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Dickey, piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie houses", embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living -- how do we deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes are made to those facts and why, Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone and crimes left unsolved.… (mer)
Debunks many of the most famous ghost stories in the US, from the Winchester Castle to Gettysburg to the French Quarter in NO, but still managed to creep me right out. This is a unique and interesting approach to US history. ( )
Wasn't at all what I was expecting, though I admit I only briefly skimmed the synopsis before borrowing it. Part of me repeatedly felt almost let down by how Dickey would present the bones of a ghost story, only to turn around and thoroughly debunk it. I was also a little taken aback by how deeply rooted racism and classism appear to be in tales of hauntings, though why I should be surprised I have no idea. I feel educated, though not in a way that makes me feel warm inside. That wasn't the point, though, I can now see.
(Though I did enjoy the section about Stull Cemetery, if only because it featured in Supernatural. I wonder how many gawkers and troublemakers that story arc might have sent there to explore.) ( )
Although I enjoy the concept of this book, there's just something about the author's tone that grates at me. I found myself getting less interested in the Book the further I got into it. The histories are often vague, but then there are tangents branching off into unnecessary detail.
Don't read this if you're looking for good ghost stories- the author spends more time dissecting and debunking them. (And although the book jacket assures that this book will be "spellbinding, scary, and wickedly insightful," I cannot say that it is any of those to me.) ( )
I tried so hard to finish this book, but from the moment that the author quoted Freud in his introduction I knew it wasn’t meant to be. Dickey makes history exactly what it isn’t: dry. Don’t get me wrong, he’s obviously done an absolutely impressive amount of research but it does little to improve what I can only call “word soup.” If I wanted to read a book condemning social practices and shortcomings of the past I’d go looking for it, but I wanted to read a book of ghost stories and how they influenced American culture and how American culture influenced them. This isn’t that book. I managed to be bored while reading about the Winchester Mystery House. A feat, I assure you. Best of luck if you try to read this one. ( )
The most fascinating moments in “Ghostland” are Dickey’s etymological musings (on terms like “haunt,” “cemetery,” “ruin porn” and “ghost town”) and his many turns down unusual paths of American history. His discussion of the links between 19th-century Spiritualism, the early feminist movement and contemporary New Age beliefs; his account of the red dwarf who is said to have haunted Detroit since the city’s founding, in 1701; and his recognition that ghost stories can aid the work of historic preservation: All of these are absorbing. While many of the ghost stories he recounts can be found in academic treatments as well as lighthearted local guides, with “Ghostland,” Dickey achieves a capacious geographical synthesis that is both intellectually intriguing and politically instructive.
Throughout history, ghost stories have been used to make money, offer a moral, mark a location, and explain the unexplainable, among many other functions.... An intriguing but somewhat uneven exploration of things unseen.
Grouping haunts into four categories—houses, hangouts, institutions, and entire towns—he shows how the persistence of these ghost stories, especially when their details change with the times, say more about the living than the dead.... Dickey embeds all of the fanciful tales he recounts in a context that speaks “to some larger facet of American consciousness.”
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The main work of haunting is done by the living. - Judith Richardson
Ghostland lies beyond the jurisdiction of veracity. - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Dedikation
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For Nicole
Inledande ord
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August 1933, a summer's day in Manhattan's Lower East Side.
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A paranormal event without a story is tenuous, fragile. What makes it “real,” at least in a sense, is the story, the tale that grounds the event. That sense of the uncanny, of something not-quite-right, of things ever-so-slightly off, cries out for an explanation, and often we turn to ghosts for that explanation.
A spinster and one who seemed to resist time in a place as restless as New York City, Gertrude Tredwell embodies a set of ideas—and anxieties—about women, domesticity, and modernity. Likewise, in the ghost of threadbare Samuel Tredwell we have a story of disinheritance and filial failure that reflects how we as a culture treat men who don’t live up to certain concepts of masculinity. Add to this the overbearing portrait of Seabury himself, and what the Merchant’s House offers is an uncanny portrait of the American family, one that frustrates our basic assumptions about how a father and his children should act.
Our ghost stories center on unfinished endings, broken relationships, things left unexplained.
We like to view this country as a unified, cohesive whole based on progress, a perpetual refinement of values, and an arc of history bending toward justice—but the prevalence of ghosts suggests otherwise. The ghosts who haunt our woods, our cemeteries, our houses, and our cities appear at moments of anxiety and point to instability in our national and local identities.
Our country’s ghost stories are themselves the dreams (or nightmares) of a nation, the Freudian slips of whole communities: uncomfortable and unbidden expressions of things we’d assumed were long past and no longer important.
...the history of America’s ghost stories is one of crimes left unsolved or transgressions we now feel guilty about.
The language of ghosts, it seems, has become an important (if abstract) way of talking about architecture and place.
Ghost tours are popular with tourists, explains geographer Glenn Gentry, because they “allow access to dissonant knowledge, dirty laundry, back stage.” They are the celebrity gossip of history, the salacious underbelly of the past, and we’re drawn to them because the standard history often obscures as much as it reveals.
With a haunted house, the question is: to what extent is the house itself alive, and to what extent is it inanimate?
Neither alive nor dead but undead, the haunted house is the thing in between.
Home ownership has always been intertwined with the American dream; we have magnified this simple property decision in part because it represents safety and security. The haunted house is a violation of this comfort, the American dream gone horribly wrong.
...the simple addition of an anomalous element to a house’s construction immediately opens up vertiginous possibilities. The secret staircase, simply by virtue of not being immediately self-explanatory, renders the entire house even more uncanny.
The narrative of the haunted Indian burial ground hides a certain anxiety about the land on which Americans—specifically white, middle-class Americans—live. Embedded deep in the idea of home ownership—the Holy Grail of American middle-class life—is the idea that we don’t, in fact, own the land we’ve just bought.
The constant evolving of the land around the Mississippi delta is anathema to human habitation, and civilizations that don’t make their mark through massive earthworks and geologic engineering—as New Orleans has—are easily erased by the constant flow and flux of the river and its mud.
Ghost stories like this are a way for us to revel in the open wounds of the past while any question of responsibility for that past blurs, then fades away.
Urban sprawl isn’t unique to San Jose, of course, but the city has a miniature allegory of itself in the form of a sprawling, formless Victorian mansion that sits in its very center. If there is a central monument to San Jose now, it is this labyrinthine, inscrutable house in the heart of the city.
If houses are supposed to be places of security, then most terrifying is the idea that they might go on forever, that they might be labyrinths.
The story of Sarah Winchester’s house, built on the fortune of the rifle that “won the West,” is always, one way or another, the story of money.
...attitudes toward America’s westward expansion and manifest destiny changed, so, too, did the role of the Winchester rifle in the tour, now emphasized as the gun that had killed untold Native Americans, all of whom were now haunting the widow who’d profited from the murder weapon.
The legend of Sarah Winchester depends on a cultural uneasiness to which we don’t always like to admit. An uneasiness about women living alone, withdrawn from society, for one. An uneasiness about wealth and the way the superrich live among us. And, perhaps largest of all, an uneasiness about the gun that won the West and the violence white Americans carried out in the name of civilization.
...we’ve projected shame on her nonetheless, as though we can quarantine such thoughts in the mind of someone long dead so the rest of us can go about our days unburdened, enjoying the California sun.
Burial reformers pushed the importance of sanitary corpse disposal, and so families, many of whom were used to keeping vigil with a loved one’s body for several days after death, saw these bodies removed from their care at a rapid rate. Suddenly bereft of this final communion due to medical and sanitation laws, families turned to Spiritualism as a means of continuing that conversation, seeking in séances a closure that had been denied them.
...since the spirit world was accessible to all, Spiritualists saw little need for the men who traditionally controlled organized religion. In short order Spiritualism became dominated by women:
Spiritualism had given many of these women practice and confidence in speaking to groups with authority; by allowing others (the dead) to speak through them, American women began to speak for themselves in greater numbers.
Since women gained the vote, however, Spiritualism’s importance as a women’s movement has more or less been forgotten or downplayed.
...if it is truly haunted, then it is haunted not by ghosts or evil spirits so much as by an idea that has vanished; a building left behind, without the animating spirit that inspired its construction.
That sense of emptiness is key to a good haunting. Few things are more unsettling than being somewhere emptied out, after everyone else has left.
As supernatural beings, spirits often come to represent some universal truth of the past. They turn space into time and can be a way of making a place stand for some transcendental value or universal ideal.
As Tiya Miles notes in her book Tales from the Haunted South, the consuming horror that animated most whites was “not a fear of ghosts but a fear of black rebellion.” The only way to keep alive the white world of Southern belles and elegant gentlemen was to deny the humanity of black people: their names, their identities, their families.
Here, then, is a central paradox in the way that ghosts work: to turn the living into ghosts is to empty them out, rob them of something vital; to keep the dead alive as ghosts is to fill them up with memory and history, to keep alive a thing that would otherwise be lost.
...what is clear is that history is not just written by the victors; it’s written by the literate. The prohibition against enslaved Americans learning to read or write had the immediate purpose of denying them agency and keeping them under control, but in the long run it also meant that the stories, lives, and opinions of millions of Americans were lost to time.
Brothels are liminal (from the Latin limins, “threshold”) places, borderland places where the traditional rules of a society are momentarily suspended. Both for good and for ill, the world of the brothel seems a world in extremis. And so perhaps no other business venture is so primed for ghost stories. The brothel, with its mix of tragedy and hiddenness, rowdy violence and erotic allure, seems the perfect place for spirits to take up residence.
...there’s something uncanny about the very nature of a hotel, its endless, involuntary repetition of home-seeming spaces, rooms that could almost be home but are always somehow slightly off. Cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum writes, “The uncanny is home defamiliarized—its rule book torn at the seam."
This is how ghost stories are born, after all: not from a complete story so much as from bits and pieces that don’t quite add up, a kaleidoscope of menace and unease that coalesce in unpredictable ways.
We tell spooky tales and scary stories because the alternative—the open-ended chaos of the unknown—is even more terrifying.
With little commercial interest to dictate how one experienced the city, downtown Los Angeles became, in its own way, a dream space—free to be colonized by alcoholics and junkies, of course, but also by artists and writers who found cheap living space and no one looking over their shoulders.
More so than houses, civic structures—not just courthouses but prisons, asylums, and other government buildings—are purpose-built. They are rarely constructed for convenience’s sake; they are built to send a message.
Part of our belief in ghosts, you could say, comes from our belief in perfect and unambiguous justice. As opposed to tales of, say, a poltergeist, a spirit that is mischievous without direction, or a demon or other actively malevolent spirit, ghost stories often revolve around crime and punishment.
Offering a vision of pure justice, the unavenged ghost wipes away all the legal ambiguities of the case with a brush of a spectral hand, leaving only the pure truth.
Asylums became haunted by what happened inside their walls and also by the walls themselves: an architecture that was purposely boastful but which spoke of a previous generation with different ideals, economic motives, and attitudes toward the sick. The moment when we were most optimistic about our ability to cure the mind is when we built our most ostentatious palaces to psychiatry. There is a danger, then, in telegraphing too prominently one’s utopian ideals via architecture.
If the Kirkbride asylums are haunted, they are haunted, you could say, by the difference between how history is conceived and how it plays out.
The word “cemetery,” which comes from the Greek koimētērion and originally meant simply a dormitory or a place to sleep, had been adopted first by early Christians, who saw sleep as temporary and used the Latin coemeterium to refer to the tombs of martyrs, who were simply sleeping and would soon arise once more.
The work of burying Confederate soldiers fell to civilians and became a grassroots movement that gave a purpose of sorts to defeated Southern culture. Southern whites undertook ad hoc attempts to bury their dead, often raising money through the community to cover burial costs and tombstones. This work was largely the provenance of women—grieving mothers and widows who would honor fallen Confederates one last time. Mourning the Southern dead became a way to subtly repudiate the Union and reject the war’s outcome.
By spreading ghost stories, Southern whites hoped to limit the unauthorized movement of black people. If cemeteries, crossroads, and forests came to be known particularly as haunted, it’s because they presented the easiest means of escape and had to be patrolled.
What better way to spend a chilly evening than trying to scare yourself into feeling alive?
What was once a person’s unbearable loss is now someone else’s “strange noises and voices,” a reminder of how quickly a personal tragedy can be molded, in the hands of strangers, into folklore, taking on a life of its own.
For better or worse, the language of hauntings and ghosts is a convenient metaphor for a whole host of problems not connected to the supernatural, and the recourse to such vocabulary becomes a means to process or make sense of experiences that can otherwise seem overwhelming and mystifying.
Detroit has become our nation’s favorite morality tale: a series of ineffectual mayors, bad public policy, and servitude to unions have all allowed a popular conception that Detroit “deserves” its fate.
A popular story, yes, but among the most patently false and easily disproved ghost stories out there. Mason was eighty-eight at the time of his death, from natural causes (as any quick Google search will tell you), which took place more than twenty years after the Masonic Temple was finished. And yet the story has cachet in part because it reflects a narrative that many have about Detroit: one of ostentatious overreach, folly, and death from financial ruin. So even though it’s obviously false, it still gets told and retold.
A ghost story’s reduction of a complex moment or the history of a building into a series of clichés is reproduced in beautifully staged photos that fetishize the past without truly representing it. Ruin porn is the visual analog of the ghost story.
The archetypal haunted house story is fundamentally about class: new money who doesn’t understand the land or the people or the history blunders into the landscape, attempting to buy his way into a community, blithely oblivious to the locals. A legend goes unheeded, a terrible secret is unearthed, sacred land is disturbed, and so forth. The townspeople grow resentful because, by the force of economics, they are imprisoned by the rich and their folly.
...she was told by employees that the ghost rumors had been started by neighbors, who were concerned that the high-priced apartments would drive up their own rents. Meanwhile, prospective renters at 123 on the Park have themselves apparently tried to use the ghosts as a bargaining chip, asking for reduced rents since their apartments already have occupants. In landscapes such as New York City, where real estate and issues of gentrification are already fraught, it doesn’t much matter if the ghosts are real or not; what matters is the financial leverage they may provide.
We tell ourselves ghost stories perhaps because we truly believe in the paranormal—or perhaps because we just need a word, a term, a story for that vague feeling that would be too silly to admit in other terms.
Ghost towns feel haunted because, even if they will never again host living society, they remain filled with hints of those who once lived there. Our imaginations cannot help but project onto these ruins the ghosts of the people who’ve left indelible traces, and these spirits can spring to life with just a shift in the wind, a creaking board, or a distant animal call.
As places like Manhattan and San Francisco become uninhabitable to all but the richest 0.01 percent, driving out even their own service workers, internal migration will continue and new places will become abandoned. A 2014 article in the New York Times suggested that as global warming increases, Americans will empty out the Southwest in favor of places like Maine, Oregon, and Alaska. Spurred by a global warming dust bowl, we’ll move north, and in time Phoenix, Sacramento, and Los Angeles may come to be as ghost-haunted as Detroit seems now.
Ghost stories are about how we face, or fail to face, the past—how we process information, how we narrate our past, and how we make sense of the gaps in that history.
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In some ways we don't want to know too much about the true story, since whatever happens, we can't break the spell - because the ghost is too important.
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Dickey, piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie houses", embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living -- how do we deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes are made to those facts and why, Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone and crimes left unsolved.
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