Colin Dickey

Dickey, piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie houses," embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living -- how do we deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes are made to those facts and why, Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone and crimes left unsolved.

An American History in Haunted Places

Ghostland

We know Salem--we know it to be a tragedy, we hold it up as a cautionary tale about mass hysteria and persecution--and yet we're also confused: we conflate the dead with actual witches, we attribute actual supernatural powers to those killed, we revisit their deaths for comedy and entertainment. Above all, we fail to apply the lessons we've supposedly learned from 1692, for by no means was this the last time in American history when a powerless minority was scapegoated, persecuted, and killed by an ignorant mass. We recall the events of Salem, but we can't quite remember why they matter.

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.

For better or worse, the language of hauntings and ghosts is a convenient metaphor for a whole host of problems not connected to the supernatural, and the recourse to such vocabulary becomes a means to process or make sense of experiences that can otherwise seem overwhelming and mystifying.

A city obsessed by its ghosts seems to be weighed down by a conflicted view of the past. Something close to melancholy: a weight it can't quite let go of, a lingering sadness. And though we don't often think of the United States in these terms, this melancholy is as much a part of our history as our triumphs.

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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.

Ghostland quotes

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