‘The lady ghost’ in the Recoleta Argentinian graveyard: dark tourism and ghostly narrative itineraries

Abstract

This article deals with the legend of ‘The lady ghost’ connected with the supernatural apparition of a young woman in Argentinean graveyards. This legend, similar to other ones which can be found in different parts of the world, presents an interweaving with historic events, such as the tragic decease of real Argentinian women, whose funeral monuments attract dark tourism. Some of these monuments are placed in the Recoleta cemetery, which can be considered as a cultural landscape of Buenos Aires city. Such funeral monuments are part of touristic itineraries that offer ways of exploring how different societies deal with emotional issues such as early deaths discourse analysis provides methodological guidelines to analyse the discursive structure of the legends, whose metaphoric symbols serve as argumentative strategies to convince the audience about the verisimilitude of the narrative discourse, connected with a ‘rhetoric of believing’. This approach leads us to conclude that narratives whose protagonists are haunting girls express both intimate experiences regarding supernatural contacts with the dead and collective experiences regarding social life in different contexts. It shows as well how ghost lore functions as an identity marker of social groups who share knowledge concerning the supernatural in heterogeneous living cultures.