ABSTRACT
In this chapter I shall discuss how Marisa Carnesky’s Carnesky’s Ghost Train1 (2004, 2008-present), an immersive and truly sensational populist performance event, accentuates the spectral potential of such rides. This is homage, not pastiche, and as such it plays with the multifarious possibilities of haunting the imagination that the form offers when employed as an artistic intervention. I shall consider specifically how Carnesky exploits the unheimlich (literally, ‘unhomely’ – uncanny or eerie) aspect of illusion, the visceral impact of fairground rides and the affective possibilities of the haunted house, to instil an immediate, live and lived – thus live(d) – response in the audience-participants, specifically to the historical, the mythologised, the political and the personal narratives of displaced and sex-trafficked women from recent history.
