Haunted Cartographies
When I was a little girl, I would sit cross-legged on the carpet with an atlas spread open before me. I treated it like a storybook, tracing the blue lines of rivers and the winding veins of mountain ranges with a fingertip. I memorised bolden cities and each name — Samarkand, Valparaíso, Reykjavik — shimmered with possibility. Maps were not flat to me; they were alive.
Perhaps that was when the haunting began.
Maps pretend to be simple: tidy rectangles that promise to make sense of the world.
But behind their neatness lurk ghosts — forgotten villages, sunken roads, and phantom coastlines that once existed and may again. A good map doesn’t just show where things are. It also hints at what’s been lost, misremembered, or deliberately concealed.
Cartographers have always known this.
Their art balances fact with faith, and every map is a small act of imagination. Take the Piri Reis map, drawn in 1513 by an Ottoman admiral who claimed to have pieced it together from ancient charts. Its parchment depicts parts of South America with uncanny accuracy — yet some scholars argue the coastline resembles Antarctica without its ice. How could anyone in the 16th century have known the shape of a landmass buried beneath glaciers? Either Piri Reis was incredibly lucky, or he glimpsed something that shouldn’t have been visible.
Closer to home, Britain’s landscape is littered with haunted coordinates.
The drowned village of Capel Celyn, not too far from where I live, flooded in the 1960s to create a reservoir for Liverpool, still appears on older maps like a ghost imprint — a community preserved beneath water.
Dunwich, once a thriving medieval port on the Suffolk coast, has been devoured by the North Sea. Its church bells are said to toll beneath the waves on stormy nights. Every map of that coastline tells two stories: one of what remains, and another of what has been erased.
Even our modern digital maps are haunted.
Satellite imagery captures the ghosts of aircraft long vanished, ships that drift eternally in pixel form, or the blurred outlines of secret sites erased by governments. Glitches reveal hidden geometries — a brief flash of the uncanny before algorithms smooth it away. The tools have changed, but the haunting persists.
Perhaps we’re drawn to maps because they promise orientation in a world that rarely offers it. Yet the more I walk, the more I find that reality resists the tidy order of a grid.
Old footpaths vanish into hedges. Tracks marked on paper lead nowhere. A street remembered from childhood opens onto a housing estate that didn’t exist before. The territory slips and shifts beneath the ink. Every journey redraws the map a little.
As an artist, I find that deeply comforting.
My creative process often begins with wandering (physically or imaginatively ) — allowing instinct to guide my route — then translating what I’ve found into collage or oracle form. Each new piece becomes a map of its own: a constellation of fragments, memories, and symbols. Sometimes a cut-out photograph of a crumbling building or a vintage compass finds its way into a composition, echoing that same fascination I had as a child. The finished image is less about accuracy than resonance. It’s a chart of feeling rather than distance.
The word cartography comes from the Greek chartēs (map) and graphein (to write). To make a map is to write the world into being — to say, this is what exists, and this is where I stand in relation to it.
But it’s also an act of storytelling. Every omission, every choice of colour or scale, alters the tale. What happens when we let the unknown back in? When we admit that our maps might also chart the invisible?
There’s a quiet magic in considering the earth as a palimpsest — a manuscript written, erased, and rewritten over centuries. Beneath each modern town lies an older one; beneath the tarmac, an older path.
Even the names we give to places are residues of belief. The moors of Yorkshire carry Norse ghosts. The downs of the south are etched with chalk figures whose meanings have long since faded. We are walking through layers of time whether we realise it or not.
Sometimes I imagine a different kind of atlas — one that would plot experiences rather than boundaries. It would show where I once felt a sudden chill on a sunlit path, or the exact spot where I heard laughter in an empty street. It would map the uncanny moments that make travel worthwhile: the sense of déjà vu, the ripple between now and then, the point where imagination collides with geography. That’s the map I’m forever drawing, piece by piece, with each journey and each collage.
So perhaps “haunted cartography” isn’t about ghosts in the traditional sense. It’s about acknowledging that the world carries memory, and that memory has shape. Every map — whether hand-drawn, digital, or conjured in dream — is a séance of sorts, calling the past into the present.
Next time you unfold a map, pause for a moment. Trace your finger along an old road, a forgotten town, a blank patch of sea. Ask yourself what might still linger there. The answers may not appear on paper, but they’re waiting — between the lines, beneath the waves, beyond the edge.