New York, August 2019. All over the city, plumes of steam rise from the pavement like urban ectoplasms: vaporous, diffuse emissions from the city’s orifices. Physical, psychical, or fictional, ectoplasms are not inherent to New York, but they have dominated its portrayal for over a century in journals, scientific literature, novels, and films. Yet, what emerged at the turn of the century as evidence of communication with the afterlife is now little more than a hoax, a last resort that may catch the public’s eye, but lacks any radical, political, or scientific basis.
This text is the result of speculation on New York City’s leaks, fluids, bodies (and lack thereof) while watching Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984) and thinking about the relationship between New York City and ghosts.
[0:02:27] Ghostbusters credits: Columbia University seen from the Alma Mater. I find myself walking along the campus paths on screen towards the fictional Department of Paranormal Studies. For the past two years, I have been following a similar route towards the Avery Library where I read about psychic phenomena for my thesis research project, “Haunted Real Estate.” I cannot help thinking about Samuel Ralph Harlow, who earned a degree in Theology from Columbia University and would later write A Life After Death in 1968, a thorough approach to paranormal phenomena from a minister’s perspective.
[0:09:16] The Ghostbusters explore the New York Public Library. Its drawers leak a viscous substance. Physiologist Charles Richet first coined the term “ectoplasm” in 1894 to describe an elusive entity, vaporous, viscous, or gauzy, extruded by certain mediums under a trance-like state. Later, Baron von Schrenck Notzing would compile hundreds of pictures of ectoplasmic experiences in his seminal work, Phenomena of Materialization (1920).
[0:10:44] The Ghostbusters’ first spectral encounter, in the stacks of the Public Library. I first read Harlow’s name at the Butler Library stacks, in a book titled Margery, Harvard Veritas. A Study in Psychics (1925). Harlow participated in the Scientific American investigation that took place at Harvard University when one of Emerson Hall’s Laboratories mutated into a séance room to test whether the psychic Mina “Margery” Crandon could genuinely communicate with the dead. Under test conditions, Margery, with her hands and ankles fastened and her tongue pressing a controlling device, produced raps, made a flourescent doughnut levitate, and channeled her deceased brother Walter. The Harvard investigation gave no unanimous results but motivated the production of highly sophisticated devices to conduct such tests. I often think of the Scientific American committee as the first ghostbusters.
[0:34:19] “He slimed me,” complains Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), lying on the floor of the Sedgewick Hotel, drenched in ectoplasm. Ectoplasms occupy a liminal space between the physiological and the spiritual. They emerge conjoined with the medium’s body, which they cannot leave. And they are meant to be observed, as a mere touch is considered violence against the medium, the passive facilitator. In films, ghosts belong to spaces more than they belong to bodies.
[05:51:44] “Oh, Shit!” Dana Barret (Sigourney Weaver) exclaims as several ghost limbs rise from the armchair. A few minutes later, she has transformed into a highly sexualized supernatural body, the Gatekeeper. Historian Anne Delgado describes the ways in which mediums are in control of the narrative in the séance room. Such narrative evokes a transformation of the female body, allegedly a passive vessel for the spirits. The secretion of ectoplasms through the medium’s nose, nipples, or vagina challenges the traditional differentiation of genders according to sexual capacities.
[1:12:00] “It’s not the girl, Peter, it’s the building,” declares Dr. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), holding the plans of 55 Central Park West. In Ghostbusters, the building supersedes the psychic. In countless fictions, ghosts emerge as products of traumatic histories and their associated spaces, often Victorian domestic spaces. Effacing the medium’s body from the ectoplasmic ritual first implies a denial of the medium’s agency over the process, while claiming the house is solely responsibly for the haunting. Yet, these same domestic spaces were once the core of radical performances when, in a trance, psychic mediums would sit in the séance room channeling radical spirits and, through their (her) voices, raise political and sexual claims. Ghostbusters is yet another fiction that builds on the Victorian-haunted trope, silencing both the medium and the ghost. This dismissal makes us wonder: is there still any way of regaining control of the way the Victorian-haunted duality can be mediated and confront the narrative fabricated by Ghostbusters, and so many other fictions?