Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

by Colin Dickey

As Samuel Johnson mentioned to James Boswell more than two hundred years ago, “It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death.”

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.

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.

“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.

The past we’re most afraid to speak aloud of in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.

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 rust-belt 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.

According to one poll, 45 percent of Americans say they believe in ghosts, and almost 30 percent say they’ve witnessed them firsthand.

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.

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. 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.

A haunted house is a memory palace made real: a physical space that retains memories that might otherwise be forgotten or that 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.

Our ghost stories center on unfinished endings, broken relationships, things left unexplained. They offer an alternative kind of history, foregrounding what might otherwise be ignored.

Paying attention to the way ghost stories change through the years—and why those changes are made—can tell us a great deal about how we face our fears and our anxieties. Even when these stories have a basis in fact and history, there’s often significant embellishment and fabrication before they catch on in our imagination, and teasing out these alterations is key to understanding how ghosts shape our relationship to the past.

Uncomfortable truths, buried secrets, disputed accounts: ghost stories arise out of the shadowlands, a response to the ambiguous and the poorly understood.

In the end, the only word that seems useful for talking about the houses is one made famous by Sigmund Freud: unheimlich. A German word, it means literally “unhomely” or “not of the home,” “unfamiliar,” “eerie and ghostly”—more idiomatically translated into English simply as “uncanny.”

Neither alive nor dead but undead, the haunted house is the thing in between.

There are haunted structures of all kinds: churches, hotels, toy stores. There are haunted bridges and haunted alleyways, haunted parks and haunted parking lots. But in the United States, the most common—the most primal—haunted place is a house. 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 more elaborate a house, the more spaces it has, the more evocative it is for our dream life: “If it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated.” It is in the corners and crevices—the places just off the main traffic corridors—that our dreams, like dust bunnies and forgotten toys, accumulate and our imagination begins to run wild.

Live in a house for any length of time, and you make it your own memory palace.

Houses seem to live, in other words, because we spend so much time living in them. Buried inside the word “inhabit” is habit: a way of being, the patterns and repetitions of life. One’s habits and one’s surroundings are engaged in a constantly changing, ever subtle dance.

This is another way to make sense of that haunting sensation: to walk into a home and recognize, even if you can’t name the feeling, that someone else not only lived here but adopted patterns of life completely alien to your own, whose daily ritual and marks of wear will never match your own.

This is the recurring structure of a classic ghost story, after all: the ghost remains because it cannot believe the perverse normality of a world that has gone on living, that has forgotten whatever personal tragedy happened here.

The town seems caught between past and present, like a doubly exposed negative.

But what does any of this have to do with 1692? The people executed by the Court of Oyer and Terminer, no matter what else they were, almost certainly were not witches, neither pagan witches nor supernatural servants of Satan. They were devout Christians, wrongly accused; if anything, the condemned would have the same antipathy toward the modern Wiccans as their accusers.

The town is overrun on Halloween with tourists, despite the fact that neither Wiccans nor Puritans celebrate the holiday. Salem, with its broom-riding-witch logo on its police cars, has turned tragedy into spectacle. The same unresolved questions that drive scholars to understand the town’s past also fuel its kitsch popularity.

Above all, we fail to apply the lessons we’ve supposedly learned from 1692, for by no means was this the last time in American history when a powerless minority was scapegoated, persecuted, and killed by an ignorant mass.

And so the ghosts remain—they walk the streets, haunt the buildings that have been erected over their hanging grounds. They keep alive the events of 1692 without forcing a reckoning. What remains is barely more than a whisper in the dark or a strange presence on the staircase.

In her book In the Devil’s Snare, historian Mary Beth Norton argues that one pressing fact lay behind the witchcraft trials and drove the hysteria: the judges and magistrates overseeing the trials were all military and civil leaders who had failed repeatedly to keep Essex County safe from Native American attacks during King Philip’s War and “unable to defeat Satan in the forests and garrisons of the northeastern frontier, they could nonetheless attempt to do so in the Salem courtroom.”

Norton’s theory reminds us that the Puritans who settled New England were not simply religious zealots but were also actively, constantly engaged in territorial warfare—with the French, with the Wabanaki and other indigenous groups, and with one another. The ghosts haunting Salem must include the casualties of those land wars alongside those falsely accused of witchcraft. As Hawthorne puts it, this curse goes to the very bedrock of the town’s foundations: “The pavements of the Main-street,” he writes in one sketch, “must be laid over the red man’s grave.”

Based on a folk belief that ghosts who lived in the trees would try to enter the house at night via keyholes, an upside-down lock was a means to confuse the ghosts and keep them out.

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.

Her fatigue is a constant refrain. “If I did not get so easily tired out I should hurry up things more than I do,” she wrote, “but I think it is better to ‘go slow’ than to use myself up. Just having the furnace man here and going over all the details with him used me up completely for a day or so.”

In their collection of ghost stories, Haunted Richmond: The Shadows of Shockoe, Scott and Sandi Bergman write of Shockoe Bottom’s rich and complicated history, particularly as “the epicenter of some of the most profound and tragic events in United States, Virginia, and Richmond history.” But in their subsequent list of these tragic events, slavery is absent:

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.

When Lupita Nyong’o won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Patsey in Twelve Years a Slave, she opened her acceptance speech by invoking ghosts. “It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s,” she told the Los Angeles audience. “And so I want to salute the spirit of Patsey for her guidance.” Then, as she thanked the film’s director, Steve McQueen, she told him, “I’m certain that the dead are standing about you and watching and they are grateful and so am I.” The dead are watching, whether or not we choose to listen to their stories.

The two were always together and claimed to be sisters, though this was a cover for their romantic relationship.

Herein lies the darker side to classic Hollywood: its promise lured so many starlets and other hopefuls to LA throughout the past century, but some instead found fame only in death.

Ghost stories like this will never have a perfect Hollywood resolution. Another LA ghost hunter, Michele Yu, once referred to this as “paranormal archaeology,” which is as good an analogy as any: you get fragments that suggest histories, that hint at a purpose, but have nothing definitive to offer, which ultimately stare dumbly back at you.

Partly this is out of necessity: places like the West Virginia State Penitentiary in Moundsville don’t receive enough public funding to cover operating expenses and need the revenue from dark tourism to avoid the wrecking ball.