IMMERSIVE STUDY OF GESTALT VARIABLES IN UNCANNY GEOGRAPHIES.

We conducted two preliminary studies to test the hypothesis that 'haunted, sacred, or enchanted' spaces are characterized by certain environmental Gestalt variables that define their space syntax or architectural phenomenology and thus help to consciously or non-consciously shape people's associated impressions or perceptions. Study 1 involved the development of a pilot Visitor Experience Questionnaire (VEQ: 18 items) to quantify Gestalt effects. Factor analysis revealed a four-factor solution defined by a setting's capacity for Affordance, Ambiguity, Presence, and Sentimentality. Study 2 used this new tool with three participants exhibiting disparate encounter-proneness, who participated in an immersive experience at a 'haunted' historic house museum. The experimentally-blinded participants spent 10 minutes alone in nine different rooms and then completed the VEQ and the Survey of Strange Events (SSE) measure of subjective and objective ghostly anomalies. Results showed that the participants' anomalous experiences had good levels of congruency across their contents and locations of occurrence. Further, Gestalt ratings significantly correlated with both the participants' SSE reporting patterns and independent 'hauntedness' ratings of the test rooms based on prior witness accounts. These findings support the idea that altered-anomalous experiences in enchanted (i.e., sacred or haunted) spaces represent an interactionist phenomenon that is partly mediated or moderated by principles of environmental psychology. The uncanny arises out of the supposedly and necessarily empty character of the supernatural as a category; it is not so much that the uncanny fills this category (with ghosts, revenants etc.) -- though it may do this readily enough -- as that it suggests a fundamental indecision, an obscurity or uncertainty, at the heart of our ontology, our sense of time, place, and history, both personal and cultural. (Collins & Jervis, 2008, p. 2) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]