Haunted places

![CDATA[Ghosts like theatres. All the older theatres of London's West End boast they have one, as do most of the pre-war theatres of Sydney, where I live. The ghost of the Paris Opera has acquired a new lease of celebrity on an international scale with the 2004 film version of The Phantom of the Opera. But do these ghosts ever haunt the stage itself other than, of course, when the script requires an actor to impersonate one of them? This essay is concerned with some questions about haunting; about what it has to do with performers, and the places in which performances are created, from formal enclosed stages to open landscape sites. In particular, I'm interested in what it may have to do with what we call presence. Tales of haunted places typically offer a narrative about some kind of presence, a disembodied agency that pulls at the living world, troubling it with an untellable need for action or resolution. 'Presence' is that mysterious quality performers, like ghosts, are supposed to have. Is there something uncanny about presence, and if so, what has this to do with the place in which presence is manifested? In the case of ghosts, the answer is: everything, since ghosts are supposed to be psychically attached to locations. But in the case of actors, presence is meant to be transportable from one site of performance to another. Wherever there is a stage (with or without a theatre building) presence can be generated. So why aren't theatrical ghosts drawn to stages? Why do they typically, like the Paris Phantom, hang around up in the balcony or the backstage recesses, anywhere but the stage?]]