Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country

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Sophisticated readers with gothic sensibilities who enjoy literary histories, social commentary, and authoritative travelogs will find this a worthy title. They roam the streets of rustbelt cities like Detroit and Buffalo, and they haunt the gothic cities of the South. 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.

Perhaps this is why, even without centuries-old castles or ruined abbeys, the United States is as ghost-haunted as anywhere else in the world—perhaps even more so. I found so many personal parallels in the book, so many shared or similar experiences, that it allowed me to re-assess my own experiences afresh. In my own case, I find myself aching to hear again the voice of my gentle, eldest sister Sandy, who died two years ago from a rare and virulent cancer; I still wish I could joke over a glass of wine with my friend and neighbor Joe, who succumbed in 2019 to a massive heart attack.Colin Dickey is a mad genius, and reading one of his books is as close to a look at his brilliant brain as we will get without use of a bone saw. 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. The ghosts who haunt our woods, our cemeteries, our houses and our cities appear at moments of anxiety, and point to instability in our national and local identities. Any building whose construction is a little bit off, as often as not, has spirits swirling about it. Though it doesn't detract from the overall enjoyment of the book, it sometimes feels as though the author drifts off on a tangent.

A distant cousin acquired the house, and since by then most of the old merchant houses of lower Manhattan were gone, he decided to preserve Tredwell’s home, first opening it to the public as a museum in 1936. We like our view this country as a unified, cohesive whole based on progress, a perpetual refinement of values, and an arc of history bending towards justice—but the prevalence of ghosts suggests otherwise. Tales of Gertrude emphasize that she never married, that after her father disapproved of her only suitor, and that she promised him she’d stay single and live in his home. Later she identified the man she’d seen from photographs: Samuel Lenox Tredwell, Gertrude’s brother, who’d died in 1917.The next morning, Athenodorus dug up the spot where the ghost had disappeared, and found the remains of a skeleton in chains that had been long neglected. Athenodorus, according to Pliny, was not in a hurry, and when confronted by the ghost “made a sign with his hand that he should wait a little, and threw his eyes again upon his papers.