Haunted: Books Exploring Memory, Place, and Ghosts
“To remember is to confront ghosts, to ask what they want, to make amends, and to learn to live with them.” Supernatural America, (2021)
Last fall, while walking the dog, I glanced into the neighborhood bookstore window and paused to check out the displays, noticing the vivid cover of Edward Parnell’s 2019 book Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Intrigued, I looked it up to request it from the library and found the identically titled Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places published in 2016 by Colin Dickey as well. Seeing these two recently published books that share a title, apparently reflecting on the haunted natures of the UK and the US respectively, inspired me to delve into other works that analyze the social aspects of the paranormal.
Ghost stories, both tales of spine-chilling fiction and real-life accounts of paranormal encounters fascinated me since childhood, stemming, perhaps, from listening to my elementary school librarian tell of a haunted house right in my own suburban neighborhood. Her tale of a family moving into a house down the boulevard from mine a few years earlier, and of their young child finding an imaginary friend named George, only for the parents to do some research after hearing strange footsteps in the night and learning that George was the name of an old man who hung himself in the attic of the house, stuck with me. In spite of being a total scaredy cat, I loved learning about spooky bits of folklore or haunted houses, no matter how gruesome the circumstances. Whether reading about Pluckley, “the most haunted village in Britain” in my Usborne World of the Unknown: Ghosts, watching sensationalistic “true” mysteries of the unknown programs on TV and having to sleep with the light on, or singing “don’t you ever laugh as the hearse goes by,” from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, I enjoyed the creepy feelings generated by these macabre, morbid media. Though I had not yet really been confronted by the reality of death or the grief of losing a loved one, these ideas of the past hanging on continued to captivate me.
Over the years, I took ghost walks, confronted my fears with performances like The Haunted Basement, or even attended a community ed class on ghost hunting, in which a bunch of Midwestern dorks showed off their collection of orb photos. I thought it would be awesome to go on a road trip to all the famous haunted or weird places in the US like the Bell Witch Cave, Roswell, and the Winchester Mystery House, and write a memoir about it (though I think several podcasts have beaten me to that one).
Everywhere I looked, my studies seemed rife with ghost stories, down to the works of political philosophy I started to read following the right wing resurgence of the 2010s, in reference to the Marxist theories of “hauntology,” referring to those intangible but inescapable presences in our lives, the way that the past continues to affect the present and the future, both on a personal and cultural level. I liked thinking about the supernatural in this way, juxtaposing the fantastic ideas of ghosts and hauntings with the actual fears of our lives.
Reading both of the Ghostlands and the five other works I chose over the last year and, in particular, attending the poignant special exhibition Supernatural America at the Minneapolis Institute of Art last spring, captured all of the elements that intrigued me and made me think more of what drew me to them, despite of my lack of belief. In addition, they challenged the way I conceived of my relationship with the paranormal, and the real people who once lived where I live now. After that first story about George, for instance, I found many of the elements and tropes in this story occur many times in ghost lore and paranormal research.
At the same time, there is more than merely these metaphorical uses of the paranormal, these “spectres haunting blank,” but the lived experiences of people who have encountered paranormal or unexplainable things, as both Claire Cronin in her work Blue Light of the Screen and Robert Cozzolino, in his introduction to American Supernatural, point out. Of course, it must also be mentioned that these works focus on the attitudes of ghosts and hauntings of the English-speaking world rather than the diverse traditions of other world cultures.
As an interdisciplinary zone where science and art, history and belief intersect, I think the mysterious aspects of discovering a hidden secret through research, and the grounding of an otherworldly, eerie, even scary phenomena into the physical settings of our world appeal to the curiosity of many, myself included. This fuzzy intersection of fields was reflected in the seven texts I read for this entry. Reading them, I found that they all responded to the ambiguity of writing about the supernatural by looking at the topic from several conflicting approaches. Each of the Ghostland books, for instance, provided good examples of these contrasting viewpoints, with Dickey taking a broad societal, factual look at ghost stories in the US and Parnell looking at a haunted UK through a more personal, artistic lens.
Whether taking the societal view like the experts included in Supernatural America or a more personal perspective like Cronin’s Blue Light of the Screen, or studying “real world” effects through historical, anthropological, or environmental tools like the nature writing in Ghostways, or through artistic representations of them in such mediums as the visual arts, the horror genre, poetry, or film such as Leila Taylor’s Darkly, the approach each author took expressed different facets of viewing the supernatural in our culture. For most, however, these facets often blur together, and all, in various ways, confront the way our cultures grapple with how memory, place, and time intertwine to make us view the boundaries between the past and present, death and life, fluid.
These latter two approaches, the historical and the artistic, set the tone of many of the books included, though both reflect and draw from each other as well. Literature often uses ghosts as a placeholder for some of the anxieties or elements of life, while societal legacies such as colonialism and racial injustice feed these tensions, and the way that the past continues to affect the present and the future, both on a personal and cultural level. These themes reflect, too, much of my own interests in ghost stories and the paranormal.
“It’s not the house that is haunted. It’s me.” Edward Parnell, Ghostland (2019)
By framing their discussions through several of the approaches I identified earlier, Dickey and Parnell’s Ghostland books were both good places to start, I feel, and each reflect how both the US and the UK are places that are haunted in different but congruent ways. Dickey, for instance, focuses on the ghosts left by history, stemming from the ever present background of genocide and slavery that undergirds everything in the United States to haunt our present day lives, and in particular the draw of “dark tourism” in which we are drawn to the physical places of past tragedy in order to both revel in and reflect on this past. His work, examining the numerous tropes of haunted locations across the US and debunking some of the common legends, is a fun bit of pop history with some fascinating ideas, but it only scratches the surface. While exploring the conflict between these deeply ingrained stories of life in the US with its own mythology of the “American Dream,” Dickey leaves a lot unsaid about the racism, sexism, and injustice that persist in these tales.
Parnell, in contrast, writes a more introspective, meandering personal exploration of his life experience in the UK and particularly how artists use hauntings to wrestle with memory and place. Drawing in many threads and elements and tying them loosely if intriguingly together, using the classic literary English ghost stories from writers like M.R. James and William Hope Hodgson and traditions of folk horror in British cinema reflect both their own personal histories and that of their society, Parnell writes an atmospheric tome. He rambles across Britain, discussing the various lonely, haunted locations of England, Wales, and Scotland, delving how this landscape influenced classic stories of ghostly phenomena and intertwining everything with stories of his own family, grief, and experiences. At times, Parnell’s tangents can be fascinating, but also can lose focus, making some chapters feel a little overlong. Still, the connections he made between these disparate threads of English life were captivating.
“The Danes have hygge and the Japanese have wabi-sabi: words that express a unique characteristic of the country which cannot easily be translated. Similarly, in America, we have our own particularly American characteristic- a sense of unease, a lingering creepy aura from the darkness of the country’s foundations, but as yet it remains unnamed.” Leila Taylor, Darkly (2019)
Both Dickey and Parnell’s approaches were used earlier in different ways by Hannah Nordaus’ 2015 work American Ghost: A Family’s Extraordinary History on the Desert Frontier, which details Nordahus’ research into her mysterious great-great-grandmother, Julia Staab, who happens to be Santa Fe, New Mexico’s most famous ghost, haunting La Posada, her husband’s European style mansion. Interested in better understanding her family background, Nordhaus finds herself exploring ideas of the paranormal along with the historical realities of life of a German Jewish woman in the Western frontier of the mid 1800s. As she confronts these conflicting threads of an immigrant arriving in a territory recently colonized by the US from its previous Mexican colonizers, her research discovers threads that take her in unexpected directions, and even, in addition to the archives and libraries of the world, seeks the advice of psychics, in a quest to see if other methods of inquiry also prove insightful. The figure of Julia Staab herself, transplanted from verdant German valleys to the harsh, unforgiving desert southwest, legendary for the tragedy and sadness surrounding her, is emblematic of many of the memories we still have of immigration and the frontier. Nordhaus’ research brought her ancestor to life, but at the same time her relatively uncritical repetition of other mythical aspects of the west, the setting of genocide and slavery, illustrates the dangers of looking at the past and its ghosts with nostalgia.
In Darkly: Blackness and America’s Gothic Soul, academic Leila Taylor explores this dichotomy specifically in her fun and thought-provoking exploration of all things Gothic through the lens of Black American culture and the truly horrific history in this country. Taylor writes affectionately of her love for Goth culture throughout her life, with its fashions, its fixation on the color black, its music, and morbid affectations but with a critical eye, detailing the hidden realities of many US ideals and stories for African-Americans, and how these dark truths themselves fit into the gothic milieu. Ghosts and hauntings are prominent parts of this, from Southern gothic literature to the post-industrial gothic of Taylor’s native Detroit, which was my favorite section of the book. The American past, “built over the bones of brown people who were here first, and built by black people who were brought here against their will” and the American fear of being held to account for these crimes makes it a particularly haunted place, and Taylor looks at for whom do the ghosts speak? Her conclusions on how the gothic, with its interest in darkness and mystery, make it ideal for challenging the illusions that prop up white supremacy and American exceptionalism, for instance, were deeply important.
“I think fear, like many feelings, dwells less in real objects and more inside a series of dark tunnels; rivers underground. Thus horror’s paradoxical appeal to the anxious and melancholic; the genre makes visible- through light, shadow, noise- our barely conscious (ghost like) fears and traps them in the mansion of the screen.” Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen (2020)
American Supernatural: The Paranormal in American Art, a lavish catalog of a traveling exhibition of the same name organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art to examine art “asserting that the supernatural is natural,” echoes Taylor’s points in elaborate fashion. I was very struck by these ideas after visiting the exhibit at MiA earlier in the year, “the first exhibition in the field of American art history to directly address this subject,” viewing its eerie, enchanting pieces, including paintings, photographs, multimedia works, and spiritual artifacts. This coffee table book is a great companion to revisit the museum’s space but also provides much deeper analyses of its themes, particularly through curator Robert Cozzolino’s introductory essay discussing how artists, particularly those from marginalized communities experience otherworldly experiences as more than just metaphors for the injustices of our white supremacist society. The essays collected here explore the subject from many fascinating and thought provoking angles, providing in depth knowledge on how the visual arts affect the haunted status of place in many ways, both mournful and joyful.
Likewise, musician and artist Claire Cronin’s memoir Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God, wrestles with her love of horror (especially film), ghosts, and her family’s Catholic faith, building surprising connections that left me with a lot to consider about these subjects. An eerie, affecting work, full of intriguing ideas and lush language, Cronin writes “Ghost stories are hovering uncertainties,” and as a historian and librarian, concerned with sharing the mysteries of the past, this sticks with me. Whether through nostalgia or through regret, trauma, or privilege, memories and the past stay with us and affect the present, personally and societally. Similar to the editors of Supernatural America, she points out the contemporary surge in using ghosts as a metaphor for “psychic processes, cultural and political histories, and the nature of media that the word is nearly emptied of its meaning” while its ubiquity “is causing the ghost to slip back to its former life as fact.” As she discusses these fascinating topics, her writing is punctuated by summaries of horror films, her spare, affecting illustrations drawn from movie stills, and poetic, italicized snippets of story fragments or dream memories, whispering ideas through the heart of the book, as though Cronin’s own prose is haunted.
Finally, crossing the pond once again, English nature writers Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood, and Dan Richards collaborate in the evocative Ghostways: Two Journeys in Unquiet Places, another work using striking artwork and poetic language to explore the connections between place, the human and natural worlds, history personal and societal, human time and deep time. Focusing on two specific locales in England, Orford Ness and a “holloway” in Dorset, Ghostways is a lovely merging of art and nonfiction, poetry and nature writing, history and memoir to consider how we experience these specific places in unique ways, connecting the reader to more ways that the past, both human, animal, and environmental, remains part of our daily world.
Together, all of these works provide ways to understand the continued presence of the otherworldly in our world, whether or not one actually believes that ghosts can affect the living. These authors’ use of art and history to understand hauntings in their works, whether through their own experiences or the experience of living in a world that could be better, seems familiar to my own journey, I think. Even as I became more skeptical of the paranormal as I grew older, I continued to seek out the idea of a place where something inexplicable could intrude on my supposedly well-ordered, mundane world.
Looking at mysterious phenomena through these mediums, both critiquing and celebrating the role ghost stories have in contemporary culture, and how writers, artists, historians, business people, and even activists make use of the idea of ghosts are used by made me consider how memory, place, and the transience of life haunt us personally and societally. In our fraught, post-Covid world facing the resurgence of dark elements, like fascism, once thought long dead, haunting seems to be part of the zeitgeist itself.