Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

by Colin Dickey

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.

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.

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 that—as with Athendorus’s haunting—what was left undone in one’s life might yet be finished by one’s ghost.

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.

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 t...

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.

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.

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.

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.

A ghost story is what Freud called “the return of the repressed,” when something we’d rather forget returns in another form—such as the famous “Freudian slip” (what he himself called a parapraxis), revealing what we’ve hidden deep in our subconscious.

If American history is taught to schoolchildren as a series of great, striding benchmarks, the history of America’s ghost stories is one of crimes left unsolved or transgressions we now feel guilty about.

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

Much of this book involves not just listening to ghost stories but listening also to architecture: how a building can feel alive and unsettling due to its age or a quirk in its construction. Any building whose construction is a little bit off, as often as not, has spirits swirling about it. The language of ghosts, it seems, has become an important (if abstract) way of talking about architecture and place.

Examining our country’s local ghost stories—where they came from, how they’ve evolved, how they’re recounted—may tell us a great deal about things we thought were long settled and in the past.

He finally seizes on Friedrich Schelling’s definition of unheimlich: “Uncanny is what one calls everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden, and has come into the open.”

Jentsch’s notion, of a confusion between the living and the inanimate, might work better—think of the anthropomorphized façade of The Amityville Horror’s house. With a haunted house, the question is: to what extent is the house itself alive, and to what extent is it inanimate?

The haunted house is precisely that which should be homey, should be welcoming—the place one lives inside—but

which has somehow become emptied out of its true function. It is terrifying because it has lost its purpose yet stubbornly persists. 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.

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

As Vladimir Nabokov once put it, “When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object.” Just by lingering in a house, you could say you end up sinking into its history.

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. Haunted houses are the repository of the dreams dreamt inside them—both our dreams and those of previous occupants. This can make even the most simple of houses feel, at times, alive.

To own an old home means inhabiting not just your own imagination but the imaginations of all those who’ve lived there before you.

Houses of any antiquity in New England,” Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote, “are so invariably possessed with spirits, that the matter seems hardly worth alluding to.”

In this landscape of greed and calamity, ancestral curses and mournful ghosts, Hawthorne turned the oddly built house on Turner Street into a rival of the abandoned castles of Europe’s gothic novels.

Salem has long embodied a contradiction in the bedrock of American consciousness: upright piety mixed with hypocrisy, sober religion mixed with violent hysteria.

With The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne took a house that, by accident of haphazard and evolving construction, had acquired a gothic patina and imbued it with the history of Salem—transforming the house into a microcosm of not only the town’s rise and fall but also its hidden secrets and unrighted wrongs.

And yet, Emmerton insists, it exists, it influences the novel, it exerts its force on both readers and those who move through the house. “For it seems to me that we feel the absence of the secret staircase in the story just as we feel the absence of a bit of a picture-puzzle that has been lost and has left an unfilled place in the picture.”

We recall the events of Salem, but we can’t quite remember why they matter.

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.”

The witchcraft trials might have begun with a group of teenage girls, but Norton argues that the town’s leaders

quickly seized on this outbreak as a means of exonerating themselves for past shortcomings: they were the ones on tri...

There’s nowhere in this nation that wasn’t already inhabited before Europeans arrived, and there’s no town, no house, that doesn’t sit atop someone else’s former home. More often than not, we’ve

chosen to deal with this fact through the language of ghosts.

Look closely, though. The keyhole to the front door is upside down, a detail added by Ruffin and Mary Catherine Stirling, who bought the house in 1834 and nearly doubled its size. 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.

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.

If you listen closely, the ghost stories of the Myrtles Plantation say more about the tellers than they do about the supernatural. A slave abused by her master, who in response turns murderous; the Indian ghosts whose burial lands have

been disturbed—all of these stories, in one way or another, respond to history. 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.

This story of the endlessly deferred completion of construction as a means to stave off death reinforces the notion of a woman whose superstition and gullibility led her to create a house beyond the bounds of sense or competence.

At some point the perpetual building seems to have become a pretense to keep her family away.

The house is, in a way, a form of automatic writing, a stream of consciousness made spatial.

The disturbingly endless house appears repeatedly in horror novels, from Poe’s House of Usher to the eponymous structure in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, built elegantly around the unsettling fact that the house in question is slightly larger inside than it is outside.

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.

Ghosts, you could say, flock to women left alone.

With a mixture of wonder and a tinge of horror, the anonymous Daily News writer taps directly into the idea that the house may literally be endless: