Haunt Manchester

Millions of tourists visit Manchester each year, from the UK and beyond. The city has everything you would expect from a major international destination: world-class sports stadiums, art galleries, theatres, shopping and more. But, as former Factory records boss Tony Wilson said: ”This is Manchester. We do things differently here.”

That’s why a group of Manchester Met academics has set up Haunt Manchester, a trailblazing, public-facing initiative to promote the city’s Gothic heritage as a unique tourist attraction, hosting a series of public events for all ages.

Since its inception in 2018, Haunt Manchester has contributed to the cultural life of the city, inspiring new work and bringing together a community of academics, artists, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts. In the COVID-19 recovery period, the team hopes to promote further economic growth and activity, even acting as a beacon to inspire similar projects in other cities.

Hosted on the tourism website Visit Manchester, and growing out of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies (MCGS) and the annual Gothic Manchester Festival, Haunt Manchester’s aim is to celebrate and promote the atmospheric, weird and wonderful side of Greater Manchester through in-person and digital events.

Led by researchers Prof Dale Townshend and Dr Matt Foley, alongside research impact manager Helen Darby and other members of staff in MCGS, the project has helped to bring together a network of people and organisations around the region. Building the network would not have been possible without the dedication and commitment of former Haunt editor Emily Oldfield.

For Dale, the goal of Haunt Manchester is “to generate and foster new cultural production – for example Helen and Matt inspired the BBC Philharmonic to produce a concert of scores from horror films as part of the Gothic Manchester Festival in 2018, which was broadcast on Radio 3.

“We’ve also worked with Manchester Gothic Arts Group (MGAG) on events, and the Dancehouse Theatre and Dance Company to put on a show called Monster Mash, linked to the festival themes. It’s all about supporting and inspiring local artists and generating new productions.

“Each of these events has been underpinned by research undertaken in MCGS, too, and Haunt Manchester is one of the ways in which we are able to share and communicate our own research interests with the broader community.”

A series of fortunate events

Other events organised by the team include walking tours and a fashion show with local young designers, and their collaborators include HOME arts centre, Selfridge’s, the John Rylands Library, alternative shopping hub Afflecks Palace and the annual Halloween in the City celebration.

Matt adds that Haunt Manchester has also built up links between businesses and artists in the city and beyond: “Through Haunt we’ve also engaged small business and put on fairs and events with a range of artists and producers who are Gothically-themed. We’ve organised networking fairs, including an online Gothic market during lockdown with Bristol Goth and Alternative Market, which was attended by around 500 people. Expanding the Haunt brand beyond Manchester, we launched our second Haunt site with Destination Bristol in 2020.”

The Haunt initiative, in itself, serves as “a very powerful model to connect academic work to the tourism industry within a city or space – showing that research can be an economic driver for tourism.”

While the dark romanticism of the Gothic might seem like the antithesis of the celebratory tones of the city of Manchester’s confident public face, the Haunt team believe that the Gothic legacy is a vital part of the city’s history.

As local historian Jonathan Schofield argues, “Manchester is Gothic physically – in its Gothic buildings such as the Town Hall and Chetham’s and John Ryland’s libraries – but also in a deeper, philosophical, undercurrent.

“Manchester was the famously dark and smoky ‘shock city’ of the industrial age, and it persists in having a Gothic philosophical identity as a place that is brooding, wild and moody.’

This dark industrial miasma, famously depicted by Friedrich Engels in ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ (1845) was an integral aspect of Manchester’s rise to global prominence as ‘Cottonopolis’ during the nineteenth century.

Laughing in the face of death

The team’s work also shows that there is more to the Gothic than vampires and graveyards. The researchers have often been dubbed ‘spooky’, and an early tabloid report on The Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies was illustrated with an image from the film ‘Twilight’.

For Dale, though, “notions of spookiness actually belie the important cultural functions that the Gothic performs. Gothic is much more than a spooky aesthetic.

“It’s easy to dismiss scholars who spend their lives researching old graves, exhumations, ghosts and haunted castles as ‘spooky’ or ‘macabre’ – but that word trivialises the important cultural functions that the Gothic fulfils in contemporary culture, and which it has done since its inception in the eighteenth century.”

A sense of playfulness and fun is important to the work that Haunt Manchester does, further busting the Goth stereotype. As Helen says, “people like to laugh in the face of death, it’s a natural reaction”. 

Matt reinforces that view, adding that “there’s always a bit of fun in studying and working on the Gothic, which is part of the appeal for students and researchers”. In demonstration of this, the team has worked with drag artistes and fashion students, and has organised events for children, including  a special black-and-white ball based around a screening of Tim Burton’s film Frankenweenie.

The team’s stories also show that there are many pathways into the Gothic. Helen’s interest in the subject, for instance, stems from her teenage years: “I was a Goth, so I was part of the subculture. I used to go to the original Goth club in Manchester, Banshee. As a result, Haunt Manchester has been one of my all-time favourite things to have worked on, and I’ve been able to bring my subcultural understanding to bear on the subject. I also worked on a project called Encountering Corpses – so death, in many ways, has become my speciality!”

Matt, meanwhile, was initially inspired by Gothic literature: “I’ve always been drawn to stories of hauntings, and the sheer range of themes that the trope of haunting can engage with – from mourning to the transformative potential of spectres.”

The team has been keen to work closely with Manchester’s Goth community. As Helen explains, “the key thing is that Haunt Manchester is a collaborative venture – we’re taking stuff that already exists, and providing a focus for people to congregate around. We help people to share knowledge, and also inform it with our academic expertise. That way we can enrich the aesthetic sense of the activity that is already happening. We’re not making it happen, we’re bringing people together.”

She describes goths as “a very self-assured group, one that’s very knowledgeable about its history and values”.