‘Supernatural Cities: Placing Urban Identities, Memory, and Cultural Crises’. Edited by Rachael Ironside and Alicia Edwards-Boon

Unlike Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in Ahmed Saadawi’s novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), it is not only the body of the monster which is fragmented, broken and piecemeal. Rather, the source of horror in the novel is the brokenness of the city of Baghdad, torn apart by violence and war. In Saadawi’s text, when the creature made out of the body parts of bomb victims comes to life, we have a living palimpsest of the stories about the victims of the land. Frankenstein in Baghdad, therefore, situates the supernatural in the junction between the city and its people, scarred by war. In this paper, I will argue that Saadawi’s narrative of the supernatural interpolates and blends into the cultural and political history of the city of Baghdad in the period after the US invasion of Iraq. I will argue that the supernatural interacts with the memory of the city, piecing together its tumultuous past with the equally volatile and violent present. By doing so, I wish to show that the supernatural here is not merely a product of fantasy but an alternative method of recreating the history of a city riddled with the politics of violence.

To many people from across the world, Hong Kong is a city where the East meets the West. This encounter gives rise to a unique lifestyle that may be understood as traversing between two calendars – the Solar and the Lunar. Theoretically the Lunar calendar refers to the traditional cycle that agricultural Chinese society observes. Although 21st century Hong Kong can hardly be considered as agricultural, the Lunar calendar does exert significant force upon people’s life throughout the year, while the busy, urban, and material life speeds on with the Solar calendar. This is a creative non-fiction presenting the dual life of Hong Kong, from the beginning to the end of a year, between the two calendars. The Lunar calendar marks the important beginning of a new year when people look up their fortune according to their Chinese zodiac, while the Solar calendar presents the festivities in a highly commercial and material urban setting.

Ghosts and ghost walks have always conjured public interest in visiting haunted locales. More recently dubbed, dark tourism, these highly specialized events have proved both an educational tool, in which to preserve and celebrate local history, as well as a boon to area economies. This article examines the importance of haunted history and offers a valuable strategy, as well as practical examples, for those individuals and/or organizations looking to create their very own dark tourism ghost walk.

Jeff VanderMeer’s novels are constantly in dialogue with the changing face of the Anthropocene and his city novels, City of Saints and Madmen, Borne and Dead Astronauts, explore how cities might develop into supernatural entities through colonisation and extreme developments in technology, bioengineering, and ecology. The hostile bioengineering corporation, ‘The Company’, in Borne and Dead Astronauts, mirrors the current corporate endeavour towards ‘Smart Cities’, spearheaded by Amazon’s search for a city to host their second headquarters. Amazon promise the ‘ultimate upgrade’ to the public sector through their Smart City approach in return for seemingly unlimited access to people’s lives. Between Amazon’s proposed Smart Cities and VanderMeer’s supernatural cities, this paper will explore when and how the city starts to be reconfigured as a supernatural space through aggressive corporate colonisation and technological augmentation.

The Covid-19 pandemic and associated travel restrictions have highlighted revived demand in armchair travelling and a re-exploration of the urban environment. This article argues that reading urban fantasy literature as a special case of armchair travelling provides valuable insights into contemporary real-world spatial practices and socio-political discourses. By introducing supernatural elements to the mundane environment, urban fantasy frequently achieves a de-familiarising effect. It marks a significant shift in armchair travelling, as it moves the destination from exotic and idyllic far-flung places to well-known, grittier urban locations and can thus contribute to a re-enchantment with the contemporary metropolis.

Whereas pre-existing definitions of urban fantasy stress the texts’ inside perspective on the city, this article analyses travel and displacement in China Miéville’s The City and the City to reveal a juxtaposition of inside and outside perspectives on the urban setting. It thus calls for a more nuanced definition of urban fantasy that accounts for this duality.

Despite the tendency to associate narratives that focus on technology and their societal impact as within the genres of science fiction or dystopia, this common tactic ignores the supernatural nature of the technology presented within these narratives, and it is worth exploring the magical aspects of unobtainable technology in comparison with more traditional depictions of magic. This article examines the titular city of San Junipero in Season Three, Episode Four of Black Mirror (2011-) as one example of such unobtainable technology, and resituates it as a supernatural city akin to the versions of Hades presented by both Aristophanes in The Frogs and Homer’s Odyssey, chosen because of their status as predecessors to Christian theology, better illustrating the evaluation of San Junipero as supernatural rather than sacred. Further, the article compares the technological necropolis to Swift’s satirical Glubbdubdrib from Gulliver’s Travels, highlighting the importance of the ritual of necromancy to San Junipero’s status as supernatural city.

This article examines myth-hunting in the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) videogame series as an expression of hypermodern folklore. GTA games, known for their open-world design and controversial themes, mimic major American cities. They are filled with ‘Easter eggs’, many coded as supernatural, such as ghosts, aliens, and haunted sites. Myth-hunters are players who seek these mysteries, documenting their discoveries online. This activity transforms gameplay into legend-tripping and tourism of mysterious sites. The ontological status of these Easter eggs—whether they’re real, urban legends, or additions by developers—creates a unique form of digital folklore. Myth-hunting once a fringe ludic form, has recently been co-opted by the games’ developer who made it a key element of newer entries in the series. Accordingly, myth-hunting, once an autonomous player practice, is now regularly part of the publisher’s player-retention strategy, allowing for further extraction of value out of hypermodern folklore of a ludic variant.

Focusing on nineteenth-century Calcutta as the literal and imagined literary space where the urban and suburban imaginaries collide, I hold Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Monihara’ [‘The Lost Jewels’, 1898] to be the first, concerted effort in pushing the urban Gothic well beyond the limits of the city. The cinematic adaptation of the same directed by Satyajit Ray [1961] will also fall within its purview. Delineating a space that is both material and metaphysical, the urban Gothic’s beating heart is often seen to reside in abandoned dwellings, calling forth an inspection into the private chambers and economies of vacant spaces, the birth of the modern subject, and the vagaries of capital.

The 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster led to the total abandonment of the city of Pripyat, a utopian Soviet atomic city. Pripyat’s abandonment inspired many re-imaginings of the city’s past and future in popular culture. One of the most enduring popular culture narratives of Chornobyl’s supernatural mythos is the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game series, which fashions an alternative nuclear future filled with mutant creatures, supernatural forces, and a reactive virtual landscape. The game delivers a highly visual and bodily experience that renders the threat of radiation in a visceral and immediate way. The game opens a potent space in which players can confront nuclear anxieties and fears and cultivate a greater awareness of the costs of nuclear power. The experience of the virtual landscape imparts prosthetic memories of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster to players, who then become virtual tourists of a grim nuclear future.

Nia DaCosta’s 2021 sequel to Bernard Rose’s 1992 film, Candyman, employs the trope of inversion to acknowledge and critique the story from an updated perspective. Since the action of the original film, the primary setting—the former Chicago housing project named Cabrini-Green—has undergone gentrification. In this article, I argue that DaCosta uses the inversion represented by gentrification as a leitmotif to highlight Candyman’s connection to the place where he was originally lynched and where he has continued to haunt the current residents. I conclude by considering how DaCosta uses the monster Candyman to address issues of toxic narratives and to offer a glimmer of hope that, as a final inversion, the monster might be deployed as a weapon against oppressive forces.

In the mediated versions of American small town life from Forks to Mystic Falls, vampires live inconspicuously among humans – thanks to overcast skies or cast spells. The first-ever Turkish vampire series Yaşamayanlar [Immortals] (2018) takes a fundamentally opposed approach: Brimming with neon lights, Yaşamayanlar provides a very different experience of Istanbul than other exported television series – one that feels eerily close to mediated versions of New York, Berlin, or Los Angeles in the 1990s and early 2000s. Between dark alleyways and stroboscopic night clubs, the series paints a picture of Istanbul not just as dangerous and gritty, but – maybe more crucially – decidedly detached from the historical heritage of the city. This article argues that this re-imagination of Istanbul as a supernatural city is entangled with narratives of modernity, connectivity, and change. In other words: the supernatural does not only shape the metropolis, but the metropolis also shapes the supernatural.

With the rise in narco activity, feminicidios, armed robberies, the disappearing of people, and State violence as daily occurrences, how can we begin to make sense of such an overwhelming amount of loss? Utilizing the graphic novel to its fullest extent, Augusto Mora’s Los fantasmas de mi ciudad (The Ghosts of My City) is a visually stunning (re)interpretation of the violence that plagues the urban cityscapes of contemporary Mexico. Forming part of a long literary tradition of fantastic stories based in Mexico’s most populated areas, Mora’s graphic novel follows the story of a teenage medium, Viridiana San Juan, and her friends as they attempt to record video evidence of the tormented souls that haunt their city, all the while navigating the violent reality that surrounds them daily. Through her desire to tell the stories of the souls that haunt her visions, Mora constructs a simultaneous and compelling critique of the historical, social, and political practice that has filled Mexico’s urban areas with ghosts and the nonchalant attitude that has made violence a normal part of everyday life. By making the unseen victims of violence become visible, the subjectivities of the city’s millions and millions of ghosts can be recognized and their narratives reclaimed.

Over the last two decades, geographers have revealed how revenant narratives inscribed in the fabric of urban environments work to haunt cities and their inhabitants, emphasising the role of social (Degen and Hetherington 2001), historical (Till 2005), and affective (Pile 2005; Holloway 2010) encounters with the supernatural in city spaces. This shared interest in spectral or ‘spectro-geography’ (Maddern and Adey 2008) provides a geographical response to the broader ‘spectral turn’ within the humanities that began in the late twentieth century (Luckhurst 2002). Existing geographical studies analyse spectrality from a predominantly figurative perspective, while frequently overlooking the significance of the supernatural in the physical production of urban geographies. Taking a literary geographical approach to supernatural Tokyo, this article (per)forms an analytic ‘legend-trip’ of the Japanese metropolis, exposing the ways in which place, narrative, and folklore amalgamate to produce the city as an ‘interspatiality’ (Hones 2022).

The article builds on two ethnographic vignettes, the fear of earthquakes that the construction of tall buildings evokes and a story of treasures under a massive housing estate, to argue the presence of material ghosts in New Town, West Bengal, a planned and developing town east of Kolkata. Through these two ethnographic accounts, the article foregrounds the weird and the eerie present in the city in plain sight and mundane articulations. The supernatural city, the article argues, need not be teeming with traditional ghosts. Rather, the supernatural in the city can be found in imaginations, articulations and relationalities of the material. The presence of the immaterial across time and space is evoked through the material relationalities of the city. The city, in the article, is presented to be resolutely enmeshed with a range of immaterial imaginaries.

This paper describes the critical and creative process behind Portsmyth, a supernatural story telling an alternative version of our city. It discusses a practice-led research collaboration at the University of Portsmouth which has produced an interactive narrative set along local streets, with a blend of real and imaginary characters based on local history and legend.

It includes extracts from the game script, devised as an immersive ‘choose your own adventure’, through collective research into some notorious figures of fear and intrigue, forgotten in the locations which still bear traces of their terrifying tales. A civil war assassin, an exorcist of 1998s council estates, and Jolly Jack, the sinister laughing sailor from the seafront amusement arcade are represented in this potential offering to dark tourism, using state-of-the-art gaming technology.

The article will discuss postmodern theories of space and place, positing a third space where our novel narrative is produced. It explores the uncanny route map or chthonic city plan underpinning our creative writing, as players navigate a new view of the seafront setting for this ‘promenade performance’. It will reflect on psychoanalytic theory to illuminate the possible wellbeing benefits of this playable plotline.

It summarises the relationship between narrative content and technical formats as we race between traditional literary and digital storytelling in the attempt to show the ‘Jackopalypse’, a symbolic uprising of maritime ghosts at the urban shoreline.

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 not only became a turning point of American history, but witchery became entrenched in the placemaking of Salem’s urban supernatural. As such, Salem’s cultural trauma has become a desirable focus of the tourist gaze, specifically through its annual ‘Haunted Happenings’ event. Drawing upon conceptual underpinning of dark tourism, semiotics, collective memory, and social identity, as well as Foucault’s ‘heterotopology’, we argue Salem is a place that is disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory, and even transforming. We argue Salem is where material realities and (re)imagined supernatural spaces collide to co-create a dark tourism place. Indeed, Salem is where we consume reflections and illusions, as well as engaging with atrocities and misdeeds of the problematic past. In turn, Salem and its supernatural placemaking exports its tragic history, which not only expresses difficult heritage but also ruptures the past to reclaim cultural and mercantile advantage. We advocate contemporary placemaking of Salem within realms of the urban supernatural and cultural trauma creates Salem into a Foucauldian heterotopia. It is here that Salem reflects the reality of our contemporary globalised community, where it is a world within a world, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside.

Dublin is a city with a densely layered history. A site of collective habitation since the fourth century, the city is marked by successive waves of settlement and violence. As a result, Dublin has a rich material and cultural history, populated with iconic landmarks, historic buildings, and a host of urban legends. As a modern tourist destination, Dublin leverages this history in service of attracting visitors from around the world, promoting the city’s complex past and, in particular, its Gothic antecedents. In October 2012, Dublin City Council in partnership with Fáilte Ireland (the Irish tourism board) held the first of what was to become the annual Bram Stoker Festival. Each year the festival coincides with Hallowe’en – which originates from the Irish pagan festival of Samhain – and celebrates Stoker’s most well-known work, Dracula (1897). Since the original festival to commemorate one hundred years since Stoker’s death, the event has expanded to become a celebration of Dublin as a supernatural city. This is despite the fact that Dracula is not set in Ireland and is devoid of any Irish characters. However, the novel has long been interpreted as a parable for the Irish sectarian and class wars of the late nineteenth century. Given that Stoker was a native Dubliner, the novel has been reclaimed as a story with an Irish subtext, and Dublin as the home of the Vampire.

This paper will chart the evolution of the Bram Stoker Festival and the concomitant reimaging of Dublin as a supernatural city over the past decade. The paper will consider the cult of Stoker and how, despite having only one work of merit, Stoker continues to be the most well-known Irish Gothic writer of all time. The paper will also examine how the festival has managed to expand from its original remit of Stoker and Dracula to a broader promotion of Dublin as a profoundly haunted city, one that now operates as a unique selling point for attracting tourists.