Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

by Colin Dickey

This is curious, because if you walk just a little way away from the haunted bars and shops, down by the freeway you’ll find the Devil’s Half Acre. For decades black men, women, and children were brought here, imprisoned, and tortured while they waited to be sold to planters and speculators. Dozens of slave traders had offices here, where slave auctions were widely advertised and men came from all over the South to make their fortunes on the backs of those enslaved. Tens of thousands of men’s and women’s lives changed hands here in the years leading up to the Civil War; all the activity centered on Wall Street, in the heart of Shockoe Bottom. Today Wall Street is gone, replaced by the freeway, though the rest of the area remains mostly unchanged. While it’s difficult to estimate how many people lost their lives in the slave pens of Shockoe Bottom, hundreds of sets of human remains have been found in the nearby slave burial ground. We typically think of ghost stories in terms of the remnants of a terrible tragedy, a past we cannot escape, or a justice unavenged. Why, then, in a place that should be so haunted by the legacy of such a terrible injustice, the scene of countless deaths, should