The way that ghosts and haunted houses have been recorded in folk archives, since the very beginning of Argentinian folklore documentation, reflects several aspects of the way in which the supernatural world is represented in folk narrative messages. Such representations express different ways of considering life and death in Argentinian culture, the distinctive feature of which is a heterogeneous blend of races, religions and worldviews.

As I have already discussed (Palleiro 2008), the representations of haunting ghosts, haunted houses, and the other manifestations of the supernatural in folk narrative archives, are connected with the different currents, trends and topics of Argentinian folkloristics. I use archive in its etymological meaning of arkhé, that is to say, as a principle of memory organization (Derrida 1997). That is how, in the first collections, tales about ghosts and haunted houses were not considered as main topics of Argentinean folk narrative. According to the folkloric paradigm of collectionism, these first archives were organized by anthological criteria, based on the general indices of types and motives. Such a way of filing narrative material tended to adjust the local archives to parameters of trans-national classification, with a privilege for the recollection of marvellous tales. At the same time, marked by the influence of contextualist paradigms of the new perspectives in folklore and performance studies, there has also been an opening both towards new topics like UFO narratives, new narrative species like cases, ‘histories’ and memorates, and new channels of discourse like the written and mediated registers.