Haunted heritage plays an important part in a late modern society in which death is supressed. Parallel with societal changes there is an upsurge of interest in the non-institutional paranormal beliefs. This thesis examines and analyses a museum named Haunted Museum in the town of Borås in Sweden. It is the only museum dedicated to haunted objects in the Nordic countries. This thesis examines what makes this museum special by using triangulation method. Haunted Museum is examined with a site visit, compared with a qualitative text analysis in which the content and meaning of texts surrounding the Haunted Museum are examined. The third triangulation method is a survey study that examines the motivations and factors influencing people visiting the museum. The results show that people visiting the Haunted Museum are motivated by personal interest in non-institutional paranormal beliefs. The museum uses an active and productive online community with other pedagogical methods to create a participatory, engaging and ever-changing museum. The museum also plays an important existential part for people donating haunted objects. Before entering the museum these haunted objects have been described to cause different problems in their homes. Haunted objects have an ability to create an uncanny atmosphere in the space surrounding them. The Haunted Museum and its owners of paranormal investigators uses the experience of the uncanny alongside with techno-scientific methods in an attempt to document and research paranormal phenomenon. They are driven by a desire to explore an outer-worldly and inner-worldly reality inhabited with spirits from the dead. This spiritual practice uses the two binary opposite worldviews created by the secularization process in the modern society. Thus dialectically transcending the two opposites reclaiming the importance of the immaterial reality and its spiritual heritage. This is a two years master´s thesis in Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-533787 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Engström, Malin |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för ABM |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Uppsatser inom musei- & kulturarvsvetenskap, 1651-6079 ; 170 |
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