Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

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This is a surprising book, and a surprisingly good book.

I purchased this book expecting a survey of haunted locations around America. I got that, but the author is a skeptic who essentially debunks every ghost story with the actual history. For example, I've always heard the story about the Winchester Mystery House, about how Mrs. Winchester kept her carpenters building “stairs to nowhere” because of a prophecy that the ghosts of those who had been murdered by a Winchester rifle would be kept away from the Winchester heir by the sound of carpentry.

Author Colin Dickey quickly and surprisingly debunks this story by pointing out that Mrs. Winchester was something of an architect and that mst of the architectural features of the “Mystery House” can be explained. He points out that the room where alleged seances happened couldn't have had seances and that the myth of the house developed over a time after Mrs. Winchester's death.

More importantly, Dickey uses the facts as a springboard into the role of “spiritualism” in female emancipation and the causes that led to it, as well as the likely reason that Mrs. Winchester was interested in architecture. Accordingly, we get an interesting slice of a world lost so very recently via the myth of the house.

Dickey applies a similar approach to stories featuring Indian graveyards causing haunted houses, the transient nature of Los Angeles, the popular misconception of decaying Detroit and other issues. Dickey comes across as a thoroughgoing rationalist, but whatever romance is lost as the ghost-lore disappears is more than made up for by the exposure of actual history.

I recently went on a San Francisco walking-ghost tour. The tour guide took us to various streets and houses around San Francisco. The ghost stories were fun, of course, albeit any sensible person took them with a grain of salt. What was the revelation to me of the tour was the history I learned. The guide casually pointed out houses from the mid-19th century that I would have gone by without a glance, he pointed out a corner where he told the fascinating story of a woman who helped run the Underground Railroad before coming to San Francisco, and he pointed out a house where an early female writer lived. She is all-but-forgotten but her writings deserve recognition, and the guide's purpose was to call her to the memory of moderns.

The guide's purpose sounded a lot like what I got from Colin Dickey's book. Ghost-tours, like literary tours, are one way of connecting modernity to history. This was an excellent book for that purpose and I recommend it.