I am writing a ghost story. 

It isn't a fictional story.  (Well, at least it isn't in that it's for a journal.)  But it is about me and an experience I had a couple of years ago now. 

I got lost in the woods (this was in West Yorks), and it got dark, and I fell over cobbles and tree roots, and I panicked.  I panicked not just because I was lost, but because every ghost story anyone in the area had ever told me (and people told lots) came flooding into my head.  I was absolutely terrified that, at any moment, a spectre would loom up ahead of me.  I really believed, right then, that it could happen. 

But it didn't and I made it home. 

So it isn't really a ghost story, because there isn't really a ghost.  There's just me, lost and panicking in the woods. 

I'm writing about it because I'm interested in the relationship between the supernatural, history and place.  It was that experience which made me think about how those pieces might be connected.  I'm also rather enamoured of the idea of a historical anthropology that looks at how people in the present experience the past, especially the past beyond memory.  (I will periodically talk about that on this blog because, in my PhD, it's What I Do.) 

Problem is, every time I open the file with the half-finished article in it, I bottle it.  Can't write.  Nothing to say.  (I'm in good company since Tracey's got nothing to say either!)

Although it's less about having nothing to say than being uncomfortable with the whole saying it bit. 

At our Ethnography Forum on Friday, we had a speaker on autoethnography (that is, using yourself and your experiences as data).  I get it, and I get that in this article I'm flirting with autoethnography.  And it gives me the jitters. 

It gives me the jitters because I've been trained to study other people, not to study myself.  It's OK to say how my background or attributes might impact on that study (as a woman I'm not likely to get to the heart of a men-only morris dancing group, for example) but not OK to actually be the study.  It seems my internal what-is-anthropology boundaries have been so well constructed (thanks ANTHRO 721 Method & Theory) that it's proving difficult to hop over them. 

I worry too about my 'right' to speak.  After all, I'm not from West Yorkshire, I'm from New Zealand.  Can I say that from my experience I learnt something about West Yorkshire?  Am I claiming more than I should? 

Lastly I have niggles about it only being one story.  I'm only one person; I'm not a pattern or a generalisation.  I'm used to the idea of talking to a bunch of people.  Talking to one - and myelf at that - can I say anything meaningful?