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.

Read Portsmyth – Old City, New Story

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.

Read ‘Haunted Happenings’: Dark Tourism Events and Supernatural Placemaking in Salem, USA