaning body and closed eyes (and, subsequently, watery eyes) work as a sense-making resource. These are exhibitions of the severity of her reaction and, by implication, the extent of the spirit’s influence on her body. It is an embodied performance of extreme spirit agency. Finally, it is not by closing her eyes that B looks away from the others; she is not looking anywhere at all. Her action thereby constitutes a temporary withdrawal from visual interaction with the others. It

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is a unilateral withdrawal from the possibility of eye contact, and the range of engagements that might ensue. So not only is B seeably and hearably inviting the inference that she is manifesting on her body the agency of the spirit, but she does in such a way as to perform the degree of that influence, while her temporary disengagement from eye contact from the others publicly enact the privacy of the experience, and the primacy of her rights to articulate in embodied form her encounter with the spirit. From these preliminary observations we can draw some tentative conclusions. First, the body may be more deeply implicated in ostensible paranormal experience than has been previously recognised. Second, it is a resource in sense making: the body may be drawn upon in coming to an understanding of an ongoing experience. Third, the significance of the body as a sense-making resource is inextricably tied to its relationship to the organisation of talk-in-interaction (Schegloff 2007). In the next chapter we develop these conclusions and begin to identify more formally the kinds of sense-making practices in which talk and the body intersect in paranormal group investigations.

References Altman, N. 2002. Where Is the Action in the ‘Talking Cure’? Contemporary Psychoanalysis 38: 499–513. ———. 2007. Integrating the Transpersonal with the Intersubjective. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 43 (4): 526–535. Balint, M. 1956. Notes on Parapsychology and Parapsychological Healing. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 36 (1): 31–35. Bass, A. 2015. The Dialogue of Unconsciouses, Mutual Analysis and the Uses of the Self in Contemporary Relational Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 25 (1): 2–17. Bem, D.J., and C. Honorton. 1994. Does Psi Exist? Replicable Evidence for an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer. Psychological Bulletin 115 (1): 4–18. Benjamin, J. 2004. Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 73 (1): 5–46. Bierman, D.J. 1995. The Amsterdam Ganzfeld Series III and IV: Target Clip Emotionality, Effect Sizes and Openness. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual

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Convention of the Parapsychological Association, 27–37. Durham, NC: Parapsychological Association. Brannigan, A. 2004. The Rise and Fall of Social Psychology: The Use and Misuse of the Experimental Method. New York: de Gruyter. Broughton, R.S. 1991. Parapsychology: The Controversial Science. New  York: Ballantine Books. Broughton, R., and C. Alexander, 1995, August. Autoganzfeld II: The First 100 Sessions. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Parapsychological Association Convention, vol. 53. Burton, N. 2012. Getting Personal: Thoughts on Therapeutic Action Through the Interplay of Intimacy, Affect and Consciousness. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 22 (6): 662–678. Cambray, J. 2011. Moments of Complexity and Enigmatic Action: A Jungian View of the Therapeutic Field. Journal of Analytical Psychology 56: 296–309. Campbell, J., and S. Pile. 2010. Telepathy and Its Vicissitudes: Freud, Thought Transference and the Hidden Lives of the (Repressed and Non-Repressed) Unconscious. Subjectivity 3 (4): 403–425. ———. 2015. Passionate Forms and the Problem of Subjectivity: Freud, Frau Emmy von N. and the Unconscious Communication of Affect. Subjectivity 8 (1): 1–24. Cardeña, E., J. Palmer, and D. Marcusson-Clavertz, eds. 2015. Parapsychology: A Handbook for the 21st Century. North Carolina: McFarland. Cimino, C., and A. Correale. 2005. Projective Identification and Consciousness Alteration: A Bridge Between Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience? The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 86 (1): 51–60. Crabtree, A. 1993. Multiple Personality Before “Eve”. Dissociation: Progress in the Dissociative Disorders 6 (1): 66–73. Crossley, N. 2012. Phenomenology and the Body. In Routledge Handbook of Body Studies, ed. N. Turner, 142–155. Oxfordshire: Routledge. De Peyer, J. 2014. Telepathic Entanglements: Where Are We Today? Commentary on Paper by Claudie Massicotte. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 24 (1): 109–121. ———. 2016. Uncanny Communication and the Porous Mind. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 26 (2): 156–174. Devereux, G., ed. 1953. Psychoanalysis and the Occult. London: Souvenir Press. Edge, H.L., R.L.  Morris, J.  Palmer, and J.H.  Rush. 1986. Foundations of Parapsychology: Exploring the Boundaries of Human Capability. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ehrenwald, J. 1956. Telepathy, Concepts, Criteria. Psychiatric Quarterly 30 (1–4): 425–448.

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Ogden, T.H. 2004. The Analytic Third: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 73 (1): 167–195. Oppenheim, J. 1985. The other world: spiritualism and psychical research in England, 1850–1914. Cambridge University Press. Parker, A., D. Grams, and C. Pettersson. 1998. Further Variables Relating to Psi in the Ganzfeld. The Journal of Parapsychology 62 (4): 319–337. Pile, S. 2012. Distant Feelings: Telepathy and the Problem of Affect Transfer Over Distance. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37: 44–59. Radin, D.I. 1997. The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. San Francisco, CA: HarperEdge. Rosenbaum, R. 2011. Exploring the Other Dark Continent: Parallels Between Psi Phenomena and the Psychotherapeutic Process. The Psychoanalytic Review 98 (1): 57–90. Roseneil, S. 2013. Beyond ‘the Relationship Between Individual and Society’: Broadening and Deepening Relational Thinking in Group Analysis. Group Analysis 46 (2): 196–210. Sacks, H. 1992. Lectures on Conversation, Volumes I and II. Ed. G. Jefferson and E. A. Schegloff. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E.A., and Jefferson, G. 1974. A Simplest Systematics for the Organisation of Turn-Taking for Conversation. Language 50: 696–735. Schegloff, E.A. 1972. Notes on a Conversational Practice: Formulating Place. In Studies in Social Interaction, ed. D. Sudnow, 75–119. New York: Free Press. ———. 1982. Discourse as an Interactional Achievement: Some Uses of “Uh Huh” and Other Things That Come Between Sentences. In Analysing Discourse: Georgetown University Roundtable on Languages and Linguistics, ed. D. Tannen, 71–93. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. Schegloff, E. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction: Volume 1: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schegloff, E.A., and H.  Sacks. 1973. Opening Up Closings. Semiotica 8: 289–327. Schneider, D.A., and M.D. Grady. 2014. Conscious and Unconscious Use of Self: The Evolution of a Process. Psychoanalytic Social Work: 1–19. Schwartz-Salant, N. 1988. Archetypal Foundations of Projective Identification. Journal of Analytic Psychology 33 (3): 39–64. Silverman, S. 1988. Correspondence and Thought-Transference. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 16 (3): 269–294. Stevenson, I. 1970. Characteristics of Cases of the Reincarnation Type in Turkey and Their Comparison with Cases in Two Other Cultures. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 11: 1–17.

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———. 1997a. Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. Connecticut: Praeger. ———. 1997b. Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group. Stolorow, R.D. 1991. The Intersubjective Context of Intrapsychic Experience: A Decade of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 11 (1–2): 171–184. Stolorow, R.D., and G.E.  Atwood. 1984. Psychoanalytic Phenomenology: Toward a Science of Human Experience. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 4 (1): 87–105. Strean, H.S., and M.C.  Nelson. 1962. A Further Clinical Illustration of the Paranormal Triangle Hypothesis. Psychoanalytic Review 49 (3): 61–73. Thurschwell, P. 1999. Ferenczi’s Dangerous Proximities: Telepathy, Psychosis, and the Real Event. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11 (1): 150–178. Totton, N. 2003. “Each Single Ego”: Telepathy and Psychoanalysis. In Psychoanalysis and the Paranormal: Lands of Darkness, ed. N. Totton, 187–208. New York: Routledge. Weiler, R.B. 1967. Apparent Telepathy in Psychotherapy. Psychiatric Quarterly 41 (3): 448–473. Wooffitt, R. 2007. Communication and Laboratory Performance in Parapsychology Experiments: Demand Characteristics and the Social Organization of Interaction. British Journal of Social Psychology 46 (3): 477–498. ———. 2017. Relational Psychoanalysis and Anomalous Communication: Continuities and Discontinuities in Psychoanalysis and Telepathy. History of the Human Sciences 30 (1): 118–137. ———. 2019. Poetic Confluence: A Sociological Analysis of an Enigmatic Moment. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 29 (3): 328–345. Wooffitt, R., and S. Allistone. 2008. Participation, Procedure and Accountability: ‘You Said’Speech Markers in Negotiating Reports of Ambiguous Phenomena. Discourse Studies 10 (3): 407–427. Wooffitt, R., and N. Holt. 2010. Silence and Its Organization in the Pragmatics of Introspection. Discourse Studies 12 (3): 379–406. ———. 2011. Looking In and Speaking Out: Introspection, Consciousness, Communication. Exeter: Imprint Academic.

3 Talk, Bodies and Tools in Interaction with Spirits

A theme of this book is that any individual experience of ostensibly paranormal phenomena in these investigations occurs as part of group activity. While one person may privately feel something unusual, it is invariably shared, and others can then assess their own subjective experience to determine if they too have experienced something similar. And in many cases, the experience is explicitly social and collaborative, in that it is brought into collective awareness through the interactions of the members with each other, and with the putative spirits, and often supported by the evidence of technical objects such as Ouija boards and Gauss meters. In this chapter we examine some broad features of groups’ interactions, both verbal and embodied. It is noticeable that, although the groups are experiencing events which are potentially extraordinary contact with deceased personalities (or even non-human entities), the interactional practices through which these experiences are noted, negotiated and accepted (or resisted) are utterly mundane. That is, the extraordinary rests on ordinary communicative practices such as turn-taking, asking questions or making requests. However, although we see ordinary communicative practices, it is clear that the interactions amongst the group members are not a form of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Ironside, R. Wooffitt, Making Sense of the Paranormal, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88407-9_3

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ordinary conversation (and obviously so when they are addressing spirits). These are everyday interactional practices adapted to the requirements of the moment and reflect the assumptions and expectations of the participants as a group of paranormal investigators. Because the groups have assembled to perform a particular series of investigate tasks, we may treat these activities as a form of informal institutional activity (Drew and Heritage 1992a): they are a type of work, even if they are unpaid and undertaken for personal interest. There is now a substantial empirical literature on talk which occurs in institutional or work-related settings (see, e.g., Clayman and Heritage 2002; Drew and Heritage 1992b; Boden and Zimmerman 1991). On the basis of this research, it is possible to identify criteria by which we can demarcate institutional talk from ordinary conversation (Heritage 1997), and it is clear that interaction in group investigations meets these criteria. In institutional interaction participants are primarily focused on a limited and specific set of tasks and goals. These constitute the work of the group. In this case, the work of the groups consists of trying to contact spirits, inviting spirits to communicate with them, using technical objects to register possible spirit presence and so on. It is reasonable to claim that the social identity of ‘paranormal investigator’ inextricably rests on these kinds of activities. Another defining feature of institutional interaction is that participation reflects constraints as to what counts as normatively appropriate conduct. In the same way that a doctor should not try to contact spirits during a patient consultation, so too it would be a marked normative departure for members of the investigation groups to seek medical advice from their colleagues. Finally, the norms and expectations that underpin institutional settings will shape how utterances and events are interpreted. In the case of the investigation groups this means that, for example, questions apparently addressed to no human recipient in the group will be heard as addressing a spirit, as opposed to being interpreted as a curious and accountable departure from communicative norms. There is one final sense in which the investigation groups can be seen to

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be engaging in a form of work, and this is in the use of tools and objects to assist them in their core activity of spirit contact. The technical paraphernalia of investigations clearly demarcate these activities from mundane interaction, and invite us to study how they are used, in the same way that research has examined, for example, the use of objects in formal institutional settings such as telecommunication control centres (Hindmarsh and Heath 2000). Treating the language of paranormal group investigations as a form of work, and drawing from CA studies of talk in workplace settings, provides a formal framework in which to gain a deeper understanding of the task-based orientation of the participants’ activities. In this chapter we examine two extracts to illustrate how the quasi-­ institutional character of groups’ activities is mediated through the use of everyday communicative competences. We also illustrate some ways that technical investigatory tools are made relevant via turn design. In this way, we examine how the presence and character of spirits may be interactionally produced.

 he Rational Investigator: Doing Being T Ordinary When the Spirits Make Contact In extract 1, the group are participating in an investigation of a reputedly haunted building in a northern city in England. It is late evening, and there are seven members of the group, referred to here as A to G, seated around a table. (We use ‘U’ to refer to utterances that we cannot confidently attribute to a specific participant.) On the table, and in front of all participants, is an Ouija board, through which the group have been trying to communicate with the spirit who is supposedly haunting the building. At the start of the extract, a noise, subsequently identified as a scratching sound, is heard by at least two of the participants and is captured on the audio track of the video recording.

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Extract 3.1 Dog Scratching 59–98 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

F: B: G: U: G: B: E: U: U: B: C: D:

F: B: E: F: G: B: E: D: E: C:

C: D:

(Scratching noise can be heard) (E looks to space next to D, B looks to same space) what was that did you hear tha[t [which is unusual because there’s this[ [mmm [theory about[universal language [like [I heard that then[ a dog [scratching [mm [mmmmmmmm [(E and B look at each other, B scratches table and points) yeh was tha- that was[n't you[ like [just wa[sn't you [no [(B points to left of D) [(B makes scratching gesture) I heard that[ tha[t as we::ll [dat [yeh yeh like a [dog grooming chu [chu [yeh [(E makes dog grooming movements with left arm) is it the board again? no: it was like-[ it was like you hh hhh[h [hh [hh [(B points towards the area around D (B points to space at left of D) I thought it was you[ scratching [yeh I’m sure it was [you scratchin [(E makes scratching motion on herself) [(C points at D) yourself n[o [(D puts hands down – B,C and E have returned to previous positions)

In line 60, two of the group members look towards a space positioned to the right of D. This space is empty. It is not occupied by any of the group members and there is no object in the space that could conceivably generate the scratching sound. Following this shift in gaze by E and B, F also demonstrates her orientation to the sound by asking, ‘what was that’

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(line 61; we discuss the use of ‘that’ as a way of producing a ‘first noticing’ in the next chapter). Participant B responds to this with, ‘did you hear that’, suggesting an alignment to the same event in the environment. At this point, participant G is continuing a conversation about spirit language (lines 63–65), and this talk is interrupted by further attempts to reorientate the discussion towards the unusual sounds. B displays her understanding of this sound through recreating a scratching sound on the table and pointing to the empty space. In response to B’s question and display, E also responds by stating that she heard a dog scratching (line 67). At this point, an event has been noted by one participant, and confirmed by another. While no one has offered an explicitly paranormal interpretation, that inference is available, not only by virtue of the rationale for the group’s presence in that building, but also in that E has offered a description of the noise as a dog scratching. Given that there is no dog in the space pointed to by E, and neither is there a dog in the room with the group, this categorisation more strongly attributes a mysterious quality to the sound. In this short sequence there have been everyday conversational actions: questions and agreement, a confirmation and assessment. Out of that limited range of utterance types, and the embodied gesture from B, a noise has been identified, which has become the focus of wider attention and categorised in such a way that it invites a paranormal interpretation. B then proposes a rational account for the noise by asking D if it came from her (line 72), while at the same time apparently pointing to the space to the left of D, and she then produces a scratching gesture in the air. D unequivocally rejects this account for the noise (line 74). F and E then state that they too have heard the noise, with E offering a more specialised assessment that it sounds like dog grooming; she also mimics the sound and movement of a dog scratching itself, to illustrate and support her assessment (lines 80–83). This elaborates upon her original description and reasserts the assessment most likely to facilitate a paranormal interpretation.

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G offers an alternative paranormal explanation by asking if the Ouija board was somehow responsible for the noise (line 84), which is rejected by B, who reintroduces a possible rational cause by repeating her proposition that the noise was produced by D while again pointing towards the general vicinity of where D is sitting. C now endorses this account, pointing at D and stating, ‘yeh I’m sure it was you scratching yourself ’ (lines 91 and 95). This is again flatly rejected by D. There are two key features to this section. First the group hear something but do not immediately offer, let alone conclude on, a paranormal explanation. Indeed, throughout this sequence, no one offers an explicit paranormal interpretation for the noise. However, the proposal that it sounds like a dog scratching, when there are no real dogs in the building, allows for the possibility that either a spirit animal is issuing the sound or the sound has mysterious qualities but just incidentally sounds like a dog scratching. There is, then, a collective circumspection about proposing a paranormal explanation in the first few moments after an unusual sound has been identified. Second, and relatedly, rational explanations are proposed: three participants, in different ways, propose that D may be the cause of the noise. In the first chapter, we described how studies have shown that descriptions of paranormal experiences are designed to address possible sceptical alternative explanations for the experience reported. They address possible sceptical counter explanations. The group here seems to be oriented to a similar set of culturally available sceptical responses. For example, these are people who formed, or joined, a paranormal investigation group and are taking part in an un-renumerated overnight investigation of a supposedly haunted house. There is clear prior interest in the possibility of encountering spirits. This interest in the possibility of spirit existence could easily be invoked to portray the group as credulous and predisposed to interpret any strange event as a sign of a spirit. However, the circumspection with which the participants collectively respond to and assess the noise mitigates this interpretation. They do not immediately claim a paranormal cause. While their utterances allow for (or perhaps implicitly propose) a paranormal explanation, there is no explicit move to a paranormal categorisation upon first hearing the sound. Moreover,

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members explore alternative, rational explanations; it is proposed that D is the source of the sound, despite unequivocal rejections. In this, we have evidence that the way the participants make sense of the sound reflects their orientation to wider culturally based sensitivities about making extraordinary claims. They display a rational person’s reaction to unusual events, rather than the reactions of someone predisposed to interpret any event in the environment as evidence of spirit activity. They are, in Sacks’ terms, doing ‘being ordinary’ (Sacks 1984; see also, Jefferson 2004; Wooffitt 1992) and, in the first instance, seeking rational non-­paranormal explanations. The ‘rationality’ that is displayed in the design of these utterances not only exhibits an awareness of the inferential landscape of making paranormal claims. They also display the participants’ understanding that they are a group engaged in a specific kind of informal work. They are paranormal investigators, with a (quasi) scientific responsibility to evaluate, consider, test explanations and so on. In this sense, the interaction in extract 1 also illustrates how the individual members of the group constitute their collective assembly in accord with norms of a work-related group with a specific set of tasks and expectations.

 alk and Tools: The Inferential Significance T of Material Objects Studies of institutional interaction have shown how everyday communicative practices, such as turn-taking, turn design and embodied actions, are the vehicles by which work identities (and expectations and obligations attendant on those identities) are brought into interactional relevance, and thereby ‘talk’ the institution into being. It is the same with the conduct of the paranormal investigation group. Through their talk and embodied actions, the participants interactionally realise perhaps the core task of the group: communication with spirits. But in addition to these everyday resources mobilised for the purpose of the investigation, the groups also use specialised tools, objects and technologies designed or adapted to provide evidence of spirit presence. The use of these tools, and

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the way that they are incorporated into sequences of interaction, further illuminates the informal institutional character of the activities of paranormal investigations. These tools furnish an inferential significance for the spaces in which they are located. For example, the group may use a Gauss meter, informed by the quasi-­ scientific theory that a spirit may be able to interact with this device by using its own electro-magnetic field. Similarly, the light display of a K2 meter may also be taken to indicate the presence and agency of spirits. When tools such as these are used, they are routinely positioned in a space that can be orientated to by the group, but not influenced by the group members or any other known natural environmental influences. By positioning objects in this way, the group are creating a space that is in essence empty except for the object or tool that inhabits it. This ‘emptiness’ is defined by the absence of normal influences that could undermine the interpretation than any change in the tool’s output is due to spiritual agency. These objects play an integral part in the interaction, as they transform the inferential significance of the space they occupy and provide the basis for paranormal interpretations of events. In the following extract, the group are attempting to communicate with a spirit through a K2 device. The K2 meter is a type of electro-­ magnetic field reader that indicates the strength of the reading through a series of lights on the front of the device. As the strength of the electromagnetic field increases, the number and colour of lights showing also increase. The meter is positioned away from the group members on the floor in the centre of the circle where it is seemingly absent from ‘normal’ interference, that is, no person is holding it or moving it. Prior to the start of the extract, the lights have flickered on and off a few times, but not in any systematic way which could support a confident claim that it is due to spirit presence. However, the participants view the fluctuations of the meter as suggestive of spirit presence; this is clear in line 1, where B sets the spirit a task to provide stronger evidence of its presence: ‘can you light it up all the way again’.

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Extract 3.2 Little Girl 1–34 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

B: B: B:

B:

B: B: D: A: B: A: B: B: D: B: B: B: B:

A: B:

Can you light it up all the way again to three so thatwe know that you’re there (4secs) if you can then we will try and communicate with you with that light (3s – during this time the K2 light flickers and then sits on 2 lights) all the way up to three to the orange light[ thank you [(K2 light goes up to 3 lights) (1.5s) okay now what we're gonna do is we're gonna try and askyou some questions it’s stuck on three yes okay that’s good thank you very much now if you want toanswer yes sorry have you got somethin-[ [(unknown) I think it’s a little girl a little girl is it a little girl (2.5s) hello:: oh I’m buzzing okay can you make those lights disappear again youcan[ do that by walking [(Third K2 lights flickers) awa[y go right down to one again can you get it down[(K2 at 2 lights) to one be very clever if you can[ go on down to one [(second K2 light flickers) (K2 lights go down to one light) yaa[aay::: [ aay::: well done hh

Nothing happens for 4 seconds, and then B re-issues the request, which is modulated in respect of the absence of a response. The second request has a more conditional formulation: ‘if you can …’ (line 4). However, in both this turn and the prior turn, B establishes that the request is made on behalf of the group. It is not B as an individual asking for the spirit to respond in this way, but it is ‘we’. With this simple pronoun, a collective agency is invoked. But this can work to invoke more than that a person is speaking on behalf of a group; it invokes this particular group, meeting at that moment for specific objectives. In this, the ‘we’ further strengthens the quasi-institutional character of the group’s purpose and objectives.

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At the end of B’s second request, the K2 meter is showing one light illuminated. Over the next three seconds, the lights flicker and stabilise on two lights illuminated. This is taken to be evidence of the spirit, as B’s subsequent turn ‘All the way up to three to the orange light’ (line 8) proposes that a spirit is in an ongoing process of influencing the K2 readings. In this way, the technological output is framed as evidence of agency (see also, Pollner and McDonald-Wikler 1985, on the use of similar framing practices by family members to attribute ‘normal’ agency to a child/sibling with significant cognitive and physical impairments). As the third and final light is illuminated, B says ‘thank you’. This further frames the K2 display as the result of intentional spirit activity. We observed earlier that the group orientation to the K2 meter transforms the space around it. Once it is taken to be sufficiently removed from the participants that their actions cannot influence its readings, then it is implicit that any change in the display may reflect spirit presence or activity. (This tacit assumption is made explicit later in this sequence: at lines 25 and 27 the spirit is asked if it can change the meter output by ‘walking away’.) That is, the empty space around the meter now has an inferential valence: via the use of technology the group can now interpret the space in relation to their (informal) work objective of contacting spirits. B has interpreted the illumination of three lights as evidence of spirit activity; her next turn demonstrates that she takes the illuminations of the three lights as confirmation that the spirit now wishes to engage in further interaction. She acknowledges the third light with ‘okay’ and announces that the group will pose questions to the spirit. At this stage B has been the only member of the group to have engaged with the spirit. She has requested that the spirit influence the K2 meter; it was she who proposed that the increase in the number of illuminated lights was a sign of the spirit interacting with the meter at that moment, and it was she who framed the illumination of the third light as the completion of the task she had requested. In this sequence, then, we can say that B is the interactional principal. The others have so far merely observed. At this point, though, others begin to participate more actively. D offers the observation that the K2 meter continues to display three illuminated lights, ‘it’s stuck on three’ (line 14). The use of ‘stuck’ highlights the continuous

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display, which further supports the inference that it is responding to a sustained (in this case spiritual) influence. A confirms this (lines 15). These observations on the K2 reading, and by implication what may be the cause, momentarily weaken B’s role as principal interactant. Although D and A do not interact with the spirit, thereby also taking the role of direct interlocutor with the spirit, their independent assessments of the stability of the meter delay any further attempt by B to continue her interaction with the spirit. B’s next turn recognises this delay and addresses it. In line 16, B repeats ‘okay’, and with ‘that’s good’ she again engages with the spirit, and her ‘thank you’ reasserts that she takes the meter’s activity to be an indication that the spirit is ready to engage further. In these turn components she re-establishes her leading role in the encounter. Her turn continues to recycle the interactional space at which she had arrived earlier, in which she is about to launch a series of questions to the spirit. However, no question is produced; instead, B’s attention seems to be drawn to one of the participants. Her turn ‘sorry have you got something-’ appears to acknowledge that another may wish to contribute at that moment. A begins to speak next. Although the first part of her turn is inaudible, it seems that she takes B’s prior turn to be an invitation to speak. A is unlike the other participants in that she is a self-declared medium, an identity known to the other members of the group. As a medium, she claims to be able to sense spirit presences, and communicate with them, without the need for tools such as meters and Ouija boards. She reports, ‘I think it’s a little girl’ (lines 18 and 19). This is a significant turn, both for the group’s work and for the negotiation of the principal interactant in this moment. First, the declaration of a possible spirit identity further delays the line of activity that B’s prior turns had proposed. Moreover, by offering a possible categorisation of the spirit, A offers a more specific understanding of the spirit than had been established in prior turns. A implicitly invokes her mediumship skills: her (albeit) tentative claim that they are interacting with the spirit of a little girl can be heard as resulting from her psychic abilities. As no one else in the group claims to have mediumship abilities, and given that mediumship is explicitly based on the ability to communicate with spirits, this utterance immediately establishes A’s epistemic authority. (As we address epistemic tussles more

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formally in Chap. 5, we will not develop this line of analysis here; but it might be useful for readers to consider this extract again once they have read the section on epistemics in the later chapter.) B’s subsequent turn first repeats A’s categorisation of the spirit, and then adopts it: she asks, ‘is it a little girl’ (line 20). Although this is not phrased as ‘are you a little girl’, this turn seems designed to address the spirit. There is a 2.5-second gap, and then B says, ‘hello’ (line 22). This is clearly addressed to the spirit: it is a check that they are still responsive to the group (which supports the analytic claim that the question ‘is it a little girl?’ was addressed to the spirit). From line 24, B again address the spirit directly; however, instead of asking the questions she referred to earlier, she asks the spirit to perform another task: ‘okay can you make those lights disappear again you can do that by walking away go right down to one again’ (lines 24 to 27). Asking the spirit to ‘walk away’ further frames the space around the K2 meter as having a particular inferential significance; moreover, it frames the meter’s previous display of one light also as the result of the spirit’s agency. As B’s turn continues, there is further evidence that they accept the implied epistemic authority of A’s claim about the spirit identity. B’s utterance ‘can you get it down to one be very clever if you can’ (lines 27 and 29) is designed for a young recipient, in that it addresses the spirit in the same way that a young child might be encouraged to complete a task. The lights on the meter flicker and eventually there is only one remaining light illuminated. A’s extended ‘yay’ (line 33) is an exaggerated non-­ lexical recognition of the spirit’s achievement, again formulated in a way appropriate for a young recipient. B’s turn, produced in overlap with A’s prior, echoes A’s turn and explicitly congratulates the spirit, framing the meter display as the intentional outcome of the spirit’s response to her earlier request. The presence and identity of the spirit are emergent phenomena, constituted through mundane communicative practices, such as turn design and turn-taking, and the framing of the readings from the K2 meter. There are various ways in which this sequence indexes and affirms the informal institutional or work-related character of the group. Requests to the spirit to influence the meter are a form of reality testing common to

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professional contexts. The work-related character of their activities is further emphasised by A’s implicit invocation of her identity as a medium, a social identity clearly relevant to the goals and expectations of the group. As a consequence of this inferential framework, the spirit’s responses, inferred from observation of the meter display, also take on an institutional character. It is taken that the spirit is complying with the request to provide evidence of its presence and participation, and performing work-related tasks relevant to the group’s investigatory business.

 aking Sense of Collective M Paranormal Experience Collective experience is largely ignored in parapsychological research, which for the most part relies on laboratory-based experimental designs in which individual participants take extrasensory perception (ESP) tests of some kind. Even more qualitative work on spontaneous experiences focuses on identifying patterns in experiences from collections of individual accounts, usually solicited in formal interviews or submitted in written form (e.g., Rhine 1981). Studies that have examined the collective features of paranormal experiences (and beliefs) tend to have a sceptical orientation and explain reported experiences in terms of group influence and conformity (Wilson and French 2004), suggestibility (Persinger 1983) or the operation of generic cognitive defects and biases (Williams et al. 2021). There is greater recognition of the importance of collective experience in social scientific research. Anthropological studies of spiritual or magical events in non-western cultures routinely emphasise the role of the community or group in bringing about experiences or in interpreting their significance (Young and Goulet 1994). In western societies, Eaton has argued that groups may provide a point of convergence for paranormal belief and ‘spiritual questing’ (Eaton 2015). They may offer a social support network to revalidate and confirm belief and experience (Festinger et al. 1956; Skultans 1974). And they can buttress people who claim to have had paranormal experiences against the cultural scepticism that may be invoked to

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recast reports as the product of misperception, cognitive defect, wish fulfilment and so on (Childs and Murray 2010; Ironside 2017). Waskul and Waskul (2016) also observe that reports of paranormal events are often presented as ‘true’ through reference to multiple witnesses. Further, they conclude that paranormal events are not immediately categorised and instead ‘emerge[s] from the minded ways that people act towards things and the consequence thereof’ (Waskul and Waskul: 52). And in her ethnographic study of people who monitor and study crop circle phenomena, Ghidina describes how their knowledge of the crop circle culture is drawn on in personal narratives to warrant the claim that circles are evidence of intervention by anomalous agencies (Ghidina 2019). Her concerns overlap with ours: how is it that a spiritual agency may be attributed to mundane spaces? As she states how people employ their creative capacities to construct spiritual experience out of sometimes seemingly mundane and profane artifacts and in the context of often opposing cultural contexts and bases of rationality offers a fascinating illumination of the social spirit. (Ghidina 2019: 297)

However, while these kinds of studies recognise the importance of the group, they do not observe the interactional practices of the group. Yet from inspection of just two extracts, we see the central role that interaction plays in the emergence and character of collective paranormal experience. We have observed the collective negotiation of the environment such that events may be attributed to possible paranormal causes or accounted for through more mundane explanations. Rationality, competence, leadership and epistemic authority are managed in the design of utterances and embodied actions, and this interpersonal positioning, woven through turn design on a turn-by-turn basis, further points to the collective foundations of paranormal experience in this setting. The evidential significance of technical objects and tools is also negotiated through observations, assessments and requests. And underpinning these diverse activities is an orientation to the groups’ informal work as an investigatory assembly.

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References Boden, D., and D.H. Zimmerman, eds. 1991. Talk and Social Structure: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. California: University of California Press. Childs, C., and C.D. Murray. 2010. “We All Had an Experience in There Together”: A Discursive Psychological Analysis of Collaborative Paranormal Accounts by Paranormal Investigation Team Members. Qualitative Research in Psychology 7 (1): 21–33. Clayman, S., and J. Heritage. 2002. The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Drew, P., and J. Heritage. 1992a. Analyzing Talk at Work: An Introduction. In Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, ed. P. Drew and J. Heritage, 3–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1992b. Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eaton, M.A. 2015. “Give Us a Sign of Your Presence”: Paranormal Investigation as a Spiritual Practice. Sociology of Religion 76 (4): 389–412. Festinger, L., H. Riecken, and S. Schachter. 1956. When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World. Connecticut: Martino Publishing. Ghidina, M.J. 2019. Finding God in Grain: Crop Circles, Rationality, and the Construction of Spiritual Experience. Symbolic Interaction 42 (2): 278–300. Heritage, J. 1997. Conversation Analysis and Institutional Talk: Analysing Data. In Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice, ed. D. Silverman, 161–182. London: Sage. Hindmarsh, J., and C. Heath. 2000. Embodied Reference: A Study of Deixis in Workplace Interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 32 (12): 1855–1878. Ironside, R. 2017. Discovering Strange Events in Empty Spaces: The Role of Multimodal Practice and the Interpretation of Paranormal Events. Journal of Pragmatics 120: 88–100. Jefferson, G. 2004. “At First I Thought”: A Normalizing Device for Extraordinary Events. In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, ed. G. Lerner, 131–167. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Persinger, M.A. 1983. Geophysical Variables and Behavior: IX. Expected Clinical Consequences of Close Proximity to UFO-Related Luminosities. Perceptual and Motor Skills 56 (1): 259–265.

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Pollner, M., and L. McDonald-Wikler. 1985. The Social Construction of Unreality: A Case Study of a Family’s Attribution of Competence to a Severely Retarded Child. Family Process 24 (2): 241–254. Rhine, L. 1981. The Invisible Picture: A study of Psychic Experiences. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Sacks, H. 1984. Notes on Methodology. In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. J.M. Atkinson and J. Heritage, 21–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skultans, V. 1974. Intimacy and Ritual: A Study of Spiritualism, Mediums and Groups. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul. Waskul, D.D., and M.E. Waskul. 2016. Ghostly Encounters: The Hauntings of Everyday Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Williams, C., A. Denovan, K. Drinkwater, and N. Dagnall. 2021. Thinking Style and Paranormal Belief: The Role of Cognitive Biases. Imagination, Cognition and Personality: 1–25. Wilson, K., and C.C. French. 2004. Memory Conformity and Paranormal Belief. In In 47th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association. New York: The Parapsychological Association. Wooffitt, R. 1992. Telling Tales of the Unexpected: The Organisation of Factual Discourse. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Young, D.E., and J.G. Goulet, eds. 1994. Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

4 What Is That?

In this chapter, we track how verbalised noticings of events may tacitly predispose a paranormal interpretation. While our empirical observations emerge mainly from examination of the paranormal research group data, we occasionally draw from examples from other discourse contexts. This allows us to make a more robust case for the properties of the communicative practices we describe. We focus on relatively short utterances which broadly take the form of ‘what is that?’ In this kind of utterances, the word that is crucial. That is one of a class of words in English used to identify or to refer to things. Other words in this class are this, these and those. These words are known as demonstratives, or demonstrative determiners, and the work they do is described as demonstrative referencing. Although they can be used to refer to features within discourse, or mental phenomena, their basic function is exophoric or situational, in that they refer to objects or states of affairs which are extralinguistic. According to Acton and Potts, determiners are ‘[f ]unction words and phrases, the nuts and bolts of language’ (2014: 3). Demonstratives are deictic, in that they rely on context for the turn recipient to come to see the thing to which the demonstrative refers; ‘look at that’, does not in itself qualify a recipient to grasp what ‘that’ is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Ironside, R. Wooffitt, Making Sense of the Paranormal, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88407-9_4

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referring to, but requires interpretation of factors such as (but not restricted to) the current topic of conversation, the physical location of the speaker (and perhaps also the recipient) and any accompanying gestural indications, such as pointing, head direction and eye gaze. It is widely stated in the literature that there is a strong contrastive relationship between this and these and that and those. The former are said to refer to objects close to the speaker, or proximal, while the latter refer to objects which are further way, or distal (Diessel 1999; Levinson 1983). The contrastive relationship, then, is said to exhibit a fundamentally spatial axis (Fillmore 1982) in which the range of possible referents identified by this is comparatively limited set aside the possible range of objects referenced by the less locally and contingently focused that. Consequently, while the use of this may restrict the number of possible referents, that on the other hand has the potential to refer to a much wider range of referents. It seems clear that, compared to this, the deictic character of that seems more pronounced, emphasising the interpretive work required to establish joint understanding of any actual referent so identified by its use. Although, as Acton and Potts phrased it, demonstratives are the functional ‘nuts and bolts’ of language, they are, perhaps surprisingly, also the vehicle for a range of socially oriented, interpersonal activities. Numerous authors cite Lakoff’s (1974) analysis as a critical contribution. According to Davis and Potts (2010) Lakoff argued that demonstratives may have an affective component, in that they can express some form of emotionality function to establish solidarity between speaker and recipient and facilitate common sentiment. Since then, others have explored the more affective dimensions of demonstratives (Acton and Potts 2014; Davis and Potts 2010; Potts and Schwarz 2010). The interpersonal functions of demonstratives were made clear in Jackson’s (2013) Conversation Analytic study of person reference in interaction. Jackson observes how, on occasions, speakers may use indirect references such as ‘that man’ or ‘that woman’ to refer to people whose names they know, and whose names they know are known by the recipient. She argues that by being seen to decline naming a person whose name is known to all relevant parties, speakers establish an inferential distance between the referred-to person

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and the actual participants in the interaction. They are, therefore, a broadly hostile (or at very least, markedly unsympathetic) interactional act. Her research shows that that can be an important component of turns in which ‘not-naming’ is done and plays a role in sharpening the inferentially available hostile edge to these utterances. Research has started to show how that is not merely a linguistic object with particular referential functions, but is a tool in social interaction and has inferential consequences for the contexts in which it is used. Our analysis builds from this position and examines how that can be a significant component of turns that establish the transgressive or uncanny component of the event to which they refer. We begin with some basic properties of the transgressive that.

Minimal Form Transgressive That The following extracts illustrate some basic forms of the transgressive that (hereafter, TT) turn. These come from recordings of paranormal investigations across the UK with between three to eight participants who are all engaged in activities to encourage interaction with a spiritual agency. In all cases, the groups are engaging in activities within reputedly haunted locations, and they use spiritual practices and equipment. In each example, the group have requested a response from the spiritual entity or are actively waiting for a form of paranormal activity that may substantiate if the spirit is present and, if so, who or what it may be.

Extract 4.1 Dog Scratching 58–67 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

F: B: G: U: G: B: E:

(4 seconds silence) (Scratching noise can be heard) (E looks towards space next to D, B also looks to same space) what was that do you[ ( )= [which is unusual because there's this [theory[mm [about [universal langua]ge =[that [I heard that then] the dog scratching

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After a period of silence, the audio track records a scratching noise, and two participants orient towards a possible location in the room. At this point, F asks, ‘what was that’. B’s turn seems responsive to F’s TT turn, but it is obscured by G’s turn, which seems to continue a line of discussion that predates the silence in line 58. However, it is clear that E’s turn in line 67 is responsive to F’s turn in line 61 and offers a description of the sound. Extract 4.2 Popping Sound 35–50 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

A: A: C: A: C: E: A: C: D:

(27 seconds silence – popping noise can be heard in background. After 8 seconds, C glances up towards A and then back to Ouija board. After 21 seconds, C looks up again. E looks towards C. After 25 seconds, C looks over to A) [I'm feeling really dizzy like you did [(A looks at C. B looks around towards A) we got that before didn't we (B looks back towards board) °what's that° what like popping so[und [(unknown) behind you [(B looks towards C. E looks at C) ye[h [yeh [yeh

In this sequence the participants are seated around the Ouija board. Over a period of 27 seconds, the audio records a strange noise; the participants engage in a range of non-verbal activities that suggest they may have heard the same odd sounds. However, the first utterance after this ­ostensible display of co-hearing does not address the noise but is a report of A’s inner sensation of dizziness, which had also been reported earlier by another participant, given A’s head gaze orientation, presumably C. C does not respond; she is focused on the Ouija board and does not seem to notice A’s non-verbal indication that the turn was intended for her. A then recycles the topic of dizziness, locating it as part of the recent collective history of the group. After B returns her gaze to the board, C says, ‘what’s that’. A’s response indicates that she had not heard the popping sounds. C’s description of the noise is overlapped by E’s turn which corroborates C’s hearing and directs A’s attention to a location in the room. A then aligns with the group’s hearing in overlap with C’s and D’s confirmation of E’s directions to locate a possible source of the sound.

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These instances illustrate key features of the transgressive that turn. It is not a stand-alone single lexical item turn but may be embedded in a minimal turn format. It is retro-sequentially responsive (Schegloff 2007: 217–219), in that it is produced as if from second position. Like other forms of retro sequences, it invokes for the moment of its production the relevance of an at-that-point unexplicated source/consequence relationship. It displays that its speaker has registered something in the audible or physical environment, which simultaneously constitutes an account for the response, in this case, the unusual scratching and popping sound. The TT utterance enjoins the co-participants’ orientation, in that it invites a search for the implied first position source by the recipient(s), and any other overhearing co-interactants. It shares key features, then, with response cries (Goffman 1978). The production of the TT is placed in a broader trajectory of body movement and gesture: in Extract 4.1, the first appearance and registering of the scratching noise motivated eye contact and change in head direction prior to the verbalised noticing; in Extract 4.2, participants’ bodily actions followed the verbalised TT turn. The TT is unpredisposed by the prior talk, in that it does not continue or develop an ongoing line of conversation; indeed, it may emerge after several seconds of silence. Although it may immediately follow a series of body movements, such as eye gaze and head turning, these are themselves bodily instantiations of retro-sequential ‘first noticings’ that are disjunctive to ongoing topics of talk or embodied activities. The noticing is not in the form of a statement, but wh- question format, addressed not to a specific individual, but to all within earshot. There is no attempt to describe the properties of the stimulus that motivated the TT, or to categorise the kind of thing it may be—the referent is wholly unspecified. The minimal design, disjunctive production (in that it proposes the relevance of an earlier source event) and inclusive recipiency of the TT turn suggest urgency; and the absence of attempts to describe or classify provides for at least the possibility of unusual provenance or properties. Consequently, despite being unspecified, there is a sense in which the TT turn proposes that the referent may be of direct relevance to the group’s business: establishing evidence of paranormal activity.

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The minimal form TT turn can be expanded to index basic properties of the referent: that it is a sound (possibly even from a spirit source), or that the speaker thinks it is located in, or originated from, a particular direction relative to the group. In Extract 4.3, two members of the group are focused on what seems to be a physical anomaly, the movement of the floor. E’s ‘Hear that’ (line 73) directs the participants’ attention towards an unspecified audible event. In Extract 4.4, the group have been focused on trying to elicit tapping noises from a spirit source, when one member asks if the others had heard ‘that voice then’ (line 68), thereby offering a basic categorical description of the proposed source/phenomenon. In both cases, then, the TT is used to propose the onset of a new form of anomalous event. Extract 4.3 Grandfather Clock 69–81 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

A: G: E: G: F: G: E: C: F:

[Do you feel like this side of the floor is buzzing(.)no [( ) the floor is moving I tell you [(E and C looks towards B, followed by G looking at F and B, and A looking at E) He[ar that? [listen to it [(G looks towards E surprised, and A looks towards E, widening her eyes) I can 'ere that °Stopped° No it's [still there [still there [still there

Extract 4.4 Whistle 64–70 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

C:

A: B:

if that was you tapping can you tap again please (18) (A looks towards B) (3) did you hear that voice then? [no [(B looks at A and shakes head)

Minimal form TT turns identify some new event in the immediate physical or sensed environment and coordinate co-participant attention. These uses of that, however, are not merely noticing something, but establishing the grounds for the thing to be noticed by others in a particular way: as

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something that might have mysterious properties. In this, they constitute an inferential landscape that occasions the relevance of particular interpretive stances. That inferential landscape can be embellished by upgrading the transgressive status of the event being referred to or noticed. A striking example comes from audio and video footage released officially in 2020 by the US military (though this footage had been in circulation without US military authorisation from 2017 onwards). The footage, recorded in 2004 on board a US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet, through state-of-the-art aerial target tracking technology, captures images of unidentified aerial phenomena. The recordings not only capture images, but also audio-­ record the concurrent interactions between the pilots as they see for the first time the images on their tracking technology. (The videos can be found here: https://movieweb.com/ufo-­videos-­navy-­pentagon/ and are considered in the 2021 Pentagon report on unidentified aerial phenomena). In the second video on this site (titled ‘GOFAST.wmv’) it is clear that at least one of the crew is in a state of extreme excitement because of the images; like the commercial pilots in the exchanges discussed in the first chapter, the object is regarded as an anomaly. At one point, early in the footage (at about 1 minute 40 seconds on the video) one of the crew can be heard to exclaim very loudly, ‘What the fuck is that thing?’. Here the effect of the TT is amplified by the reference to the object being tracked as a ‘thing’, and the use of an expletive. Upgrading the uncanny nature of the referent via the use of thing can also be seen in discursive contexts other than verbal interaction. The following is taken from Myer’s (1903) classic examination of unusual psychological states, such as disassociation, hypnosis and other altered states of consciousness. It comes from a section on cases where seemingly discrete personalities alternately inhabit one body. In one case, a new personality, identified as Sally, would act in a hostile or mischievous manner to the main or original personality (e.g., vandalising art projects undertaken by the other personality when in conscious control of the body). Myers observes that [t]hrough suggestion given during hypnosis Dr Prince was finally able to synchronize the various personalities into what was to all appearances the

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original Miss Beauchamp—the one who existed before she underwent the various nervewracking experiences which had made her personality split. Sally called her ‘that new thing’ and when she was present Sally was unable to make herself evident. (Myers 1903: 36–37; emphasis added)

In our data, there are instances of expletives or ripe vernacular language being used to upgrade the uncanny status of the referent. Extract 4.5 Spooksfest 272–277 272 273 274 275 276 277

F: B: F:

[(Scraping sound) [(B and F suddenly look over the right of the room. F jumps) [what [the- .hhhh [what the hell was that [.hhh [sorry

Extract 4.6 Grandfather Clock 17–28 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

G:

A: A: C: A: G: G:

Are you scared (0.5)[ of us? [(A lifts her gaze off the board and looks to top left of camera, G follows A's gaze) (Unknown tap and then quiet moaning sound can be heard. C looks towards the sound. A looks at C) [What the fuck is that? [(A winces whilst speaking. C and G look at A) |Ehh[(C shakes her head whilst looking at A) That's another clock it’s somewhere [else innit [it sounds like a proper clock

In these cases, the transgressive that turns work by emphasising the speaker’s surprise at the onset of the phenomenon, or, as in the case in Extract 4.6, some new surprising development of an ongoing event.

Normative Properties of the Transgressive That When a form of ‘what’s that’ is used at the start of a turn, speakers are declining to say what they figure the that is at the first opportunity where that description could occur. The first response, then, is a form of

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unspecific noticing, rather than an attempt to identify a candidate categorisation (e.g., ‘I hear a voice’) or a description of its properties (‘I hear moaning’). It may be that in many cases the stimulus sound or event is essentially ambiguous, making more informative referencing problematic. But in some cases, it seems that speakers actively withhold a more informative assessment so as to ensure the minimal or upgraded TT constitutes a complete turn. If an initial TT noticing does not receive confirmation or alignment from co-participants, speakers can then subsequently offer more information. An example of this came from Extract 4.2 (presented as Extract 4.7), where A’s response to a minimal form TT leads C to characterise the sound. Extract 4.7 Popping Sound 43–47 43 44 45 46 47

C: A: C: E:

°whats that° what like popping so[und [(unknown) behind you [(B looks towards C. E looks at C)

Similarly, in the following extract, a TT that identifies an audible referent is met with confirmation from one of the participants, but not another. The speaker then reformulates the initial TT turn as a negative interrogative and appends ‘whistle’. In Extract 4.9, following an equivocal response, the speaker does not name the referent but attempts to enact it by taking an extended in-breath. Extract 4.8 Whistle 25–32 25 26 27 28 29 30 28 29 30 31 32

B: B:

B: A: C: B:

can you make a noise with your voice (2) oooo:: ooo (2.5) (A and B quickly look up at each other at the same time.) (3) did you hear that? yes I heard [that [(A looks off towards her left)] I didn't did you not hear that whistle?

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Extract 4.9 Lillian’s Breath 46–50 46 47 48 49 50

B: A: B: A:

was that you? [wha[(A looks up towards B who is looking at A) like a .hhhhhhhhhhh nope

These cases, however, present weak evidence that speakers defer more explicit description in preference for a minimal form TT. Without wanting to propose psychological explanations, it is possible that at the point of their first awareness of the phenomenon, and the expression of the initial TT, speakers did not have a clear sense of what it was they were hearing (or seeing), and so were unable at that precise moment to offer more information. However, other instances make a stronger case for a normative dimension in the design of TT turns. In the following extract C is the first to speak after hearing a noise (caught on the audio track). Initially this turn seems designed to reflect some feature of the noise, but is then abandoned; the speaker produces a TT component that focuses on recruiting other participants to the experience, and offers less specific information about the referent than the turn projected by the initial turn components. Extract 4.10 Scratching 63–67 63 64 65 66 67

B: C: B:

(Unknown tap can be heard. B glances up as tap occurs) 'kay (unclear) [it went-did you hear that [(C points to the board and looks at B. A also looks at B) yeh I heard that

C’s self-repair may have its origins in the prior turn. Given that C subsequently tries initially to capture some aspect of the noise, we know that, when it occurred, C heard it (and was loud enough to be recorded on the video). But B’s ‘kay’, and the unclear fragment of talk that follows, is ambiguous, in that it could have been in response to the sound, or something else entirely. C’s initial turn design suggests

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that she infers that B’s prior turn was indeed responsive to the sound and had done ‘first noticing’, thereby making relevant next speaker activities such as alignment and assessment. This is what her turn is initially designed to do. However, C’s self-repair demonstrates the alternative understanding that ‘first noticing’ via a TT turn component was either warranted or required.

More Complex TT Turn Forms and Activities The transgressive that can occur in more complex turn designs, and those turns can perform activities other than ‘first noticing’. In these cases, the other turn components, and the actions performed by the turns, support the inferential work constituted by the transgressive that components. The following two extracts come from Woods and Wooffitt’s (2014) analysis of the talk recorded on video capturing mysterious lights in the night sky in northwest United States. The video was posted on YouTube (though it is no longer unavailable), and it captured conversations between the person actually recording the lights and two companions with him at the time. In these cases, the TT turn components are embedded within an ongoing turn. In both cases, the ongoing turns prior to the TT component are clearly designed to emphasise what the speaker perceives to be highly unusual features of the lights. These turn features thereby support the inferential work of the subsequent TT components. Extract 4.11 From Woods and Wooffitt 2014: 248 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

M2: F: M2: F: M2: F:

LOOK AT IT< look how bright it is= =it ↑is so bright. (1.5) its just hovering ther:e= =yeh (.) o::h >>oh oh ohyou see that?>oh oh oh>oh oh ohyou see that?>oh oh ohHE he hehoh my god that’s crazy< .hhh’. Finally she routinely points to some aspect of the lights that seem to differentiate them from lights associated with known and mundane objects or events, for example, she says, ‘o:h wo:w iz blinking’ and ‘look iz falling >↑iz ↑falling [mm-hm

bread

It appears that Beth may not like peanut butter (her turn in line 2 can certainly be interpreted as indicating a dislike of its aroma), but she is unequivocal in her opinion that it has no place on onion bread: it transgresses her view of what foods can be combined. In her turn in line 5 she uses that to refer to the peanut butter, a turn which is then followed by her equally unequivocal expression of disgust in line 8. The next instance from Wiggin’s corpus suggests that young children are equally adept at using the transgressive that. In this sequence from a family dinner, five-year-old Isla uses a minimal form TT to refer to a drink, which, it transpires, she does not like.

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Extract 4.17 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Mum: Isla: Mum: Isla: Mum: Isla:

eh: (0.2) [cutlery? [what's- (0.4) tha:t [(Isla looking down into cup) (1.0) (looks up at Mum) what's what. that (looks down into cup, Mum peers in too) (0.8) 's o↑range juice= yuck:y: (leaning back in chair, looking away)

Finally, the following comes from an article from the UK restaurant critic and broadcaster, Jay Raynor, which was published in the monthly food supplement of the UK Sunday newspaper The Observer. The thrust of this light-hearted article is that we should not be ashamed to like basic or unsophisticated foods. He begins by invoking a morally deviant identity. Being a pervert carries with it risks, the most acute of which is exposure. Deviating from the norm is fine, unless everyone finds out. The only way to face this challenge is to be open. … That is what I intend to do right here and right now. I found the strength to do so after … some mocking from my eldest son. He looked at what I was having for breakfast one day, shook his head and said: “If only people knew …”. For a moment I was afraid. What if people did find out? … Which was when I concluded that I had to be myself, that if I was honest and open, nobody could hold anything over me. So here it is: I adore burnt toast. I don’t mean slightly darker than the way you like your toast. I mean black. Best of all is still hot black toast with a smear of butter (the cheap spreadable kind) that fizzes into the holes on contact and then a bit of Marmite to dance with the acrid carbon notes. … It makes me happy. (Raynor, The Observer Food Supplement, April 13, 2013; original emphasis.)

He then writes: ‘You don’t think that’s especially transgressive, do you? OK. How about this’ (emphasis added) and goes on to confess to a range of other tastes and culinary practices not normally associated with the sophisticated palate of the professional food writer and restaurant

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reviewer. What struck us, of course, is that this line embodies many of the themes we have developed in this analysis: he uses that to refer to something out of place, or transgressive; and he even explicitly uses the word ‘transgressive’ to refer to the eating habits he is disclosing. The minimal form transgressive that is a core component of retrospective reports of unusual experiences, such as those elicited in interviews, especially in accounts that draw on reported speech to portray the drama of a moment. A narrative instance comes from the following account, in Wooffitt’s (1992) analysis of reports of personal paranormal experiences. In this interview fragment the speaker (who is claiming to have mediumship powers) reports how a friend came to hear an unusual sound that hitherto only the speaker had been able to hear. (In the denouement to the narrative it is revealed that the cause of the sound was a spirit.) Extract 4.18 From Wooffitt 1992: 73 >it’s very interesting< because hh (.5) something like this happened to me hhh a few years ago (.) when I was living in edinborough (.) every time I walked into the sitting room, (.3) er:m. (.7) right by the window (.3) and the same place always I heard a lovely (.3) s:ound like↑de↑dede↓dedede↑dededah just a happy (.) little tu:ne (.5) a:nd >of course< I tore apart ma window I tore apart the window frame I >did Everything< to find out what the hell’s causing that cos nobody else ever heard it hhh (.2) >y’know< (.) there could >be ten people in the room nobody’d hear it but me< (.7) er:m: and I wanted to know what was the: (.) material cause of this hh well: (.4) I never could figure it out and it didn’t (.) upset me in fact it was quite a lovely little happy sound un:d so I just let it go (1.7) one night however a friend was with me (.) and we’re just watching the tele (.3) and she was also very psychic a:nd urm (1.3) its- (.) th-the s:ound started the litt(le) musical (s) tus::ound started again (.3) and uhm: (.) >she said what’s THAt I said oh (.) have you heard it it< ah (s) >oh ↑that’s wonderful you’re the first person who’s ever heard it besides me< hh ((coughs)) she was frightened by it (.) got up and ran out of the room.

The transgressive that can also be found in fictional depictions of initial noticings of events that transpire to be otherworldly. The following instance, for example, comes from Ray Bradbury’s classic Gothic Americana novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and captures the moment that one of the book’s main characters, a young teenage boy, first

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hears a sound that is later identified as the imminent arrival in town of a deeply supernatural carnival. The boy and his friend are racing to the library. Up steps, three, six nine, twelve! Slap! Their palms hit the library door. Jim and Will grinned at each other. It was all so good, these blowing quiet October nights and the library waiting inside now with its green-shaded lamps and papyrus dust. Jim listened. “What’s that?” “What, the wind?” “Like music ….” Jim squinted at the horizon. “Don’t hear no music.” Jim shook his head. “Gone Or it wasn’t even there. Come on!” They opened the door and stepped in. (Bradbury 1998 [1962]: 12; original emphasis)

In both the last two cases, the that turn reflects the properties of the minimal form transgressive that: the turn is short, produced with a degree of urgency (indicated by italics in the literary version, and captured by exaggerated pronunciation of reported speech in the interview account) and suggests the speaker is noticing something new in the environment. They establish mystery, and the expectation of a resolution. And in both cases, the referents subsequently transpire to be uncanny or supernatural entities. The work of the transgressive demonstrative in verbal interaction has permeated a range of discursive and cultural contexts and practices. In the paranormal group investigations data, and in the YouTube UFO recordings data, the transgressive that is a key communicative resource by which to notice and constitute events in the world as out of place, in violation of norms and expectations, or uncanny. In this chapter we have focused on how utterances can be designed to refer to something in such a way that its mysterious qualities are implied or made inferentially available. In the next chapter we extend our focus to include the work of the body in determining the presence of spiritual agency in paranormal investigations.

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References Acton, E.K., and C. Potts. 2014. That Straight Talk: Sarah Palin and the Sociolinguistics of Demonstratives. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18: 3–31. Bradbury, R. 1998 [1962]. Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: Simon Shuster. Davis, C., and S. Potts. 2010. Affective Demonstratives and the Division of Pragmatic Labor. In Logic, Language and Meaning: 17th Amsterdam Colloquium, ed. M. Aloni, H. Bastiaanse, T. de Jager, and K. Schulz, 42–52. Amsterdam: Springer. Diessel, H. 1999. Demonstratives: Form, Function and Grammaticalization. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. ———. 2006. Demonstratives, Joint Attention and the Emergence of Grammar. Cognitive Linguistics 17 (4): 463–489. Fillmore, C.J. 1982. Towards a Descriptive Framework for Spatial Deixis. In Speech, Place and Action, ed. R.J. Jarvella and W. Klein, 31–59. Chichester, NY: John Wiley and Sons. Goffman, E. 1978. Response Cries. Language 54: 787–815. Heritage, J. 1984. A Change of State Token and Aspects of its Sequential Placement. In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. M. Atkinson, and J. Heritage 299–345. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, C. 2013. ‘Why Do These People’s Opinions Matter?’ Positioning Known Referents as Unnameable Others. Discourse Studies 15 (3): 299–317. Jefferson, G. 1986. Notes on Latency in Overlap Onset. Human Studies 9 (2/3): 153–183. Lakoff, R. 1974. Remarks on This and That. In Papers from the Tenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, ed. N. LeGaly, R. Fox, and A. Bruck, 345–356. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistics Society. Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myers, F.W.H. 2001 [1903]. Human Personality and the Survival of Bodily Death. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads. Potts, C., and F. Schwarz. 2010. Affective ‘This’. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology 3: 1–30.

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Schegloff, E.A. 2007. Sequence Organisation in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiggins, S. 2013. The Social Life of ‘Eugh’: Disgust as Assessment in Family Mealtimes. British Journal of Social Psychology 52: 489–509. Woods, C., and R. Wooffitt. 2014. Telling the Moment: Seeing a UFO. Narrative Inquiry 24 (2): 239–258. Wooffitt, R. 1992. Telling Tales of the Unexpected: The Organisation of Factual Discourse. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

5 Embodied Sense Making

In this chapter we describe how the body, and sequences of talk in which the body becomes relevant, are implicated in four concerns relevant to the investigations. First, we examine how the body is used to make public a subjectively felt experience. Second, we examine how joint understanding is produced through enactments of private experience on the public body. Third, we look to see how the body is a resource in the way that members of the groups can attribute to an empty space in the room a paranormal relevance, as a place where an unseen spiritual presence may be located. Finally, we extend the focus on epistemic rights and the warrant to speak with authority on possible paranormal experiences occurring within the setting. Several related themes run through our analysis, such as the way that social reality is constituted through embodied interaction in the moment by the participants, and the interactional negotiation of what counts as evidence of paranormal occurrences as the group participants share and discuss their subjectively felt experiences.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Ironside, R. Wooffitt, Making Sense of the Paranormal, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88407-9_5

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The Body in Displays of Subjective Experience There are two notable features of ostensibly paranormal moments in the group investigations. First, they involve unseen spiritual presences. This is normal. Spirit presences and ghostly manifestations are rarely visible. The accounts examined by Waskul and Waskul (2016) demonstrate that it is highly unusual for individuals to report a visual encounter with a ghost. Moreover, events that suggest a spirit presence are usually private. If, for instance, someone reports being touched by a ghost, there is rarely a visible sign that the event has taken place. Likewise, a drop in temperature in a room may be attributed to a spirit presence; but the experience of that change in temperature may be privately felt, rather than a change in the environment felt by others. This raises an interesting analytic question: How do individual, subjective experiences lead to collective group experiences? Collective experience in the context of ghost investigations is unlike other collective experiences, such as an audience reaction to a dramatic event in a play or in a movie, where each member of the audience can react at the same time because they all have equivalent sensory access to that moment. In these group investigations, the collective response is invariably emergent, an outcome of social processes initiated by one person, but then validated or negotiated by others in subsequent interactions. How, then, does one person convey that they have an experience that might constitute spiritual agency, in such a way that their private subjective experience may be the basis for a group response? How are others invited to share in a private experience? Prior research has provided insight into the multimodal and embodied practices that inform how individuals notice, share and come to collectively understand features in the local milieu. Predominantly, this research has largely focused on workplace contexts, highlighting how visual actions such as pointing, gesturing, head tilts and body shifts provide a way for individuals to highlight something in the environment to others and invite further collaborative action (Enfield et al. 2007; Hindmarsh et al. 1998; Heath and Hindmarsh 1999; Heath

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et al. 2002a, 2002b, 2009). As examined in Goodwin’s (1994) study of an architectural school and Hindmarsh’s (2010) research in dental practices, visual actions, such as pointing, can invite others to look and see features in certain ways. In doing so they develop what Goodwin (1994) termed a professional vision of their practice by demonstrating an understanding of what these referents mean in the context of their professional activity. Likewise, vom Lehn’s (2006a, 2006b) study in museums and galleries discusses how visitors share their ‘way of seeing’ exhibits (such as finding something funny or interesting) with others through referential action. This research suggests that how people organise their visual and verbal actions has implications for when and how others discover, understand and react to certain features of the local milieu in relevant ways (Heath and Hindmarsh 1999). So, then, what are the embodied processes by which a collective response is produced from subjective experience in paranormal investigations? We begin by returning to the ‘Munthob’ data we considered in the previous chapter. A recap: the term ‘Munthob’ in this extract was produced prior to this moment by the Ouija board in response to a request for the spirit’s name. In line 78, the group address the spirit for the first time as ‘Munthob’. Behind participant B is located a Gauss meter, used by groups to indicate the presence of a spirit through the measurement of electro-magnetic fields. On mention of the word ‘Munthob’ the Gauss meter (line 80) audibly increases in volume (we note here that this is a significant increase in volume which would indicate the existence of a much stronger electro-­ magnetic field which was not, at least audibly, present in the room previously). In response to this, B and A look towards each other and B bites her bottom lip. C then confirms her understanding that the spirit is indeed called ‘Munthob’ (line 82) and as she produces this assessment B exhales and exclaims ‘Jesus’ (line 83). This verbal utterance is accompanied by an embodied gesture as she leans towards the table in front of her (away from the Gauss meter) and closes her eyes. When C questions if B is ‘alright’ (line 87), B responds by squinting her eyes and says that they are watering while still leaning forward towards the table.

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Extract 5.1 Munthob 78–90

In this example, B appears to be affected by something. While the cause of her discomfort is not explicitly stated, her embodied actions in response to the increased volume of the Gauss meter and vocalisation of the name ‘Munthob’ suggest that these events may be connected. Following this the Gauss meter sound continues to get louder and louder, and the participants exchange glances. They are clearly excited; one participant directly addresses the spirit by saying, ‘Hi Munthob’. Then, abruptly, the Gauss meter goes quiet, which is marked by two participants exclaiming ‘fuck’ and ‘fuck off’ (which we hear as an exclamation). A asks, ‘is that you Munthob’, while B says, ‘oh my God’. It is at this point that C asks why B’s eyes were watering, and B responds with a statement and a question, ‘it was really strong did you not feel that’ (line 124).

Extract 5.1 Continued 122–127

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In this moment it is clear B is having an experience. Her facial expressions, audible exhale, movement away from the source of the sound and closing of her eyes all imply that she is feeling something. The description offered by B that her eyes are watering also suggests that whatever it is she is feeling is strong enough to cause a physical reaction. Furthermore, her description of the event as ‘it was really strong did you not feel that’ at least implies uncanny qualities. A and C are not privy to this subjective experience in their own bodies; however, the talk and gesture produced by B act to highlight her experience, invite others to question her reaction and imply that her experience may be linked to the activity of communicating with ‘Munthob’. These kinds of subjective experiences are common in paranormal investigation groups and contribute to the work of evidencing spiritrelated phenomena. In this instance, and others, the body is drawn upon as a resource to display a private experience and make it relevant to the ongoing activity of the group by eliciting others to notice and respond. B’s actions in this example do more than just react to her own private feelings but are ‘produced in the light and presence of others’ (vom Lehn 2006b: 1352). Therefore, while supernatural embodied experiences may not be observed, or felt, across multiple bodies, they are made visible and shared through embodied action. In eliciting further interaction through displays of embodied experience individuals also shift the experience from an individual, private event into an interactive space where it can be jointly understood and interpreted (Ironside 2018). These observations point to a key feature of the group and its participant members and the way they interact with each other. This is not merely a group of like-minded individuals (or perhaps friends); their assembly in reportedly haunted places, and their interest in contacting the spiritual agencies purportedly behind those hauntings, means that their actions are a socially constituted activity type. According to Levinson (1992), an activity type refers to periods of focused social encounters in which the members have common goals. He cites teaching, a dinner party, and a football match as examples of activity types. Activity types are informed by normative expectations related to their core goals, which constrain participants’ actions and inform interpretations of members’ actions. That is, the normative expectations associated with a socially

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constituted activity type shape both the production of actions and the way in which others may understand them. Mazeland (2019) draws a distinction between those activity types that are mediated entirely through talk (such as a telephone conversation) and those in which are (or which can be) mediated primarily through embodied actions (such as dressing a baby). The paranormal investigation groups occupy an interesting space on the continuum between activity types based on talk and those based on embodied actions. They are, in one sense, primarily discursive events. The members talk to each other throughout their investigation, relaying their thoughts and experiences; moreover, they may address remarks to assumed spiritual agencies. But their activities also exhibit physical, embodied phenomena. As we saw in the Munthob data, a participant may close their eyes and torque their body in a display of a physical response to a putative spiritual presence. Indeed, there is a functional relationship between the talk and the embodied in this activity type, in that it is through the talk, and the activities that are organised through that talk, that the group seeks to solicit precisely the kinds of spiritual interventions that may result in extreme physical sensations. In the following two extracts, we see the relevance of the concept of activity type and evidence of the distinctive relationship between talk and embodied experience. Here subjective experiences are encountered by one participant, and then communicated through vocal and bodily actions to other group members. In extract 5.2, a group of five people are investigating apparent ghost experiences in a private residence in the northeast of Scotland; they are using the Ouija board to contact a spirit. They each have a finger placed on the planchette; through the movement of the planchette to different letters on the board the spirit has so far ‘told’ the group that she is a female spirit and that her name is Gurt. The spirit has also indicated that she is a young girl and that she is in the room with them. In addition to the group (and, according to the Ouija board, the spirit) there are also two pet cats in the room that belong to the resident of the location, which are currently by the door. Prior to the start of the extract, participant C had looked over his left shoulder towards the door and had rubbed his left arm with his right hand. The rubbing actions occurred after the

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looking and invite the interpretation that the two events are in some way related. The extract begins with E’s remark, the first part of which is unclear (as indicated by the standard brackets) but which then seems to embark on an observation about the cats. At the start of this turn, C again looks over his left shoulder towards the door. He then reorients his body to the group. Shortly after this he looks to his left again, grabs his upper left arm with his right hand and begins to rub (lines 44–46). His gaze then returns towards a specific co-participant, B. Following this he reports that he feels that he has been touched on the arm (line 47). At line 57 A addresses the spirit, which leads to a series of playful exchanges in which the participants tease C (whose name has been removed from the transcript) that the spirit is calling him a cat (not on the transcript). Extract 5.2 Alley Cat 41–57

When C reports that he has been touched by something, he is rubbing his left arm. But at that stage he had already been rubbing his arm and had previously looked over his left shoulder in the direction of the door. But on the prior occasions when he had rubbed his arm and looked over his shoulder, he had not announced that he had been touched. It would

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appear, then, that the sensation of being touched did not immediately result in a contemporaneous announcement of that experience: it was momentarily withheld. Given that the core task of paranormal investigations is to produce evidence of spirit contact, it seems curious that C would delay a report of precisely the kind of sensation that might constitute evidence of physical spirit contact. There are, however, interactional advantages to the delay of a verbal report. First, the looking and the arm-rubbing invite others to interpret C’s actions to come to an understanding of what might be going on. There is evidence that this seems to work, as prior to C’s verbal report, two other members of the group look in the same direction that he had been looking (D and C, in lines 43 and 44). That is, without having to be explicitly informed that there may be something uncanny about that part of the room (and thereby having to assess C’s authority to make such a claim), they had been invited to attend to it by C’s momentary disengagement from the Ouija board and his attention to the area around the door. As the core concern of this activity type is contact with spiritual entities, other participants will be predisposed to interpret C’s actions as suggesting the location of a spirit, or at least something mysterious. That is, C’s embodied actions alert others to a possibly significant curiosity about their environment. The second interactional advantage is that C’s embodied alert of a possible paranormal feature of the environment facilitates a collaborative response, in that others are invited to look where he looks (and come to interpretations which resonate with the key concerns of the business of the group); this in turn establishes the foundation for a collaborative understanding of the root of C’s actions. In this sense, C’s embodied actions of looking and rubbing his arm constitute a form of recruitment. In the last decade in Conversation Analytic research the term ‘recruitment’ has been adopted to identify a series of fundamental social actions: the ways in which people issue requests, and seek help or assistance. The term ‘recruitment’ is preferred to more vernacular terms such as request, as it focuses analytic attention on a series of generic interactional resources which underpin this range of discrete social actions (Drew and Couper-­ Kuhlen 2014). These resources, however, are not only linguistic.

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The recruitment of assistance embraces the variety of embodied forms of conduct through which assistance may be solicited or provided, through verbal, vocal and non-verbal conduct, to resolve difficulties that are experienced, manifest or anticipated, which disrupt the progressive realization of practical (embodied) courses of action. (Drew and Kendrick 2018: 1–2)

Work on recruitment in interaction is essentially about the way in which a participant may display that assistance is required, exhibit the kinds of assistance that is required or, less explicitly, alert others to the situation such that they may infer that assistance is sought (Kendrick and Drew 2016; see also, Heritage 2016). In the paranormal investigation data, there are episodes in which one participant seeks to recruit others’ attention and to direct them to an aspect of the environment that is salient for their investigation generally, and for that moment in the investigation specifically. However, this is not recruitment for assistance or help; it is not recruitment in the sense that the term has been used in Conversation Analytic research. Rather, it is recruitment, first, to an ontological position: that there is a state of affairs in the immediate environment that warrants others’ attention because it is relevant to the expectations and objectives of the activity type. Second it is recruitment to a proposed epistemological position, in that the recruitment also evidences the warrant for a particular (paranormal) interpretation. Take, for example, the events in Extract 5.2. Throughout, C’s disengagement from the Ouija board to look over his left shoulder towards the door invites others to attend to the space, and to try to locate its relevance in terms of their investigatory concerns. Moreover, the rubbing of the arm makes inferable the interpretation that whatever motivated the looking is connected to the implied sensations that also led to the arm touching. Throughout this sequence, the body is used as a recruitment tool; without explicitly asking for others to align with his claim to have been physically touched by a spirit, C’s body is deployed in such a way that that interpretation is at least available to the group; moreover, it establishes a supportive inferential context when he makes an explicit report of possible spirit contact. Practices of recruitment, then, are resources by which subjective experience can not only be made public

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but made public in such a way as to facilitate others’ affiliation (Stivers 2008) to an implied paranormal interpretation of events. In the following extract there is a more explicit form of embodied recruitment to a paranormal interpretation, which again hinges on the public display of private experience. Here, the participants are again focused on the planchette and its movement on the Ouija board. They are listening for a knocking sound that they have heard coming from the board when B suddenly looks towards A and then down to her left. This unilateral disengagement from the business at hand and towards her left is also seen by C who follows B’s gaze towards the point of interest. B then reports that she ‘felt’ something, and as she reaches “that” in her verbal utterance “it’s like some doing that” (line 108) she strokes C’s arm and looks towards A. Extract 5.3 Scratching 105–121

In the exchange that follows, A comments that B’s experience might be caused by a ‘child’ (line 111), and this is confirmed by B who offers an agreement ‘yeh::’ whilst assessing that the event was ‘weird’ (112). C overlaps with B’s assessment to ask if the experience occurred on B’s legs; however, B reaffirms her own experience by stating, ‘no no like th-’ (line 115).

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As she produces this turn, she repeats the stroking gesture on C’s arm. As B strokes C’s arm, A interrupts at ‘th-’ by saying, ‘hands and arms’ (line 116) and then offers her own similar experience by expressing that she too ‘felt it on there’ (line 118) as she strokes her own left hand. In the previous extracts, the subjective experience encountered by participants was displayed on and through their own bodies. However, in this instance the stroking gesture produced by B is enacted on a different member of the group. In doing so, in addition to demonstrating the feeling of being touched, B is also able to transpose her embodied experience to another (Heath 2002; vom Lehn 2006a). Similar to Extract 5.2, when a misunderstanding is displayed by C as to the location of the experience—it is on her arm rather than her legs—the gesture is repeated to confirm its position. The overlapping turn by A as B repeats her gesture, and her report of a similar experience accompanied by the same gesture on her own arm, is also interesting. It demonstrates a shared understanding, and collective experiencing, of the event between two participants. These subjective experiences continue to inform the activity of the group as they commence a new line of enquiry with the spirit (line 121). In the three data extracts examined above, embodied gesture is used by participants to highlight, display and make visible experiences that are subjective in nature. By situating these embodied gestures within talk, the subjective experiences are shared with other group members. In the context of the ‘business at hand’ for this activity type—attempting to contact spirits—practices of recruitment serve to invite collaborative actions and affiliation to paranormal interpretations of subjective experience and, as we explore further in the next section, the immediate environment.

J oint Understanding and Enactments on the Body Just as participants may accompany a report of an experience by enacting it on their body, so too can others demonstrate their shared understanding, or shared experience, by mimicking the prior embodied actions.

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If we return to Extract 5.2 (presented below as Extract 5.4), we can see how joint understanding of the experience is demonstrated. C begins to rub his left arm; he then reports that he has been ‘touched in the arm’ (lines 47 and 50). D direct his gaze towards C, and then he too rubs his arms as if cold (line 57 and 58). This is a slightly exaggerated version of the gesture by C: it involves both hands and arms, and is accompanied by the body movement suggesting shivering. Extract 5.4 Alley Cat 42–58

In in Extract 5.5 (presented earlier as Extract 5.3), B has reported that she experienced a sensation as if someone was stroking her hands and arms. She demonstrates her experience to C by gently stroking her arm, and then she engages A in this embodied description by looking directly at her as she concludes the gesture on C’s arm. Shortly after, A claims that she too has experienced the stroking sensation. The reference to ‘it’ (line 118) demonstrates that she is claiming the same experience; and she strokes her own body to indicate where the sensation was located, which further confirms that this is a shared experience and not a coincidental but different kind of experience.

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Extract 5.5 Scratching 105–119

This kind of embodied mimicry is a common resource in the development of shared understandings in institutional settings. For example, Heath (2002) reveals in his study of doctor-patient consultations that imitations are used by doctors to demonstrate an understanding of the suffering being experienced and to confirm their diagnosis. Imitating the gesture produced by the patient is organised in such a way within talk to engender a confirmation from the patient of their symptoms, or, as in the case examined in Heath’s work, further discussion of the relevant symptoms if a discrepancy arises (Heath 2002: 611). Likewise, in his study of visitors to a medical exhibition, vom Lehn (2006a) observed how the body was used to share assumptions about pain that would entail from medical problems illustrated by the exhibits. Visitors would enact their understanding of the pain on their own bodies for their companions, thereby making public what would be privately felt pains and providing the basis for their companions’ shared understanding of their anticipated sensations. In the cases examined here, by imitating the embodied talk and action produced by the first participant, other participants establish and share a joint understanding of the properties of the experience. In each case the nature of the gesture or verbal description of embodied experience produced shows similarities to the initial report. By sharing and validating

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each other’s claims through their own similar embodied experiences, the event is transformed from an individually felt private sensation to a social, collective phenomenon. The group become involved in ‘experiencing’ the event and through that collaboratively confirm its paranormal character.

Pointing, and the Uncanny Life of Empty Space In paranormal investigations, the spirits are, for the most part, unseen. If spirits are present, they are present in spaces which, to our visual system, are empty. But as we saw in the data in the previous section, participants display noticings of ostensibly void areas, and in such a way as to impute a relevance to that void; moreover, they invite others to collaborate in further actions that establish the transgressive and potentially paranormal properties of the event. Through these collaborative activities the group not only constitute the relevance of a space for the immediate interaction, they attribute to that space mysterious qualities or spiritual presences. The body is central to these activities. Embodiment and the interactional significance of empty space have received attention in the social science. As far back as 1934, Bühler identified the practice of Deixis am Phantasma, which he described as ‘the imagined objects, on and to which “pointing” takes place within imagination’ (Bühler 1990: 150). This practice often involves individuals creating a shared understanding of a ‘non-present’ entity in visible space. Stukenbrock (2014) expands on Bühler’s early work, examining how non-visible phenomena are constructed and constituted as interactional objects through verbal deictics and visible bodily acts. She identifies two different forms of Deixis am Phantasma. In the first, imagined phenomena are brought into real space, for example, in pointing to the space which had been occupied by people who are now no longer present to the interactants. In the second, the space itself is constructed in the imagination, for example, in referring to objects within the imaginary context of a story. As Haviland (2000) has demonstrated, pointing to empty space is often used by speakers to tell a story, and is a resource for creating an imaginary narrated space in which it can take place.

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The process of pointing at nothing (also referred to as ‘abstract deixis’) during conversation is a fairly common phenomenon, and provides a space for abstract ideas to be expressed and formulated (McNeill et al. 1993). Like other forms of pointing that help to anchor abstract notions in visible space (Cooperrider 2014), the ‘empty spaces’ that abstract deixis takes place in are ‘rich with contextual information which can be used as a resource … [and] … functions to establish co-orientation and shared imagination between participants’ (Stukenbrock 2014: 76–77). In addition to narrating abstract ideas, this form of pointing may also help individuals to share and co-construct understanding of non-visible referents (Bavelas et al. 2011). On the basis of this research on the recruitment of imaginary objects to ongoing interaction, and the interactional functions of abstract deixis, it is to be expected that these practices would be relevant to group activities which seek to establish the presence of incorporeal spiritual agents. Deictic gestures, usually in the form of either a hand point or head point, often accompany a verbal ‘there’ reference towards a particular space. Enfield et al. (2007) suggest that pointing gestures, specifically what they term ‘B-type’ gestures (extended points with the hand and arm), often accompany a description of ‘where’ a referent is. These gestures are generally produced alongside a verbal ‘there’ or ‘here’, and when identifying a location will also display a shift in gaze and a head turn towards the relevant space. In the following extracts we examine how the location of an event is collectively negotiated in ‘empty space’ through these interactional sequences. Extract 5.6 Dungeons Moan 23–33

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Fig. 5.1  Dungeons Moan: A points with head to empty space

In Extract 5.6, eight group members are sitting in a circle conducting a séance when a ‘that’ reference is produced in response to what is described as a moaning sound. This is not experienced by the whole group with F and G providing a negative response while A replies that she did hear the sound. In Fig. 5.1, I and A simultaneously refer to the sound as coming from ‘over there’ (line 28) and ‘down there’ (line 29) and produce a gaze shift and head point towards an empty space. Like many of the experiences we examine, the moaning referred to in this example has the potential for a mundane explanation—it could have been one of the group members or just an odd sound from the building that sounded like moaning. However, the gaze shift and head point produced towards an empty space in the environment highlight this space as relevant and engender a particular quality to the experience that occurred. It is proceeded by D, G, F and E all looking towards the space, and producing further turns that engage with and orientate to it as the source of the event. It is worth noting that in this instance the group are participating in a séance session and are told at the beginning of the session to hold hands and not to let go until the session has concluded. As such a typical ‘B-type’ gesture (Enfield et al. 2007) is restricted; however, the head point

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produced by A achieves the same outcome—highlighting a relevant space in the local milieu. By accompanying the verbal ‘there’ with a visual deictic gesture the speakers are able to invite others to not only see the space but to see it in a particular way (Vom Lehn et al. 2001; Heath et al. 2002b), as empty (and therefore possibly suggesting a paranormal source for the sound). By highlighting the potential source of an event through deictic gestures, others are then invited to co-participate in d ­ iscovering the event and its paranormal qualities based on its connection to the highlighted, empty space. In Extract 5.7, the group are in the process of trying to identify the source of a loud ticking sound that they have described as resembling a grandfather clock. In the room with the group is a digital clock which, prior to this extract, has been located, removed from the wall and brought over for the group to investigate. After listening to the ticking of the digital clock, A (who was the first person to report the experience) confirms that the sound is not the same (line 111) and produces a deictic hand pointing at the space she originally gazed towards when the sound was first identified (line 114). This accompanies a verbal turn which not only references the space, but also enforces the possibility that it is not the ‘normal’ clock in the room, but one that exists unseen in an empty space (and is therefore of paranormal origin). Her hand point is followed by C turning to gaze towards this space and verbally confirming the direction of the sound. Extract 5.7 Grandfather Clock 111–115

In both cases a deictic gesture accompanies a reference towards empty space, highlighting it to other members of the group and thus making the space visible and relevant to the ongoing interaction. As the event in question is often invisible to the group, producing a visible gesture that positions it in a space in the local milieu provides a point of reference, and in these cases reinforces its ‘empty status’. As a result, others are not

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only encouraged to orientate towards this space as a point of reference, but also to see it in a particular way (Heath et al. 2002b). In basic terms, if the source of the event is from an empty space, it suggests transgressive properties, and may exhibit paranormal qualities. Therefore, similar to studies by Vom Lehn (2006a, 2006b), Vom Lehn et al. 2001), Goodwin (1994) and Heath et al. (2002b), the identification of relevant features of the environment, in this case an empty space, enables the group to share a way of seeing, and thus understanding it as potentially having paranormal significance. These findings illustrate that empty spaces are an important resource for understanding paranormal experiences. Following on from the work of Bühler (1965) and others (McNeill et al. 1993; Haviland 2000; Stukenbrock 2014), we have demonstrated that the practice of ‘pointing at nothing’ has interactional relevance. In these instances, the referent is not imaginary; it is intended not to allude to something that is absent, but to act as a resource to interpret and understand the qualities of an unexplained event. In this, it has a constitutive function: it does not merely draw others’ attention to a space, but it proposes it has a particular character and relevance to the group. The examples discussed also illustrate that this is a collaborative activity. Reference to empty space occurs in a wider framework of orientation, as participants notice (by shifting their gaze), refer to (by producing a ‘that’ reference) and point towards empty spaces in the environment. In each of the experiences examined, a point towards empty space does not occur before or immediately after the first noticing, but after a participation framework has been established (Goodwin 2003). These spaces are void of specificity. In the ‘Dog Scratching’ example the point is to the general space to the left of D, while in the ‘Dungeons Moan’ example the point is towards a space behind the group and in the vicinity of the camera. These deictic gestures, therefore, are not necessarily intended to reference the exact position of an event but rather to create a domain of scrutiny in which collaborative action can occur and meaning and intelligibility can be established.

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Epistemics and the Body When discussing the ‘Munthob’ data in the previous chapter, we noted that the participants’ responses to the possible agency of a spirit exhibited an orientation to epistemic matters. Epistemics in this context simply refers to the negotiation of who has rights or authority to speak on what matters. Research on epistemics in interaction focuses on the ways in which turns are designed to advance or warrant knowledge claims, and how these epistemic grounds may be negotiated, resisted or challenged (Heritage and Raymond 2005; Raymond and Heritage 2006; Stivers et al. 2011). Epistemic concerns inform mundane interaction (Bolden 2013; Stivers et al. 2011; Weiste et al. 2015) and have been described as one of the engines of interaction (Heritage 2012b). To illustrate the significance of epistemic matters, we can consider some data from ordinary conversation. The following transcript comes from a study of assessment in conversation by Pomerantz, and illustrates the sensitivities attendant on claiming to know what someone else claims to know. The participants here are discussing a movie. This movie has been seen by J and L, but not by E, yet it is E who offers an assessment of the movie. Extract 5.8 Pomerantz 1984: 67 E:   …‘n she said she f- depressed her terribly J:  Oh it’s [terribly depressing.

L: [Oh it’s depressing. E:  Ve[ry L: [But it’s a fantastic [film. J: [It’s a beautiful movie

E’s turn is a second-hand assessment, in that she refers to someone else who saw the movie, and it is that person’s assessment of the emotional impact of the movie that E offers. There are two responses to this assessment. J produces an agreement with E about the emotional impact of the

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film: ‘oh it’s terribly depressing’. L’s turn, in overlap with J’s turn, also asserts her agreement. These two responses are built to assert J’s and L’s independent epistemic assessment. Both turns are ‘oh’ prefaced: this ‘oh’ does the work of establishing that they had themselves arrived at the conclusion that the movie was depressing. That is, it is a way of saying ‘yes that’s right: it is depressing’ (Heritage 2012a). Moreover, they are establishing their primary rights to speak about the film: their assessment is not second-hand but is presented as arising from their first-hand experience of the movie. So, they are not merely agreeing with a prior assessment; they are confirming it and presenting their credentials to make that confirmation independently of anything E has said. Their turns are designed to establish their credentials to speak on this ‘territory of knowledge’ (Heritage 2011). Epistemic matters are of distinct concern in the paranormal investigation data. This is because the spirits are unseen, and evidence of their presence is often felt subjectively. This means there cannot be independent visual confirmation by others, and one participant’s experience has to be asserted through their talk and embodied actions. Moreover, participants are speaking on highly controversial and contested matters: the possible presence and active agency of spirits. Overly enthusiastic interpretation of any state of affairs in the environment as evidence of spirit activity is likely to diminish a participant’s credibility; overt scepticism about possible spirit agency would also raise issues about the even-­ handedness of their judgements, and might even be taken to suggest hostile motives for their participation in such an investigation in the first place. Participants, therefore, have to demonstrate rational scepticism and critical thinking, negotiate a stance between credulity and overt debunking, while at the same time managing their own and others’ rights to advance claims about possible spirit activity. Consider the ‘Alley Cat’ sequence in the following extract, which we have examined previously in this chapter. (Our analytic remarks here focus on the talk, but it is clear that the physical actions act as an embodied and visual scaffold in support of the epistemic matters addressed in the talk.)

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Extract 5.9 Alley Cat 43–51

Prior to this extract, C has repeatedly glanced over his left shoulder, and does so again at the start, while grabbing his left arm. He then reports that something touched him. The turn is initially unequivocal and declarative: ‘Uh I just got-’, and we can assume that the projected turn was ‘I just got touched on my arm’. This turn is abandoned; in a self-initiated, self-repair (Schegloff et al. 1977), C restarts the report of being touched. This time, however, there is a modification on the degree of the epistemic certainty being expressed: ‘I just got’ is deleted, and replaced with ‘[I] felt like …’. The responses from D and B display in different ways an alignment with this epistemic downgrade. They both acknowledge that C’s claim to have been touched by a ghost is exceptional through expression of surprise; these may be heard as expressing a degree of scepticism, or, at least, as inviting confirmation or elaboration from C. In his subsequent turn C does confirm the claim, but here reinstates a stronger epistemic foundation: he reports being ‘literally poked’. The ‘literally’ addresses and rebuts any suggestion that he was mistaken about his experience or was being metaphorical in his claim to have been touched by a spirit; and the use of ‘poked’ attributes agency: this was not an accidental glancing touch, but an intended and directed act. Clearly, C could have provided this epistemically strong claim in his original report; indeed, the projected turn prior to the self-repair would suggest that is precisely the kind of epistemic claim he initially embarked on. Yet it is only after D and B invite a confirmation that the stronger claim is eventually delivered. This is evidence that C’s strong claim about

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the presence of spirits and their physical interaction with him is mediated in interaction with respect to the other participants’ contributions to the exchange. This in turn suggests C is orienting to interpersonal sensitivities about making a strong epistemic claim to have been touched by a spirit prior to a more circumspect report. In his pioneering work on epistemics in interaction, Heritage refers to territories of knowledge, drawing attention to the way that social actors work to establish the boundaries of authority, rights and expertise. And like physical or political boundaries, these epistemic boundaries may be subject to monitoring, oversight and enforcement. It is striking that interactants are so particular about managing epistemic domains and the boundaries between them. The boundary areas are, in fact, quite relentlessly policed … these territories of information are patrolled and regulated in much the same way that ethologists argue that animal territories are. (Heritage 2014: 383)

Epistemic work, then, is a form of interpersonal struggle, so subtly ingrained in the weave of interaction that it is easy to miss. But it has important implications for the way that sense making unfolds in paranormal group investigations. In the next extract, there are several instances of epistemic jostling, in which two issues are negotiated. There is, first, a tension between the pursuit of two kinds of evidence for spirit: evidence accrued from private sensations of a drop in room temperature, and the evidence that may be derived from direct interaction with spirits designed to elicit their response. Within that broader tension, there is a series of reports of embodied experience which, on a turn-by-turn basis, incrementally upgrade the participant’s epistemic authority to claim that the spirit is directly interacting with the group. Finally, at the end of the sequence, we see how a participant who has not yet contributed to this specific discussion produces a turn which, though confirming what others had already reported, proposes the speaker’s own independent (and thereby authentic) embodied evidence of spirit contact. Prior to the start of this extract, the group have established that they are communicating with the spirit of a young female child and have been using a K2 device in the centre of the room to engage in a form-mediated conversation.

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Extract 5.10 Little Girl 63–85

At the start of this sequence, the group are trying to verify the presence of a spirit by asking it to respond to specific request (though being invisible, it is not clear how B’s request that the spirit run around as quickly as possible would help the group’s assessment). But in lines 64 and 65, A introduces a new topic, in overlap with B’s request: instead of directing talk to the spirit, he reports, ‘it’s chilly here’. In the context of a paranormal investigation in which the group is trying to determine if a spirit is with them at that moment, this observation on the environment in the room will be heard as evidence of a spirit. Here, then, is the first epistemic tussle. Prior to this turn, the group had been seeking evidence of the spirit through direct engagement and led by B’s request to the spirit, but with this turn, A proposes an alternative evidential locus: the secondary effects of spirit presence, such as room temperature. There is now a particular interactional landscape which shapes subsequent contributions. The rest of the group can either align with A’s focus on the evidential value of subjective experience or reassert the evidential

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focus on direct interaction with the spirit (e.g., by reissuing B’s request that the spirit run around the room or perform another task). This is consequential because in that interactional moment, the group are negotiating what counts as evidence for spirit presence. I’s next turn, in overlap with A’s repeat that the room is ‘chilly’, aligns with the focus on the evidential force of secondary effects of the spirit’s presence. However, I faces an epistemic dilemma. Merely confirming A’s observation would not establish their own epistemic authority. Their turn, though, is designed to propose that their experience of the temperature of the room is formed independently of A’s assessment. I reports, ‘I’m getting really cold’ (line 66) and then ‘it’s really cold’ (line 69). During this turn they momentarily orient their body towards A, which, on conjunction with their turn, constitutes an embodied alignment with A’s focus on temperature. However, I’s turns do not merely confirm A’s assessment, but personalise that earlier assessment. ‘I’m getting really cold here’ focuses on I’s subjective experience. There are domains of knowledge over which it is conventionally taken that a speaker has authority and expertise, such as feelings, thoughts, pain and hopes. The report that she is experiencing cold is thereby epistemically secure. Even another participant’s report that they do not feel cold, or even some form of objective measure (a thermometer showing no change), would not undermine a subjective sense of being cold. Moreover, I’s turns upgrade A’s assessment: whereas A reported the room is ‘chilly’, I reports that she feels ‘really cold’ and that the room is ‘really cold’. C develops I’s focus on subjective experience, but establishes her own independent epistemic authority by specifying which part of the body the cold is felt (‘my elbow’s really cold), and which side of the body the cold is felt (‘on this side’). However, C then embarks on a much stronger epistemic claim. She goes on to state, ‘it has been for’ (line 72). Although this turn component is not completed, it is reasonable to assume that it projected a turn something like ‘it has been for some time’ or ‘for a while’ or some variant. This turn, then, is designed to establish that C was aware of the room temperature before the assessments offered by others. It also contrasts with I’s assessment that she’s ‘getting really cold’, which suggests merely a recent noticing and emergent awareness. This further establishes that C’s experience of the temperature was independent of the other’s reports and grounded in more sustained experience.

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Three participants, A, I and C, have produced turns which each seeks to establish their independent epistemic authority, and, consequently, they have interactionally and incrementally elaborated on the nature of the phenomenon being experienced. Represented schematically, the phenomenon develops in this way: A: It’s chilly here I: I’m getting really cold I: I turns to others C: My elbow’s really cold C: My elbow’s really cold on this side C: This has been ongoing on some time Over lines 64–72, three participants report personal experience of room temperature as the primary source of evidence of spirit presence. However, recall that just prior to this, B had sought to establish evidence via a direct request to the spirit, but that had been suspended as the group explored their subjective experience. In line 73, B speaks again, asking ‘are you making us cold’. While this preserves the focus on subjective experience of the immediately prior turns, it reasserts the evidential value of directly addressing the spirit. B’s question proposes spirit agency—that she is responsible for bodily sensations. This agency is maintained in A’s next turn, in which he states, ‘I think she’s sat next to us I think she’s breathing on our arm’. However, while the spirit agency is preserved, the evidential vehicle—the direct request to a spirit—is abandoned in a return to more personalised and localised observation. Although A’s report is hedged with an ‘I think’ turn initial component, it is nonetheless a significant epistemic claim, proposing spirit proximity (she is right there beside them) and an explanation for the sensation of cold (the spirit is breathing on them). The body is a central resource in developing this account. It invokes the spatial arrangements of the participant’s bodies; embodied sensations in the arm are recruited to elaborate the scenario, and the collective nature of the experience is established through reference to ‘our arm’. This is undoubtedly an evocative, haunting scenario, and elicits a fitted embodied response from I (her turn towards A and B, line 76), and an exclamatory response (‘oh God’, line 81);

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in addition, there is a turn from B that, although incomplete, seems to be designed to accept the premise of A’s account (line 82). It is here that, for the first time in this sequence, D contributes, saying, ‘I just got the absolute shiver-’. Here, D is in an epistemically inauspicious position, as others have already established their epistemic authority. However, the use of ‘absolutely’ is significant in the design of this turn. ‘Absolutely’ is an extreme case formulation (Pomerantz 1986). Extreme case formulations are terms that refer to the maximal or minimal character of an event or thing, such as ‘always’, ‘never’, ‘everyone’ and ‘everything’. Pomerantz analysed their use in conversation and found that they tended to occur when the speaker was proposing a claim which was interactionally sensitive, in that the speaker had grounds to infer that the recipient(s) may not align or endorse the claim being proposed. Extreme case formulations, then, are a warranting device for knowledge claims. Although there is no evidence to suggest that other participants have grounds to be sceptical of D’s report of her bodily sensation, D’s use of ‘absolutely’ to frame her own experience orients to the possibility that her relatively late contribution to the group’s reports of physical sensations may be regarded as motivated not by independent experience, but an attempt merely to align with the prior talk. In just a few seconds of interaction, over a few turns and via a few movements of the body, the participants engage in a variety of epistemic work. What seem like mere reports of internal sensations or observations on the environment are designed to propose the pursuit of types of evidence of the spirit, or establish independent authority to speak on matters on which the group is momentarily focused. The epistemic negotiations are responsive to prior turns and claims to epistemic authority that group members had previously proposed and warranted. In these turns and brief movements of the body, the participants negotiate rights to talk, and thereby manage sensitive interpersonal relations. But more than that, through their epistemic positioning, they constitute the spirit phenomenon on which they report. At the start, the room is cold, with the inference available that the spirit is responsible. Within a few turns, the group’s understanding has developed such that it can be proposed that the spirit is sitting with the group, blowing on people’s arms and moving amongst them. This specification of the spirit, its agency and the capacity to interact directly with the group are interactionally generated and emergent phenomena.

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In the paranormal group investigations the body, in conjunction with talk, is a resource to make public subjective experience, invest empty space with a spiritual relevance and negotiate epistemic authority to report on experiences which constitute evidence of spirit contact. Through these activities, group collaboration is sustained and developed, and the nature of spirit entities and their actions are interactionally constituted.

References Bavelas, J., J. Gerwing, M. Allison, and C. Sutton. 2011. Dyadic Evidence for Grounding with Abstract Deictic Gestures. In Integrating Gestures, ed. G. Stam and M. Ishino, 49–60. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Bolden, G.B. 2013. Unpacking “Self ” Repair and Epistemics in Conversation. Social Psychology Quarterly 76 (4): 314–342. Bühler, K. 1965 [1934]. Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Gustav Fischer Verlag, Stuttgart. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. ———. 1990. Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Cooperrider, K. 2014. Body-Directed Gestures: Pointing to the Self and Beyond. Journal of Pragmatics. 71: 1–16. Drew, P., and E. Couper-Kuhlen, eds. 2014. Requesting in Social Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Drew, P., and K.H. Kendrick. 2018. Searching for Trouble: Recruiting Assistance Through Embodied Action. Social Interaction. Video-based Studies of Human Sociality. 1 (1): 1–15. Enfield, N., S. Kita, and J.P. De Ruiter. 2007. Primary and Secondary Pragmatic Functions of Pointing Gestures. Journal of Pragmatics 39 (10): 1722–1741. Goodwin, C. 1994. Professional Vision. American Anthropologist 96 (3): 606–633. Goodwin, Charles. 2003. Pointing as Situated Practice. In Pointing: Where Language, Culture and Cognition Meet, ed. S. Kita, 217–241. New Jersey: Taylor and Francis. Haviland, J.B. 2000. Pointing, Gesture Spaces, and Mental Maps. Language and Gesture 2: 13–46. Heath, C. 2002. Demonstrative Suffering: The Gestural (Re) Embodiment of Symptoms. Journal of Communication 52 (3): 597–616.

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Heath, C., and J. Hindmarsh. 1999. Embodied Reference: A Study of Deixis in Workplace Interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1855–1878. Heath, C., M.S. Svensson, J. Hindmarsh, P. Luff, and D. vom Lehn. 2002a. Configuring awareness. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 11 (3): 317–347. Heath, C., P. Luff, D.V. Lehn, J. Hindmarsh, and J. Cleverly. 2002b. Crafting Participation: Designing Ecologies, Configuring Experience. Visual Communication 1 (1): 9–33. Heath, C., P. Luff, and M.S. Svensson. 2009. Embedding Instruction in Practice: Contingency and Collaboration During Surgical Training. Sociology of Health and illness 31 (6): 889–906. Heritage, J. 2011. Territories of Knowledge, Territories of Experience: Empathic Moments in Interaction. In The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation, ed. T. Stivers, L. Mondada, and J. Steensig, 159–183. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012a. Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (1): 1–29. ———. 2012b. The Epistemic Engine: Sequence Organization and Territories of Knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (1): 30–52. ———. 2014. Epistemics in Conversation. In The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, ed. J. Sidnell and T. Stivers, 370–394. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. ———. 2016. The Recruitment Matrix. Research on Language and Social Interaction 49 (1): 27–31. Heritage, J., and G. Raymond. 2005. The Terms of Agreement: Indexing Epistemic Authority and Subordination in Talk-in-Interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly 68 (1): 15–38. Hindmarsh, J. 2010. Peripherality, Participation and Communities of Practice: Examining the Patient in Dental Training. In Organisation, Interaction and Practice: Studies of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, ed. N. Llewellyn and J. Hindmarsh, 218–240. Hindmarsh, J., M. Fraser, C. Heath, S. Benford, and C. Greenhalgh 1998, November. Fragmented Interaction: Establishing Mutual Orientation in Virtual Environments. In Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference on Computer supported Cooperative Work (pp. 217–226). Ironside, R. 2018. Feeling Spirits: Sharing Subjective Paranormal Experience Through Embodied Talk and Action. Text and Talk 38 (6): 705–728. Kendrick, K.H., and P. Drew. 2016. Recruitment: Offers, Requests, and the Organization of Assistance in Interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction 49 (1): 1–19.

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Levinson, S.C. 1992. Activity Types and Language. In Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, ed. P. Drew and J. Heritage, 66–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mazeland, H. 2019. Activities as Discrete Organizational Domains. In Embodied Activities in Face-to-face and Mediated Settings, ed. E. Reber and C. Gerhardt, 29–61. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. McNeill, D., J. Cassell, and E.T. Levy. 1993. Abstract deixis. In Semiotica. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Pomerantz, A. 1984. Agreeing and Disagreeing with Assessments: Some Features of Preferred/Dispreferred Turn Shapes. In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. J.M. Atkinson and J. Heritage, 57–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pomerantz, A M. 1986. Extreme Case Formulations: A Way of Legitimizing Claims’. Human Studies 9: 219–229. Raymond, G., and J. Heritage. 2006. The Epistemics of Social Relations: Owning Grandchildren. Language in society 35 (5): 677–705. Schegloff, E.A., G. Jefferson, and H. Sacks. 1977. The Preference for Self-­ Correction in the Organization of Repair in Conversation. Language 53 (2): 361–382. Stivers, T. 2008. Stance, Alignment, and Affiliation During Storytelling: When Nodding Is a Token of Affiliation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 41 (1): 31–57. Stivers, T., L. Mondada, and J. Steensig, eds. 2011. The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stukenbrock, A. 2014. Pointing to an ‘Empty’ Space: Deixis am Phantasma in Face-to-Face Interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 74: 70–93. Vom Lehn, D. 2006a. The Body as Interactive Display: Examining Bodies in a Public Exhibition. Sociology of Health and Illness 28 (2): 223–251. ———. 2006b. Embodying Experience: A Video-Based Examination of Visitors’ Conduct and Interaction in Museums. European Journal of Marketing 40 (11/12): 1340–1359. Vom Lehn, D., C. Heath, and J. Hindmarsh. 2001. Exhibiting Interaction: Conduct and Collaboration in Museums and Galleries. Symbolic Interaction 24 (2): 189–216. Waskul, D., and M. Waskul. 2016. Ghostly Encounters: The Hauntings of Everyday Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Weiste E., L. Voutilainen, and A. Peräkylä. 2015. Epistemic Asymmetries in psy­chotherapy Interaction: Therapists’ Practices for Displaying Access to Clients’ Inner Experiences. Sociology of Health and Illness 38 (4): 645–661.

6 Experiencing the (Anomalous) Moment

In this book we have developed an approach to the study of naturally occurring paranormal experiences that is grounded in Conversation Analytic studies of the organisation of talk and embodied interaction. Our analytic objective has been to outline some of the interactional practices through which participants in paranormal group investigations come to interpret events in their environment as representing the presence or agency of spiritual entities: ghosts that haunt buildings. Focusing on the sequential organisation of talk and on the use and interpretation of bodies, we have examined the mundane communicative competences through which possible spirit activity is noticed, negotiated, resisted or confirmed, thereby identifying the collective, social basis of this kind of anomalous experience. We have also examined how the spaces in which these investigations occur, and the investigatory tools which are used, may also be woven into the participants’ interactions to imbue them with an inferential and evidential relevance to the groups’ activities. Finally, we have argued that paranormal investigations of this type can be examined as a form of informal work; this quasi-institutional context shapes the design of the participants’ utterances, informs recipients’ interpretations

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and underpins the way that epistemic authority is negotiated in the detail of interaction. The wider relevance of the analyses presented here might be questioned given the relatively marginal or fringe character of paranormal investigations, especially when compared to studies of interaction in doctor-­ patient consultations, courtrooms or political interviews. However, the analysis of interaction in paranormal investigation groups does allow us to address a range of topics that are taken to be central to sociology and other social sciences. In this final chapter we outline how our analytic approach may contribute to research on sacred spaces, religious practices, dark tourism and agency. We begin, though, by making a case for the importance of the paranormal investigations in contemporary culture.

Paranormal Investigations and Contemporary Culture Paranormal investigations are not rare; since the early part of the century, they have become increasingly common. Take the case of groups in the United Kingdom. In the 1990s it was estimated that there were 150 groups (Hill 2011). By 2010, it was estimated that there were over 1200 (Parascience: Who Ya Gonna Call?, 2010), although other researchers suggest that this figure is closer to 2500. In the USA, the figure is significantly higher, with over 4000 groups actively conducting investigations (Blake 2013). This rise is often attributed to the ‘spectral turn’ (Goldstein et al. 2007) associated with paranormal reality television which has popularised ghost hunting, and groups have been influenced by the investigative methods employed by groups featured on these shows. As Walter (2013) observes, paranormal reality television creates a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ by combining scientific and spiritual rationalities to construct evidence of communication with spirits, an approach observed in investigations not organised as part of a television show (Eaton 2020; Hanks 2016a; Ironside 2016). A considerable industry of events, tourism and hospitality has also emerged, offering commercial ghost walks, ghost hunts and a variety of other supernatural-themed experiences (Hanks

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2016c; Ironside 2018). Indeed, Blanco and Peeren (2010) argue that the consumption of paranormal popular culture has firmly normalised ghosts and their investigation. [I]t seems ghosts are everywhere these days. Whether in rock songs, Internet news feeds, or museum exhibits, we appear to have entered an era that has reintroduced the vocabulary of ghosts and haunting into everyday life. (Blanco and Peeren 2010: ix)

Despite the growth of paranormal groups in the UK and the US in the early part of this century, it is only recently that scholarship has provided some detailed analysis of the practices, perspectives and beliefs shared by these groups. An early study by Childs and Murray (2010) revealed how scepticism is used rhetorically by investigators to present credible accounts of paranormal events. Baker and Bader (2014) observed how scientific language in drawn upon to substantiate and legitimise experiences. And Hanks’ (2016a, 2016b) ethnographic research has shown how group members frame their investigations to warrant the claim that they are scientific and rational; she also observed that displays of self-doubt and humour have rhetorical functions in participants’ accounts of their activities. Additionally, she describes how spiritual energy is experienced in different ways through subjective bodily sensations, and physical interaction with equipment such as electro-magnetic field meters. Finally, in his study of paranormal investigation groups, Eaton (2020) discusses various forms of work through which the reality of the spirit is socially constructed, such as somatic work (Vannini et al. 2012), techno-empiricist work and debunking. He writes: ghosts are a social accomplishment, a product of interpretive processes that take place within specific cultural, idiocultural, and locational contexts, all of which influence individuals’ perceptions of what “really” occurs in reportedly haunted places. (original emphasis, 2020: viii)

However, while these studies recognise the importance of language and embodied experience, they do not offer a systematic analysis of recordings of paranormal investigation groups during actual

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investigation, instead relying on ethnographic observations or retrospective accounts generated in formal or informal interviews. So, while they can offer broad accounts of the social construction of ghosts and spirits, there is little insight into the communicative and embodied practices through which the social reality of ghosts is produced in the moment. Our work therefore complements research by Eaton and the others described earlier; it explores precisely how talk and action are used by investigators collectively to understand and interpret sensory experiences. That is, we can refine the sometimes loose term social construction of reality, to focus more on the interactional production of social reality, a focus which is grounded in the observable details of talk and embodied interaction. In addition, we have drawn from Conversation Analytic studies to highlight how the relevance of space is configured in the moment-by-­ moment unfolding of interaction. Moreover, the recognition that investigations are a form of institutional or work-related activity provides for a more technical appreciation of the ways that subjective understandings are displayed; it also opens up for investigation the analysis of the discursive production of social identities relevant to that work (such as that of medium), and the negotiation of epistemic authority among the participants.

Place and Sacred Spaces In addition to interaction between people and bodies, we have also highlighted that the study of interaction between people, environment and objects is important to our understanding of anomalous events. This is because paranormal experiences happen in places. Spontaneous phenomena may occur at home or at work. Experiences may occur to people while they are in transit, or they may have just ended a journey and be at a destination; or they may be about to embark on a journey and be at the point of departure. But people are always somewhere. Whenever they occur, therefore, paranormal experiences always have a local, spatial dimension. The social sciences have not systematically explored the relationship between place, space and experience, with perhaps the exception of anthropological studies of the way that shamanic ceremonies and

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experiences often cluster around traditionally sacred sites. There is research in neuroscience and psychology that explores how anomalous phenomena may be related to the effects of recognised forces, the occurrence of which are crucially connected to particular locations. For example, Persinger’s work on the relationship between electrical distortions to the temporal lobe and anomalous or mystical experiences suggests that energies locally displaced by tectonic movement may influence the consciousness of people in that location (Cook and Persinger 2001; Persinger and Healey 2002; Persinger et al. 2001; see also Wiseman et al. 2002; Wiseman et al. 2003). Though this kind of research ignores the way that people actually make sense of space in the moment, it does at least acknowledge the substantial anecdotal evidence that location and space are implicated in the way that paranormal interpretations or reports emerge. In a recent review of relevant research on studies of haunted houses, Dagnall and colleagues identified six environmental variables: embedded (static) cues, lighting levels, air quality, temperature, infrasound and electro-­magnetic fields (Dagnall et al. 2020). In their critical assessment of this research, they concluded that, despite a multitude of studies into these variables, their findings are inconsistent. They call for an approach to studying haunted houses that acknowledges the wider role of physical variables, sociocultural influences, situational context and interactional dynamics—all of which shape the character of spaces and settings, as well as define how experiencers are ultimately situated inside them. (Dagnall et al. 2020: 10)

Dagnall et al. call for work that moves beyond correlations between personality, belief, experience and the physical resonances of architecture; they recognise the importance of a wider range of sociocultural and interactional factors that may influence how spaces become seen and understood as having anomalous qualities. We propose that Conversation Analysis, and the analytic gaze associated with that approach, provides the tools to identify and describe sociocultural and situational variables as they become relevant to the participants. In talk and embodied gestures, we can see how, for example, local knowledge of a building’s history may be raised in a participant’s turn at talk. Moreover, we can begin to see

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what kind of work that turn accomplishes at that moment: we can track the interactional context in which and for which it is produced, and we can monitor the way that turn shapes the interactional landscape for subsequent turns. In this way, the sociocultural and the situational are made visible in the observable details of communication. From our research, this is most clearly exemplified in analyses of the way that participants orient to the inferential significance of space during their investigations and negotiate its relevance through turns at talk and embodied actions. The places investigated by paranormal groups are special, in that they are reputed to be sites in which living humans may experience contact with dead ones. In that, they have a spiritual relevance which makes them distinct from buildings in which there are no reports of ghostly activity. While they are not the same as sacred spaces in formal religions, there is sufficient spiritual common ground to explore if the analysis of investigation group interactions may offer possibilities for the study of religious experience and sacred spaces. In the social sciences, studies of sacred spaces often adopt an ethnographic approach, relying on the researcher’s participation in group activities and on interviews with relevant individuals. Moreover, they tend to be motivated not by an interest in the specifics of conduct in the sacred space, but by the way that broader cultural, political or historical contexts have shaped the space and the conduct of people for whom that space has religious significance. For example, Sinha’s (2003) study of the merger of religious spaces in Singapore, encompassing Taoism and Hinduism, is rooted in a historical analysis of the development of Singapore as a city nation-state, and the religious history of its people. It is also an exploration of the impact of modernity on the way that religious culture is shaped. But there is very little insight into the way that people actually worship or use this sacred place. We are left wondering how, exactly, do worshippers find spiritual reality in this space? There is a similar issue in Thiessen and McAlpine’s (2013) study of a space used by Canadian worshippers for religious holidays and other spiritual events. Through analysis of interviews with people who have attended these religious events, they argue that sacred spaces are important because they allow participants to renew their faith, find meaning in life and manage change. However, these analytic claims seem general and lack specificity. In part

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this may be due to the influence of philosophical arguments on their work. They write: The significance of sacred space encompasses the functional, but exceeds beyond to include the epistemological and ontological. Henri Lefebvre argues that any monumental work or architecture has ‘a horizon of meaning; a specific or indefinite multiplicity of meanings, a shifting hierarchy in which now one, now another meaning comes momentarily to the fore, by means of—and for the sake of—a particular action’. (Thiessen and McAlpine 2013: 133)

But their approach overlooks precisely the situated communicative practices through which ‘one meaning comes momentarily to the fore’ in actual social interaction. Yet we have seen in the analyses of the paranormal investigation data, how such meanings (and interpretations, understandings, attributions, categorisations) are embedded in and mediated through talk and embodied activities. There are direct interactions with spiritual entities: they are spoken to and spoken about, their identities are attributed, their motives are proposed and their personality is made inferentially available. The architectural ‘horizon of meaning’ to which Lefebvre refers—a concept that Thiessen and McAlpine clearly find useful—can be found directly in the situated language practices of religious groups. How they find space to have spiritual significance can be examined empirically in the same way that we can investigate how groups can find evidence of ghostly agency in their investigations. In this way the horizons of meaning can be explored in situ, in the design of talk and embodied actions as participants make sense of their experiences on a moment-by-moment basis.

Faith and Prayer We suggest here that the socially organised practices revealed in the study of paranormal experience also have relevance to other settings in which subjectivity, embodiment and demonstrative actions are prominent. We have noted studies in medical consultations, museums and gastronomy

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but the potential applications of the focus on talk and embodied interaction are wide-ranging. For example, the study of religious and spiritual experience has received very little consideration from an interactional perspective, with some limited studies exploring the practices of talking about and reading from the Bible (Lehtinen 2005, 2009). In many respects, religious and paranormal experiences have similar phenomenological qualities, and they are sometimes considered under the wider banner of anomalous events (Bourque 1969; Hay 1987). The ostensible overlap warrants research on religious events informed by the focus in talk and embodied actions we have adopted here. Studying the different ways that people communicate and share religious experience across faiths and culture might reveal similarities and differences in the way language, body and the environment are drawn upon to establish personal and collective religiosity. It may be illuminating to study the practice of speaking in tongues widely associated with Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, but also evident in other religions. Interactional analysis of the socially organised discursive and embodied practices of an ordained exorcism might reveal how this extraordinary act rests on mundane practices. (As an aside, the second author recalls watching a documentary about the demonic possession of a teenage woman which featured film of a traumatic exorcism. At one point the demon, speaking through the woman, curses the priest, spitting the words ‘fuck you, fuck Jesus, fuck God’. He was struck that the demon’s profanities oriented to the normative convention to produce lists in three parts [Jefferson 1990].) Perhaps the aspect of religious life that most readily lends itself to the kind of analytic approach we have developed here is prayer. It is acknowledged that prayer is fundamental to religion and religious life (Krause 2004). James quotes Sabatier’s observation that prayer is ‘no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of certain sacred formulae, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence’ (in James, [1902] 1982: 464). However, there has been little sustained social scientific analysis of prayer, let alone the ways in which communicative practices appropriate for a ‘personal relation of contact with the mysterious’ may be established. As Brown has argued, ‘Our understanding of prayer

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seems to rely on anecdote, analogy, and experience, rather than on any abstract evidence about it’ (in Krause 2004: 249). Swatos (1982: 153) argues that the largely positivist orientation of social science has ‘created a bias against granting any empirical credence to prayer at all’. In contrast, he urges that social scientists should adopt a position of agnosticism and neutrality as to the existence of a divine recipient of prayer, thereby facilitating the investigation of sociologically relevant questions. His analysis focuses primarily on the latent functions of prayer, and the way in which power is mobilised in the activity of prayer and prayer content. However, he does make the observation that face-to-­face interaction is a model for virtually all prayer. He states, for example, that ‘[p]ractically all prayer assumes that there is a receiver who ‘hears’ the prayer and who is capable of making a response’ (1982: 157). Swatos thereby draws a parallel between everyday talk-in-interaction (Schegloff 2007) and human-divine interaction. There have been numerous studies of the relationship between religion and language (e.g., DuBois 2001; Lindgren 2005; Szuchewycz 1994; VandeCreek et al. 2002; Zaretsky 1974), but, aside from Keane’s (1997) broad consideration of some of the communicative dimensions to human intercourse with spirits, there has been no systematic study of the way in which prayer to a divine spiritual being may reflect everyday patterns of verbal communication; neither is there exploration of how studies of talk-in-interaction can inform our understanding of the establishment of prayerful consciousness in preparation for human-divine interaction. Relatedly, prayer is an embodied practice: the comportment of the body as a prelude and accompaniment to prayer is common to religious practices. Even if a prayer is only produced internally, and not spoken aloud, and away from the setting of formal religious worship, that prayer will be embodied in a person. Prayer, then, can be examined as a site in which interactional practices and embodied actions intersect, and through which human-divine interaction is organised as a practical and spiritual activity.

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Spiritual Quest Culture and Dark Tourism The paranormal experiences we examine in this book also sit within the wider cultural context of a growing ‘spiritual quest culture’ (Eaton 2015), legend-tripping and dark tourism. While vom Lehn’s (2006) study of the Body Worlds exhibit provides some insight into how individuals negotiate ‘dark exhibits’ there is currently limited research into social interaction within dark tourism and legend-tripping. Dark tourism can be defined as visits to places ‘associated with death, suffering and the seemingly macabre’ (Stone 2006: 146). It has also been called ‘thanotourism’ (Seaton 1996: 234), ‘morbid tourism’ (Blom 2000: 29) and ‘black-spot tourism’ (Rojek 1993: 142). The term, while fairly new in academic research, has grown in notoriety in recent years as the popularity of dark tourism sites has increased with the now commonplace commercialization of death and tragedy (Coldwell 2013). (Ironside 2018: 99)

While some destinations for dark tourism may not be associated with paranormal events, many are. Legend-tripping, though, is explicitly defined as an excursion to places where something uncanny has allegedly occurred with the intention of experiencing something supernatural (Ellis 1996). While research has explored the subcultural practices and motivations of legend-tripping (Bird 1994; Holly and Cordy 2007) as well as its role in contemporary society (Ironside 2018; Light 2007), very little is known about how people experience legends in particular places. Furthermore, scholars have called for greater experiential understanding of dark tourism (Miles 2014; Stone and Sharpley 2008), research on which has hitherto predominantly focused on visitor motivations and theoretical assumptions. In the context of legends and dark heritage, people are engaging with an experience that may be abstract, evocative and subjective. Yet, like paranormal experiences, these occur within a wider framework of interaction between bodies and the environment. Specifically, they are associated with places that are charged with a particular quality and feeling because of their historical and cultural associations. We propose that the interactional perspectives gained from the

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study of paranormal experiences may also prove relevant to these contexts and provide a methodological and theoretical base for further enquiry.

Agency, in Three Senses Finally, we turn to implications for the study of agency: the agency of the body, the agency of material objects and the attribution of agency to non-­ human entities. In our study, we have emphasised the active role of the body in paranormal investigations to examine embodied sense-making resources. From this perspective, the body has interactional agency. During collective paranormal events people position their bodies in particular ways through pointing, body shifts, head movements, eye contact, gestures and facial expressions. These movements may seem mundane, but they perform specific functions by displaying subjective experiences, constructing domains of scrutiny in the environment and communicating the features of anomalous activity. The role of the body in communicating experience has been acknowledged in other settings including medical consultations (Heath 1984) and museum exhibitions (Vom Lehn 2006). In these instances, subjectivity and emotion are transposed through bodily action in such a way that others are invited to see, share and understand the experience of others—as fearful, disgusting, exciting or interesting. In most cases, these actions occur in the presence of a physical object that can be pointed at and orientated towards. For paranormal events, this is often not the case: the spirits are not seen, but felt, or registered through the displays of technical objects. We argue, therefore, that this makes the body even more important to the interactional constitution of experiences as paranormal experiences. In the same way that bodies have interactional agency, so too do the tools of group investigations: the Ouija board, Gauss meter and K2 meter. It might be thought that this claim aligns us with Actor Network Theory or ANT (Ashmore et al. 1994; Latour 1999) in which the word actor (or more precisely actant) is applied to non-human entities. ANT is a radically democratic in that agency is assumed to be operating in any part of a network. However, work in ANT is concerned with associations

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of individual actants in any network. The concern with associations is often explored at an abstract or a conceptual level. Consequently, the talk and embodied practices through which people bring objects into their immediate social reality, and imbue them with significance for that moment, are overlooked. We argue that a perspective informed by Conversation Analytic studies of interactions with objects in work settings provides a more satisfactory account of the way the objects are made relevant to local interactional projects. The material tools of investigations are not merely there, present but inert in the investigation, providing some objective measure of changes in the environment. They are recruited for particular courses of action; they are resources with which to claim and legitimise leadership and authority; they are mechanisms by which the spirits can be tasked to produce evidence of their presence; and they may be implicated in the negotiation of epistemic authority and group leadership. In this, we contribute to empirically grounded analyses of the various ways that the agency of objects—and the various kinds of agency they may exhibit—are embedded in social practices. There is a final sense in which our study bears on agency. In the past three decades, some psychologists have developed a sustained critique of the cognitivist and experimental traditions of the discipline. Drawing from Wittgenstein, semiotics and more extensively from Conversation Analytic techniques and findings, discursive psychologists have argued that ostensibly cognitive terms that appear in talk are not determined by psychological or cognitive reality, but are attributions produced in talk for social interactional purposes (Edwards and Potter 1992. Edwards 1997; Te Molder and Potter 2004). Attributions of agency, intelligence, mental states … are in the first place participants’ categories and concerns, (manifested in descriptions, accusations, claims, error accounts, membership disputes etc.) just as much as reality, imitation and authenticity are. (Edwards 1997: 319)

Discursive psychologists have produced extensive empirical research on the ways that cognitions, personality, identity, memory, attitudes, attributions and so on are warrantably invoked and indexed in the particulars of language use in a variety of discursive contexts. There is, however, little

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research on the ascription, rejection or negotiation of agency in discourse. There are earlier philosophical or ethnomethodological studies, but these tend to adopt analytic approaches which do not capture the ways in which agency is mobilised in discursive practice. Harré (1995), for example, offers a philosophical account of agency in discourse in which actual interaction is not examined. Bogdan and Taylor (1989) identify only broad strategies by which humanness is attributed to people in a severely vegetative state, such as attribution of thinking, ascribing individuality, and viewing the other as a reciprocating entity. Even those studies which are more attentive to the key role of language in attributions of agency provide only a gloss of instances of interactional practices. Pollner and McDonald-Wikler (1985) studied some of the discursive practices by which members of a family maintained that another member of the family, a little girl, regarded by doctors as severely retarded, was agentic, responsive and interactionally alert. So ‘framing’ is identified as the practices whereby the environment is constructed so that whatever the child did seemed like meaningful, intentional activity; and they characterised the way in which the significance or intentionality was attributed after the child’s movements and vocalisations as ‘postscripting’ and so on. Yet, although they did examine how family members fashioned some sense of the child’s random gurgling, there is little sense of the interactional basis for such ascriptions. Yet the significance of interactional basis for ascriptions of agency is clear. In an earlier chapter we examined this sequence. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

B: B: B: B: B:

B: B: D: A:

16 B:

Can you light it up all the way again to three so thatwe know that you’re there (4) if you can then we will try and communicate with you with that light (3secs – during this time the K2 light flickers and then sits on 2 lights) all the way up to three to the orange light[ thank you [(K2 light goes up to 3 lights) (1.5) okay now what we're gonna do is we're gonna try and askyou some questions it’s stuck on three yes okay that’s good thank you very much

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The agency of the spirit is inextricably tied to the readings from the K2 meter, which are made relevant in turn designs that treat them as intentional and sustained. Through turns designed for human recipients and turns which address the spirit directly, its participation in the group’s investigation is established. The spirit is thanked, portraying it as actively participating in the interaction and responsive to requests issued by the group. The extension of agency through time is made inferentially available in the reference to earlier occasions on which the meter displayed three lights (‘can you light it up all the way again’). This turn also mitigates against interpretations of earlier readings as random fluctuations, unconnected to the group’s attempts to engage with spirits. So, through communicative acts such as statements, requests, expressions of thanks, agreements, observations and encouragements, the agency of the spirit is talked into being and becomes part of the group’s collective reality. It is in this final observation that we return to our earlier assertion that these ordinary communicative acts, performed in extraordinary circumstances, are essential to the social production of paranormal accounts and experiences. By focusing on seemingly mundane interaction, we have revealed how groups make sense of unexplained events in the context of paranormal investigations. Our analysis is focused on the details of interaction, yet we propose that in pursuit of questions about strange and mysterious experiences much can be learnt from studying the ordinary, observable and commonplace social activities from which they emerge.

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Appendix

In this Appendix we provide an overview of the transcription symbols used in this book and their associated meanings. Symbol

Meaning

A: – Z:

Each letter followed by a colon defines a group member

[

A square bracket indicates overlapping speech between lines

[

A bold square bracket indicates overlapping action between lines

.hhh

-

Indicates an inhalation (the number of h’s indicates the length of the inhalation) Indicates hearable aspiration, such as laughter and exhalation (the number of h’s indicates the length of the sound) Colons illustrate a prolonging of the preceding sound (the number of colons indicates the length of the prolonged sound) A hyphen mid-sentence indicates a cut-off from speech

word

A hyphen at the end of a line of script indicates speech carrying on to the next line Underlining of a word indicates emphasis on a piece of talk

hh ::

-



CAPITALS °

=

(.)

°

The arrow symbol illustrates a rise or fall of pitch during talk The use of capitals illustrates louder sounds The use of degree symbols illustrates quieter sounds The equals symbol illustrates no break or gap in talk A short break in speech of less than 0.2 seconds (continued)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Ironside, R. Wooffitt, Making Sense of the Paranormal, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88407-9

141

142 Appendix continued Symbol

Meaning

(0.5)

Within talk brackets indicate the length of a break between speech in seconds. During non-verbal interaction the numbers within brackets indicate how long the interaction lasted for Text in brackets indicates unclear talk

(text) (

)

(Text)

>