Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

by Colin Dickey

She was the 1 percent, and the city resented her for it. And so it punished her through gossip and myth.

Testimony from her many employees over the years mattered little, though; what mattered, then as now, was the story that taps into those larger social and cultural trends, perfectly embodied by such an architecturally unsettling house.

Brown had not yet begun building his house when, he later explained, his dead sister, Mary, presented him with a vision one morning.

His disdain was shared by, among others, Herman Melville, who parodied Spiritualism and its “table-rapping” sessions in a short story, “The Apple-Tree Table,” in which a family believes a table to be possessed by spirits, only to discover that it’s infested with bugs.

The basic tenet of Transcendentalism was that one need only open up an extrasensory perception to access the divine all around us. If Emerson could find God in the forest, why couldn’t a medium find departed loved ones in a darkened room?

This new DIY religion brought with it an additional attraction: since the spirit world was accessible to all, Spiritualists saw little need for the men who traditionally controlled organized religion. In short order Spiritualism became dominated by women: for one thing, they were generally acknowledged to be superior mediums, and many saw in Spiritualism an antidote to the patriarchal misogyny of traditional religion.

Behavior that would have then been diagnosed as nervous sensitivity and hysteria were exactly the kinds of traits that made for good mediums.

the Spiritualists, Stanton, Anthony, and Gage noted, “have always assumed that woman may be a medium of communication from heaven to earth, [and] that the spirits of the universe may breathe through her lips.”

Spiritualism had given many of these women practice and confidence in speaking to groups with authority;

Spiritualism was only one of many factors and social movements that drove women’s suffrage, but it was a vital and important one.

As Spiritualism became associated more and more with a rejection of patriarchal religion and traditional marriage, women’s rights, and other subversive agendas, the backlash became increasingly vehement.

Spiritualism-influenced political agitation led to lasting reform: the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1920.

The movement itself may be gone, but Spiritualism’s penchant for using the latest technological advances to communicate with the dead has found a resurgence with modern paranormal enthusiasts and ghost hunters.

You could say that Spiritualism, now practiced at Halloween and on reality TV shows, is back from the dead.

The house’s rounded corners—which punctuate its otherwise unremarkable Italianate style—are often held as evidence of the Stickneys’ Spiritualist beliefs, though there does not appear to have ever been any kind of codified building regulations, rounded corners or otherwise, for spirits.

There is a Chinese folk belief that evil spirits—kuei—can travel only in straight lines, a belief that supposedly accounts for the curved eaves on Chinese roofs,

And so a practical, if unusual, design becomes associated with a foreign folk legend about the devil, which then gets repurposed as part of the narrative of the new, burgeoning Spiritualist movement, and this in turn gets attached to an ordinary house in rural Illinois.

The more unusual the house, the more likely it’ll cause unease among its neighbors and the more we seem to require some kind of story to explain its construction.

But Spiritualism ultimately was not an institutional religion by and for “great men” like Whitman and James; it was a messy, homespun set of beliefs that were embraced and spread mainly by women, and so American history has downplayed it as aberrant and foolish rather than accept its place in our national psyche. As a political and social movement, Spiritualism has become a ghost itself, a legacy of feminist liberation and belief without dogma that still haunts the land.

Belief in a spiritual realm may now be depoliticized, divorced from the radical social agenda that once went hand in hand with Spiritualism, but it remains vitally alive nonetheless.

The thunder is following on the heels of the lightning; it is right above us. In the bar the stained-glass portraits of William Lemp, Jr., and his first wife, Lillian Lemp—the Lavender Lady—flicker to life from the lightning

outside with disturbing frequency, the accompanying thunder coming fast afterward. It is the perfect night for a ghost hunt: the air already electric, everyone already a bit on edge. In his portrait, William Lemp looks prematurely old; the glass artist has added shading to his face to give the appearance of three dimensions, but the result instead is that he appears haggard, black pits around his eyes, deep creases in his skin. As if he knows he’s going to die.

The first suicide in the Lemp Mansion happened in 1904.

Charles Lemp was the only one to leave a note, which read simply, “In case I am found dead, blame it on no one but me.” But most have instead chosen to blame a curse of some kind, a curse under which the Lemp family suffered, unable to shake the fate that awaited each in turn.

The rain is deluging the streets outside, and we gather in one of the dining rooms on the first floor, where there are light snacks and infrared camcorders.

You feel a bit dizzy, but you tell yourself it’s probably because you’re looking through the infrared camera’s viewfinder too much. Your feet feel a bit unsteady, but that’s probably because, after more than a hundred years, the staircase and the floors have begun to slope slightly as the foundation of the

house has become uneven. All your hairs are standing on end—probably, you tell yourself, from the storm outside. It’s time to go upstairs.

It’s not that a belief in ghosts began in 1848, of course, but the Spiritualist revolution reformulated how we believed in ghosts. No longer were they purely emanations of terror; now a direct communication with the dead could be established through technology. This has largely continued through all subsequent technological advancements: nearly every major communication technology has sooner or later been appropriated by ghost seekers.

I discover that holding the camera for a long five seconds on an object is usually enough to make it unnerving, and I begin to question the light that I saw playing out over the air conditioner. Perhaps it was just my expectation of something, but standing alone in a pitch-black room of an old mansion, with nothing for illumination but an infrared camera, thunder rolling through the distance—it becomes unnerving very quickly.

That sense of emptiness is key to a good haunting.

Ghosts move into places such as these: businesses that have fallen on hard times, places where the façade has started to fall away.

the kinds of ghosts you look for, and the kinds of ghosts you see, depend on your frame of reference.

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 there be nothing but white ghosts?

As supernatural beings, spirits often come to represent some universal truth of the past. They turn space into time and can be a way of making a place stand for some transcendental value or universal ideal.

An advocate for liberty and equality, and yet a slaveholder, Jefferson embodies the contradiction of early America, particularly of the South. And for all its architectural beauty, Monticello bears the ineradicable stain of its origins in slave labor.

If ghost stories depend on an ongoing oral tradition, passed from one anonymous source to another, embellished and refined through the telling, then they can only ever reflect the knowledge and the folklore of the people telling them.

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.

Why does Elizabeth Short—the Black Dahlia—haunt the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles? True, it was the last place she was seen alive, but why doesn’t she haunt the sad stretch of sidewalk in South Los Angeles where her body was found? Why doesn’t she haunt wherever she was actually murdered?

Assume, then, that every nightmare you’ve ever had in a hotel was a cry for help, some violence from the past reaching out to you.

This is how ghost stories are born, after all: not from a complete story so much as from bits and pieces that don’t quite add up, a kaleidoscope of menace and unease that coalesce in unpredictable ways.

Ghost stories are unresolved, ambiguous. There’s a vision, a noise, maybe a voice that speaks a name, offering the tiniest bit of a story. Usually not much else. You have to go digging through the archives; unearth a story of a long-forgotten murder, a jilted lover whose name has been lost to history, local lore that no one bothers with anymore. Even then it’s hardly a guarantee you’ll be able to put the pieces together. Many times a ghost story is simply an attempt to account for some scattered tidbits, some disconnected facts, that don’t add up. We tell spooky tales and scary stories because the alternative—the open-ended chaos of the unknown—is even more terrifying.

Southern California has less compunction about demolishing the old to make way for the new, but even here the ghosts remain. The problem with ghosts is that they can never figure out if they’re transients or residents—they don’t quite stick around, and yet they never really leave.

How a public building—or, as we’ll see, a cemetery or even a park—can come to be haunted has a lot to do with the evolution of our cultural ideas, which change faster than our landscape can keep up with, rendering these places obsolete, archaic, and anachronistic.