Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

by Colin Dickey

“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.

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.

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.

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.