In fact, it may be easier to argue Ghostland is too conservative: some ghost stories might be convincing enough to make the most hardened skeptics think twice. Dickey is astutely self-aware, carefully avoiding embellishing his own ideas. One would have difficulty denouncing the book for pandering to pseudoscience. Taylor didn’t die under the bridge, she died eight blocks away.ĭickey has a knack for breathing life into an urban legend and then letting the air out, making Ghostland satiating for skeptics.

Whether one believes in residual haunting proves mute. Johns Bridge limestone) are primed to record imprints of certain actions that they then play back later. The legend acts as a springboard for Dickey to introduce a phenomenon called residual haunting: the belief that certain inanimate objects (in this case the St. Johns Bridge is allegedly haunted by the ghost of abducted and murdered teenager Thelma Taylor.

Portland, Oregon doesn’t hold an overtly racist history, but it’s still guilty of embellishment. “Because ghost sightings are so ephemeral, and so vague,” Dickey writes, “they can easily be attached to the dominant narrative and only that narrative.” Why then are all its stories about white ghosts? New Orleans, meanwhile, markets the mysterious allure of its French Quarter through ghost tours while deliberately hiding its racist past.

It was one of the most heavily trafficked slave trading areas in the U.S., second only to New Orleans. Case in point: the historic Shockoe Bottom neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia, where one can throw a stone and hit six haunted buildings. Throughout, Dickey connects themes in each story to literature, philosophy, psychiatry, or sociology, making for a deceptive, albeit entertaining, way to eat your vegetables. His occasional first-person accounts affirm he’s combed asylum halls and grave markers as thoroughly as the research archives. Each chapter is an amalgamation of vivid sightseer descriptions, interviews, and the kind of folklore only a local could know. Dickey, who holds a PhD in comparative literature from USC, leaves no gravestone unturned and no trapdoor unopened. Ghostland has its own unique history as a book, originating in lectures at Machine Project, Acme Studio, Odd Salon and Death Salon as well as essays in the Paris Review and the Virginia Quarterly Review. that reveals how Americans love to embellish history with the paranormal. How does an ordinary cemetery become the site of mysterious lights and whispered voices? What makes an abandoned farmhouse the perfect setting for a grizzly murder? When does a real-life abduction in the 1950s turn into a campfire tale of revenge? These questions comprise the skeleton of Colin Dickey’s Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, a tight analysis of the most haunted houses, hangouts, institutions and towns in the U.S.

Ghostland an american history