The Ghost in the Black Box: A Haunting in Negative Space

Nestled in the sprawling suburbs just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, Stone Mountain looms large in the city's imagination.The second Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was established atop the mountain in 1915 and, with the help of the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), laid the groundwork for the bas-relief of three Confederate figures on the mountain's face (Engebretson 2015).Stone Mountain can be many things to many people -it's a landscape and a naturescape, for instance -but, as a contested and contestable memoryscape fraught with racial politics, the space can never be politically neutral.During the weeks leading up to Halloween, a visitor to the park surrounding the mountain might choose to purchase a memento that's a bit different from what one can ordinarily find there -a "Boo Box." Boo Boxes are small gift boxes, tied shut with ribbon, and said to contain a ghost.Although deceptively simple-looking commodities, this article will argue that, far from being simple souvenirs, Boo Boxes, which are sold in conjunction with the annual ghost-story event "A Tour of Southern Ghosts," are complex cultural products that tie together multiple networks of historical, political, and cultural negotiations over identity and memory at Stone Mountain.While similar to other tchotchkes sold in tourist gift shops across the world, Boo Boxes -like all such objects -are best historicized in relation to their place of origin.These particular boxes become most legible when they are seen as connected to the ghost tour, which they help fund, Stone Mountain, and, ultimately, the geographic US American South as a site of official and vernacular cultural memory-construction.That is, we focus on the "public," or the "negative space," surrounding the souvenir -the location of cultural production and the context of identity formation -because it is in this space, filled with social and cultural relationships, that the Boo Box gains its identity (cf.Ikegami 2000: 994-995).We argue that the box, and its negative spaces, can productively be understood as fantastic in a dialectical sense, and that this dialectic is crucial to the positioning of the Boo Box as a souvenir and Stone Mountain as an apolitical place of fun and recreation rather than one permeated by the ongoing legacies of slavery and white supremacy.We will begin by outlining a critical theory of hauntology before showing how the Boo Box turns from a seemingly mundane object into something fantastic.We will then place the Boo Box in its larger context, analyzing its public negative spaces -Stone Mountain Park, Historic Square, and A Tour of Southern Ghosts -through textual analysis to show how it can be