Phantom Geographies: Haunted Landscapes & Memory in the Middle East
Phantom Geographies is a research-led book project that explores how supernatural phenomena—ghosts, jinn, hauntings, and spirit presences—are embedded in the cultural landscapes of the Middle East, not merely as folklore, but as living archives of resistance, grief, and memory. Grounded in a decolonial framework, the project seeks to understand how these spectral narratives function as counter-histories to colonial erasure, state violence, and enforced forgetting.
In a region marked by successive empires, wars, and forced displacement, the supernatural has long played a vital role in how communities make sense of rupture. Haunted sites—abandoned villages, desecrated shrines, old colonial prisons, or city buildings rumored to be possessed—often carry with them deep, unspoken knowledge. These “phantom geographies” are not static remnants of the past; they are living, affective spaces where memory persists through story, atmosphere, and belief. The project asks: what does it mean to listen to these haunted spaces, and what forms of knowledge emerge when we treat them as legitimate archives?
The research combines fieldwork, oral history, and archival study. Site visits to haunted or spiritually charged locations—such as destroyed Palestinian villages, sacred shrines in Lebanon and Syria, or colonial ruins in North Africa—will be paired with interviews with local residents, elders, and spiritual practitioners. These personal narratives will be supported by critical readings of colonial ethnographies, religious texts, and contemporary literature and visual art. Rather than framing supernatural beliefs as irrational or exotic, Phantom Geographies affirms them as epistemologies with their own internal logic, rooted in long histories of survival and resistance.
The project also reflects on the aesthetic and political function of the haunted. In many cases, the persistence of a ghost story may be the only means by which a community can preserve a place's memory, especially when formal archives are absent or censored. Haunting becomes a political act: a refusal to forget, a way of marking space, and a form of testimony that speaks when language cannot. In urban contexts, ghost stories often emerge around spaces affected by war, gentrification, or state violence, revealing the emotional and spectral toll of “development.”
Ultimately, Phantom Geographies challenges how history is constructed, whose stories are preserved, and whose spirits are dismissed. It proposes an alternative cartography—one shaped not by state borders or colonial maps, but by the invisible, affective traces left behind by those who can no longer speak. By centering voices, sites, and stories often excluded from official narratives, the project opens up space for new, decolonial ways of remembering, grieving, and knowing.
Phantom Geographies will result in a book-length manuscript and may be accompanied by visual and audio documentation, offering a multidisciplinary portal into the spectral and political landscapes of the Middle East.
In a region marked by successive empires, wars, and forced displacement, the supernatural has long played a vital role in how communities make sense of rupture. Haunted sites—abandoned villages, desecrated shrines, old colonial prisons, or city buildings rumored to be possessed—often carry with them deep, unspoken knowledge. These “phantom geographies” are not static remnants of the past; they are living, affective spaces where memory persists through story, atmosphere, and belief. The project asks: what does it mean to listen to these haunted spaces, and what forms of knowledge emerge when we treat them as legitimate archives?
The research combines fieldwork, oral history, and archival study. Site visits to haunted or spiritually charged locations—such as destroyed Palestinian villages, sacred shrines in Lebanon and Syria, or colonial ruins in North Africa—will be paired with interviews with local residents, elders, and spiritual practitioners. These personal narratives will be supported by critical readings of colonial ethnographies, religious texts, and contemporary literature and visual art. Rather than framing supernatural beliefs as irrational or exotic, Phantom Geographies affirms them as epistemologies with their own internal logic, rooted in long histories of survival and resistance.
The project also reflects on the aesthetic and political function of the haunted. In many cases, the persistence of a ghost story may be the only means by which a community can preserve a place's memory, especially when formal archives are absent or censored. Haunting becomes a political act: a refusal to forget, a way of marking space, and a form of testimony that speaks when language cannot. In urban contexts, ghost stories often emerge around spaces affected by war, gentrification, or state violence, revealing the emotional and spectral toll of “development.”
Ultimately, Phantom Geographies challenges how history is constructed, whose stories are preserved, and whose spirits are dismissed. It proposes an alternative cartography—one shaped not by state borders or colonial maps, but by the invisible, affective traces left behind by those who can no longer speak. By centering voices, sites, and stories often excluded from official narratives, the project opens up space for new, decolonial ways of remembering, grieving, and knowing.
Phantom Geographies will result in a book-length manuscript and may be accompanied by visual and audio documentation, offering a multidisciplinary portal into the spectral and political landscapes of the Middle East.
The supernatural is not merely a matter of belief. It is a language—at once metaphorical and literal—that allows us to hold what is otherwise unholdable: grief, fear, memory, longing. In many cultures, but especially in the Middle East, where land is layered with rupture and resurrection, the supernatural offers a frame for what official history fails to contain. When the archive is silent, the ghost speaks.
We invoke spirits not only to explain the unexplainable but to render visible what has been deliberately obscured. Jinn stories, haunted houses, saints who appear in dreams—these are not simply tales of the uncanny, but intimate negotiations with trauma, injustice, and loss. In a region where political violence often erases evidence, and where memory is contested terrain, the supernatural persists as an informal archive, preserving truths that cannot survive state narratives or colonial frameworks. A ghost story, in this context, becomes a counter-history.
The supernatural exists in tension with modernity. It unsettles the rationalist order and challenges the tyranny of the linear. Spirits do not respect borders. They drift through walls, across generations, through language and into sleep. They are not bound to empirical truth, but they are real. Real in the way that a dream can make your body tremble. Real in the way that a child refuses to sleep near the window, because the wind carries a voice only they can hear.
For those of us raised between languages, or across multiple geographies, the supernatural also becomes a connective thread—a way of holding together what diaspora threatens to scatter. An old story of a jinn at the edge of a village. A grandmother’s whisper that a particular alleyway is cursed. A healing prayer passed through the women of a family, its words never written down. These fragments are not distractions from “serious” history; they are its pulse.
In urban environments, where the landscape changes quickly—through gentrification, war, or demolition—the supernatural often arises in places of sudden absence. A building is bombed and a ghost appears. A shrine is removed, and inexplicable illnesses begin. These are not coincidences, nor are they just folklore. They are acts of resistance—subconscious or otherwise—against erasure. The supernatural steps in where political memory has been severed.
We tend to think of ghosts and jinn as relics of the past, but they are just as concerned with the present. They manifest in moments of moral ambiguity, personal guilt, or collective unrest. They appear when something is unresolved. They demand recognition. In this sense, the supernatural is not a retreat from reality, but a deeper engagement with it. It reminds us that history is not finished. That the land remembers. That our bodies remember.
The supernatural, then, is not a matter of superstition. It is a methodology. A cosmology. A form of knowledge transmission. It is how we return to places we’ve lost. How we name what official records will not. How we listen—not just to the living, but to what still lingers.
We invoke spirits not only to explain the unexplainable but to render visible what has been deliberately obscured. Jinn stories, haunted houses, saints who appear in dreams—these are not simply tales of the uncanny, but intimate negotiations with trauma, injustice, and loss. In a region where political violence often erases evidence, and where memory is contested terrain, the supernatural persists as an informal archive, preserving truths that cannot survive state narratives or colonial frameworks. A ghost story, in this context, becomes a counter-history.
The supernatural exists in tension with modernity. It unsettles the rationalist order and challenges the tyranny of the linear. Spirits do not respect borders. They drift through walls, across generations, through language and into sleep. They are not bound to empirical truth, but they are real. Real in the way that a dream can make your body tremble. Real in the way that a child refuses to sleep near the window, because the wind carries a voice only they can hear.
For those of us raised between languages, or across multiple geographies, the supernatural also becomes a connective thread—a way of holding together what diaspora threatens to scatter. An old story of a jinn at the edge of a village. A grandmother’s whisper that a particular alleyway is cursed. A healing prayer passed through the women of a family, its words never written down. These fragments are not distractions from “serious” history; they are its pulse.
In urban environments, where the landscape changes quickly—through gentrification, war, or demolition—the supernatural often arises in places of sudden absence. A building is bombed and a ghost appears. A shrine is removed, and inexplicable illnesses begin. These are not coincidences, nor are they just folklore. They are acts of resistance—subconscious or otherwise—against erasure. The supernatural steps in where political memory has been severed.
We tend to think of ghosts and jinn as relics of the past, but they are just as concerned with the present. They manifest in moments of moral ambiguity, personal guilt, or collective unrest. They appear when something is unresolved. They demand recognition. In this sense, the supernatural is not a retreat from reality, but a deeper engagement with it. It reminds us that history is not finished. That the land remembers. That our bodies remember.
The supernatural, then, is not a matter of superstition. It is a methodology. A cosmology. A form of knowledge transmission. It is how we return to places we’ve lost. How we name what official records will not. How we listen—not just to the living, but to what still lingers.
