What is a hauntique?

It is a word we made up for a thing that has existed for centuries: an object somebody was frightened of, and could not bring themselves to throw away.

People ask this at almost every show, usually in the bar afterwards. A hauntique is a haunted or accursed relic. An antique with a history that makes people uneasy. Some are objects that were made for a supernatural purpose. Some are ordinary objects that acquired a reputation. The interesting part is rarely whether the object is genuinely haunted. It is what the object tells you about the people who owned it.

What is in the collection

The collection Kevin brings on stage runs to several categories, and each one has a different kind of story behind it.

Vampire hunting kits

These are wooden cases fitted out with the tools of the trade: a stake, a mallet, a crucifix, glass vials for holy water, sometimes a pistol with silver shot. They usually carry a label attributing them to a European maker and dating them to the nineteenth century.

Here is the honest part. Most researchers and auction specialists regard the great majority of these kits as later assemblages rather than genuine Victorian equipment. The components are often authentic period pieces, but the kits themselves appear to have been put together well after the fact, for collectors and curiosity seekers. The maker named on many of the labels has never been traced to a real person.

That does not make them less interesting. It makes them a different artefact than they claim to be. They are evidence of a market: proof that at some point enough people wanted to believe in vampire hunters that somebody started supplying the equipment. Several museums hold examples, and they draw crowds precisely because of the ambiguity.

Cemetery padlocks and grave ironwork

This category is not ambiguous at all, and it is the grimmest thing in the collection for exactly that reason.

In Scotland in the early 1800s, there was a serious trade in stolen corpses. Anatomy schools needed bodies to teach with, the legal supply was tiny, and the gap was filled by men who dug up fresh graves at night. The case that made it notorious was Burke and Hare in Edinburgh in 1828, who eventually stopped bothering with graves and simply murdered people instead.

Families responded with hardware. They fitted graves with iron cages and heavy stone and metal covers called mortsafes, hired watchmen, built watchhouses in the corner of the churchyard, and locked things down. Cemetery ironwork from that period is not a curiosity. It is a physical record of ordinary people being frightened that their relatives would be dug up, because their relatives were being dug up.

Voodoo dolls

The pin-stuck figure that everyone pictures is largely a Western invention. Haitian Vodou is a real religion with real practitioners and it does not much resemble the version in films. It is worth saying plainly, because the misrepresentation has done real harm to real people.

What does have a long documented history in Europe is the poppet: a small figure made to represent a person, used in folk magic for healing as often as for harm. Poppets turn up in English witch trial records and occasionally in the walls of old houses. The idea that you can affect somebody through a likeness of them is very old and very widespread, and the doll in the case on stage sits in that tradition rather than the Hollywood one.

Haunted dolls

The best known example is Robert the Doll in Key West, Florida, a child's doll from the early twentieth century that now sits in a museum and has accumulated a large body of legend, including the tradition that visitors should ask permission before photographing him.

There is also a thriving online trade in haunted dolls, where sellers list dolls with attached histories and buyers purchase them knowing exactly what they are buying. Whatever else is going on there, it demonstrates something consistent: people will pay more for an object with a story than for the same object without one.

Why objects hold stories at all

A hauntique works on the same principle as a relic or an heirloom. The object is a physical anchor for a narrative that would otherwise drift. You can hold it. It has weight and wear and a smell. Once you know what is supposed to have happened to it, you cannot un-know it, and that changes how the object feels in your hand.

That is the whole mechanism of the show. Kevin does not need you to believe the object is possessed. He needs you to hold the story and the object in your head at the same time, in a dark room, for an hour. What happens after that is up to you.

See them for yourself

The hauntiques come out every Thursday at The Lost Dice in the Adelaide CBD, from 8pm to 9pm. Each show works through several pieces from the collection. If you would rather have the witch trial material specifically, that is the focus of HAUNTED 2.0: The Witching Hour.

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