‘I’ve seen people on the train,like really weird people’ hauntological reflections on the fear of crime

Abstract

By exploring the hauntological dimensions of fear of crime, this article proposes that this phenomenon exists as an ontological absence that manifests through the spectacle of crime’s imaginary, shaping thoughts, emotions, and movements. In so doing, we highlight fear of crime’s alignment with Fisher’s concept of the eerie – a presence that at once indicates an absence and an object that points to nothing beyond itself. Building on this foundation, we incorporate Simmel’s rendering of the Stranger and Casey’s theorization of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ places to argue that fear of crime is not solely a reaction to crime events, but manifests as a phenomenon that circulates independently, akin to Baudrillard’s simulacra, reacting against crime’s imaginary. Woven through phenomenological experiences of place, fear of crime emerges as a stain, eliciting a strong sensory, anticipatory and often pre-reflexive response that alerts us that not all is as it seems. Fundamentally, we aim to highlight how fear remains an object that points to an absence, a phantasmagoria and an atmospheric sense of dis-ease, that can engulf us all and press upon spaces, societies and bodies in equal measure.

Introduction

Extending Hillyard et al. (2004) axiom that crime has no ontological reality, in this article we examine the experience and expression of the fear of crime as rooted in the hauntology of the eerie. We argue that the fear of crime exists as an ontological absence, which manifests through the spectacle of crime’s imaginary. Akin to Baudrillard’s (1983) simulacra, fear is decoupled from the ‘reality’ of crime events, circulating not simply as a by-product, as effluvium, but as an autonomous phenomenon that shapes human thought, emotion and movement. In this way, fear of crime resembles what Derrida (2003: 99) describes as an autoimmune condition, meaning that attempts to deny, repress or forget the trauma produced by our fears only ‘feed the very monstrosity they claim to overcome’. In doing so, we place fear as ‘the autonomous movement of the non-living’ (Debord, 1994: 2) that points towards a dead future, with the constant churn of crime event reportage exacerbating our sense of insecurity. Such a conceptualization helps give shape to an otherwise evasive topic, allowing us to emphasize the hauntological character of fear as an experience and to draw attention to its alignment with the eerie. While fear of crime is often understood as a manifestation or symptom of broader social problems, in this article, we examine the way fear masks more diffuse anxieties. We reveal the disorientating juxtaposition of the ‘strange within the familiar’ (Fisher, 2016: 10) that surrounds, and makes ‘real’, our experiences of fear. Using illustrative examples, and a conceptual framework borrowing from Fisher’s (2012) concept of the eerie, Simmel’s (1950) rendering of the Stranger, and Casey’s (2001) theorization of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ places, we can begin to see how fear points to nothing beyond itself, locked as it is within the spectacle of imagery and a collapsed sense of distance – distance from the past and each other.

While haunting is often examined through the prism of time, specifically ‘broken time’, here we prioritize spatial contours of encounter and disruption. As Fisher (2016: 62) reminds us, the eerie ‘clings to certain kinds of physical spaces and landscapes’, manifesting as an ontological threat that we cannot resolve. Or as Mayerfeld Bell (1997 813) comments, ‘ghosts – that is, the sense of the presence of those who are not physically there – are a ubiquitous aspect of the phenomenology of place’. The experience of the eerie, and the critical faculties it affords, is captured in Gordon’s (2011: 2) articulation of the relationship between haunting and futurity, experienced when:

‘[. . .] things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and the rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings won’t go away, when easily living one day then the next becomes impossible, when the present seamlessly becoming ‘the future’ gets entirely jammed up’.

Gordon describes the disturbed sensations that arrive when both time and space are disrupted. Within the gaps between the anticipated and the apparent, a sense of being located in linear time is disrupted, and a sense of anxiety, bounded by place, can fester into a fear of crime. Specific places almost breathe a sense of anxiety, creating an ‘atmosphere’ (Bissell, 2010; Young, 2019) enveloped within a chilling presence of fear. Empirically this is played out in survey work that identifies specific types of places with fear of crime (e.g. Lee et al., 2021; Pain, 1997). Woven through the contours of place, fear emerges as a stain, eliciting a strong sensory, anticipatory, often pre-reflexive, response to alert us that something is wrong. Through examining sensory encounters of fear that manifest within place, we are led towards the eerie. The eerie is a presence that points to an absence, an object that points to something unknown beyond itself. This is to say, moments of disruption and encounter that reveal objects are not in ‘their assigned places’ (Gordon, 2011: 2), provoking speculation, suspense, anxiety and, ultimately in some cases, fear.

Conceptually, we align the eerie with Simmel’s (1950) concept of the Stranger. Both, are relational entities that can slip through time and space, flowing through the rhythms of capital exchange to appear both highly mobile and, through their ubiquity, an immovable presence (Fu, 2022; Gordon, 2008). In this reading, the Stranger is an eerie, unknowable agency, bound to space but disrupting time. The Stranger, and the mark of the strange, help us locate the eerie within place. For example, the spectre of the fear of crime denotes disruption to anticipated atmospheres, be it the shudder that arrives through the metallic echo reverberated through an empty train carriage, the hollow void that surrounds a dimly lit alley or the cultural fright carried on the sound of lone footsteps approaching.

We argue that such encounters can evoke this sense of the eerie and the strange, because they occur in what Casey (2001: 684) describes as ‘thin places’. In contrast to ‘thick’ places, which facilitate close sensory and affective associations, thin places provide no depth of experience or attachment. Purposively ‘thinned out’ atop the endless flatlands of capitalist realism (Fisher, 2009), thin places are characterized by fluid, floating encounters of capital exchange processes, which heighten the feeling of being out of time. In these contexts, fear arrives to reveal the ‘cracks and rigging’ of our spatial, temporal, and societal order; alerting us to the fact that the categories which we use to make sense of the people and place are no longer valid – everyone is rendered ‘a passer-by, an alien or a missing person’ (Virilio, 1989: 28). Here, we can see how both the Stranger and the eerie share a core concern with the limits of human agency – ‘what kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all?’ (Fisher, 2016: 11). Trying to make comprehensible this alien agency, in turn, causes anxiety and uncertainty, conjuring up the fear of crime.

In what follows, we draw on illustrative interview material from a (2016) project that examines perceptions of crime in Sydney and which captures the eeriness of places that frequently evoke this specific fear. This relates to qualitative data conducted in the City of Sydney local government area that included 71 participants interviews through thirteen focus groups that represented a diverse demographic of gender, age, race and sexual orientation. The focus groups were semi-structured, allowing participants sufficient scope to communicate their own narratives of fear and anxiety as related to crime as well as feelings of safety, community and connectedness (for more information see Lee et al., 2020, 2021). It is from the focus group interviews that the three illustrative evocations discussed below are drawn. Each evocation provides a window through which we explore deeper hauntological resonances. However, it is also important to acknowledge the gendered nature of these evocations, and how our reading of the hauntological nature of fear also intersects with cultural and structural narratives of gendered fear (Fanghanel, 2018). That is, the voices taken for this piece are from three women and, as such, the hauntings we discuss here are likely to be amplified through women’s (and other marginal groups’) intersectional experiences of both crime and fear (Madriz, 1997), including ‘everyday intrusions’ of street harassment by men (Fileborn, 2016; Fileborn and O’Neill, 2023), rape cultures (Fanghanel, 2018), and feelings of vulnerability about both the physical ability to control unwanted encounters and the perceived serious negative outcomes of such encounters (Killias, 1990; Warr, 1984). That each of these voices identify as women is significant and we invite the reader to peer through these situated excerpts and to follow the deeper theoretical resonances that speak to the lingering, sensory presence of fear and its eerie attachment to both the ‘thin’-ness of space, characterized by liminality, and the recurring mize-en-scene that surrounds such evocations of anxiety. In doing so, we also respond to Linnemann’s (2015: 530) call for criminologists to do more to ‘confront these ghosts of past violence and reckon the force of haunting as a social phenomenon’, constructing a critical epistemology that engages with the absence that, we argue, surrounds the concept and experiences of fear.

The spectrality of fear and crime

Fear of crime has long been a contested concept in criminological scholarship, partly because, at its core, it evokes both a present and absent entity (Ditton and Farrall, 2016; Lee, 2007). Developing out of victim surveys and public perceptions research (Lee, 2007), fear of crime scholarship concerns individual or collective fears of being victimized, which are often contrasted to ‘actual’ probabilities of victimization indicating something of an excess of fear (Hale, 1996). While individuals’ fear of crime remains strongly influenced by the geographic or temporal proximity of offences or potential offenders, there has long been a recognition that these objective measures do not account for broader expressive fears (Jackson et al., 2009). The central concern within the fear of crime literature is understanding the perceptions individuals carry and subsequently express; perceptions which are, by their very nature, assessing the probability of an absence becoming present within a specific spatial and temporal register. As Jackson (2006) writes:

‘[Fear of crime is both] an emotional evaluation of an immediate situation (interpreting cues in the environment that signify a sense of possibility and threat) and an anticipatory state (a concern about potential danger, of imminent and distal threat or events yet to transpire)’ (Jackson, 2006: 257 emphases added).

‘Possibility of threat’, ‘anticipatory states’, and the unspecified dangers ‘yet to transpire’, all refer to an event that might occur but is, in actuality, absent. Indeed, much fear of crime research asks us to imagine, recall, or project possible crime events that may (or may not) relate to our lived experiences and are also heavily critiqued (Holloway and Jefferson, 2000; Lee, 2007). For example, victimization scenarios, common to fear of crime survey research work, ask us to respond to imagined events: for example How worried would you be walking in your neighbourhood at night? How worried are you about being burgled? How worried are you about unsupervised youths in your neighbourhood? How likely is it that you will be the victim of [insert offence] in the next 12 months? Containing a strong attachment to placed surrounds as well as gendered encounters with fear, within these scenarios, we are provoked to imagine encounters within real or imaginary darkened lanes, liminal public spaces, such as transport hubs, or the likelihood of the individual who wanders in from the dark. In other words, what we sense lurking unremarked within normative understandings of fear, but not fully recognized, is the strong attachment to absence and its felt presence as an ‘anticipatory state’ of anxiety.

Furthermore, fear of crime literature has continually acknowledged the spatial nature of our anxieties and responses to feelings of fear and safety (Chataway, 2020). These feelings of unsafety are not evenly distributed across urban, suburban, rural and remote places, nor are they evenly distributed across the public, semi-public and private spaces that people move through (Krannich et al., 1989). As Pain (1997: 369) notes, people’s reporting of fear of crime is closely linked to specific environments, especially those that are perceived as dark, lonely, unattractive or uncared-for. Similarly, both Chataway (2020) and Lee (2007) outline how feelings of safety are often shaped by physical, social and environmental features, including an overall sense of familiarity or knowledge of the immediate sense of place and those who occupy it. Such feelings need not be linked to the objectively dangerous or high crime rates. Instead, even these experiential fears speak more to an affective relationship with place and feeling, where unease is amplified by more expressive media reports, stories and shared narratives (Farrall et al., 2009). As Rader (2017) highlights, a relatively weak correlation exists between actual crime rates and fear of crime. In other words, our perception of safety emanates less from empirical realities of crime and more from sensory architecture and ‘atmospheres’ of fear that circulate as an affective reverberation between ourselves and our spatial surrounds (Bissell, 2010; Young, 2019). As Young (1996) reminds us, this points to how such surveys on fear do not capture crime itself but crime’s imaginary.

Our understanding of crime remains trapped within linguistic turns, discursive frames, and visual imaginaries that manifest within media, political and legal representations that may or may not be attached to anything more than an imaginary, an atmosphere, or ‘fear’ with little attachment to the realities of ‘crime’ (Meyer, 2021; Young, 1996). On these imaginaries hang our anxieties and fears – the two coalescing as a seamless whole and refracted through broader attitudes to gender, race and other ‘problem populations’ (Fanghanel, 2014). As crime’s imaginary is endlessly replayed through media and political discourse, our perception of these events suddenly becomes heightened and cast as never-to-be-forgotten (Bogard, 1994). Drawing on the language of Baudrillard (2007), both crime and fear remain trapped within a closed loop of mediated discourse, pointing at nothing beyond itself. The imagery of crime takes on a life of its own, entombed within its spectacle. As a result, fear becomes detached from the empirical basis of crime, an ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail. For Baudrillard (2007), the outcome is a repetition in advance in which, locked only to the past, the object of our fears is orientated to a pseudo-future, one that has already happened. Our visions of crime have been played out through mediatized simulation and etched into our understanding of not only what is likely but what now seems almost inevitable. Such coding within media and public discourse, as Ystehede (2014) notes, establishes a spectral imaginary of crime that gives shape and presence to stereotypes of the morally vanquished objects of societal fear. Similarly, for Meyer (2021), fear of crime research too often begins with an object onto which our fears are projected without full appreciation of the propulsive circulation of affects that produce individual, social and spatial fears more broadly. In this way, as Linnemann (2015: 518) argues, the objects of our fascination, commonly the ‘mad “psychopathic” dispossessed others, adrift and untethered to wage labour and social convention’, appear and remain in spectral form.

These spectral apparitions are little more than ‘reflected anxieties about “modernity”, fears of chaos, and a general “feeling of insecurity”’ during or after a period of change that allow for ‘social identities and values to be evaluated, confirmed or revised’ (Ystehede, 2014: 368). Fear, therefore, is entwined with what Buse and Stott (1999) call the return of an apparition and the slippage of the re- found in re-turn, re-peat or re-appear, an object or place familiar yet strange and which is etched into our public consciousness. This spectacle of fear, to draw from Baudrillard (1983), repeated within the endless mediated narration of crime’s imaginary, foregrounds the affective relations of unease that seeps through the cracks of thinned-out places. Here, the language of the spectre speaks to a critical epistemology. Contributing to criminology’s nascent ‘spectral turn’ (Fiddler et al., 2022), we seek to enunciate fear’s relationship to absence and erasure more so than empiricism. Drawing on Fanghanel’s (2014) interpretation of absence, we examine fear as both an object that can only be perceived by what surrounds it, like a stencil making present the absence, as well as examining the ‘inarticulateable presence’ that stems from an absence of origin. Through this prism, the objects of our fear emerge from the spectacle of our imaginary and through placed evocations that give new meanings to the world around us.

Spectres, haunting and place

Hauntology, a homophone and antonym of ontology, the study of being, troubles epistemic exactitude by redirecting our gaze towards ‘the spectre’, ‘the ghost’ or that which cannot exist. As Davis (2005: 223) explains, ‘the ghost is neither properly dead nor fully alive, it is neither here nor not here, it is neither in the present nor in the past’. Parkin-Gounelas (1999: 128) describes the spectre as a ‘non-present presence’ that is both pre-originary and anteriority, existing in defiance of space, time and the metaphysical desire for both presence and origin. Hauntology’s insistence on spectrality, as Jameson (1999: 86) describes, does not mean that ‘ghosts’ actually exist, but that ‘the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be’. Be it the silenced legacies of an unresolved trauma from our past or anticipated futures that may never arrive, these non-presences influence our experience of the present. However, to avoid becoming a ‘disintensifying influence’ and a passive symptomatology without a programme for the future, cultural critic Mark Fisher built upon Derrida’s hauntological foundations, blending different temporal registers, the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’ (Gildea, 2020: 411). Derrida’s (1994) focus on the ‘no longer’, namely the lingering spectre of communism that continues to haunt Europe, is interpellated through Fisher (2014: 18) who seeks also to commune with the ‘agency of the virtual’, conjuring the spectres of possible futures. Such temporal disjunctions, characteristic of the experience of late capitalism, requires affective language beyond the ‘uncanny’ and led to the development of the weird and the eerie (Fisher, 2016). Fisher’s sensorial and aestheticized development of hauntology sought to sensitize and attune publics to the hollowness – the actual uncertainty and therefore contingency – of their present (Stock, 2023: 781). Hauntology, as Barad (2010: 243) argues, affects a ‘diffractive reading’ in which texts, events, actors, and agencies are read ‘intra-actively’ through one another. And so, within these fractions, we read Fisher and Derrida as not counter to one another, but as part of an intra-active continuum. It is in this spirit that we engage with the hauntological work of Derrida, Fisher and others to build a reading of fear that is orientated around the primary frame of absence.

Hauntology has a long pre-history with space and place. After all, Freud’s (2003 [1919]) unheimlich, that first order hauntological of affect, is more accurately translated as unhomely rather than the more popular uncanny (Fisher, 2012). The unheimlich transforms the home from a place of comfort to an estranging space, a site of danger and otherness rather than safety and self. This psychoanalytic proposition finds willing hosts throughout critical theory, from Benjamin’s (1999) proto-psychogeography of Paris’ Arcades, through to Vidler’s (1992) The Architectural Uncanny. That built environments should act as the mize-en-scene of hauntological encounters should come as no surprise. Places are permanently stained by time, and so our experience of space-time/linearity-simultaneity can slip ‘out of joint’ (Simpson and McGuinness, 2024). Typically our experience of place is mediated by urban design and place-making projects that aspire to re-shape a new reality as much as escaping an old one (Spencer, 2016). As Benjamin (1999) highlights in his examination of Paris’ Arcades, the formation of place explicitly builds over earlier memories or identities to bring to life a new projection: a phantasmagoria that channels the enchantment, the supernatural and the dead to create a new dreamworld of ideas woven within the material landscape. Woven through space, therefore, is a material world as well as an emotionally felt imaginary that is carried through our understanding and connection to place – something more akin to an atmosphere (Anderson, 2009; Böhme, 2006). In this capacity, Frosh (2012) describes how atmospheres skip across the surface of space to transfer registers of fear, joy or uncertainty as a collective shiver or expression of mood. Such transference of thought and feeling is rooted in space, giving rise to an invisible sensation in which we each find ourselves troubled by the objects around us and, more crucially, each other.

The sudden hollowness of the urban life, however, amplifies the fear of crime through what we might think of as ‘thinning’. For Casey (2001), ‘thin places’ stand in opposition to ‘thick places’. The latter contain sites of art, craft, work; placemaking practices that undergird community, creating attachments between people and space to form place. Casey (1993) describes such attachments as ‘habit memories’, the thick sediment that forms the foundations for both personal and communal enrichment. By contrast, thin places provide no depth of experience to anchor the self and are, as Duff (2010: 882) describes, spaces in which we encounter ‘no memorable or resonant command of placial experience’. And yet, thin places proliferate within capitalist realism as deliberately designed ‘non-places’ (Augé, 2009) that prioritize fluid and fleeting encounters governed by capital exchange, such as airports, suburban shopping malls, and hotel rooms. These are anti-anthropological places in that they erase earlier memory or identity of place. Such formations of place are at once solid and forever shifting, with all senses of temporality erased from space (Spencer, 2018). ‘Thin-ness’, as Sack (1997: 198) argues, culminates in a ‘lability of place’ in which ‘places become thinned out and merge with space’.

Thick places are not necessarily safer than thin places. ‘Home’ and ‘community’ often provide cover for intimate harms – especially for women – but fear of crime proliferates more within thin than thick places (Campbell, 2022; Fanghanel, 2018). After all, thin places denote ‘the collapse of the kind of surface that is capable of keeping something within it’ (Casey, 2001: 685; emphasis original). The sanitization of public space to lubricate capital exchange invites the return of the repressed. For example, Bishop (2013: 144) argues that waiting rooms, emblematic of ‘thin’ places, are often ‘haunted by what they attempt to control, deny, and efface: the multifaceted and rhizomatic nature of time-space; the equations of power/powerlessness; the hierarchies of mobility; the complex and paradoxical spatial-temporal rhythms of everyday life’ (Bishop, 2013: 144). In this context, fear of crime represents a failure of place and the disintegration of modernity’s promise of security. As Meyer (2021: 271) argues, security contains an ‘ambivalent character’ through the perpetual failure to actually achieve a state of security along with the continued investment in apparatus that sustains the very threat objects being targeted. Security, along with fear, exists within the ruins of Western ‘progress’ and ‘development’ (Fisher, 2008; Meyer, 2021). When we are confronted by the not-yet ruins of thin places, we are jolted into a sensory encounter out of both time and space.

By focussing on fear of crime as an eerie entity, we peer through the ontological cracks in our common understandings, identifying its presence as less an issue connected to crime control and more as a failure of place. Escaping temporal and spatial fissures, fear of crime touches upon the eerie presence of ruined ‘thick’ places and compels us to ask, ‘What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance?’ (Fisher, 2016: 11). In what follows, we examine three illustrative evocations of fear, drawn from a 2016 study that examined perceptions of fear of crime across Sydney, Australia. This data focussed on narratives respondents communicated relating to their fears and anxieties of crime, safety and community (see Lee et al., 2020, 2021). It is important to note that the original project from which our evocations are drawn did not find exceedingly high levels of crime, nor fear of crime. Yet, the narratives surrounding fear that emerged contain strong socio-spatial contexts that each speak to the ‘thinning out of place’ and the creation of an unsettling dis-ease. It is not our aim here to draw further empirical conclusions from this data, rather to present three voices as evocations, or windows, through which we invite the reader to peer through to examine how fear manifests as a spectral quality. This is not to say that fear is not real, it is. Rather it is to unpack how fear is coded as a reflexive response found within, firstly, the thinned-out liminality of both place and people, secondly, the lability of place that may, at any moment, give way and betray us and, finally, atmospheric points of rupture that skips across space to alert us that all is not well. In this context, hauntology speaks to atmospheres of concern and disjuncture that exist beyond empirical observation or measurability, but enabling us to unpack the critical, spectral resonances that reverberate through these voices of concern and their placed sensibilities.

Strangers on the train: Ghosts of our past

‘I’ve seen people on the train, like really weird people. The train is two hours, it’s a long time and in the dark, no, no good. And the city is dangerous at night because you hear on the news all the time that someone got stabbed and, someone got shot and someone got robbed in Sydney. So, I wouldn’t come here at night, only in the daytime, unless I had somewhere to stay overnight at a friend’s house or something and I was with a friend, but I’d never come up here on my own at night’.

It is not especially ground-breaking to suggest people are more likely to fear crime at night – the vast majority of victim surveys report such findings. As this respondent – a young woman in her late-teens who identifies as queer and is a visitor to Sydney – highlights, darkness brings a dynamic, an atmospheric presence, out of which our fears emerge (Melbin, 2017). The void that the night brings has the capacity to transform objects, amplify emotion and create a new canvass of possibility, unmoored from our immediate spatial surroundings, dragging us into the eerie. Be it the echoes of our own footsteps down an empty train carriage or the reverberating horrors of past events that are pressed onto our imaginary, we recognize that, within the space around us, something has happened here – or worse, is just about to (Linnemann, 2015; Mayerfeld Bell, 1997). There is no indication that the respondent has personally experienced any of the events described. Instead, the feared ‘shootings’ and ‘robbings’ that the respondent describes reach out from the past and announce something is wrong. The sense of anxiety, in this instance, is born from a fear of history repeating (or the ‘spectacle of history’ cast through the popular consciousness). In other words, fear has less to do with the unknown than with the re-turn, re-peat or re-emergence of the known. The coding of re- indicates that the spectre of our fear is the familiar that has been made strange by its spatial (here, not there) and temporal (now, not then) proximity (Buse and Stott, 1999; Fisher, 2013). For example, the presence of a fellow passenger could be familiar, as it often is during the security of the day, but has been made strange as the words, memories, and half-remembered news events of the past that spill into the present, carrying the unsettling presence of wrongness.

Crime’s imaginary, as both Young (1996) and Deleuze (1989) inform us, becomes an expression of the ‘truer-that-the-true’ or the ‘more-real-than-the-real’, locking us into an eternal, hyperreal replication displays the phantasmagoric reflection to amplify images of fear. The play of signs and the appropriation of images of crime can, drawing on Baudrillard (1983), determine how individuals, groups and societies perceive and relate to fear. The presence of the strange and its embodied form, the Stranger, marks the disruption of established boundaries of community, identity and, above all, security (Simmel, 1950). The Stranger is characterized by its spatial proximity and mobility as a fundamentally relational entity, at once too distant and too close. This slippage, along with their relational position within society, allows images of our fears to be caught up in – and projected onto – the Stranger. In the same way Butler (1993: 20–21) writes of police brutality belonging to ‘phantasm of white racist aggression’ that ‘beats the spectre of its own rage’, fear is less connected to the object in question, a fellow passenger on the train, for example, than it is to the potential re-appearance of an ‘externalized figure of its own distortion’. In a similar vein, Meyer (2021) illustrates the ontological void found within the objects of societal fears. Using the example of ‘the gang’, Meyer argues that these figures are essentially ‘the description of a ghost’ and function primarily within urban security paradigms and are produced through social relations of subjectivity, power and space (Meyer, 2021: 277). All this lends trappings of familiarity to our fear of crime. Projected are the refracted images of the past, the murderers and robbers that stalk our collective imaginary, but which proliferate and only refer to themselves as a carnival of mirrors that distort, rather than reaffirm, our sense of security within place. Fear, in this context, becomes a phantasmagoria of crime’s spectacle and societal anxieties.

Of equal importance in the above extract is the liminality of both space – the train – and liminal figures – the weird people. Non-places, such as the carriage of a train, are intrinsic to modernity and demonstrate a sense of permanent liminality as the gaps between fixed positions, or thick places, grow (Lefebvre, 1991; Turner, 1985). Here, everyone is a stranger. As Bissell (2010) notes, the tensions between the isolation of travelling alone, but alongside the parallel collective of other passengers, instils what Fujii (1999) describes as ‘intimate alienation’. At once too close and yet too far, such tensions make face-to-face encounters almost unbearable. This liminality of both places and bodies contributes to the sense of the distinction between the past and the present collapsing, the unsettled feeling of a time out of joint. After all, Simmel’s (1950) Stranger can be read as an essay on the phenomenology of liminality and the manifestation of an object bound to neither time nor space, only to the flow and rhythm of capital. No longer pointing to anything fixed or stable, but an ‘ontological interregnum’ that constitute merely ‘staging posts on the way towards the desert of the Real’ (Fisher, 2016: 50). As a phantasmagoria of societal anxiety, the objects of our fear remain elusive, beyond our grasp, manifesting as spectral and given physical form by being placed onto those around us – the weird people on the train. However, this is not to say nothing is there. As a repetition in advance, our visions of crime have been played out through mediated simulation and etched into our understanding of what is almost inevitable (Baudrillard, 1983). In many ways, this sense of unknowable inevitability is far more concerning and ‘real’ than the threat of possibility.

The failure of urbanism: contesting for a new future

‘The alleyway, it’s dark there and like there’s trees just coming over the path, you can’t really. . . Like if I’m walking, I feel like I’m hearing footsteps behind me ’cause it echoes and all that. So, it’s not a nice place to be walking, and then there’s, you know, like houses in very close proximity and they have like really aggressive dogs or something’.

The force of the spectre does not belong to the past alone; it haunts the present, and we hear its footsteps echo. For this young female respondent, for whom everyday street harassment and socio-structural concerns about sexual assault are undoubtedly very real (Fileborn, 2016; Fileborn and O’Neill, 2023), fear is an expression of what may happen, not what has already come to pass. This is the temporal virtuality of what Fisher (2014: 19) calls the not yet. The very grammar of not yet indicates an immanent event, an apparition with no physical presence because it has yet to come to pass but is buried deep into our imaginary, demanding urgent attention. Beyond the struggle of placement that runs through the past and the present, haunting has at its core a contest over the future or, in other words, what will come next (Gordon, 2008). Returning to Simmel’s (1950) Stranger, the presence of the ghost is not only a reminder of the past through the spectral re-turn of a figure we once knew, but it is an affective presence that shows no sign of leaving. Out of place and time, the Stranger embodies weightlessness, flitting through spatial and temporal divides. This force of lightness makes the stalking presence of the strange feel all the more immovable, a disturbing presence that won’t relinquish its grip on the present and stretches the temporality of now so that the future becomes entirely jammed (Gordon, 2008, 2011). In this way, the present begins to seem endless, and the fruits of promise and alternative possibilities held within the abundance of the future atrophies. As with our respondent, the spectre of the past is forever present, an indelible mark on any future.

Our respondent highlights no physical, embodied form other than an alleyway that, like the train previously, marks a liminal point of connection. No stranger is stepping in from the dark, no imaginary wrapped up in the presence of an outsider who threatens the very security and viability of the present. Yet, there remains an unshakeable sense that all is not well, a foreboding presence of the strange carried through the cadence of empty footsteps, the shadows of the trees, the echo of concreted over landscaping, the claustrophobia of cramped housing and uncertainty of what is on the other side of the door; ‘really aggressive dogs or something’. This anxiety is born of a foreboding presence within a thinned-out place, bereft of positive associations of attachment, identity and belonging so that it has come to merge with space (Sack, 1997: 138). Stretching into the future and marking what has yet to be, absent are the densely enmeshed infrastructures of communal safety and substance associated with thick places. It is a space that cannot hold anything, marking only a perforated surface liable to fail or give way at any moment and collapse (Casey, 2001). The respondent captures the immovable atmosphere or force-of-feeling generated by thinned-out urbanism and the ‘logic of loss’ that ties such spaces to melancholy and points to a dead future. In one sense, and as it is with our evocation, the future is always expressed as a haunting; be it the virtuality of hope, promise and redemption or fear, anxiety and dread. The force of feeling wrapped within the lifeless, thinning-out of place is a melancholia expressed through the loss of a future once promised, now denied, as we struggle to reconcile an anxiety associated with the forever of the present. A sense of dread accompanies the endless cycle of the present and the lost ‘golden age’ of security.

Urban placemaking, as we can see here, is about a world striving to come into being and bringing to life a promised future whilst erasing a past soon to be forgotten (Simpson and McGuinness, 2024). By creating and arranging material fragments of light, sounds, symbols and texts, atmospheres of place are ‘enhanced’, ‘transformed’, ‘intensified’, and ‘shaped’ to create affective qualities of homely, serene or welcoming (Anderson, 2009; Böhme, 2006). And yet, within thin places, the same processes can be at work to create atmospheres of uncertainty, loss and insecurity. Returning to our respondent, they speak not of what has happened but that which may yet come and stalk the present. The spectre of crime has the potential to wander, jamming up the future and clearing the way for the endless flatlands of the present. This is, in the very starkest terms, it. The strange brings an unsettling presence that threatens to reach into and create a future stuck in the present (Fisher, 2014; Gordon, 2008). As Fisher (2012) and Jameson (2007) demonstrate in their respective analysis of The Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, thin spaces allow us to feel the coming, empty temporal plane of ‘corporate hyperdomination’ whilst, at the same time, remind us of the thin separation between ourselves and the ‘repressed sectors’ history on which we stand (Fisher, 2012: 20). Through a hauntological lens, thin places become sites of spectral encounter that reveal the ways we have incorporated, rather than confronted, the ghosts of our past and betrays a future in which alternative imaginaries have atrophied.

Whereas thick places are encoded with hope and aspiration, the thin-ness here is characterized by a loss that dismantles the present. The uneasy presence of fear emerges from the de-bounding of place and associations of attachment, which bleeds into thinned-out formations of place. Within this evocation, we can see both the disappearance of place and the loss of time that marks a future projected with sorrow, melancholy, and anxiety.

Not here: Spatiality and the transference of fear

‘[I]f I’m riding [my bike] sometimes I’ll go the quieter back streets to stay away from cars. There’s one route I take and think, oh, how do I feel about travelling this way tonight, because I know it’s a quiet area and there are not many people around, and you sort of get the butterflies in the stomach, but I tend to do it anyway. If I was walking . . .I just tend to . . .stay on the busier streets where there are people around’.

As with our previous evocations, here we see similar imaginaries of liminal and transitional spaces contained within an object that symbolizes modernity, movement and transference within thinned-out spaces; this time empty rather than occupied, but still spaces of departure and destination. This female resident of Sydney’s Inner West and who is in her mid-forties captures the ways space itself, be it dark alleys or empty streets, both contain and transmit a felt presence that possesses and gives a sense of social aliveness to place (Mayerfeld Bell, 1997). It is not so much a Stranger whose presence unsettles a sense of order but an absence or (non)presence that creates an atmospheric affective encounter out of which the spectre of crime emerges. Building on the atmospheric reverberances of the strange and, drawing on Young (2019: 767), affective atmospheres are a sensory phenomenon encountered when familiarity is broken by an unexpected occurrence. The rupture of one atmosphere is replaced with another, fostering a sense of dis-ease characterized by ‘butterflies in the stomach’ and leads to associations of insecurity, loss or fear. We are reminded of Fiddler’s (2019: 471) sentiments that ‘all sites at some point will have been touched by violence’. However, there must first be a disturbance for this to be felt as an atmospheric presence. Otherwise, these sites and the feelings they carry would remain buried beneath our feet, unnoticed. The link between past violence, therefore, is carried by or transmitted through atmospheric encounters. That is to say, the affective connections between bodies, experiences and environments produce meaning, positively or negatively described (Anderson, 2009; Bille et al., 2015). In the respondent’s case, the feeling of dis-ease is navigated through the fleeting transience of the encounter and distance afforded by her bicycle.

Nonetheless, she continues to be notified, in Gordon et al.’s (2020) sense, that not all is well. The respondent identifies no specific threat, just an empty space providing a temporal and sensory disjunction, allowing the spectre of crime to (re)emerge and transmit fear. What we see the respondent notice is, as Linnemann (2015: 530) states, ‘the spaces we travel through are alive with the ghosts of the dead’. As McKay (2022) puts it in reference to motel rooms, and Campbell (2022) states in relation to domestic sites of extreme violence, spaces have unacknowledged ghosts, absent victims and perpetrators that lead to an atmospheric sense of dis-ease. Whilst these examples are enveloped within the verticality of time, our evocation highlights what Frosh (2012: 242–243) calls the ‘horizontal transference of feeling’ that fizzes across spatial landscapes, carrying shared expressions of anxiety, threat or fear; a characterization of what we can call the not here. Such a ghost criminological perspective reveals the cultural absences woven into our understanding of space and place, revealing the extent to which our sense of presence can so easily waver (Fiddler et al., 2022). As our respondent highlights, we do not need to witness the violence of the past to sense its spectral evocations; we remain touched by unseen traumas contained within the atmospheric experience of space and place. Within such atmospheres are articulations of how place is stained by time, rendering an eerie sense of agency to the otherwise inert tapestry of our material surroundings (Fisher, 2012; Mayerfeld Bell, 1997). The emptiness of the street may carry no physical markers of crime or violence in terms of presence, yet the atmosphere of place contains and transmits the stain of time. As Young (2019: 767) elaborates, the rupture created by an atmosphere of disturbances fosters an, albeit momentary, ability to identify what has been lost – be it a sense of peaceful tranquillity, security or an institution’s orderly routines. Recognizing that something is lost, the atmospheric disturbance can elicit the sense that something happened here or, worse, that something could yet and is about to.

Surrounding objects and sensorial encounters produce meaning and, with it, place takes on a new sensibility: the level of lighting afforded by the streetlights; signs of habitation or activity behind the walls of homes or commercial premises; signs of disorder (for some), such as graffiti, rubbish, overflowing drainage. Crucially, there is no proximate danger attached to these symbols. While they may contribute to the Baudrillardian spectacle of crime, they also retain a capacity to create anxiety and induce fear through the atmospheres they invoke. These are all junctures born not out of time but out of place. We are not suggesting that the presence of such symbols and sensory cues will produce affective fear in every individual – as eluded before, these are dependent upon biographical and demographic characteristics. Nor are we suggesting that the absence of positive cues in the empty street will necessarily always give rise to the spectres of fear. Rather, we join Mayerfeld Bell (1997) and Fisher (2012) in arguing that there is a spectral agency contained within our material surrounds, an agency that can become a source of fear when our attachments to thick places are thinned out. We become lost in the lost moorings of space. After all, place, alongside memory, connects us to the past and serves as a reminder of what has been or used to be. As Young (2022: 227) has recently argued, ‘Violence threads through urban spaces, sometimes rendered visible by official markers such as plaques and statues, but more likely occluded and all but forgotten’.

Place is a critical container that carries and reflects the stains of vertical (time) and horizontal (space) affects to create and give meaning to sensory encounters within space. The spectre of past trauma lends a force of feeling that skips across space and transfers the register of fear from person to person, site to site, as a collective shiver of anxiety (Frosh, 2012). This transference of thought, feeling and emotion is rooted in space, giving rise to an invisible sensation in which we each find ourselves troubled by the objects around us and, more crucially, each other (Frosh, 2012: 243). Our evocations share a common framing of the past overwhelming the present to weigh down the future. It is this quality that gives a spectral, haunting power to space. For our cyclist passing through the empty streets at night, the ‘butterflies’ of discomfort stem from the transference of feeling that something happened here; maybe not actually here, but somewhere very much like here. In this context, we see an evocation of crime’s imaginary, which skips across space and is transferred through people to lend a distilled sense that all is not well. Such feelings can be linked to being located within a space that carries the memories or echoes of past violence as well as thinned-out places, which erode our sense of connection as well as the stains of time to erase memories of attachment, creating a new, deeper, understanding of dislocation. In each instance, we see the containment of the eerie; an absence where there should be a presence or a presence where there should be an absence.

Conclusion

In this article we have examined how fear of crime emerges out of an imaginary connected to past events but, more commonly, woven into a public consciousness that oscillates between reality and spectacle. As crime’s imaginary remains stuck in an endless loop of media reports, political consciousness and half-remembered memories, fear of crime lurks between the living and the dead future of this spectacle. Challenging its ontological foundations, fear of crime becomes what Debord (1994: 2) calls the ‘autonomous movement of the non-living’, stuck in a spectacle of anxiety, risk and insecurity. This is not the same as saying that fear is not real or simply imagined. Fear and its impact are all too real. Nor is it to say that fear does not evoke greater senses of insecurity and (real) heightened risks depending on the markers of difference, such as gender, race, or sexuality. Rather, what we serve to highlight is how fear remains an object that points to an absence. The senses that alert us that all is not well are seldom attached to an object manifesting within the spectrum of the material world. We are instead alerted by an atmospheric sense that all is not well. In this reading, fear of crime manifests as a stain of time that elicits a strong, sensory emotion and, in Fisher’s (2016: 62) words, ‘clings to certain kinds of physical spaces and landscapes’. This presence flows through the material imagination of our placed surrounds, invoking atmospheric senses of suspicion and anxiety that may interrupt, perturb and haunt places, people and things (Anderson, 2009; Meyer, 2021). Atmospherically, fear is a real phenomenon and works upon cleavages of gender in very real and impactful ways (Fileborn and O’Neill, 2023). This is not to spirit fear away, but to expand upon how fear can envelop us, press upon society and we each feel its force, wrapped as it is within the spectacle of crime’s imaginary.

This is to align fear with the eerie. Through Simmel’s (1950) Stranger, we have examined how fear exists as a weightless yet immovable presence bond to space and people alike. The Stranger along with the mark of the strange brings about a crack in time and space, a sensory disconnection that removes us from the world around us and from our sense of security. In this sense, fear of crime can be seen as a failure of absence and a failure of presence, along with a failure of distance that brings a sense of being at once too close and too far. The sensation of fear, like the eerie and the strange, is one of dis-ease. The rippling sensation that arrives as a response to an encounter with an remains mysterious or unknowable despite attempts to make it make sense. As Fisher (2016: 62) remarks ‘when knowledge is achieved, the eerie disappears’. And so it is with fear. Each of our evocations raise the attachment of fear of liminal or ‘thin’ places. Drawing on Casey (2001), these are sights of non-encounter that are activated by the consumer logics of capitalism and fluid, mobile nature of fleeting encounter. In other words, these are spaces in which there is no attachment beyond consumption in which everyone is ‘a passer-by, an alien or a missing person’ (Virilio, 1989: 28). This again amplifies the ‘intimate alienation’ (Fujii, 1999) that is a marker of The Stranger and expressed as the tension of being at once too close (in proximity) and too far (in affective association) (Fu, 2022). Without ontological attachment or association to both place and people, fear arrives as a sensory shudder, reminding us that the ‘cracks and rigging’ of our understanding of time and space are exposed. The categories with which we draw upon to make sense of the world are no longer of use, provoking a sense of dislocation, anxiety and loss of certainty.

Without fully understanding the objects of our fears, interwoven as they are into bodies, communities and spaces, they will continue to feed into and shape a broader cultural imaginary. To bring a hauntological or ‘ghost method’ (Ferrell, 2022) to the imaginary of crime is to assert that, as an eerie non-presence, fear of crime cannot be solely addressed by empirical observation. Incorporating the eerie within fear of crime research is to recognize that fear is shrouded by absence, alive within the spectacle of crime, and entombed within crime’s imaginary. So long as criminology’s generally accepted episteme continues to recognize only objects existing ‘out there’, comprehensible within a realist ontology, then it will continue to overlook the distressing sense of a presence when there should be an absence, or an absence when there should be a presence (Fiddler et al., 2022; McGuinness and Simpson, 2022). After all, as criminologists and social scientists, our empirical focus on the recovery meaning through truth belies the way that truth is never ‘quite there’, unable to be ‘fully tracked down’ (Frosh, 2012: 247). Like an unlaid ghost, an object that has not been understood inevitably reappears, stalking the present as an immovable object that shapes individual and collective anxiety (Frosh, 2012; Gordon, 2008). Here, hauntology presents us with an alternative framework to approach the nature of this absence and the ways in which crime’s imaginary and spectacle creates an active grip on how we sense, respond and understand the world.