Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places - Softcover

Dickey, Colin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1101980206 ISBN 13: 9781101980200

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2017

Synopsis

New York Times Bestseller · One of NPR’s Great Reads of 2016

“A lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories...absorbing...[and] intellectually intriguing.” —The New York Times Book Review

From the author of The Unidentified, an intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history that takes readers on a road trip through some of the country’s most infamously haunted places—and deep into the dark side of our history.

Colin Dickey is on the trail of America’s ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and “zombie homes,” Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. Some have established reputations as “the most haunted mansion in America,” or “the most haunted prison”; others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget.

With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living—how do we, the living, deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed, for whatever reason, haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made—and why those changes are made—Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved.

Spellbinding, scary, and wickedly insightful, Ghostland discovers the past we’re most afraid to speak of aloud in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.

About this title

About the Author

Colin Dickey grew up in San Jose, California, a few miles from the Winchester Mystery House, the most haunted house in America. As a writer, speaker, and academic, he has made a career out of collecting unusual objects and hidden histories all over the country. He's a regular contributor to the LA Review of Books and Lapham's Quarterly, and is the co-editor (with Joanna Ebenstein) of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology. He is also a member of the Order of the Good Death, a collective of artists, writers, and death industry professionals interested in improving the Western world's relationship with mortality. With a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California, he is an associate professor of creative writing at National University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1933, a summer’s day in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There are children playing outside on East Fourth Street; it is August, and they are wild, they are shouting and running through the street, trying to gather up the last of the season before the fall sets in. There is nothing unusual about any of this. Then the door swings open at 29 East Fourth Street, and an old woman emerges on to the stoop overlooking the street, waving her arms wildly and shouting to the children to be quiet. The children, as well as the adults on the street, all recognize her: Gertrude Tredwell, who’s lived in the house for over ninety years, born there only a few years after her father purchased it in 1935. She is enraged; she tells them they are being far too noisy, they must calm down. The children quiet, turning towards the high staircase that leads to Gertrude’s front door, looking up with fear at the old woman who, satisfied, returns indoors and shuts the door. 

There’s nothing unusual about any of this—except that Gertrude Tredwell has been dead now for several weeks.

It is not the last time Gertrude Tredwell will be seen at the house on East Fourth Street. In the months after her death, the house falls into the hands of a distant cousin; since by then most of the old merchant houses of lower Manhattan were gone, he decides to preserve the house as a museum, first opening it in 1936. Open to the public, over the years there are dozens of sightings of odd and inexplicable things happening in the house. In the early 1980s tourists come across the house and ring the bell. A woman in period costume tells them politely that the museum is closed for the day, and could they please come back at another time. Later, when they call the house to get the hours, they are told that the museum was in fact open when they came by, and that, furthermore, none of the staff ever dresses in period costume. Gertrude has also been seen inside the house, sometimes humming, sometimes playing the piano—always appearing as a frail, petite woman in period costume.

Nor is she alone. A visitor to the house in the summer of 1995 claimed that while upstairs she had a lengthy conversation with an older gentleman in a tattered suit and a heavy wool jacket smelling of mothballs, who talked to her of what the house was like to live in. After listening to him for a few minutes, she turned her back on him for a moment, and when she looked back, he was gone. Later she identified the man she’d seen from photographs: Samuel Lenox Tredwell, Gertrude’s brother, who’d died in 1917.


Ghost stories like these mean more than we are usually prepared to admit. If you want to understand a place, ignore the boastful monuments and landmarks, and go straight to the haunted houses. Look for the darkened graveyards, the derelict hotels, the emptied and decaying old hospitals. Wait past midnight, and see what appears. Tune out the patriotic speeches and sanctioned narratives, and listen instead for the bumps in the night. You won’t need an electronic device to capture the voices of the dead; a patient ear and an open mind will do. Once you start looking, you’ll find them everywhere.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion once wrote, and that is just as true of ghost stories: we tell stories of the dead as a way of making sense of the living. More than just simple urban legends and campfire tales, ghost stories reveal the contours of our anxieties, the nature of our collective fears and desires, the things we can’t talk about in any other way. The past we’re most afraid to speak of aloud in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.

Ghost stories are as old as human civilization, appearing in the earliest written epics and throughout the ancient world. In one of his letters the Roman writer Pliny the Younger describes a house haunted by a ghost "in the form of an old man, of extremely emaciated and squalid appearance, with a long beard and disheveled hair, rattling the chains on his feet and hands." The house remained vacant until the philosopher Athenodorus rented it; his first night he waited up for the ghost, writing in his study, until the apparition appeared.

Athenodorus, according to Pliny, was not in a hurry, and when confronted by the ghost “made a sign with his hand that he should wait a little, and threw his eyes again upon his papers.” Eventually the philosopher allowed the ghost to lead him outside of the house into the yard, where he vanished. The next morning, Athenodorus dug up the spot where the ghost had disappeared, and found the remains of a skeleton in chains that had been long neglected. He gave the corpse a proper burial, and the haunting ceased.

Ghosts bridge the past to the present; they speak across the seemingly insurmountable barriers of death and time, connecting us to what we thought was lost. They give us hope for a life beyond death, and because of this help us to cope with loss and grief. Their presence is the promise that we don’t have to say goodbye to our loved ones right away, and—is with Athendorous’s haunting—what was left undone in one’s life might yet be finished by one’s ghost.

Perhaps this is why, even without centuries-old castles or ruined abbeys, the United States is as ghost-haunted as anywhere else in the world—perhaps even more so. You’ll find ghosts in the stately plantations of the South, in the wilds of the plains states, in the ornate hotels of California, in the wooden colonials in the Northeast. They roam the streets of rustbelt cities like Detroit and Buffalo, and they haunt the gothic cities of the South. You’ll find them in abandoned mining towns, and in the bustling metropolis of New York City. 

Forty-five percent of Americans say they believe in ghosts, and almost a third say they’ve witnessed them firsthand. Though this belief lies outside the ways we normally explain the world—contradicting science and complicating religion—it’s a difficult belief to shake. That we continue believing in ghosts despite our rational mind’s skepticism suggests that in these stories lies something crucial to the way we understand the world around us. We cannot look away, because we know something important is there.

*

The Merchant’s House Museum in lower Manhattan has stood by itself against the din and rush of the city; it has stood for one hundred and eighty years and might stand for that many more. Within, walls continue upright, bricks meet neatly, wood floors give gently under foot, and spirits gather. 

The house was bought by Seabury Tredwell in 1835 when he retired. Owner of a large hardware firm, he had eight children altogether, the last of whom, Gertrude, was born there in 1840 when Tredwell was sixty. Gertrude never married; she had one suitor, but her father disapproved of his Catholicism. And so she lived out her life in the house on 4th Street, her siblings dying one by one until only she remained. Over time, she focused her energies on keeping the house exactly as Seabury intended it, maintaining its nineteenth century charm until she died, at the age of ninety-three, in 1933. A distant cousin acquired the house, and since by then most of the old merchant houses of lower Manhattan were gone, he decided to preserve Tredwell’s home, first opening it to the public as a museum in 1936. The ghosts, they say, came quickly thereafter.

The Merchant’s House is a prime example of a grand old American haunted house. Its exterior is stately, refined, with a touch of frayed elegance. Its front door welcomes, even as it seems to be hiding something. Inside, the floors creak without warning, without any sense of someone there. The old wood is thick with the humidity, as if the walls and floors still breathe. It stands as the oldest brownstone in New York with its furniture still intact. All around it are gleaming glass and steel towers of the modern age, bustling with life still living.

It is easy to feel as though you’re stepping back in time as you walk in the steps of those long gone. And it’s easy, in such a well-worn house, to feel that something is not quite right: an invisible presence, a trace of something that doesn’t belong. Through the years guests have reported feeling cold spots, or seeing strange, wispy streaks of light, some of which have been captured on film. Paranormal researchers have conducted EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) sessions in the house, turning on a tape recorder and asking questions to an empty room, playing back the tape later in hopes the ghosts will have answered back. Several EVPs from the house have recorded bits of faint, muddled noise that some claim are voices speaking from the beyond.

But these events alone are easy for a skeptic to brush aside, and discount. 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. Just as an oyster turns a speck of dirt into a pearl, the ghost story doesn’t make the feeling disappear, but can transform it into something more stable, less unsettling. 

Long before the word “haunting” became associated with ghosts, it meant simply to frequent, in the way teenage kids haunt a park or drunks haunt a bar. A house like the Merchant’s House Museum is haunted, then, by use and by habitude, by grooves worn into the floors and walls—as though you could map out the daily patterns of the people who’d lived here by analyzing these signs of wear.

The ghosts at the Merchant House emerge not only out of the uncanny feeling we get from creaking wood and antiquated architecture, but also from the stories about its one-time inhabitants that are told and retold over the years and embellished where necessary to heighten the drama. Tales of Gertrude emphasize that she never married, that after her father disapproved of her only suitor, and that she promised him she’d stay single and live in his home. The spinster who honored her father’s wishes even after his death, Gertrude seems tragic, bordering on the pathological. Even before her death, she haunted this house—an emotionally stunted recluse, unable to let go of her attachment to her father.

Samuel Tredwell, by contrast, is described as a “black sheep,” someone who never amounted to much and was disinherited by the family. This is a tad unfair; Samuel followed in his father’s footsteps as a merchant, specializing in china and crockery, though he was not the success his father had been. He was indeed written out of Seabury’s final will, mainly due to debts he’d incurred in the wake of the Civil War (Seabury instead left a trust in Samuel’s daughter’s name). But the legends of the Merchant House exaggerate the tensions and family drama, relying on melodramatic caricatures. The sight of Samuel’s ghost is far more exciting and menacing, after all, if he’s come back from the grave to claim his rightful inheritance. 

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.

Instead of, or perhaps in addition to, the supernatural, old buildings are haunted by their memories: memories of those who once inhabited them, and the memories we bring to them. We’re conditioned, after all, to conflate memory and physical space. At the same time that Pliny was writing his tale of Athenodorus’s haunted house, Cicero and Quintillian were developing a technique for remembering great quantities of information known as a “memory palace.” 
Rather than direct memorization, one imagines a house and “places” different parts of a speech in different rooms—the first point in one’s speech is placed in the entryway to the home, the second point in the first room, and so on. To remember the speech, the orator simply has to “walk” through the house in her or his mind, picking up each aspect of the speech as she or he moves through the building. The technique suggests the degree to which memory is spatial, or at least primed to work spatially: our brains are hardwired to think in terms of place, and to associate psychic value or meaning to the places we inhabit.

Just as imaginary houses may be used to remember things, real physical houses may have their own memories—or at least memories we project on them. A haunted house is a memory palace made real: a physical space that retains memories that might otherwise be forgotten, , or which might remain only in fragments. Under the invisible weight of these memories, the habits of those who once haunted these places, we feel the shudder of the ghost.

*

Ghosts, Thomas W. Laqueur writes, are "a representation of the unrepresentable: the dead who were somewhere." In a world where nearly every moment of our lives is photographed, recorded, and documented, the gaps in the past still beckon us. Searching for ghosts can be an attempt to reconstruct what is lost. By sifting through time for stories that have been misplaced or forgotten, we listen to the voices that call out to be remembered. Our ghost stories center on unfinished endings, broken relationships, things left unexplained. They offer an alternative kind of history, foregrounding those precisely what might otherwise be ignored.

Ghost stories are a way of talking about things we’re not otherwise allowed to discuss: a forbidden history we thought bricked up safely in the walls. They cover up over the gaps and in the process help us assuage our anxieties, providing a rationale after the fact. Just as Gertrude Tredwell’s life has informed the ghost stories that now circulate around her, so too does the legend of her ghost make meaning out of her life. Those aspects of a life that are discontinuous, fragmented, or unexpected, are made whole through the ghost story.

In her study of the ghost stories of the Hudson Valley in New York, Judith Richardson describes how one ghost in particular has changed shape through the decades to suit different needs of different eras. For over two centuries, residents in the village of Leeds, New York, have reported seeing a spectral apparition of a ghostly horse riding down the main road, dragging behind it a young woman. The story, in its most basic form, has to do with a cruel master who wickedly killed a young servant girl as punishment for some minor transgression. When she was invoked by writer Miriam Coles Harris in her 1862 novel The Sutherlands, the ghostly victim is a slave of African and Native American descent; Coles Harris used her as a parable in the vein ofUncle Tom’s Cabin, castigating not only ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1101980206
• ISBN 13: 9781101980200
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336