The wide range of ways in which Americans have experienced the presence of those who have departed.
Ghosts
The Haunting of a Heights House
Although its owner died in 1865, many visitors to the Morris-Jumel Mansion still come just to see her.
Set on a green lawn at the edge of northern Manhattan, the Morris-Jumel mansion, white and stately, might seem charming enough on a sunny afternoon. This evening, however, is a blustery, gray one. As the doorbell echoes inside I wait on the porch where, more than fifty years ago, a woman appeared on a balcony above and told a group of field-tripping schoolchildren to shush. When the tardy curator finally arrived to open up the house, she insisted that the house had been empty. She had been elsewhere, the door was padlocked, and no one could have entered. But the woman described by the children sounded familiar—just like Eliza Jumel, the mansion’s former owner. She had died in 1865.
Eliza was a revolutionary woman for her time—a sharp businessperson who started life in the lowest tier of American society and courted controversy as she climbed to the top. Her posthumous reputation suffered even more. It was said that she had killed her husband for his money and that, after her own death, her ghost wouldn’t leave the house.
She herself had claimed the place was already haunted when her husband bought it in 1810. Built by Colonel Roger Morris, a British loyalist, and commandeered asGeorge Washington’s headquarters during the Revolutionary War, the building had quartered Hessian mercenaries before briefly becoming a tavern in 1789. Now, a century and a half after she died, Eliza’s ghost is supposed to linger here still.
The management resisted ghost hunters for a long time after the mansion became a museum in 1904. On occasion, though, visitors would report an encounter with Eliza, or a Hessian soldier rumored to have died on the stairs, or a maid who had jumped out a window. The house had a long enough history to have accumulated a cast of ghosts, some quite famous: General Washington himself was said to pace the floors, and some felt the presence of the man Eliza married after her first husband died, former vice president Aaron Burr.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT LAPHAM’S QUARTERLY
Signs of Ghosts
What do we do when there are whole cities full of ghosts, each one with their own unique story to tell, each one with something left undone?
Let me tell you a ghost story.
My street—East 21st Street in Brooklyn, on the border of Flatbush and Ditmas Park—is filled with ghosts. A block up from me, in late 2020, there began to appear a series of strange signs in the Japanese elms that line the street. They were made from tile of marble, 6 by 18 inches, strung around the limbs of the trees that lined the block. Someone had used a Dremel to carve words and pictures on them. One in white marble read simply,COVID took you. May l❤️ve keep you forever. In the corner, a small heart with the street name, 21st, superimposed on it. Another, in blue marble, had the faces of three middle-aged Black men, and readFor the ones we lost, the two first. A third, in black, was hung vertically; on it, written in cursive:For the stolen ❤️s of COVID, for the ❤️s stolen by COVID of Two First, Amen.
I walked by these memorials several times a day; I didn’t always need to, but I realized at some point I was altering my path to see them. They haunted me, in the sense that we often mean that word. “Haunted” as in a haunting melody, a haunting story—a thing that you cannot stop thinking about, that follows you like a ghost through your waking hours. Haunting like Hamlet’s father, reminding you what’s left undone, haunting like a vague blur, a noise or a whispered word, reminding you that the borders between us are porous, sometimes nonexistent. I saw the faces Dremeled into the marble—who were they? What stories did they leave behind?
By that point, I’d been thinking about ghosts, more or less nonstop, for months. In February of that year, I had been contacted by a magazine editor preparing a big summer issue on movies about New York City; would I, she inquired, be interested in writing aboutGhostandGhostbusters?I jumped at the assignment and the opportunity to write once more about this city I love and what haunts it. So I started writing about these two films. I wrote about them as the news each day got stranger and stranger, I wrote about them as a friend predicted “summer is going to be canceled,” I wrote about them as the city emptied out. I wrote about them after the magazine shelved its summer movie issue, I wrote about them after the editor stopped returning my emails. I kept writing; I wrote about them in cafés that were almost entirely empty, and I wrote about them at home when I realized it was no longer safe to write in cafés.
The usual idea behind a ghost is that they’re someone you shouldn’t normally see, someone who, due to some cosmic accident or injustice left unaddressed, has become visible again. The same, I understood, came to be true of pandemics: they are invisible until they suddenly become visible. The 1918 Spanish Flu had been more or less forgotten by history, a mere footnote to World War I, until we had our own pandemic and suddenly we couldn’t stop seeing the Spanish Flu everywhere. And watching these movies about ghosts as a new and terrifying reality loomed, I realized there were things there all along that I’d never noticed, that had, all at once, become all I could see.
So much lurks in the shadows of Jerry Zucker’s 1990 film,Ghost. At first, there is only Patrick Swayze’s character, Sam Wheat. The film’s title, after all, is singular. It’s hard not to root for him: he’s likable, successful, and has just started a promising ceramics internship before he’s tragically murdered by a hitman hired by his scheming business partner Carl Bruner. Once it’s clear his girlfriend (Demi Moore’s Molly) is also in danger, he enlists Whoopi Goldberg’s huckster psychic, Oda Mae Brown, to help save her from murderous Carl.
Sam sees himself as uniquely important. At first, he’s the only one Oda Mae can see, but after he unlocks her “gift,” she’s beset by ghosts, all trying to reach loved ones. (At one point she barks at him, “Did you tell every spook in the world you met about me? I got spooks from Jersey coming in here.”) But Sam can’t see beyond his own problems, even in death, and forces her to shoo these other souls (almost all of whom are Black or Latino) so she can focus onhisproblems.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT LONGREADS
The Family That Would Not Live
Writer Colin Dickey sets out across America to investigate America’s haunted spaces in order to uncover what their ghost stories say about who we were, are, and will be.
It is, quite literally, a dark and stormy night. A summer storm has settled over St. Louis: gray-black clouds turning the air yellowish and electric, the rain pulsing down in waves. The sprint from theparking lot to the front door of the Lemp Mansion—no more than fifty feet—leaves you soaked. The thunder is following on the heels of the lightning; it is right above us. In the bar the stained glass portraits of William Lemp, Jr., and his first wife, Lillian Lemp—the Lavender Lady—flicker to life from the lightning outside with disturbing frequency, the accompanying thunder coming fast afterward. It is the perfect night for a ghost hunt: the air already electric, everyone already a bit on edge. In his portrait, William Lemp looks prematurely old; the glass artist has added shading to his face to give the appearance of three dimensions, but the result instead is that he appears haggard, black pits around his eyes, deep creases in his skin.
As if he knows he’s going to die.
The owners of the Lemp Mansion seem quite content to capitalize on the building’s reputation. Ghost hunters come here regularly to take tours, use KII meters and ghost boxes, and record for EVPs (electronic voice phenomenon) and orbs. I’m here for one such tour,led by a local ghost-hunting group. I’m also here to spend the night, since the Lemp Mansion operates as a bed-and-breakfast—though I won’t be able to get into my room until 11 p.m. My room, the Elsa Lemp Suite, is itself part of the tour: the most haunted room in this most haunted house.
The Lemp family story should be remembered as your classic rags-t0-riches success story: Johann Adam Lemp emigrated to America from Germany in 1838 and within a short time had grown a prosperous business selling beer. At the time the only beers available in America were strong English ales, and Lemp, along with John Wagner in Philadelphia, is credited with introducing the lighter, German-style lager beer that has since become ubiquitous in the United States. Lemp’s beer caught on quickly, particularly in the German immigrant community of St. Louis, and by 1850 he was shipping four thousand barrels of beer annually. Prior to electric refrigeration, Lemp had found that the natural caverns beneath St. Louis provided a stable and year-round cool environment, which allowed him to ramp up production without fear of spoilage. His success was mirrored by constant rivals Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch, whose Budweiser beer would play second fiddle to Lemp’s Falstaff brand well into the early twentieth century. Johann died in 1862, but the company soldiered on under the direction of his son, William, who continued to grow the brewing juggernaut, which, by the dawn of the twentieth century, seem destined to endure forever.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT LONGREADS
Speaking with the Dead in Early America
A new book recovers the many ways Protestant Americans, especially women, communicated with the dead from the 17th century to the rise of séance Spiritualism.
JUNTO:Your book recovers the many ways Protestant Americans, especially women, spoke with the dead from the 17th century up to the well-known rise of séance Spiritualism around 1850. What do you think caused previous historians to miss all of this pre-Spiritualism activity? Did the fact that speaking with the dead was a gendered phenomenon lead to this oversight?
ERIK SEEMAN:Yes, gender is definitely a big part of the story. For the complex of beliefs that I call the antebellum cult of the dead, the sources I use are ones historians have largely overlooked: women’s spiritual journals and sentimental literature.
Take, for example, Sally Hersey’s 200-page journal. As far as I can tell no other scholar has ever used it. Who cares about an ordinary woman’s religious musings, right? Yet in that journal are dozens of prayers Hersey composed to her dead son, daughter, and husband. “Dear departed shade,” she addressed her son, “I shall behold the[e] no more in the land of the living.” That’s not how Protestants were supposed to think about the dead.
JUNTO:There is a fascinating section in the book on the conspicuous presence of ghosts and the dead during the Salem Witch Trials. You use this to draw out the 17th century “science of the dead,” as you term it. What was the “science of the dead” and what does this framework tell us about the speaking with the dead in colonial American life?
ERIK SEEMAN:The science of the dead included efforts by minister-scientists such as Joseph Glanvil in England and Increase Mather in Massachusetts to learn about what happened to the soul after death. These ministers feared the ideas of Hobbes and like-minded materialists who were skeptical about whether the soul even existed. Glanvil and Mather felt it was a short step from “Hobbism” to a denial of God’s existence. Therefore, they became active ghost hunters. They sought credible evidence of the supernatural to prove God’s existence.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE JUNTO
Edith Wharton’s Bewitching, Long-Lost Ghost Stories
A reissued collection, long out of print, revives the author’s masterly stories of horror and unease.
Wharton was a practical woman, as savvy about business affairs as social conventions, and she eventually overcame her fear of ghost stories enough to become a master of the form. Near the end of her life, in her mid-seventies, she spent time putting together a selection of her best ghost stories for publication. It was one of her final literary acts; she died in August, 1937, at her lavish home in the north of France. A New Yorker by birth, she had been an expat for two decades by then. She had grown increasingly preoccupied with the past, having lost many friends to war or illness, and her own health was failing. In “All Souls’,” one of Wharton’s last stories, a rich old woman wakes to a mysteriously empty house, surrounded by deep snow. She is injured—a fractured ankle—and cut off from the outside world, and she drags herself through the rooms looking for help. The silence is oppressive. (“It was not the idea of noises that frightened her, but that inexorable and hostile silence,” she wrote.) One of Wharton’s biographers, Hermione Lee, in herdoorstopperon the author’s life, described “All Souls’ ” as “a story about the terror of death.”
For a writer known mostly forincisive social novelsabout the old New York of her childhood, Wharton’s ghost stories make up a significant chunk of her œuvre. In addition to longer works, including “The House of Mirth” and “Ethan Frome,” she published some eighty-five short stories, many of them spectral. Wharton’s ghost tales have been anthologized alongside other American masters of unease—Edgar Allan Poe, whom she admired, and her good friend Henry James—but her 1937 collection, which was published shortly after her death, has long been out of print. This October, it will be revived by NYRB Classics, with the same preface it was initially published with, and the same title, “Ghosts.” Spanning the length of Wharton’s career—the earliest story, “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” is from 1902—the tales appear in their original, somewhat perplexing order. Wharton seems to not have arranged them chronologically or thematically, but according to her own mysterious preferences. “I liked the idea of, ‘This is exactly what she put out,’ ” Sara Kramer, the executive editor of NYRB Classics, told me.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NEW YORKER
The Haunted World of Edith Wharton
Whether exploring the dread of everyday life or the horrors of the occult, her ghost tales documented a nation haunted by isolation, class, and despair.
Wharton inhabited grand houses throughout her life, from Land’s End in Newport to Pavillon Colombe in France. But the world of her youth, among the cloistered New York families for whom a Newport summer home was wholly unremarkable, was transformed by the breakneck growth of the Gilded Age, the world-historical fortunes of tycoons like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller, and increasingly violent struggles between capital and labor at the turn of the century. By the time Wharton was born, her family was several generations past its income-earning phase and her circle prided itself on wasteful leisure. While they coasted on inherited wealth, the new robber barons made huge profits that they strove to make even huger by exerting downward pressure on their workers’ wages and lifestyles. (Wharton memorably depicted this shift inThe Age of Innocence, whose old-money protagonist, Newland Archer, twiddles his thumbs at an undemanding law firm while the arriviste, scandal-shrouded financier Julius Beaufort makes vast sums that are utterly incomprehensible to families like the Archers.) Furthermore, the once-farm-based American economy rapidly industrialized; agricultural jobs shrank from 64 percent of the workforce in 1850 to 30 percent in 1920. The newly proletarianized working class had many occasions to rebel, and they certainly did not escape the notice of Wharton, who conducted firsthand research into subjects like factory towns, cotton mills, and the lives of poor New Englanders.
That may be why the specter of underclass rebellion animates so many ofGhosts’ stories—what the scholar Karen J. Jacobsen has called their “economic hauntings.” In “All Souls,” Agnes, the “dour old Scottish maid whom Sara had inherited from her mother-in-law,” leaves her infirm mistress with a tray of sandwiches while she and the other servants deliberately clear out for their secretive group activity. We never actually find out what they get up to on that night, but the point is that they are empowered to do so by banding together. Agnes begins the story as inherited human property but ends it with a triumphal performance. She puts on a “masterly” display of surprise the day after getting away with her scheme—essentially gaslighting her prideful mistress. And why not? Sara knows, even after her terrifying solo ordeal, that “she was dependent on [the servants] and felt at home with them.” But then the same thing happens the following year, so Sara simply flees the house and its supposedly “efficient, devoted, respectful and respectable” servants. Agnes might see it as a successful collective action.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NATION
Meet Mr. Mumler, the Man Who “Captured” Lincoln’s Ghost on Camera
When America’s first aerial cameraman met an infamous spirit photographer, the chemistry was explosive.
Early one morning in October 1860, while the rest of Boston lingered under blankets to delay exposure to early winter temperatures, a respectable middle-aged photographer named James Wallace Black prepared his hot-air balloon to ascend to the heavens.
It would be a bright and sunny day, but when Black arrived on Boston Common the grass was still stiff with frost. He carefully rolled out a massive pouch of stitched silk, then connected its open end to a portable hydrogen pump resembling an oversized casket on wheels. As gas escaped the tank, the photographer watched the shroud of smooth fabric stir to life. It seemed to breathe, growing gradually with each inhalation. Then all at once it stirred and began to rise.
No expert balloonist, J. W. Black had spent half his years behind the camera, and all of them with his feet firmly on the ground. For guidance in this new interest, he turned to Samuel Archer King, New England’s preeminent aerialist. King had traveled from Providence, Rhode Island, to help Black see Boston from above. Their balloon, called “Queen of the Air,” soon climbed 1,200 feet above the city.
After they had landed, the images Black made—the first aerial photographs taken anywhere in the United States—were a revelation. Within one frame, church steeples and storefronts, rooftops and alleyways, sailing ships and merchants’ carts, were all collected like odds and ends in a junk drawer. From the jumbled landscape emerged a world moved by designs too grand to be seen.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
Haunted Houses Have Nothing on Lighthouses
From drowning to murders to the mental toll of isolation, these stoic towers carry a full share of tragedy.
Though they shared a name, it’s said the two lighthouse keepers, the towering Thomas Griffith and the middle-aged Thomas Howell, didn’t get along, and couldempty pubs with one of their heated arguments. In the winter of 1800 to 1801, the two men were stuck on the most remote island in Wales, 20 miles from shore, operating Smalls Lighthouse. The brutal winter weather turned what should’ve been a month-long stay into a grueling, almost five-month exile. Then, four months into their stay, things got worse. Griffith took ill, according toIvor Emlyn’s 1858 account, or perhaps he fell, asChristopher P. Nicholson writes inRock Lighthouses of Britain. Howell hoisted up a distress flag (likely an inverted Union Jack), but no help came. After weeks of suffering, Griffith died.
For the next three weeks, Howell’s only companion was Griffith’s rotting corpse. He feared that casting the body into the sea would implicate him in Griffith’s death. After all, everyone knew they didn’t get along. So Howell, trained as a woodworker, assembled a makeshift coffin for his departed colleague and secured it to the lighthouse’s railings. After three weeks, a massive sea swell tore the coffin apart, scattering Griffith’s remains across the beach. Howell again secured Griffith’s body the best he could, this time to the outside gallery.
Ship after ship attempted to land on the island to relieve the desperate keepers, with no knowledge that only one remained. According to Nicholson, one ship managed to get close enough to see “a man leaning motionless on the gallery next to the flag of distress, his hand waving freely as if trying to attract attention.” Unable to dock, the ship took home the news that the keepers were managing. The light was still lit, after all. The ship’s captain didn’t realize the hand flopping in the wind belonged to a dead man.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT ATLAS OBSCURA
A Century of Highway Zombies
Since the 1920s, “highway hypnosis” has lulled drivers to disaster.
Sixty years ago, America was reinventing the road. Eisenhower had just signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which funneled billions of dollars into thousands of smooth and precisely designed highways. A general feeling of national pride pervaded: Goods would flow more efficiently, citizens would travel more comfortably, and the nation would draw together more intimately.
But that comfort and ease belied something ominous—these sleek new highways, the country soon discovered, conjured ghosts.
During long drives, the roads could begin to play tricks on the mind. During the 1950s, public safety organizations and newspapers began to report unusual experiences. Drivers forgot routes they once knew by heart, or weirdly recognized highways they had never driven before; some drivers felt as though they had been transported some 20 miles further ahead in a mere blink of the eye. More disconcerting: People started to have strange visions. A man on an expressway near Joliet, Illinois, noticed a tiger stalking the light beams of his car. Another, driving at a swift clip through rural Georgia, saw a stately colonial mansion materialize in the middle of the highway, which he barely missed by swerving off the road. Yet another reported hitting a man, but when the police arrived there was no sign of a body. The visions weren’t benign, either. One newspaper reported that by 1956, one-car accidents with no apparent cause were responsible for a third of all traffic deaths.
What to make of these specters that stalked post-war freeways? Consensus quickly emerged: It was widely known as “highway hypnotism,” a new epidemic that was literally hypnotizing drivers to death. It became the malady of the brave, new world of American mobility, a crisis that struck at the heart of the middle-class imagination. Today, highway hypnotism has fallen from the public eye, but its rise in the 1950s reveals the anxious convulsions that shook new infrastructure that promised to make citizens freer, safer, and more comfortable.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE ATLANTIC
The Suburban Horror of the Indian Burial Ground
In the 1970s and 1980s, homeowners were terrified by the idea that they didn’t own the land they’d just bought.
“America is not a young land,” William S. Burroughs writes inNaked Lunch; “it is old and dirty and evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians… the evil was there… waiting.” It’s this same belief in an old, dirty evil that drives so many of our modern ghost stories. There are haunted bridges and haunted alleyways, haunted parks and haunted parking lots. But in the United States, the most common—the most primal—haunted place is a house. Home ownership has always been intertwined with the American dream; we have magnified this simple property decision in part because it represents safety and security. The haunted house is a violation of this comfort, the American dream gone horribly wrong. And in the last few decades, the most common cause for a house’s haunting—a problem cited so frequently it’s almost become a cliché—is the Indian burial ground.
The Anglo fascination with Indian burial lands stretches back at least to the eighteenth century. The Revolutionary poet Philip Freneau was one of the earliest to approach these sacred lands with a mix of exoticism and foreboding. In his 1787 poem“The Indian Burying Ground,”he saw the spirits of vanquished Indians still hunting, feasting, and playing:
Thou, stranger, that shalt come this way,
No fraud upon the dead commit—
Observe the swelling turf, and say
They do not lie, but here they sit.
Be wary of the Native burial ground, Freneau warns us, for life still moves there.
If for Freneau these lands were mystical and sacred, in the 1970s this idea turned malevolent, becoming the foundation for a series of horror movies and stories of haunted houses. Its popularity stems almost entirely from Jay Anson’s 1977 massive bestseller,The Amityville Horror, and the genre-defining horror film based on it. Anson’s book, advertised as a true story, was based on testimony from George and Kathleen Lutz, who claimed to have undergone a harrowing experience in the Long Island, New York, hamlet of Amityville. When the Lutzes bought their dream home, they knew it had been the site of six murders: In October of 1974, twenty-three-year-old Ronald DeFeo, Jr., shot his father, mother, two sisters, and two brothers in the house. Deciding not to let this factor influence their decision, the Lutzes bought the house just over a year later. But a host of unexplained occurrences took place as soon as they moved in: George began waking up every morning at 3:15 a.m., the time that the DeFeo murders had happened, and the Lutz children began sleeping on their stomachs, the same pose in which the DeFeo victims had been found dead. The children began acting strangely and claimed to see a pair of red eyes hovering outside their bedroom. In less than a month, the Lutzes abandoned the Amityville home, leaving their possessions behind.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NEW REPUBLIC
Ghosts are Scary, Disabled People are Not: The Troubling Rise of the Haunted Asylum
Tourist-driven curiosity about the so-called “haunted asylum” has led many to overlook the real people who once were institutionalized within these hospitals.
This past spring, the defunct Willard Psychiatric Center (previously known as the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane) in Ovid, New York, opened its doorsfor tours — one day only, with no advance sale tickets. I immediately made plans to make the two-hour drive — after all, for the past few years, I’ve been working on a project that touches on institutionalized Union veterans, and many of my subjects lived, and died, at Willard. The opportunity to see the asylum was rare: the grounds still house a correctional facility, so security on the campus is tight, and most of the buildings sit locked and empty. I was eager for the opportunity see where so many of my old soldiers lived out their lives, and to visit their graves.
I left bright and early from Buffalo and arrived in Ovid with plenty of time before the tour. But instead of getting my ticket, I found myself at a dead stop, just before the asylum grounds, in a line of hundreds of cars. There is nothing else in Ovid (no offense, Ovidians), so it was pretty clear that the traffic was for the tour. Within a few minutes, state troopers arrived to direct traffic, and it became clear that no one was getting in to see the asylum — there were just too many people. I waited in line for half an hour before a trooper turned me around and sent me, grumpy and disappointed, back to Buffalo.
I spent the rest of my drive pondering what on earth had caused hundreds and hundreds of people to show up on a Saturday morning to go on a tour of an old mental institution. I discovered later thatnearly 4000 people tried to get tours, up from less than 500 the year before. Visitors had swarmed the grounds, causing property damage and sneaking into areas of the campus that were closed to tours. Were there really thousands of folks so excited about New York State history or local landmarks that they would flood a tiny village to take a building tour?
When I got home, some research revealed what attracted so many to the tour: the paranormal. The Travel Channel’sDestination Fearhad run a short segment on the asylum, featuring two employees of the correctional facility campus describing vaguely creepy events, such as the suspicion that the ghost of a red-haired nurse-turned-patient wandered the halls. When the tour of the asylum was announced, news had apparently traveled through local ghost-hunting circles. Most of the folks who had lined up by the thousands to tour the old asylum weren’t interested at all in the history of asylums — they were hoping to see a ghost.
Asylums and institutions have long been a source of fear and curiosity. Asylums, along with other institutions such as soldiers’ homes and prisons, werecommon tourist attractions in the 19th century, mostly for their beautiful grounds and architecture but also for able-bodied visitors to catch a glimpse of the patients. More recently, asylums entered into pop culture as a setting for scary movies and television shows, including the successfulAmerican Horror Story: Asylum. A new development includes using the asylum as a form of haunted house attraction during the Halloween season. Buffalo’s ownFright Worldfeatures an “Eerie State Asylum” attraction this year, which challenges guests to “escape from the lunatics” and survive the attack of “demented doctors and patients.”
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT NURSING CLIO
Lucinda Williams and the Idea of Louisiana
An exploration of the family stories, Southern territory, and distortions of memory that Lucinda Williams’ songwriting evokes.
My mother would listen to Lucinda Williams in the car. My first memory of it, Lucinda’s voice, would have been at 7 or 8 years old, around the time my parents split up. I’m putting this in the conditional tense because of my uncertainty on the facts. This memory would be in the car, because that was the year my mother took an apartment outside of New Orleans to be closer to work. It would have been a small apartment that we moved into, far from my father’s house in Baton Rouge. To get to it, you would have had to take a long drive that passed under a grain elevator that loaded barges on the Mississippi. I don’t remember anything about that time as clearly as I remember the smell of the grain elevator. My sister and I slept on the second floor of the little apartment. I could have seen a swamp from my bedroom window, and on some Saturday mornings, between days at my new elementary school, I would have wandered into the muck of it to look at the family of nutria living together there. My mother slept on the couch in the living room and, if that sounds untidy, sleeping on the couch in the living room, I assure you it was not. She would have made her white sheets on the couch with tight hospital corners at night, and then unmade them every morning before work so that the couch could be used during the day. Some nights, I would wake at the sound of a horrible noise below, and when I would investigate halfway down the staircase, I would have seen her cleaning in the living room, running a vacuum before bed. She had been through crisis before. She had her ways of getting through it.
My mother was born in New Orleans in 1953, the same year as Lucinda. Her father, Jack, was a drinker. They lost their house in New Orleans when she was 5 or 6 years old, evicted, probably after he lost another job. They moved just across the state line to a little house on the coast in Mississippi. Her youngest brother, Stephen, was so small they put him in a dresser drawer on the backseat for the drive over. Jack would drive back into New Orleans on occasion for odd jobs. They were Irish Catholic and, for a few years, a Catholic school in Bay St. Louis allowed her to attend for free on account of being poor. Jack didn’t stop drinking. When he beat my grandmother, sometimes my mother’s half-brother Parker would try to stop it. Stephen drowned in a fishing pond. He would have been maybe 2 years old. In 1965, their house in Mississippi was destroyed by Hurricane Betsy, and Jack left. The order of events is unclear now, but they both happened that year. My mother saw him only once again before he died.
The strange part about going through a house destroyed by a hurricane is how much of it is still there but in the wrong places. The roof is still there, but in pieces in the yard. The windows are still there, but they’re in shards in the sink or scattered on the floor. The stuff is all moved around inside and bloated full of floodwater and made unrecognizable. It gets to be hard to remember where things were supposed to be in the first place. And then there are other things that are just gone, disappeared with the water or the wind, and it becomes hard to say if they ever were there to begin with.
As I understand it, my mother felt some responsibility to try to help keep things together for her mother after Jack left, after the storm: cooking, cleaning, helping keep after her younger siblings. She was 12. Parker worked on shrimp boats for a while, bringing home the occasional sack, until he left for California to play pool. There were some beautiful moments: She snuck into a club to see Otis Redding. On holidays, her mother made French bread dressing with oysters from the Gulf. She told me once that the purest feeling of happiness she’d ever felt was being a little girl on the coast with her brothers, making mud pies in the pluff.
I’m not sure if I can remember my mother’s mother; if I possess any real memories of her or if they are invented ones that my mind has made out of old, weathered photographs. But if I can remember her, I would remember the deep folds of her skin in the sun on a beach in Mississippi. She would have been sitting on a folding chair, smoking long white cigarettes, and her mind would have been long gone and absent from Huntington’s disease. She died a couple of years before myparents split up. I have no memory of any funeral.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE BITTER SOUTHERNER
A Forgotten 19th-Century Story Can Help Us Navigate Today’s Political Fractures
Reconciliation is good — but not at any cost.
Can Democrats truly reconcile with those Republicans who called President Biden’s election fraudulent and encouraged violent attack of the U.S. Capitol? Earlier moments in U.S. history should caution us about the lure and danger of reconciliation when one side refuses to acknowledge wrongdoing. After the Civil War, former Union partisans sought to get along with the Southerners who fought to keep Black people enslaved even after the war. But later, they doubted the wisdom of having done so.
One of those people was Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852), the most influential novel in the United States during the 19th century. Her famous book kindled readers’ sense that they could and must end slavery, even if that meant disrupting alliances, friendships and family ties with enslavers and their supporters. Thirty years later, Stowe wrote a story little known even it its own time, in which she considered what happened when these same White Northerners who fought against slavery reconciled too easily with former enslavers.
Written in 1882, but set in 1866,“The Captain’s Story”tells of two former Union army captains who visit Florida, where they once fought on the battlefield. They hope to relax and recuperate from the toll the war had taken on their health. The two listen to their White Floridian guide’s ghost story, which includes his casual mention of having murdered enslaved African captives. The ghost of one captive continues to haunt a nearby plantation, he says. Despite moral qualms, the two captains decide to continue their trip with their murderous guide who can show them all the best fishing grounds. They will get along, and leave his punishment to God.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE WASHINGTON POST
Spirits
Why Did Everyone in the 19th Century Think They Could Talk to the Dead?
Kevin Dann on the spiritualists of New York City and beyond.
From about the last week of May through mid-July 1850, a steady stream of visitors made their way to a parlor in Barnum’s Hotel on Broadway. On the door of the room, they found a notice giving the rules for guests: the admission fee (one dollar per person), seating arrangement, and instructions to act as if in a solemn religious gathering. Visitors then took a seat at a long table that sat up to thirty people, to put questions about their deceased loved ones, or general questions about the afterlife, to “the spirits,” courtesy of Maggie and Kate Fox, teenage sisters from a small village upstate whose Morse code-like communication with a disembodied being had received wide attention after a demonstration in November 1849 at Corinthian Hall in Rochester.
The sisters had begun their “spiritual telegraph” innocently enough, playing with a household poltergeist as if with a cat, but this cat had a voracious appetite and began to devour the unsuspecting girls and any who would follow them. The story of the Fox sisters and the birth of Spiritualism has been told many times: on April Fool’s Eve in 1848, two sisters aged 10 and 14—having grown up in a house reputed to be haunted—play at speaking with the ghost by way of a rapped code; the invisible entity tells the girls lurid tales about a murdered peddler; the girls’ older sister exhibits them as having the ability to speak with the dead, giving birth to the many-colored movement known as Spiritualism. To get at the truth of this seemingly eccentric episode of American history requires a certain sideways glance.
At the very same moment when the Fox sisters arrived in Manhattan, another poltergeist was grabbing headlines across America. On Sunday, March 10, the Reverend Eliakim Phelps of Stratford, Connecticut, returned with his family from church to their sprawling mansion on Elm Street to find all the doors and windows open. Inside, they found the furniture knocked over, dishes smashed, books, papers, and clothing scattered all over. They had not been robbed; Reverend Phelps found his gold watch, silver heirlooms, and even loose cash undisturbed. In an upstairs bedroom, a sheet was spread over a bed, and Mrs. Phelps’s nightgown was laid out on it. At the bottom, a pair of stockings were stretched out, and the arms of the gown were folded across the chest, like a corpse.
Later, while the rest of the family returned to church for the afternoon service, Reverend Phelps hid in his study with a pistol, hoping to catch the intruders should they return. After some time, he went downstairs and, entering the dining room, found a circle of eleven effigies of women, kneeling or standing in prayer, some holding Bibles. Articles of the family’s clothing had been stuffed with rags and other materials from around the house to create the dummies, which had been put in place during the brief period while Phelps was standing guard. Over the next few months, twenty more mock women would appear out of the blue. They would be joined by leaping umbrellas, silverware, books, and other household objects; bedding sailing off beds; food and clothing dropping out of nowhere onto the breakfast table while the family ate. Friends and other visitors to the house watched as these objects fell at impossibly slow speeds or changed course in midair. By the end of April, the disturbances had turned quite nasty: screams and odd sounds were heard each night; silverware was mangled; windows were broken; the children’s limbs were jerked about violently; and welts appeared on their skin. Reverend Phelps’s son was hit with a barrage of small stones. Later, in front of a dozen witnesses, the boy vanished and was later found tied up and suspended from a tree in the yard.
As the most famous authority on Spiritualism in the nation, Andrew Jackson Davis made a visit to Stratford to investigate. Davis lent his authority to the genuineness of the activity and stated that the outbreak was caused by “vital radiations” from the Phelps children, whose “magnetism” caused objects to be attracted to or repelled from them. As with eyewitness reporters in Hydesville, Davis chose “spirits of the dead” as the rubric for understanding the disturbances, rather than the more common interpretation given them by local rural people—these were lowly tommyknockers, house hobbies, mischievous fairies tweaking the noses of a minister of the Gospel’s family. Both Davis and all the other commentators somehow missed the “telegraphic” aspect of the Stratford knockings.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT LITERARY HUB
William James and the Spiritualist’s Phone
A story of a philosopher, his sister, and belief.
The dead spoke through Leonora Piper, and the living answered through her hand.Shouted, really, because the connection between her hand and Eternity was often spotty. Calling on the dead required this kind of stagecraft in the waning days of the Spiritualist movement, when every quack with a set of candles claimed knowledge of the occult.
Leonora would first enter into a trance, goosefleshed and murmuring. The sitters would take her hand. They would then scream questions at her open palm, as though it were a murder suspect, or a bad dog, or the receiver of an old-timey telephone. In fact Leonora called her hand “my spiritual telephone.” Perhaps she knew, psychically, that her séances would one day resemble something far more terrifying: bad improv comedy.
Alice Jamesdidfind it hilarious. Her brotherWilliam—a professor at Harvard, one of America’s most important philosophers and psychologists, and the brother of its most famous living novelist,Henry James—had been fooled by a Boston housewife who claimed to speak to dead people. By the time the eldest James sibling wrote to Alice in 1885 requesting a lock of hair (to test Leonora’s “psychometric” abilities), he had already sat for multiple sessions in the psychic’s darkened parlor, scribbling notes as she stuttered out communiqués from the spirit world. Leonora had distinguished herself from pretenders with the maternal exactness of her insights. She knew things about the dead that mothers know—the hue of a birthmark, the shape of a scar. It helped that she was a mother herself and looked the part, with her high-necked dresses and fussily wreathed hair.
The twenty-eight-year-old Leonora never advertised her abilities. If anything, she seemed embarrassed by them. But word had gotten around the previous year, when she had visited a clairvoyant, a blind former judge, to ask about a pain in her side and passed out at his table. When she came to, she hastily scribbled a note: a message for your honor, she explained, from his dead son. Leonora had not intended to upstage a stooped provincial psychic in his own home. Back then, she wanted only to have more babies and live out her tidy little life. As she got older, she refused to travel for any psychic business unless her kids could come, too. But she lived in a war-ravaged country of worn-out people, all broken from burying children and pledged to private ghosts. They pleaded for her help. Who was she to refuse them?
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT LAPHAM’S QUARTERLY
The Fox Sisters
The story of Kate and Margaret Fox, the small-town girls who triggered the 19th century movement known as Spiritualism.
Joanne Freeman: But first we’re going to begin in the 19th century when the idea that the living could commune with the dead turned into a full fledged American religion. It was known as spiritualism. And while there’s been plenty of debate about what to make of it, most people agree on when and where it started. In 1848 in a tiny town in upstate New York. I’m going to hand things over now to Nate Dimeo to tell us the story of the Fox sisters.
Nate: People said the house was haunted and that was even before the two girls started talking to the dead. Kate Fox was 11, her sister Margaret was 14 when they moved into a little house in a nothing village, 40 miles East of Rochester, New York. A little house that all their neighbors knew as the one where the traveling salesman had been invited in years before and was never heard from again. Never heard from that is until one night in March of 1848 when their parents first heard the sound. Some nights it would sound like knocking other nights like furniture moving and it always seemed to come from the girl’s bedroom. But they’d open the door and their daughters would be fast asleep.
Nate: They never suspected that their daughters could be tricking them. They were just young girls, but they were tricking them. What started with a little tap tapping on the wall and tiptoeing back into bed with giggles muffled by pillows, got more sophisticated as the nights went on. And on the night of March 31st the Fox sisters revealed the latest in their growing repertoire of ghost stimulating techniques. The one that would place the two girls at the center of a cultural and religious revolution.
Nate: They call their mother into the room. Margaret snapped her fingers once and they heard a tap and response. She snapped twice and it tapped twice the next night. All of their neighbors squeezed into the girls candle it room. They explained that one tap meant yes, two taps meant no. And then they started asking questions. And in the morning the audience left convinced that they had spent the night in the presence of a dead man and two girls with incredible powers.
Nate: Mr and Mrs. Fox wanted to protect their daughters and they sent them to live with their responsible older sister, Leah. But they soon found that the ghost followed the girls and Leah found an opportunity. She had booked her little sisters in a 400 seat theater in Rochester. By 1850 they were the toast of New York city. People would wait in line for hours to ask the sisters for words of their dead loved ones on the other side. William Cullen Bryant caught their act, James Fenimore Cooper, George Ripley, though we don’t know whether he believed it or not. The newspaper man, Horace Greeley introduced them to New York nightlife in the pages of his paper, introduced them to the world. Soon people were holding seances like we hold dinner parties, but even as spiritualism was sweeping the nation, it was leaving the sisters who started it behind.
Nate: On October 21st, 1888 a 54 year old Margaret Fox sat on the stage at the New York Academy of Music in front of 2000 paying customers and her sister Kate and showed them all how she spoke to the dead. She told them about how 40 years before back in that little house in the nothing town after a few nights of knocking and tiptoeing back to bed, she and her little sister realized that they could both crack their toes and no one could see them doing it. And that when they did, people actually believed they were hearing from dead people. Because sounds are hard to place in space and because you believe pretty much anything if you really want to believe it.
Nate: She revealed all of that but not everything. She didn’t tell them about how she and her little sister started to unravel not long after Horace Greeley introduced them to the world. And to worldly things like power in wealth and wine. She didn’t tell them about how her sister began to believe that maybe there was something to it all, even as they both struggled under the growing weight if their shared secret. And she certainly didn’t tell them about the night she tested her own belief. After scurvy had taken the life of a polar explorer who had taken her heart. Now she broke down and tried to contact him, tried to do for real what she had spent the last nine years pretending to do. She didn’t say how she called out to him and how he didn’t call back. And how she sat in the dark knowing that he never would.
Nate: Kate and Margaret Fox weren’t forgotten, but at the times of their deaths, they weren’t remembered fondly. Each died poor, neither living to see 60. The people who still clung to spiritualism were glad to see them go. And people who never believed, they were too. Now, there is a postscript here that really can’t be resisted and you can do with it what you will. They tore that little house down in 1904 and inside one of the walls near the girls room. They found the skeleton of a man believed to be a traveling salesman who appeared to have been murdered a few years before the Fox family moved in. It’s true.
Joanne Freeman: That was Nate Dimeo. You can listen to a longer version of the story as well as many more of Nate’s American history stories at thememorypalace.us.
“Pajamas from Spirit Land”: Searching for William James
After the passing of William James, mediums across the US began receiving messages from the late Harvard professor.
I’ve been writing a book about a failed and forgotten science, poring over the testimony of people who saw and heard impossible things, for years now. I joke that it will make me crazy. People ask if I believe in ghosts, and I can always tell if they’re asking because they experience reality as haunted in some way, or because they think I’ve fixed on a wrong idea. Walking out of the icy American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) library into the sunset-saturated clamor of evening on the Upper West Side, I feel like a shade among the living. I have my feet in other people’s inner worlds, their yearnings and anxieties are mine. Traffic, bodegas, the cartoon animals on children’s backpacks wash over me, meaning obscured by a curtain of sheer sensory noise. Unmoored, I take my cell phone out of my pocket and call whoever will answer. It’s as simple as trading gossip with my high school best friend or an old roommate. Unbeknownst to them, they’re talking me back into our common reality. But where am I when I’m drifting? What if no one answers the call? Over time, the people we love slip out of range.
It was hard for his friends to let William James go. “I always thought that [he] would continue forever”, declared the irascible editor John Jay Chapman, “and I relied upon his sanctity as if it were sunlight.”James’ death in August of 1910 came on quickly, though he had long suffered from ill health. The fact that he was so often sick, and the causes of his illness so obscure, made even James doubt that his heart would finally fail. Perhaps he could still think his way out of it. If only he could overcome the growing anxiety that his major contributions to philosophy, 1907’sPragmatismand 1909’sA Pluralistic Universe, were being misinterpreted and poorly received. His gasping for breath was “partly a spasmodic phenomenon”, he insisted, something in the mind. Yet, as his brother and wife rushed him across the Atlantic after another failed Alpine rest cure, it became clear to all of them that it would be his last return to New England. In constant pain, he could no longer walk and had to be carried on a litter. Sixty-eight years of chaotic comings and goings, restless transmissions, had come to an end. This ending left Henry James “in darkness . . . abandoned and afraid”.The elder brother was a pillar shoring up Henry’s unstable emotions. “His death changes and blights everything for me”, Henry wrote, staggering under the weight and finality of loss.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE PUBLIC DOMAIN REVIEW
American Spirit: A History of the Supernatural
An exploration of previous generations’ fascination with ghosts, spirits, and witches.
Halloween—despite its solemn Celtic roots—has become a safe way for Americans to transgress social norms and toy with the idea of ghosts in a family-friendly fashion. But for some, spirits from another plane have always been a very real part of life onthisplane. So this episode of BackStory delves deeper into Americans’ ongoing fascination with the supernatural, and explores why witches, spirits, and ghosts have haunted American history.
Why were colonists so fearful of New England “witches”? How is it that progressive social reformers found a home in the Spiritualist movement of the 19th century? Why do new media technologies tend toconjure up talk of the undead? Brian, Ed, and Peter look for answers.
Overlooked No More: Rose Mackenberg, Houdini’s Secret ‘Ghost-Buster’
Working undercover for the illusionist, Mackenberg exposed phony psychics who claimed they could connect people to their dead loved ones.
Spiritualism, the religious movement centered on the belief that the spirit survives earthly death and can communicate with the living, was at its peak in the early 20th century; its most famous advocate was probably Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
With that movement came thousands of phony psychics claiming to be mediums who could connect people with their dead loved ones.
Harry Houdini, the renowned illusionist and escape artist, attended hundreds of séances, trying to communicate with his dead parents, before deciding that many self-described seers were in fact con artists soaking the gullible.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Man Who Photographed Ghosts
A new book explores the work of William Mumler and the mysteries of spirit photography.
Before there’s even a chance to delve into “The Apparitionists,” the frontispiece gives the whole thing away. It’s a quote — I’d never seen it before — from Franz Kafka: “Nothing can be so deceiving as a photograph.” It immediately caught my interest because it captures something that I already believe: that photography is inextricably connected with lying. How could it be otherwise? I have a theory of how language started. Whether it was in the Garden of Eden or in some primal swamp, Og was trying to trick Ug into believing the wildebeest went to the right when in fact it had gone to the left. He at first tried various forms of gesticulation and pointing, but was unclear whether he had effectively communicated his deception to Ug. Suddenly it occurred to him that if he said, “The wildebeest went to the right,” he could more effectively trick Ug into believing this falsehood. It’s hard for me to imagine that language could have been invented without the simultaneous need to communicate and to deceive. In fact, in my more pessimistic moments — they occur fairly frequently — it’s hard for me to imagine communication without deception. They go hand in hand.
So how does photography fit in with all of this? Isn’t lying, if you buy into my argument, an artifact of language? Where are the verbs, the adjectives, the nouns in a photograph? They’re nowhere to be found. That alone has led me to assert that photographs have no truth value. They can’t be true, false or anything in between, whatever that might be. However, stick a sentence next to a photograph and you have a potent missile more powerful than anything dreamed up by either Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Emancipatory Visions of a Sex Magician: Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Occult Politics
How dreams of other worlds, above and below our own, reflect the unfulfilled promises of Emancipation.
Born in Five Points, Manhattan to a Black mother and a white father who left soon after his birth, Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825–1875) grew up in poverty that deepened after his mother died of cholera when he was six. After a difficult, itinerant childhood, he recounts working on ships sailing between New England, Cuba, and Britain, before beginning to lecture on spiritualism and perform as a trance medium. In 1858, however, he publicly broke with the spiritualists, citing their racism, the hypocrisy of their radicalism, and their narrow view of the immaterial world. In a series of lectures, he attacked the characters of leading spiritualists, ridiculed their trances as “jugglery” (or worse, demon possession), dismissed their “business of world-bettering” as hypocrisy, and railed against some of their central tenets, such as the belief popularized by Andrew Jackson Davis that only select souls are immortal and thus all spirits are good. He concludes, “My crime wasrete mucosmal”, residing in the color of his skin.Randolph relates that after a harrowing suicide attempt (or, as he explained it elsewhere, a transformative experience with Egyptian hashish), he finally left spiritualism behind.
While Western occultists balked at a “tawny student of Esoterics” like Randolph, they often invested their knowledge with power by racializing it, attributing its secrets to Oriental, Chaldaic, Persian, Egyptian, Asiatic, or Arab sources.Randolph trafficked in this manufactured exoticism too, but also developed a philosophically and politically complicated theory of the occult anchored in his own racialized identity. “I owe my successes,—mental,—to my conglomerate blood; my troubles and poverty to the same source”.He spent two of his most productive writing years in Louisiana, where he encountered the area’s rich African diasporic religious life. Although in one of his lectures he boasts of exposing “the whole tribe of voudeaux in New Orleans”, he also concedes “it was from one of the voudeaux queens . . . that I gained much of my knowledge”, and elsewhere he cites hoodoo and obeah practices and flaunts the secrets he learned from “the quadroons of Louisiana”.His self-identification as a “sang mêlée” — Randolph’s curiously feminized form of the colonial intellectual Moreau de Saint-Méry’s term for people with the smallest fraction of African ancestry — afforded him “peculiar mental power and almost marvelous versatility”.Because he already channeled multiple racial identities within his body, Randolph reasoned, he was predisposed to channel other identities, not of this world.
Although at times Randolph insisted that “not a drop of continental African, or pure negro blood runs through me”, over the course of his life he increasingly identified with the struggles of Black people.When the Civil War began, he recruited Black troops for the Union army, and during Reconstruction he worked as a teacher and agent for Freedmen’s Bureau schools in Louisiana, participated in important Black and Republican conventions, and served as a correspondent for theWeekly Anglo-African. But from within these established institutions, Randolph was also developing a subterranean praxis that he called “angular and eccentric” and which L. H. Stallings describes as that of a “funky black freak”.He founded a series of secret societies organized around his idiosyncratic interpretation of Rosicrucianism, an esoteric religious movement claiming to preserve the wisdom of a mysterious ancient order, and he dreamed of building still more. Randolph produced a huge body of writing, which he mostly self-published with his first wife, Mary Jane Randolph, and his second wife, Kate Corson Randolph, both gifted spiritual practitioners in their own right.In handbooks, pamphlets, novels, newspaper articles, manifestos, historiography, a wildly embellished memoir, printed “private letters”, handwritten manuscripts, and more, he taught curious students a kind of DIY occult practice that used their own bodies — through study, sex, and drugs — to make connections with the spirit world. But the gospel of a hallucinatory, cosmic sex magic was not an easy path for anyone in the late nineteenth century, much less a Black man. Randolph struggled against racism (which he deeply internalized), economic precarity, and an abiding sense of being an outsider his entire life. Even when it came to his own theories, he seems to have vacillated between belief and doubt. In 1875, he shot himself in the head at age forty-nine.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE PUBLIC DOMAIN REVIEW
The Plunder and the Pity
Alicia Puglionesi explores the damage white supremacy did to Native Americans and their land.
The American Society for Psychical Research still exists. A group of scholars and scientists including William James founded it in 1885 to promote the study of dreams, clairvoyance, mind reading, premonitions, séances, hallucinations, out-of-body states, and other such phenomena. At the time many people in the United States had been caught up in the Spiritualist movement, with its mediums who contacted the dead and reported back. TheASPRwanted to determine whether the mediums were frauds; if they weren’t, could the spirits’ special info, or the cryptic message in a dream, somehow make a person rich? Its archives contain thousands of accounts by everyday citizens who said they had firsthand knowledge of unexplainable psychical occurrences. As the oldest institute for such research in the US, the society has been located at a few addresses, mostly in New York City. Today it is in a town house on the Upper West Side.
When Alicia Puglionesi, a writer with a Ph.D. in the history of science, medicine, and technology, began to work on a book about the society, its staff figured she must be a researcher from a ghost-chasing cable show, of which there are many; apparently the society gets a lot of nonserious inquiries. She e-mailed, called, left messages—no answer. Finally, she took a bus to New York from her home in Baltimore and went to 5 West 73rd Street. After a day of alternately sitting on the steps in front of the locked and iron-gated entry and leaning on the buzzer, she got in. Persuading the society’s president of her seriousness, she was allowed into the archives.
The rule “Be careful what you wish for” always applies. Letters about people’s psychical experiences (especially yellowing, crumbling letters from more than a century ago) tend to be incredibly boring. She was not the first to discover this. Back in the early days of the society James himself was almost defeated by the correspondence: the piles of letters the society received were “a weariness, and I must confess…almost intolerable to me.” But Puglionesi stuck with it. In the book that resulted,Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science, she describes her research as, often, “an aimless drift through the flotsam of the unremembered dead.” This had been the main challenge for theASPRright along—reading all the mail and making note of what, if anything, the letters contained. As the hours went by, Puglionesi found herself confronting a tedium requiring a “devotion to something beyond the self, something so vast that it can only be glimpsed through the labor of many human lifetimes.”
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NEW YORK REVIEW
Necromancers, Killers and Presidents, Summoned From the Pages of History
Did Abraham Lincoln, like John Wilkes Booth, ever find solace in spiritualism?
Is there anything more unknowable than a politician’s soul? Even a figure as exhaustively documented as Abraham Lincoln — whole tomes have been devoted to his marriage, his melancholy, his hats — remains in some essential way a mystery, the private man subsumed by two-plus centuries of folklore and iconography. But he was of course a person who lived and loved and grieved like any other — and like his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, found perhaps some solace in the prospect of an afterworld still reachable from this one.
At least that’s the case intermittently made by Terry Alford’s“In the Houses of Their Dead,” a well-sourced if slight piece of sideways biography that often strains to justify its thesis, but makes a lively study of two wildly disparate clans nonetheless. The ties that bound an American president and an acting scion from Maryland are somewhat legend now, a series of kinships and coincidences that range from the quotidian (both men had difficult fathers and revered Shakespeare) to the genuinely strange (Booth’s brother Edwin once purportedly saved Lincoln’s eldest son’s life on a train platform).
What’s sure is that both men were products of their time — an age, Alford writes in his colorful introduction, of great social and scientific progress, but also one where “millions of Americans clung to beliefs that seemed irrational. They believed in ghosts. They studied omens, dreaded comets and feared witchcraft. Apocalyptic writing flourished and credence was given to visions, spells and curses. Prophets and mystics abounded.” And there was profit in all that, naturally: dividends duly pursued by the parade of charlatans, schemers and true believers who parlayed their “mystical” gifts and parlor tricks to gain access to the highest halls of 19th-century power and celebrity.
Whether Lincoln ever put real stock in the self-proclaimed psychics and seers who streamed through the White House during his tenure there, largely at his wife Mary’s behest, is as often as not contradicted in the text. Though his family belonged to a Baptist church, Lincoln himself was a natural iconoclast who “had no particular religion,” according to his own stepmother, and put little faith in the concept of eternal damnation and other standard Christian orthodoxy of the day. He also, Alford dutifully notes, stopped well short of Mary’s keen, even consuming passion for spiritualism, once confiding to an Army officer that while he took solace in the words of mediums who claimed to channel the dearly departed, he understood that “it just wasn’t real. Communications from the other world were delusions, he said.”
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES
Dispatches from 1918
Thinking about our future, we look back on the aftermath of a century-old pandemic.
JAD:Okay, so the 1918 flu is kind of famous for being forgotten. It wasn’t widely taught in schools. You won’t find it written about in a lot of novels and plays. But what I didn’t realize is that it wasn’t just forgotten after the fact, it was ignored in the moment as it was happening. And there are a lot of reasons for this. I mean, you had censorship in certain countries. You had self-censorship in this country, journalists feeling like maybe they had to keep morale up and stay focused on the war. Not to mention there wasn’t much anyone felt that they could do about the flu. It was even kind of familiar, came around every year. And that year there was just more of it. But on top of that, and this is what I find interesting, they didn’t even know what it was. Like, think about a couple months ago, March, coronavirus. Immediately, you began to see these illustrations in the paper of this spiky ball. My kids started drawing pictures of the spiky ball. We all had something we could visualize. Back then, they had no picture of the enemy. They didn’t even know the flu was a virus. It was truly invisible.
JAD:And yet this tiny unseen unspoken of force was reshaping human history in all kinds of surprising ways. This show began with a simple question. What happens afterward, after this? And Molly Webster, who you’ll hear from later in the program suggested well, let’s look back at what happened after that one. And that’s what we’re gonna do today. As we enter the summer of coronavirus and look forward to the fall, we have five stories of how the invisible hand of that flu has continued to guide and shape us for the last hundred years and has left the world a very different place.
Scary Stories
Why Are There So Many Female Ghosts?
Female ghosts seem to dominate the afterlife. Whether the spirits are real or not, the reasons for the disparity could be revealing.
If you drive south of San Antonio, Texas on Applewhite Road, past the fire station and the Toyota plant, and pull over just shy of the Medina River, you can walk a few hundred feet through tranquil forest and patchy sunlight to where a small bridge crosses a burbling stream just out of sight of the highway.
There, on certain evenings, when the last rays of light cut through deepening shadows, andthe sound of the windhas faded from the tree tops, you may have an experience you cannot easily explain. A rustle in the undergrowth, a flicker in your vision, the distinct clopping of hooves. You may not see her, but, as many visitors report, the Donkey Lady was nearby.
This quirkily-named phantom has for decades been said to haunt the San Antonio bridge. Visitors report the sound of hoofbeats and distant screams and the presence of a specter, her face and body disfigured, lurking nearby. Some even claim to have found hoofprints on their cars. Despite the apparent danger, or perhaps because of it, theDonkey Lady bridgehas become a popular spot with locals eager for a ghostly encounter, and a tourist attraction of sorts.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT ATLAS OBSCURA
The Haunted Past
What ghost stories of the formerly enslaved tell us about their lives.
In 1937, workers with the Federal Writers’ Project (F.W.P.), a New Deal program for unemployed writers, were dispatched to collect the testimonies of the last surviving generation of American slavery. The surveys, devised by the white folklorist John Lomax, included questions that could fill in the historical record, such as “Who were your masters?,” “How were you treated?” and “How did you learn that you were no longer a slave?” But interviewees were also encouraged to provide details about Southern Black life that would presumably titillate white readers. They were asked about folk remedies (“What charms did they wear and to keep off what diseases?”), music (“Tell about the baptizing; baptizing songs?”) and ghosts. “Do you believe in spirits?” one questionnaire read. Another did not even bother to phrase it as a question, simply commanding respondents to “tell about the ghosts you have seen.”
In the end, more than 2,300 narratives were gathered, and scholars who’ve examined them have detected what seems to be a bias among the collectors in favor of ghost stories. In her book, “Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project”(2016), the historian Catherine Stewart noted that, of the material on Black folklore collected in Arkansas, for example, “superstitions” and “ghosts” were the second largest categories, “folk songs” being the largest. In the Arkansas batch, there were 123 pages on “ghosts” and fewer than 20 on “births.” Across the slave narrative collection, the ghost stories stand out as literary marvels, showcasing Black storytelling prowess and deep spiritual engagement. But F.W.P. interviewers often took them literally, as the “embodiment of the naïveté and superstitious tendencies of Black folk.” Back in Washington, the white editors in charge of assembling the narratives into anthologies saw the ghost stories as something that could “provide color and human interest” for F.W.P. publications.
It’s no secret that F.W.P. slave narratives are compromised historical documents. Scholars have long discussed the various factors that affected their reliability, not least that the interviewers were overwhelmingly white. (Some were even related to the owners of the former slaves being interviewed.) However, the presence of an exoticizing white gaze does not diminish the objects themselves. Black spirituality might have been perceived through a racist lens, but there are other ways of seeing. The ghost stories — or “hant stories,” as they were colloquially called — were part of a belief system that, as the historian Lawrence Levine argued, prevented “legal slavery from being spiritual slavery.” In “Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom”(1977), Levine writes that the spirit world was an alternative to the one in which masters and overseers dominated. For the enslaved, it was “a world they shared with each other and which remained their own domain, free of control of those who ruled the earth.”
Though the last F.W.P. slave narratives were collected in 1939, the ghost stories continued to be extracted and reprinted much later, including in books like “Ghosts and Goosebumps: Ghost Stories, Tall Tales, and Superstitions From Alabama”(1981) and “Slave Ghost Stories: Tales of Hags, Hants, Ghosts, & Diamondback Rattlers” (2002). While the stories are by no means uniform in style or detail — some informants were more skilled storytellers than others — patterns do emerge. An unfulfilled yearning echoes across these stories,a palpable desire for divine justice in the absence of any earthly one. This is clear from the number of stories about slave owners being haunted by slaves. Jane Arrington, a former slave from near Raleigh, N.C., told her interviewer a tale her grandmother relayed to her about a slave named John May who was beaten to death by his masters but came back as a ghost to haunt them. “The white men groaned in their sleep and told John to go away. They said, ‘Go away, John. Please go away,’” Jane explained, adding, “John wouldn’t go away.” In another story, a slave named Joe tries to attack his master with a fence rail, but the master kills him instead. Joe then haunts the trees by the master’s home, shaking the branches whenever his favorite fruit, persimmons, are being collected.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES
Ghost Stories at Flagler College
Telling a spooky story around a campfire—or in a dorm room—may be the best way to keep a local legend alive.
Osceola, raised in the Muscogee Creek area of Alabama, migrated with his family to Florida after the Creek War (1813–1814). Arriving as a refugee, he became an influential leader inthe Seminole resistance against the US government’s “Indian Removal” policies. He served as an advisor to the Seminole chief, Micanopy, and was a key strategist in the fight against US government demands to cede territory and relocate to lands west of the Mississippi River.
On October 25, 1837, while negotiating a treaty under “white flag” protections, Osceola, along with eighty-one other members of the treaty party, were captured by the US Army. Despite this betrayal of the accepted rules of parley, which caused both national and international backlash, he was imprisoned in St. Augustine’s Castillo de San Marcos. He was soon transferred to Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, where he perished three months later.
Some in St. Augustine believe that Osceola’s ghost still haunts the city, even though he died in another state. Some even assert that he was executed in or near the city, not at Fort Moultrie at all, and that his head still “floats around” Castillo de San Marcos. Still others place the haunting at Fort Mose, north of St. Augustine.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT JSTOR DAILY
The Haunting of Drums and Shadows
On the stories and landscapes the Federal Writers’ Project left unexplored.
Savannah is haunted. That’s the first thing tourists learn about this city at the northern end of Georgia’s hundred-mile coast—a notion solidified in the popular imagination by the success ofMidnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, both the 1994 book byJohn Berendtand the subsequent film directed by Clint Eastwood.Midnightrevolves around a nouveau riche antiques dealer named Jim Williams. Berendt, formerly the editor ofNew Yorkmagazine, happened to be in Savannah in the early 1980s when Williams killed a roughneck rent boy; he chronicled the event’s reverberations through Savannah society, which he depicts as eccentric and decadent. “The whole of Savannah is an oasis,” an informant tells him. “We are isolated. Gloriously isolated!”
“I suspected that in Savannah I had stumbled on a rare vestige of the Old South,” Berendt concludes. This vestige isn’t exactly the plantation fantasy—for Berendt, the Old South seems to have something to do with an enduring, atavistic faith in certain habits and creeds. The white elite believe in social custom; they have their teas and luncheons. Williams, bred in small-town Georgia, is able to insinuate himself into this echelon, but he maintains connections to other worlds, too. Williams buttresses his defense with an extralegal approach: heengagesthe services of a black root worker named Minerva. (Related tohoodoo, root work is a West African–derived form of folk medicine or magic practiced in the South.) Williams explains to Berendt that Minerva had been the “common-law wife of Dr. Buzzard,” a famous voodoo practitioner. One of Dr. Buzzard’s specialties was in the legal realm, where he “was especially effective ‘defending’ clients in criminal cases. He’d sit in the courtroom and glare at hostile witnesses as he chewed the root.” After Dr. Buzzard died, Minerva continued his work both in and out of the courtroom. A central scene in the book is set in a cemetery: the midnight garden of the book’s title, where Minerva has Williams drop “nine shiny dimes” into the dirt while she communicates with his victim, whom she tries to persuade to “ease off a little.”
In some ways it was a familiar scene, and the notion of the southeast coast’s being “gloriously isolated” was not a novel proposition. Earlier in the century, a similar spirit undergirded another spooky book,Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes, a peculiar volume compiled in the 1930s by workers affiliated with the Federal Writers’ Project’s Savannah Unit. Other FWP workers in the South gathered oral histories of slavery; the Savannah Unit, under the leadership of a white woman named Mary Granger, embarked on a stranger and far more fraught mission. Inspired by the anthropologist Melville Herskovits, Granger believed the lack of outside influence had led black people to retain certain “African” cultural traits or “survivals.” Her idea of what these attributes were is expressed in the book’s title and in her introduction, which mentions “sorcery,” “root doctors,” “miracles and cures,” and “mystic rites.” One such rite would be familiar to Berendt’s readers: “Not very long ago when a man was arrested for murder,” Granger wrote, “his friends, wishing to save him, went to the grave of the murdered man, secured some dirt, and left three pennies on the grave.”
Who’s to say what did the trick, but Jim Williams was eventually acquitted, following his fourth trial.Midnightbecame a juggernaut, credited with boosting Savannah’s tourism industry while earning it a reputation as uniquely spooky—the U.S.’s “most haunted” city, according to a 2002 designation by the American Institute of Parapsychology (an honor conceded to be “more honorary than scientific”). The Minerva scenes were more or less tangential to the book’s action. Combined with the fact of the murder itself, the strange social scene surrounding it, and the city’s gruesome preexisting history (slavery, several nineteenth-century yellow fever epidemics), they nonetheless seemed to suggest a place imbued to its bones with the macabre—a place where the dead were unusually close at hand. In 2007 the scholar Glenn W. Gentry credited the book with sparking a “boom in Savannah’s ghost tourism trade,” which hasn’t really flagged. Visitors still tour the city in repurposed hearses, walk through colonial and antebellum cemeteries, and pay for admission into purportedly haunted mansions lining Savannah’s famous squares.
Published in 1940,Drums and Shadowswas nowhere near as successful asMidnight, but its impact was at least as profound: if Berendt’s book helped shape Savannah’s reputation in the 1990s and beyond,Drums and Shadowsdid similar work for the whole of the Georgia coast a half century before.1
It continues to be a valuable source for historians, folklorists, the descendants of enslaved people, novelists, artists, and many others, though it was always a plainly fraught endeavor. If white writers traveling the American South in the 1930s in pursuit of what they perceived to be the most “exotic” aspects of people then living under the violent terror of Jim Crow sounds like an ethical and methodological train wreck—well, it is.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT LAPHAM’S QUARTERLY
The Indebted Dead
Tracing the history of the Grateful Dead folktale and the evolving obligations of being alive.
In 1965 the San Francisco band the Warlocks needed a new name after learning another band was already using theirs. Their guitarist, Jerry Garcia, the legend goes, opened the 1955 edition ofThe Funk and Wagnalls New Practical Standard Dictionary, Britannica World Language Editionto a random page and launched his finger at an entry. He landed on “The Grateful Dead,” and what came next, as they say, is history.
What came before is also history. What was this preexisting “Grateful Dead” that had already earned an entry in the dictionary?
The term that Garcia landed on referred to a specific genre of folklore. The structure of a “grateful dead” tale is easy to follow, best captured in a storyCicerorecounts inOn Divination, first published in 44bc. The poet Simonides, Cicero writes, “once saw the dead body of some unknown man lying exposed and buried it. Later, when he had it in mind to go onboard a ship, he was warned in a vision by the person he had buried not to do so and that if he did he would perish in a shipwreck. Therefore he turned back and all the others who sailed were lost.”
A more fleshed-out version of the story appears in the late thirteenth-century romanceRichars li biaus(Richard the Handsome), which tells the story of the eponymous wandering knight. Setting off through a foreign land in pursuit of glory, Richars wastes so much of his father’s money that he can’t enter a tournament for the hand of a maiden. A benefactor gives him a horse, attendants, and some gold to compete, but en route he spends part of his money giving a great feast at a city in Austria. At the feast he is astonished to discover a corpse suspended from the beams and is told that the dead man owed the lord of the house a great sum of money. Richars gives away everything he has, including his armor, to pay the debt and bury the man. With no means to compete in the tournament, he wanders hopelessly. He then meets a mysterious White Knight who provides Richars with a new set of armor and a better horse. Richars wins the tournament, and then offers the White Knight either the hand of the maiden or the property won. The White Knight refuses both, reveals himself to be the ghost of the indebted man, and disappears.
The plot element was well known to nineteenth-century folklorists, but the stories featuring this arc weren’t examined together until the folklorist Gordon Hall Gerould published his 1908 bookThe Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story. Gerould found evidence of the Grateful Dead story in folklore and myth from Siberia to Spain and from Iceland to Armenia. The narrative is so old and widespread that it was almost impossible to divine its origins—yet until Gerould’s book, no one had thought to bring them together for study. “The combination of narrative themes is so frequent a phenomenon in folk and formal literature,” he wrote at the time, “that one almost forgets to wonder at it.”
The Grateful Dead, at its essence, is nothing more than this: a traveler comes across a corpse, unburied, and endeavors to give it a proper burial. Some time later, the traveler meets a stranger who offers a form of aid, and who subsequently is revealed to be the ghost of the dead man. Cicero’s story offers its most essential elements, but in most versions of the story the reason the body hasn’t been buried in the first place is due to the deceased having unpaid debts. There is a story out of Lithuania in which a king pays his last fortune to bury a dead man and in doing so is forced to become a merchant, traveling the seas to regain his wealth. He rescues a princess and marries her. The princess’ father doesn’t approve, of course, and sends a messenger to take the couple on a voyage; at sea, the messenger throws the former king overboard, but he’s saved by a man in a boat who reveals himself to be the dead man. In the Irish folktale “Beauty of the World,” it is a king’s son who discovers a church where four men are arguing over a body. The dead man owed two of the men five pounds, and they refuse to release it to the man’s sons unless they pay; they don’t have the money, so it is the king’s son who pays the debt. Subsequently, a red-haired stranger appears and, through a series of trickster-like machinations, helps the king’s son win the hand of a woman before revealing himself to be the ghost of the dead man. In one Norwegian variant, an executed man has been frozen in a block of ice on display outside the tavern for villagers to spit on; the young man who frees and buries the corpse later meets a helper who similarly repays his generosity.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT LAPHAM’S QUARTERLY
Legends and Lore
A roadside marker program in New York State embraces the gray area between official history and local lore.
One day in the early 19th century, a woman was killed with a silver bullet shot through her kitchen window in Esperance, New York. In some versions of the tale, she had made local cattle disappear, caused crops to fail, and was able to walk on water. In others, she was a French woman, widowed by a Napoleonic Wars soldier and unable to speak English. She was shunned, called a witch, and eventually, the local people voted on her murder. They buried her upside down, with a stake in her head. An evergreen tree was planted to mark the grave. Orso the story goes.
It’s dark lore for a town whose name means “hope” in French. Yet a year ago this week, on New York’s Route 20, the Esperance Historical Societydedicated a sign to the “Esperance Witch.”It was the latest addition to the roster of Legends and Lore Markers, meaning that the story’s murky details did not get in the way of official commemoration.
Since 2015, theLegends and Lore Marker Grant Programhas fundedover 35roadside signs commemorating New York folklore. A partnership between theWilliam G. Pomeroy Foundationand theNew York Folklore Society, the program offers grants to municipalities and nonprofits to document folklore in their communities. Red and tan markers — very similar in shape and style to the blue and yellow state historical signs that were mostly erectedin the 1920s and ‘30s— are adorned with a stargazing moon. Instead of describing Revolutionary War battles or famous figures’ birthplaces, the new signs offer accounts of witchcraft, spectral encounters, eccentric hermits who danced for pennies, and other unexplained phenomena. One stands outside the Goshen Courthouse, regaling visitors with the tale of Claudius Smith, a “reputed Tory marauder” hanged there in 1776. (Allegedly his skull is still in the masonry over the courthouse door.) Another, on the outskirts of Canaseraga, recounts the “hairy women” first sighted in 1926, who fled into the forest and lived there like wild creatures. Travelers along Route 29 may notice a sign for “Spook Rock,” where a “beautiful Indian maiden” and her lover from an opposing tribe rest. When church bells ring, the rock — the story goes — turns over, and the star-crossed lovers appear.
Ellen McHale, the New York Folklore Society’s executive director, believes that the Legends and Lore program can give people a valuable glimpse into the kinds of stories that had currency in previous generations. “It doesn’t necessarily show up in the historical record,” she says, “but it’s really a story about the community itself, and it’s important to recognize those stories that people tell about themselves.”
In 2016, the Friends of Long Point Park put up a Legends and Lore marker tothe “Phantom Indian of Conesus Lake,”a hoax by a boat tour operator named Colonel S. Toohey. Between the 1920s and 1970s, Toohey earned local fame in the western edge of the Finger Lakes by offering tourists glimpses of a ghostly apparition (played by a person in costume decorated with phosphorescent paint). Another 2016 sign in Ossining’s Sparta Cemetery commemorates an 1880s figure known as “The Leatherman,” who for “no known reason” walked a 365-mile loop every 34 days between New York and Connecticut dressed in 60 pounds of leather. The Town of Brookfieldunveiled a marker in 2017for the Gorton Lake Turtle. It reads “As Tom Dorsey cleared land his wagon load of huge rocks couldn’t be moved by horses. A giant turtle surfaced and dragged [the] wagon into the lake.”
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT BUNK HISTORY
The Elusive, Maddening Mystery of the Bell Witch
A classic ghost story has something to say about America—200 years ago, 100 years ago, and today.
Sometimes we don’t pay closeenough attention to the stories we’re given. That, at least, is the message of many a ghost story. Take the horror filmThe Blair Witch Project, the 1999 cult blockbuster by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez that purports to tell the true story of three filmmakers who disappeared while working on a documentary about the legend of the Blair Witch, a ghost that haunts the forests near Burkittsville,Maryland. The young people—actors, all, though it didn’t seem that way at first—discount their interviews with locals (“Do you remember something that Mary Brown said the other day?” one of them asks her companions, before muttering to herself, “f*ck, I wasn’t listening to her because I thought she was a lunatic.”), only to find themselves the witch’s next victims. It is, of course, a common trope in ghost tales and horror films: We know the outlines of the story, we tell it to spook our friends, but we haven’treallylistened. The mistake only becomes apparent once it’s too late. This is true both for the characters within a story and for us, the audience of readers or viewers. Ghostly narratives carry lessons for us, too, even if we’re not in imminent danger.
According to Ben Rock,The Blair Witch Project’s production designer and the person responsible for the film’s mythology, the Blair Witch was inspired by (among other stories) an actual legend: the Bell Witch of Tennessee.* In addition to Myrick and Sánchez’s film (and its two sequels), there’s also 2005’sAn American Hauntingand several direct-to-video offerings, along with an A&E series,Cursed: The Bell Witch.The legend has inspired all manner of music, from Charles Faulkner Bryant’s classical cantata tothe Seattle-based doom metal bandthat took Bell Witch as its name. There is alsothe tourist trap in Adams, Tennessee, about an hour north of Nashville: the Bell Witch Cave, which remains enduringly popular despite having only the most tenable connection to the legend itself. In a dozen ways, it’s a story we’ve been telling over and over again, as if we know it, without really paying attention to what it’s trying to tell us.
The story of what happened to the Bell family two hundred years ago is unsettling and terrifying, to be sure, but it lingers not just because it’s a good ghost tale, but because it’s built around a series of anxieties that have come to define much of American culture: about what happens when a patriarch loses control of his family, when religions come into conflict, and what takes place out on the borderlands between civilization and the wild.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT ATLAS OBSCURA
Haint Blue, the Ghost-Tricking Color of Southern Homes and Gullah Folktales
Cultural histories of unusual hues.
Raw Headis perhaps the most hideous of boogeymen—assembled from parts borrowed from various species, which somehow makes him even more fearsome than Frankenstein’s hom*o sapiens mix-and-match monster. While the story ofRaw Head originated in 1500s England, it really took root in the American South, where Raw Head and his sidekick Bloody Bones became oft-invoked figures used to scare kids and bond adults. According to Appalachian historian Dave Tabler, the word haint can refer to an angry dead spirit, but also to “an undefinable something that scares the bejeevers out of you.” Raw Bones is a haint story, and haint stories are the reason that southern porch ceilings are often painted a pale, sweet, powdery sky blue—a group of light shades known collectively as “Haint Blue.”
In the 1700s, Raw Head and his fellow ghosties inadvertently spawned a design craze that continues today and is celebrated bydesign bloggersandfolklorists alike. Like Millennial pink, Haint blue isn’t a specific color so much as a collection of colors—what makes the color Haint blue isn’t the color itself, but rather how it is used. Robin’s egg blue on a porch ceiling is Haint blue, but Robin’s egg blue in a bedroom is just that—light blue. According to Gullah folk traditions, blue ceilings and blue doors can keep unwanted specters, phantoms, spooks, and apparitions from strolling in through the front door. It fools them into thinking that the door is part of the sky, that the porch is surrounded by water, that the house is protected by something sublime, more powerful and permanent than a coat of paint. It’s trickery though design, and trickery is something the Gullah people knew well.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE AWL
A Plea to Resurrect the Christmas Tradition of Telling Ghost Stories
Though the practice is now more associated with Halloween, spooking out your family is well within the Christmas spirit.
For the last hundred years, Americans have kept ghosts in their place, letting them out only in October, in the run-up to our only real haunted holiday, Halloween. But it wasn’t always this way, and it’s no coincidence that the most famous ghost story is a Christmas story—or, put another way, that the most famous Christmas story is a ghost story. Charles Dickens’A Christmas Carolwas first published in 1843, and its story about a man tormented by a series of ghosts the night before Christmasbelonged to a once-rich, now mostly forgotten tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. Dickens’ supernatural yuletide terror was no outlier, since for much of the 19th century, was the holiday indisputably associated with ghosts and the specters.
“Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories,” humorist Jerome K. Jerome wrote in his 1891 collection,Told After Supper.“Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood.”
Telling ghost stories during winter is a hallowed tradition, a folk custom stretches back centuries, when families would wile away the winter nights with tales of spooks and monsters. “A sad tale’s best for winter,” Mamillius proclaims in Shakespeare’sThe Winter’s Tale:“I have one. Of sprites and goblins.” And the titular Jew of Malta in Christopher Marlowe’s play at one point muses, “Now I remember those old women’s words, Who in my wealth would tell me winter’s tales, And speak of spirits and ghosts by night.”
Based in folklore and the supernatural, it was a tradition the Puritans frowned on, so it never gained much traction in America. Washington Irving helped resurrect a number of forgotten Christmas traditions in the early 19th century, but it really was Dickens who popularized the notion of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. The Christmas issues of the magazines he edited,Household Wordsand (after 1859)All the Year Round,regularly included ghost stories—not justA Christmas Carolbut also works likeThe ChimesandThe Haunted Man,both of which also feature an unhappy man who changes his ways after visitation by a ghost. Dickens’ publications, which were not just winter-themed but explicitly linked to Christmas, helped forge a bond between the holiday and ghost stories; Christmas Eve, he would claim in “The Seven Poor Travellers” (1854), is the “witching time for Story-telling.”
Dickens discontinued the Christmas publications in 1868, complaining to his friend Charles Fechter that he felt “as if I had murdered a Christmas number years ago (perhaps I did!) and its ghost perpetually haunted me.” But by then the ghost of Christmas ghost stories had taken on an afterlife of its own, and other writers rushed to fill the void that Dickens had left. By the time of Jerome’s 1891Told After Supper,he could casually joke about a tradition long ensconced in Victorian culture.
If some of these later ghost stories haven’t entered the Christmas canon as Dickens’ work did, there’s perhaps a reason. As William Dean Howells would lament in aHarper’seditorial in 1886, the Christmas ghost tradition suffered from the gradual loss of Dickens’ sentimental morality: “the ethical intention which gave dignity to Dickens’ Christmas stories of still earlier date has almost wholly disappeared.”
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
Who Knows? Radio and the Paranormal
A radio drama series from 1941 based on Dr. Hereward Carrington’s case records of psychic phenomena.
Who knows “Who Knows?”? This program was produced for the Mutual Broadcasting System from March 16, 1940 through August 29, 1941. Few sources on old time radio mention it, which maybe a reflection of its short run and somewhat narrow distribution.
The weekly 15-minute program explored the world of psychic phenomena. On early broadcasts, announcer George Lowther described it as “a series of dramatizations based on the case records of Dr. Hereward Carrington, internationally recognized authority in the study of psychic phenomena.”
Lowther then extolled the show’s sponsor, Griffin Manufacturing and their shoe polish line, before yielding the microphone to Jack Johnstone, the show’s creator, writer and director, who elaborated, “in the study of clairvoyance, telepathy, premonitions and other psychic phenomena, one of the world’s greatest authorities is Dr. Hereward Carrington, author of over 100 books on the subject. He’s come to the conclusion that by far the greater percentage of so called psychics are fraudulent.”
Carrington (1880-1959) was indeed a prolific author of everything from “The Boy’s Book of Magic: Including Chapters on Hindu Magic, Handcuff Tricks, Side Show and Animal Tricks, Ventriloquism, Etc.; Together with Numerous Sleights, Now Published for the First Time” to “Modern Psychical Phenomena; Recent Researches and Speculations.” He specialized in exposing and debunking dishonest mediums and spiritualists, and had even starred in a series of silent films for Bray Studios in 1918 titled “Unmasking the Mediums.” Nevertheless, Carrington believed passionately that some psychic phenomena were real. At times, the show was a primer for discourse on the paranormal. Carrington would describe concepts such as “premonitions” or “sorcery” with a story from his research, and cast members would act out a short drama that fit neatly in the show’s 15 minute time limit.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT NOW SEE HEAR!
One of America’s Best
Ambrose Bierce deviated from the refined eeriness of English-style ghost stories for his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation.
Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) is arguably the finest not-quite-first-rate writer in nineteenth-century American literature. Civil War veteran, contrarian journalist, master of the short story, muckraker, epigrammatist, and versifier, he is today most widely known for that word hoard of cynical definitions,The Devil’s Dictionary, and for a handful of shockingly cruel stories about the Civil War.
In those dozen or so “tales of soldiers,” gathered in the collection eventually titledIn the Midst of Life(1892, augmented in 1898 and 1909), a brother shoots his brother, a sniper is compelled to kill his father, and a cannoneer obeys the order to destroy his own house, where his wife and child await his return from battle. The best known of thesecontes cruels, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” has been called—by Kurt Vonnegut, himself a kinder, gentler Bierce—the greatest short story in American literature. Surely, no first-time reader ever forgets the shock of its final sentences.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NEW YORK REVIEW
How Early Americans Narrated Disease
Early Americans coped with disease through narratives that found divine providence and mercy in suffering.
In April, as COVID-19 marched wearily into its second year, my mother became suddenly and unnervingly ill. Barely coherent, she was hospitalized.
Only a couple of days earlier she had been playing with my children, hiking in Northwest Arkansas, dyeing Easter eggs, and—as my mom tends to do—talking non-stop. Now, in the hospital, she sounded like she was in another world. Her normally sharp mind became fanciful and her sentences slipped away into empty pauses.
My mother didn’t have COVID, our initial fear. She had developed sepsis, an extreme and life-threatening physical response to an infection in the blood or other bodily tissue. According to theCDC, each year approximately 1.7 million Americans develop sepsis, and 270,000 die. It accounts for one-third of in-patient deaths.
I am a scholar of religion, sickness, bodies, and medicine, and over the last 15 months I have often been asked to reflect on COVID-19, vaccines, and quarantines. But in early America, the period which I study, the common experience of illness was less like COVID, and more like the run-of-the-mill health crisis my mother experienced: utterly mundane and yet intimately terrifying.
It took the experience of being over a thousand miles away from my mother, unable to do anything but talk to my dad over the phone and hope to catch her briefly awake, to gain a new perspective on how my work relates to the current pandemic. Suddenly, in an immediate and personal way, I saw the parallels between routine illness and epidemic disease. In my mother’s quiet, I became uncomfortably aware of the silencing power of coronavirus, the grievous separations, and the challenges of storytelling.
Early Americans actively responded to sickness and disease through narrative—seeking to find God’s providential power and mercy in their suffering. They worked out these narratives in their day-to-day encounters with illness, and they applied them to experiences of epidemic. As I tried to work out my own story in the midst of the pandemic, I was at a loss. And yet, I am convinced that, as in early America, stories are still necessary. They offer solace, they allow us to see both mistakes and good fortune, they invite us to reorganize and reimagine the disturbed plot of our lives, and they give us a path forward.
Individual, local, and familial accounts of sickness were widespread and important in early America. In my research, I’ve found journals, memoirs, and letters of these sickness stories. They are all shaped by Protestant teachings that pushed followers to understand illness and pain providentially. This was instilled not only in church, but also through stories shared among families and communities.
Early Americans had been trained in such personal accounts by the importance of conversion narratives, which they heard testified in church or read in popular books like John Bunyan’sPilgrim’s Progressor James Janeway’sA Token for Children. Sickness narratives mapped onto the cadences of conversion narratives, with their emphases on repentance, faith, and salvation. In describing sickness, early Americans were to look back and reflect, to admit their failings and their frailties, and to turn with dependence to God.
Sickness accounts were published and distributed widely, especially when they were written by well-known religious leaders or mission communities. Frances Asbury, the Methodist itinerant minister often wrote of sickness in his journals, which were published in theArminian Magazinebeginning in 1789. In the German Pietist Lutheran community of Ebenezer, Georgia, the minister Johann Martin Boltzius wrote in detail about sickness in his family and the wider community from 1735 to 1753. His journals were published in Halle and Augsburg for a wide audience of coreligionists and financial supporters.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT ZÓCALO PUBLIC SQUARE
The Vigilante World of Comic Books
A sweeping new history traces the rise of characters caught in a Manichaean struggle between good and evil.
For those of us who grew up enjoying (and have grown old romanticizing) the bright, resplendent four-color pleasures of comic books, it may be time to admit we’ve been had. It may once have seemed that comics offered intelligent young men and women an escape from the awfulness of middle-American life. But seeing today how thoroughly those serial fantasies have infiltrated every aspect of modern culture, it’s beginning to look as if comics largely reinforced our worst impulses and instincts.
From their early days, comic books taught kids about a Manichaean universe in which subterranean, irrational, and irredeemably evil forces continually threatened society’s superficial order. The popular, early detective stripDick Tracyenvisions criminals as creatures from the “lower orders,” such as a “tramp” who flagrantly steals rides on trains (and murders the hard-working guard who tries to stop him). Later they develop into genetically twisted, born-bad mutant-freaks such as Mumbles, Pruneface, Flattop, and the Mole—a rogues’ gallery often referred to as “the Grotesques.” Their collective homicidal methods include stabbing, shooting, immolation, and freezing people to death in refrigerator cars or scalding them in steam baths. To stop these evil-mutant types from taking over the world, Dick Tracy and his square-jawed fellow cops meet force with force, firepower with firepower. And they always, always win. As one newspaper editorial replied to complaints about the violence in Dick Tracy: “The sooner a child finds out what kind of world it is, the better he or she is equipped to get along in it.”
What children “learned” from early crime comics was that people with lots of money were at the endless mercy of people without any. From the time The Batman first appeared inDetective Comicsin 1939, his enemies were, like Tracy’s, noted for their disfigurements—such as the Joker, Two-Face, and Clayface. And in a typical story, “crime” was something usually committed by people with nothing, against those with too much—often by means of jewel-thievery and house-breaking, or by robbing banks and trains. In The Batman’s first appearance, Commissioner Gordon enlists Bruce Wayne to investigate the murder of “old Lambert … at his mansion”; and “victims” of the next two issues include both the Van Smithsandthe Vander Smiths. The Batman routinely hangs men outside high skyscraper windows or pummels them senseless in order to obtain confessions. No Miranda rights forthesecreeps. They were born bad and deserved everything they got.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NEW REPUBLIC
Moral Injuries
Remembering what the Iraq War was like, 20 years later.
“Shock and awe.” Twenty years ago today, that was the phrase everyone kept saying as America invaded Iraq. There will be lots of analysis on this anniversary, discussions about what happened, why, and whether or not it was worth the cost.
But this is something different.
I spent nearly 1,500 days downrange in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I am still unpacking my own experience. Those memories are not pleasant, especially those from the Summer of Death in Baghdad, when destruction, futility, and defeat hung in the air. For me, there is no way to get over it until I go back through it.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT BULWARK+
An AIDS Activist’s Archive
June Holmes was in her late twenties, working as a social worker on Long Island, when she first heard about “this thing called AIDS.”
June Holmes was in her late twenties, working as a social worker on Long Island, when she first heard about “this thing called AIDS.” It was sometime in the first half of the 1980s, and Holmes was sitting in her living room with two good friends. One, a nurse, turned to the other, a gay man, and said, “Be careful. Something really awful is happening to gay men.”
Holmes, who had just moved to Long Island, was already planning her exit—she wanted to return to New Haven, Connecticut, where she had lived while earning her undergraduate degree in social work at Southern Connecticut State University. Her friend’s warning piqued her interest, so when she started seeing newspaper headlines about AIDSandNew Haven not long thereafter, she paid attention. The articles were, unusually for the time, not about a gay man with AIDS, but about a woman with AIDS—whom the newspapers identified using her full name. The woman, Carlotta Locklear, was almost exactly the same age as Holmes, but in pretty much every other respect the two women differed: Holmes was white, Locklear was Black; Holmes was educated and safely middle-class, while Locklear was a precariously housed sex worker and intravenous drug user.
The papers claimed, damningly, that Locklear knew she had AIDS, but was continuing to have sex with clients anyway. Holmes recalled years later that the articles “just kind of broke my heart.” They disclosed so much personal information about Locklear—including the fact that she had a two-year-old son, Ray Shaun, who also had AIDS—information that almost certainly came from a cop or a health care worker, its disclosure a form of abuse.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NEW YORK REVIEW
Pocahontas, Remembered
After 400 years, reality has begun to replace the lies.
Four hundred and sixteen years ago on December 4 of this year, John Smith was captured by the Powhatan Confederacy while he was out searching for food on the Chickahominy River in the Tidewater area of Virginia. He was captured by Chief Powhatan’s brother and taken along a route through many Powhatan Confederacy towns before reaching Chief Powhatan. It was during this encounter that Smith interpreted his head on two stones as an imminent execution; and imagined that the Chief’s daughter, Pocahontas, risked her life to save him from certain death. But Algonquin culture would suggest this was not the case. This was more likely an adoption ritual and Chief Powhatan made John Smith an honorary werowance or leader, seeing him as a kind of leader from the colonists.
One of the most well-known stories about the relationship between colonists and Native Americans is the story of Pocahontas, John Smith and John Rolfe —mostly believed to be fabricated. But it has taken almost four hundred years to reach a point where most serious scholars no longer take John Smith’s story as fact. But it was also due to a lack of understanding of Algonquin culture that would have immediately highlighted the fallacy of John Smith’s claims.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
The Feminist of Oz
Learn more about the story of Matilda Gage, whose writings inspired the witches in “The Wizard of Oz.”
In the classic 1939 filmThe Wizard of Oz,Dorothy is asked, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” These two opposing archetypes, immortalized by L. Frank Baum’s children’s story published decades earlier, have a little-known feminist history explored in a recent installation in our Joyce B. Cowin niche on the 4th floor. Baum drew inspiration for the tale from his mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage. She wasan ardent suffragist, abolitionist, and advocate for Indigenous rights, who held more radical views than many of her contemporaries. Gage’s writing explored the historical suppression of women’s power and intellect—including the history of the witch archetype.
Born in Cicero, New York, in 1826, Gage is often remembered for her collaborations with fellow suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The trio co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 and co-authored the multiple volumeHistory of Woman Suffragefirst published in 1881. However, Gage publicly broke with Stanton and Anthony in 1890 after the latter two suffrage leaders welcomed conservative Christian women into their coalition. Gage called for a new, more “progressive” suffrage organization. She railed against the influence of religion within the suffrage movement and called “the Church” the “ever most unscrupulous enemy of freedom.”
Gage identified the witch stigma as a historical source of women’s oppression through religious institutions in her 1893 book,Woman, Church & State. As she interpreted the history of Christianity, “The church degraded woman by destroying her self-respect, and teaching her to feel consciousness of guilt in the very fact of her existence.” Moreover, she argued that “the extreme wickedness of woman” was “taught as a cardinal doctrine” with “witchcraft being regarded as [woman’s] strongest weapon” against Christian society. Gage decried these beliefs and pointed to the persecution of witchcraft as a form of physical violence and a cause of psychological and spiritual harm targeting women: “It is impossible for us at the present day to conceive the awful horror falling upon a family into which an accusation of witchcraft had come. Not alone the shame and disgrace of such a charge; the terrors of a violent death under the most painful form; the sudden hurling of the family from ease and affluence to the most abject poverty; but above all the belief that unending torment by fire pursued the lost soul through eternity, made a combination of terrors appalling to the stoutest heart.”
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Fear and Horror
The History of American Fear
An interview with horror historian David J. Skal.
You’ve spent decades writing about horror and American history. What have you learned?
Horror movies provide a secret history of modern times. All the great social cataclysms and traumas of at least the 20th century seem to have put in motion, decade by decade, new patterns in the kinds of entertainment we use to scare ourselves. And I think what we’re doing is processing unpleasant information in such a way that we don’t have to look at it too directly. It’s not exactly catharsis; I invented the term “catharsis interruptus,” which maybe describes it better as a half-remedy, a temporary coping mechanism for dealing with the conundrums and challenges and traumas of modern life. Something that at least gets us through the night.
When do we first start to see horror films in America? What are these early films like?
In American silent cinema, there were often scary stories and terrifying characters, usually played by Lon Chaney, the famous “man of a thousand faces.” But they were always human beings, and if something seemed to be ghostly or supernatural, it had to be explained away as a criminal enterprise.
That wasn’t the case in Europe, where the early cinema embraced the outright fantastic from the very beginning — the trick films of Georges Méliès, for instance. And then there were the German expressionist classics like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and “Nosferatu” — which were not escapist entertainment, but rather self-conscious art films intended to embody metaphors about the Great War. In “Caligari,” you have this malignant authoritarian figure sending forth his sleepwalker to kill and be killed, just as untold numbers of soldiers had been in the Great War. And in the original promotion for “Nosferatu,” there was this idea that the vampire represented the cosmic vampire of war itself, which had drained the blood out of Europe.
The European and the American traditions came together at the beginning of the talkie era, when Universal Pictures produced “Dracula,” which was the very first time that Hollywood had taken a chance on an outright supernatural premise. Dracula was not a criminal; he was a 500 year old demon from hell. The film was a freak success. It came out in 1931, the worst year of the Great Depression, and literally saved Universal from bankruptcy, as did “Frankenstein,” which they brought out very quickly after they realized what a success they had on their hands with “Dracula.” So even though “Dracula” is not a polished or artistically innovative film — in fact, it really creaks — it’s still one of the most influential films Hollywood ever released because it opened up the dormant possibilities of the fantastic and the supernatural.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, PBS
The 1992 Horror Film That Made a Monster Out of a Chicago Housing Project
In Candyman, the notorious Cabrini-Green complex is haunted by urban myths and racial paranoia.
In the 1992 horror filmCandyman, Helen, a white graduate student researching urban legends, is looking into the myth of a hook-handed apparition who is said to appear when his name is uttered five times—“Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman.” She ventures to the site where the supernatural slasher is supposed to have disemboweled a victim. Alone, of course, she enters a men’s public toilet at Cabrini-Green, which in real life was the city’s most infamous public housing complex. This solitary building, surrounded by sheer-faced towers, arouses a queasy feeling of both desolation and being watched by unseen multitudes.
Though Candyman is rumored to dwell inside one of the looming high-rises, what’s most terrifying here is really the idea of the inner-city location. Decades before writer-director Bernard Rose’s horror flick arrived in theaters, public housing for many Americans had come to represent the unruliness and otherness of U.S. cities. And Cabrini-Green stood as the symbol of every troubled housing project—a bogeyman that conjured fears of violence, poverty, and racial antagonism.
Like many mid-20th-century public housing projects across the Northeast and Midwest, Cabrini-Green was conceived as a model of civic redevelopment, and as a source for a more democratic form of urban living. It was built in stages on Chicago’s Near North Side beginning in the 1940s—first with barracks-style row houses and then, in the 1950s and 1960s, augmented by 23 towers on “superblocks” closed off to through streets and commercial uses. It contained 3,600 public housing units in total, with a population exceeding 15,000, packed tightly into a mere 70 acres of land.
The Cabrini-Green area, along the banks of the Chicago River’s North Fork, previously had been an industrial slum, home to a succession of poor immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Sweden, and southern Italy, in addition to a growing number of African Americans who had fled from the Jim Crow South. The smell of sulfur and the bright flames of a nearby gasworks had given the river district the nickname “Little Hell.” House fires, infant mortality, pneumonia, and juvenile delinquency all occurred there at many times the rate of the city as a whole.
Public housing was seen as a cure for the area’s decay and disrepair. At the dedication of the Cabrini row houses, in 1942, Mayor Edward Kelley declared that the modest and orderly buildings “symbolize the Chicago that is to be. We cannot continue as a nation, half slum and half palace. This project sets an example for the wide reconstruction of substandard areas which will come after the war.”
Then, as now, the for-profit real estate market had failed most low-income renters. During the 1940s, the rental vacancy rate in Chicago fell to less than one percent. A quarter of the existing homes were falling apart and needed to be replaced. In the city’s segregated black neighborhoods, families were excluded from the open housing market, and conditions there were even more dire. New public housing offered renters a kind of salvation—from cold-water flats, firetraps, and capricious evictions. For many families, the Chicago Housing Authority promise of a “decent, safe and sanitary home” felt like a leap into the middle class.
But as time went on, the Chicago Housing Authority, like many big-city authorities, was perennially underfunded and disastrously mismanaged. In Chicago, as elsewhere, high-rise developments were built intentionally in neighborhoods that were already segregated racially. After the 1950s, as large numbers of Chicagoans fled the city for the suburbs, and manufacturing jobs disappeared as well, public housing populations became poorer and more uniformly black. The amount collected in rent—as a proportion of a resident’s income—declined. Deficits ballooned; maintenance and repairs lagged.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT ZÓCALO PUBLIC SQUARE
‘The Exorcist’ at 50: How One Horror Movie Shocked the World
Could a movie about a girl possessed by the devil really have caused audience members to faint and lose their lunch at theaters?
Of all the heads to spin, why this one?
That question was at the core of the dispute between the director William Friedkin and the screenwriter William Peter Blatty during the making of “The Exorcist.” Their artistic argument was not merely about narrative or character, but the fundamental meaning of the movie.
Blatty, a devout Catholic whose screenplay was an adaptation of his best-selling novel, aimed to make a movie about how an evil demon tests the faith of a priest, Father Damien Karras, through taking over the body of an innocent girl. In an interview more than a decade ago at his Maryland home, Blatty told me that he aimed for more than scares. He took exorcism seriously, and perceived a real and urgent threat. “There are demons running all over that campus,” he said about Georgetown University, the school he attended and the setting for the movie.
Friedkin, an agnostic Jew, was less invested in the religious message but was fascinated by Blatty’s story, which follows an increasingly desperate mother as she tries to explain why her daughter is behaving strangely. After exhausting medical options, she contacts Karras, a priest questioning his faith.
To Friedkin, the seeming randomness of this girl was part of what made the movie so frightening. He preferred some ambiguity, so he cut out two scenes: one that spells out how the priest is being targeted, the other a comforting coda where a detective talks to a friend of Karras. These changes rattled Blatty, who thought they snipped the message right out of the movie. Friedkin told him: “I’m not doing a commercial for the Catholic Church.”
Blatty appealed to the studio to restore the changes but got nowhere. By its premiere, he felt his movie had shifted from being about the virtue and triumph of faith into exactly the kind of morally indifferent gross-out he didn’t want to make.
Blatty and Friedkin stopped talking to each other but later reconciled. (Blatty died in 2017, and Friedkin died this past August.) As a “gift,” Friedkin restored the cuts when the movie was rereleased in 2000. But the original, which you can still see streaming on Max, hits harder. Its abrupt ending and refusal to overexplain are strengths. Not knowing why this girl is being tormented is far more horrifying than the narrative satisfaction of pat closure.
The religious conviction of Blatty’s story still comes across, but with more dimension. “The Exorcist” works on multiple fears of the unknown: the confusion of a parent over the changes of a child approaching puberty; the intimidating jargon of doctors. But its most important fear, one achieved through the clash of aesthetics between Blatty and Friedkin, stems from the mysteries of faith. It holds onto the anxiety of inexplicable awe in the face of an overwhelming world, something horror and religion share.
Sometimes the best work comes not from an artist achieving a vision but compromising it.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES
Rocky Horror Has Surprising Roots in Victorian Seances
‘Time Warp’ all the way back to the 1800s.
“Worms will crawl over yourface! Ghosts will roam the aisles!” Dr. Silkini warns as the Frankenstein monster slowly comes to life onstage, “If the lights go out, stay in your seats!” Suddenly possessed by a fit of rage, the monster strangles the hunchbacked assistant and charges into the audience with a roar. As the front row squeals in anticipation, there is a blinding flash, and the lights suddenly go off.
Pandemonium erupts in the pitch black theater. There are screams, macabre laughter, wild howling. Glowing skulls appear and disappear. Something slimy slaps your head and slithers over your face. You furiously bat away what indeed feels like worms. A strange luminous form floats overhead. On the stage, a kick-line of skeletons dance and then fly apart. The little boy next to you turns, and his face glows in the dark.
A moment later, the logo for Universal Pictures flickers to life on the movie screen. Everyone giggles with relief as they settle back to watch a cheesy horror film.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT ATLAS OBSCURA
Creaky Boards and Cobwebs
Film critic David Edelstein reflects on the history of haunted houses in the movies.
Ed Ayers: You know, guys, we’ve been talking for the last hour about the dream of American home ownership, but a lot of people have made money off the nightmare of home ownership. And I’m not talking about those people who are handing out sub-prime mortgages. I’m talking about Hollywood. Just thing about it. Just recently, I’ve seen all these ads for movies. Dream House and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and if you can believe it, the third installment of Paranormal Activity. But this genre of the modern haunted house was created in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The post-Nixon years when in movies like Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror, the houses themselves really take a starring role and a scary starring role. Why would that be? Well, fortunately, we were able to ask New York Magazine film critic David Edelstein to scare us up an answer.
David Edelstein: American men got back from World War II where they’d seen truly horrible things. And they dreamed about a country that would be safe, where they could keep their families safe from the kind of things they had seen overseas. They dreamed of a national highway system. They dreamed of a suburb. And the 70’s, on the other side of the counterculture when we were suddenly laughing at Leave It to Beaver, we were suddenly laughing at The Brady Bunch. Many of us getting high and watching those old episodes. That’s when we began to question the very foundation of the American dream.
Poltergeist:They’re here…
David Edelstein:Films like Poltergeist really prey on our deep suspicion that this is not a way of life that we can sustain. Perhaps the houses are very house and freshly painted and they are beautiful gardens, but somewhere or other someone has done something wrong. There is some original sin and in the case of Poltergeist, of course, we learn it’s become a joke. It’s become a cliché. It was built over an Indian graveyard.
Poltergeist :Son of a [inaudible 00:48:24]! You moved the cemetery but you left the bodies, didn’t you? You son of a [inaudible 00:48:30]! You left the bodies and you only moved the headstones! You only moved the headstones!
Amityville :I just wish that all those people hadn’t died here. A guy kills his whole family? Doesn’t that bother you?
Sure, but houses don’t have memories.
David Edelstein: Well, this is the Amityville Horror which is supposedly based on a true story. We’ve since discovered that it was in fact a scam, though it fooled a great many people. What’s interesting about that movie is that you see that this idea of this house… It’s not only haunted in and of itself, but it gets inside. It stirs the inner demons.
Amityville:Would you please leave that damn fire alone and listen to me?
I’m not going anywhere. You’re the one that wanted a house. This is it, so just shut up!
David Edelstein: They chose this house. They wanted to move there because they felt that it would change their lives. The way we all feel we’re going to be able to re-launch our lives. We’re going to be able to start afresh. And this demon here manages to prey on the very things that this house was supposed to be strengthening.
Amityville: What do you want from us? God[inaudible 00:49:51] this is my house!
David Edelstein: In this culture in particular, we invest so much of our hopes and dreams. So much of our identity’s invested in our houses, our real estate. We’ve become increasingly obsessed with real estate at a time when so many people are unable to afford it and are, in fact, dispossessed. Now, it’s sort of funny when you think of dispossession versus possession by demons. Well, in some ways, the ghost in the haunted house is the most efficient foreclosure artist in history because you buy something and you think it’s mine. I own this house. I own this land. And then, you are slapped upside the head. You understand somebody comes out of the deep dark past and says, “You don’t own this. You don’t own anything. You don’t even own your own flesh. I can get inside you. I can get inside these walls. I can get into your baby’s room. I can bring this house and everything it’s standing on and everything it represents in your pathetic bourgeois world. I can bring it crashing to the ground and you don’t have a chance against me. You don’t have literally a prayer.”
Ed Ayers: David Edelstein is a film critic whose reviews appear in New York Magazine and are heard on NPR’s Fresh Air and CBS Sunday Morning.
This House Is Still Haunted: An Essay in Seven Gables
A spectre is haunting houses—the spectre of possession.
As we have seen some languages in use today can only render the German expression “an unheimlich house” by “a haunted house.”
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”
To have a ghost, you must first have a past.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an author with a past. His fictions repeatedly return us to the foundations of the United States, weaving narrative from the way that his past lingered in his present, from a haunting. He prefacesThe House of the Seven Gables(1851) with a simple lesson, that “this Romance might effectually convince mankind (or, indeed, any one man) of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms.” This lesson—past evils will destroy those who come to benefit from them—guides the haunted house tale, wherein the cracked foundations of the past must be repaired, lest the house, like Poe’s House of Usher, crumble into the earth, along with all it signifies: family, nation, hope. These are vast problems, bigger than any one house, but locating evil in a haunted place lets Americans concentrate the past’s wrongness. The haunted house is a place where we deal with how things have gone wrong.
The United States is a nation where ghosts are real. At least, they’re as real as the houses they haunt.The House of the Seven Gablesdepicts a house that is not ostensibly haunted by ghosts or demons; rather, it is demonized by the generational reproduction of wrongs and inequalities where haunting provides the syntax for Hawthorne to make sense of this repetition. The haunted house tale, as Hawthorne tells it, has governed the way that Americans reckon with their out-of-joint past. Hawthorne positionsHouseas a “romance,” rather than a novel, and the former genre’s capacity for moralistic fables captures something of thisHouse’s function as a floor-plan for a particularly American haunting. In Richard Brodhead’s account, Hawthorne’s widespread influence in American literature often has less to do with anything he himself said or wrote than with the way that later authors bring their own concerns to Hawthorne and rework his myths to their own ends. So, it’s not that Hawthorne haunts American literature; rather, that literary tradition has haunted him.
Across this history, the word “haunted” provides a vocabulary for the forces outside individual control, as well as the way that we, as individuals, are constrained by them, even and especially when we cannot perceive or even comprehend what they are. As Sigmund Freud points out, “haunted” is already a limited translation of “unheimlich,” and the repeated description of houses in particular as haunted illustrates some of the way that this vocabulary guides both thought and actions. Being haunted is, in a sense, the experience of being constrained, whether by another’s will or by the blunt necessity of historical circ*mstance. So, if I tell you a house is haunted, you might expect to encounter ghosts, dead bodies, perhaps the devil himself, but what you’ll find is, unfortunately, much worse.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT DILETTANTE ARMY
The Horror Century
From the first morbid films a hundred years ago, scary movies always been a dark mirror on Americans’ deepest fears and anxieties.
A girlgoes for a twilight swimjust off a secluded beach. We see her from underneath the water, silhouetted between the sun and the sea. From this angle, she’s the picture of a tranquil bathing beauty enjoying a peaceful dip in the sparkling ocean just before sunset. Then we hear it: a sinistertwo-note bass themeas the camera approaches her from below.
She feels something, a tug on her leg that tells her something is very wrong.
Her face crumples into worry, then horror when it happens again, pulling her briefly under water. She screams, but her boyfriend is passed out on the beach, unable to hear her from just feet away; she tries to swim to safety but has no idea which direction to swim in. For a few terrifying moments, she’s flung about in the water, dragged under again and again by something unseen, something awful. Finally, with one last, dreadful scream, she vanishes below the surface.
How Horror Changed After WWI
The war created a new world, an alternate reality distinct from what most people before 1914 expected their lives to be.
What exactly constitutes horror? Being spooked by the dark, and by thedead who might return in it, may have haunted the earliest human consciousness.Ceremonial burial predates all written history; the act apparently represented an effort to placate the corpse so it would not make an unwelcomereturn. The roots of religion itself may be in this impulse, with gifts tothe dead constituting the first ritual.
In fact, much of what we think of as “natural human life” may stem fromthe terror of death and of the dead. Even sexual desire, and our constantlychanging conceptions of gender roles that accompany it, may have much to do with the terror of the dead. The urge to reproduce, once inextricablylinked to sex, may have a connection to a neurotic fantasy of cheating deathby creating an enduring legacy. You can test the primal strength of this cultural idea by noting how no one questions the rationality of reproduction,even in a world of rapidly dwindling resources. Meanwhile, people whochoose not to have children often receive both religious and secular disdainas selfish, the breakers of an unspoken social contract, or simply odd.
Does the fear of death that drives us mean that horror has always beenour dark companion, a universal human experience in which cave paintingsand movie screens are simply different media for the same spooky message?Not exactly. The idea of death and ruin as entertainment, even somethingone could build a lifestyle around, appears first in the 18th centuryin novels like Horace Walpole’sThe Castle of Otranto(1764) and MatthewLewis’sThe Monk(1796). Commentators called this taste Gothic because theinterest in ruins and castles called to mind the Gothic architecture of theMiddle Ages.
Our contemporary term “goth,” used to describe everything from a styleof music to black fingernail polish, of course comes from those 18th-centurygoths. The wealthy of that century could fully indulge this newfascination, turning estates into faux medieval manors and forcing theirservants, on top of all their other indignities, to appear at parties dressedin robes that made them look like what Clive Bloom describes as “ghoulishmonks.” It’s hard to call this precisely a popular taste, as the novels ofsuspense that inspired these ideas were damned or banned in some places and very few people had a suitable estate, or enough money or servants, forplaying haunted house.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT LITERARY HUB
‘The Exorcist’ & Catholicism
What explains the traditionalist Catholic infatuation with ‘The Exorcist’?
Nathaniel Hawthorne had an ambivalent regard for his once-prominent Puritan ancestors. His great-grandfather was a judge who presided over the trial and execution of witches in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. “The remote past has to be recovered with considerable effort for there ‘the Actual and the Imaginary may meet,’’’ the political theorist Judith Shklar writes, quoting Hawthorne. “It is because it is so different from the present that it enlightens us about our actual selves, here and now, about our possibilities, our beliefs, and our conduct. It is an education for the present moment.”
I was reminded of Shklar’s comments on Hawthorne and the conundrums of understanding the past when reading Carlos Eire’s terrificpiecein the September issue ofCommonwealon the Church’s traditional acceptance of the seeming impossibility of acts of levitation and bilocation, especially in the lives of saints. As Eire writes, “What kind of nonsense is this?” That, at least, is our usual reaction to testimonies regarding such phenomena. Yet such “wild facts,” Eire reminds us, were common and widely believed in the Church’s past. How should we make sense of those claims now? To be sure, such “extremely rare events are seldom taken seriously outside certain belief systems,” Eire writes, but “they most certainlydohave a broader context into which they fit.” Understanding that context is key to understanding not only our Catholic ancestors but also, as Shklar notes, ourselves. Quoting the historian Lucien Febvre, Eire goes further. We must accept “the strangeness of the past as an essential rational feature of the past, not as something irrational.” As Febvre argues, “To comprehend is not to clarify, simplify, or to reduce things to a perfectly clear logical scheme. To comprehend is to complicate, to augment in depth. It is to widen on all sides. It is to vivify.”
Which brings me to the recent celebration, by some conservative Catholics, of the fiftieth anniversary of the Academy Award–winning horror movieThe Exorcist. Improbably, they see that fright film as an evangelical tool to correct a contemporary Church that has abandoned its supernatural beliefs. This nostalgia regarding 1970s schlock coincided with the recent death of William Friedkin, the film’s director, who himself professed a belief in the kind of demonic possession flamboyantly depicted in the movie. “I made the film as a believer, not as a skeptic,” Friedkin claimed.
The film was based on the best-selling novel by William Peter Blatty, a Catholic graduate of Georgetown University. Blatty wrote the movie’s screenplay and produced the film as well. He was a known quantity in Hollywood, having written a number of screenplays for successful film comedies, including the Pink Panther sequelA Shot in The Dark.Aspiring to something more serious, he said he wrote the book “quite frankly as an apostolic work.” He subsequently claimed that the enormous popularity of the film brought many people back to the Church.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT COMMONWEAL
The Shadow Over H.P. Lovecraft
Recent works inspired by his fiction struggle to reckon with his racist fantasies.
In the energetic sphere of commentary and fandom that surrounds Lovecraft and his growing influence, the same approach is evident. “I would address the issue of Lovecraft’s racism first,” the horror writer Mary SanGiovannisaidlast year in an interview withLibrary Journalmeant to offer a guide for librarians on Lovecraftian fiction. On occasion, the desire to address Lovecraft’s racism has led to disputes prefiguring many of today’s debates over cancel culture. In 2015, after a campaign led by the writers Daniel José Older and Nnedi Okorafor, the World Fantasy Conventionstoppedhanding out a Lovecraft bust to its winning writers, replacing this with the representation of a tree in front of a full moon.
Yet confusion rather than clarity hangs over Lovecraft and the relation between his writing, his racism, the world he lived in, and the one we live in now. Was Lovecraft racist because he was an insular New Englander, limiting himself largely to Providence after a serious mental crisis provoked by encountering the immigrant population of New York? That is one interpretation, and not entirely without substance, given that Lovecraft channeled his troubled experience of New York into the story “The Horror at Red Hook.” Or was his racism an expression of the times Lovecraft lived in and not entirely germane to his fiction, as S.T. Joshi, biographer and one-man critical industry on Lovecraft,arguedwhileprotestingvehemently against the cancellation of the Lovecraft bust?
Both arguments sequester Lovecraft, either in time or in space, and yet everyone argues for Lovecraft’s continuing validity as a writer, his relevance so contemporary that it has, in recent years, burst beyond the subculture of horror and into the mainstream. Known today both as “weird fiction,” as Lovecraftcalledhis own work, as well as “cosmic horror,” his writing is an unending source for films, from 2016’sThe Voidto a 2019 adaptation ofThe Color Out of Space. Lovecraft himself is to be the subject of aforthcoming projectfronted by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss—the duo behind theGame of Thronesshow—who plan to adapt Hans Rodionoff’s graphic novel,Lovecraft. In music, video games, cartoons, plush toys, politics—the satirical website “Cthulhu for America” launched in 2015 and is still going—and in the school of philosophy known as “speculative realism,” Lovecraft is rampant. Still, the question remains: Are horror and racism so easily separated in our times, or are they far more deeply intertwined than the mainstreaming of Lovecraft can admit?
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NEW REPUBLIC
Watching the End of the World
The Doomsday Clock is set to two minutes to midnight. So why don’t we make movies about nuclear war anymore?
A coward may die a thousand times before his death—and a morbid kid can be killed over and over by phantom Soviet warheads. That was me in the mid-1980s, between the ages of seven and twelve. I spent, or lost, that much of my youth priming for nuclear holocaust, projecting scenarios onto the Republic of Ireland.
Multi-megaton payloads bursting above my bright green Roman Catholic parish in the foothills of the Dublin mountains. Neutron bombs leaving my house, school, and church intact while turning my body to a pillar of fire, then a pile of red dust. A single ballistic missile homing in on me with evil animus, its shrieking arc over continental Europe ending on contact with the top of my skull. Would I be crushed by the weight of the device itself, or was the firing mechanism so hair-trigger that I’d be atomized by the blast before it could bear down further?
“For a split second, you’d have to feel the very point, with the terrible mass above,” wrote Thomas Pynchon inGravity’s Rainbow(1973), as the quasi-clairvoyant British secret agent Pirate Prentice contemplates taking a direct hit to the head from an incoming German V-2 rocket. When I read that novel many years later, I recognized my own terror in it, as if my boyhood nightmares had been intercepted by psychic, subterranean war planners.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT BOSTON REVIEW
The Lost World of Weegee
Depression-era Americans viewed urban life in America through the lens of Weegee’s camera.
It is thus surprising that the first full-scale biography of Weegee has only just been published. Fortunately, Christoper Bonanos’sFlash: The Making of Weegee the Famouswas worth the wait.1Profusely illustrated and written in a lively but not showy manner,Flashis comprehensively informed, consistently intelligent, almost entirely devoid of technical jargon, and, unlike many pop-culture biographies, not too long for its substance. It explains with clear-eyed sympathy why “Weegee the Famous,” as he billed himself, had slipped into obscurity by the time of his death in 1968, and why he is increasingly remembered only by historians of photojournalism.
Born in what is now Ukraine in 1899, Weegee was the second son of a family of Yiddish-speaking Galician Jews who emigrated to Manhattan 10 years later, where they shared a rat-infested Lower East Side tenement. He discovered his métier by chance when an itinerant street photographer took his picture in 1913. Fascinated by the results, he bought a tintype kit, and within a year he had landed a job at a commercial photo studio. By 1921 he was a darkroom assistant at theNew York Times, and shortly after that he was selling pictures to any newspaper that would print them.
The invention in 1925 of the flashbulb, which made it possible to take unposed photographs at night and indoors, sealed Weegee’s future. By 1934 he had become a full-time freelance news photographer. He set up shop in a squalid studio apartment that doubled as his darkroom, installing a police radio and a fire-department alarm bell and prowling the streets of New York each night in search of scenes of carnage.
As he later explained:
Most of your job is just sitting around waiting for some baby doll to toss a knife into her daddy.… Most fires happen around one or two in the morning. Five o’clock is the jumping time—people are out of liquor and the gin mills are closed. Their resistance is low, and if they’re going to do it, that’s when they do it.
Weegee’s photos, which were syndicated to newspapers throughout the U.S., appeared in those papers a few years after Warner Bros. and other studios began releasing gangster movies such asLittle CaesarandScarfacethat contained unprecedentedly explicit scenes of mayhem. The black-and-white cinematography of these films was strikingly similar in effect to the news photos taken by Weegee and his colleagues. Whether their cinematographers had been influenced by newspaper photojournalism—or vice versa—cannot be known. What can be said with certainty, though, is that a growing number of Depression-era Americans, whether they knew it or not, increasingly viewed urban life in America through the lens of Weegee’s old-fashioned Speed Graphic camera.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT COMMENTARY
“Bambi” Is Even Bleaker Than You Thought
The original book is far more grisly than the beloved Disney classic—and has an unsettling message about humanity.
Felix Salten was an unlikely figure to write “Bambi,” since he was an ardent hunter who, by his own estimate, shot and killed more than two hundred deer. He was also an unlikely figure to write a parable about Jewish persecution, since, even after the book burnings, he promoted a policy of appeasem*nt toward Nazi Germany. And he was an unlikely figure to write one of the most famous children’s stories of the twentieth century, since he wrote one of its most infamous works of child p*rnography.
These contradictions are nicely encapsulated by Beverley Driver Eddy in her biography “Felix Salten: Man of Many Faces.” Born Siegmund Salzmann, in Hungary in 1869, Salten was just three weeks old when his family moved to Vienna—a newly desirable destination for Jews, because Austria had lately granted them full citizenship. His father was a descendant of generations of rabbis who shook off his religious roots in favor of a broadminded humanism; he was also a hopelessly inept businessman who soon plunged the family into poverty. To help pay the bills, Salten started working for an insurance company in his teens, around the same time that he began submitting poetry and literary criticism to local newspapers and journals. Eventually, he began meeting other writers and creative types at a café called the Griensteidl, across the street from the national theatre. These were the fin-de-siècle artists collectively known as Young Vienna, whose members included Arthur Schnitzler, Arnold Schoenberg, Stefan Zweig, and a writer who later repudiated the group, Karl Kraus.
Salten was, in his youth, both literally and literarily promiscuous. He openly conducted many affairs—with chambermaids, operetta singers, actresses, a prominent socialist activist, and, serially or simultaneously, several women with whom other members of Young Vienna were having dalliances as well. In time, he married and settled down, but all his life he wrote anything he could get paid to write: book reviews, theatre reviews, art criticism, essays, plays, poems, novels, a book-length advertisem*nt for a carpet company disguised as reportage, travel guides, librettos, forewords, afterwords, film scripts. His detractors regarded this torrent as evidence of hackery, but it was more straightforwardly evidence of necessity; almost alone among the members of Young Vienna, he was driven by the need to make a living.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NEW YORKER
“The Wizard of Oz” Invented the “Good Witch”
Eighty years ago, MGM’s sparkly pink rendering of Glinda expanded American pop culture’s definition of free-flying women.
Delving into the provenance of Glinda’s character reveals a lineage of thinkers who saw the witch as a symbol of female autonomy. Though witches have most often been treated throughout history as evil both in fictionand inreal life, sentiments began to change in the 19th century asanticlerical, individualist valuestook hold across Europe. It was during this time that historians and writers including Jules Michelet and Charles Godfrey Leland wrote books that romanticized witches, often reframing witch-hunt victims as women who’d been wrongfully vilified because of their exceptional physical and mystical capabilities. Per Michelet’s best-selling book,La Sorcièreof 1862: “By the fineness of her intuitions, the cunning of her wiles—often fantastic, often beneficent—she is a Witch, and casts spells, at least and lowest lulls pain to sleep and softens the blow of calamity.”
The ideas of Michelet and like-minded writers influenced Matilda Joslyn Gage, an American suffragist, abolitionist, andtheosophist. She posited that women were accused as witches in the early modern era because the Church found their intellect threatening. “The witch was in reality the profoundest thinker, the most advanced scientist of those ages,” she writes in her feminist treatise of 1893,Woman, Church, and State. Her vision of so-called witches being brilliant luminaries apparently inspired her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, to incorporate that notion into his children’s-book series about the fantastical land of Oz. (Some writers havesurmisedthat “Glinda” is a play on Gage’s name.)
Like Gage, Baum was a proponent of equal rights for women, and he wrote several pro-suffrage editorials in the South Dakota newspaper he owned briefly, theAberdeen Saturday Pioneer. Although his bookThe Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, is titled after a man, it is fundamentally a female-centric story: a tale about a girl’s journey through a land governed by four magical women. There are actually two good witches in Baum’s original version: Glinda is the witch of the South, not the North, in his telling, and she doesn’t appear until the second-to-last chapter. The book states that she is not only “kind to everyone,” but also “the most powerful of all the Witches.”
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE ATLANTIC
Mourning in America
The Right to Grieve
To demand the freedom to mourn—not on the employer’s schedule, but in our own time—is to reject the cruel rhythms of the capitalist status quo.
In March 2022, a new species of mental distress was added to the fifth edition of theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a syndrome called “prolonged grief disorder.” Afflicted individuals find their everyday functioning inhibited by grief that persists for an apparently unreasonable duration following the loss of a loved one. Telltale signs include “feeling as though part of oneself has died,” a “marked sense of disbelief about the death,” and “intense loneliness.” How long is too long for such symptoms to linger? The American Psychiatric Association’s benchmark is a year for adults and six months for children. But the important thing is that “the person’s bereavement lasts longer than might be expected based on social, cultural, or religious norms.”
Though critics of the category of prolonged grief disorder—perhaps most vocally the scholar Joanne Cacciatore—have argued that the new diagnosis risks pathologizing the very act of mourning, the APA is not incorrect, exactly, to argue that “persistent grief is disabling.” But disability is not a natural or objective category; rather, it registers the way society is organized to accommodate some bodies and persons and not others. In particular, as scholar and activist Marta Russell has emphasized, disability is always defined in relation to work, describing those whose physical and mental capacities don’t fully conform to its needs, expectations, and demands.
The truth is that American society hasmadepersistent grief disabling, because the demands that grief makes on a person are at odds with the way that American capitalism expects people to comport themselves as workers. The normal worker, in our economic system, is a person whose ability to work is not impaired by grief—not someone who doesn’t experience loss, which would of course be impossible, but someone who simply doesn’t let it get to them. There is no statutory entitlement to bereavement leave in the United States, except in the state of Oregon. In fact, Department of Labor guidance on the Fair Labor Standards Act explicitly cites mourning as the example par excellence of unprotected non-work: Federal law “does not require payment for time not worked, including attending a funeral.”
While the ideal worker under this regime is supposed to keep calm and carry on in the face of any loss, real workers experience grief all the time—in which case they must depend on the generosity of their bosses. Support is too often lacking. Gig workers, whose employers pretend to be nothing of the sort, are out of luck, as are the vast majority of part-time employees (which, of course, includes the millions of Americans who work full-time by stringing together multiple part-time jobs). Though upwards of 70% of full-time workers do have access to bereavement leave as part of their benefits package, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median allotment is a mere three days, after which employees—if they’re lucky—must start using sick days or vacation time. Employer policies also provoke painful conflicts over which relationships warrant time off to grieve. Often workers can only get dispensation to mourn members of their “immediate family” or that of their spouse. If employers grant leave after the death of an extended family member or a close friend, it is typically just a single day. Workers who have good relationships with their supervisors can sometimes circumvent such restrictions, but needing to prove one’s closeness to the deceased can be traumatizing or, for queer people in unsafe workplaces dealing with the loss of a partner or a member of their chosen family, even dangerous.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT JEWISH CURRENTS
The Elitist History of Wearing Black to Funerals
Today, mourning attire is subdued and dutiful. It wasn’t always that way.
Funerary dress code can be powerful when it makes royalty look, at first blush, like one of us. In contemporary England, as well as in the United States, the donning of subdued black clothing can be an equalizer. In its best moments, it is a common costume for people unified in grief. But black mourning attire, simple and accessible as it appears now, has a long history of being neither.
More than 400 years ago, the body of the first Queen Elizabeth was brought to Westminster Abbey in a largely dark-hued procession. Her coffin was accompanied by statesmen in black gowns and imposing hats. Even the horses were draped in fine black velvet. The color black’s use at funerals had some precedence: Since the sixth century, it had been deployed in the Christian Church for its suggestion, according to the 19th-century artist and professor F. Edward Hulme, of “the spiritual darkness of the soul unillumined by the Sun of righteousness.” By the 14th century, it was widely associated with death. But white and brown were also among the colors long considered suitable for mourning in the Anglican world—white because it was easily approximated by sun-bleaching undyed wool and linen, brown because it was similarly practical to produce; in multiple accounts from the 16th and 17th centuries, the latter was referred to interchangeably as “sad colour.”
What set black apart—and helped solidify its status astheshade of mourning by the time of Elizabeth I’s 1603 funeral—was its expense. Achieving a luxurious hue, coaxed from the red roots of the herb madder and the small bluish leaves of the flower woad, required multiple rounds of costly dyeing. Black-clad royal funerals were political theater, intended not just to console the bereaved but to put on a show so over the top that it reified the cultural crevasse between commoners and the ruling class. Funerals were the red carpets of the early modern era.
Extravagant displays of funerary excess weren’t just unattainable for common people; they were, for centuries, illegal. Beginning around the 1300s, England, and much of Europe, was governed by “sumptuary laws.” The laws made unorthodox fashion literally a crime by dictating the colors and fabrics that one could wear based on rank in society, making one’s social status evident upon first sight. Laborers, for instance, were permitted to wear linens and most lower-quality wools, but were barred from embroidered silk, tinseled satin, finer furs, certain buttons, and threads of gold, purple, and silver.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE ATLANTIC
Mary Lincoln Wasn’t ‘Crazy.’ She Was a Bereaved Mother, New Exhibit Says.
The Lincolns had four sons. Mary buried three of them. A new exhibit at President Lincoln’s Cottage sheds light on bereaved parents, then and now.
Callie Hawkins had been working at President Lincoln’s Cottage museum for 10 years when she became pregnant. She and her husband were thrilled, and she joked with her co-workers about the baby’s “perfect” due date — Feb. 12 — Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.
When the day arrived, Hawkins went into labor right on schedule. But when she and her husband got to the hospital, the medical team couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat. Their son Coley James Hobbie was stillborn the next day.
Three years later, Hawkins sits on a picnic bench near the cottage where Lincoln and his wife spent more than a quarter of his presidency, pressing with her thumb a pendant around her neck that says “Mama.”
“After my son died, I got really afraid that people would maybe judge me or think about me in the way that history has remembered Mary Lincoln,” she said. Which is to say, she was afraid they would think she was “crazy.” In her lifetime, the former first lady lost her husband to an assassin’s bullet and three of her four children to disease. Her lengthy, public mourning defied conventions of the day and led to criticism and questions about her sanity.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE WASHINGTON POST
Joe Biden’s Audacity of Grief
On the mournful threads connecting his half-century in politics.
Step back from Biden’s forty-some years in national politics. Is there an ideological thread? A unified theory of Bidenite politics? Not really. One does not look to him for ideological robustness or even coherence. He is not “divisive,” exactly; it’s just that his long time in public life leads different people to see different Joe Bidens: precocious young senator or bumbling old senator, tribune of the “white working class” or tribune of Delaware-based banks, champion of battered women or clumsy misogynist, friend of cops or outlaw Diamond Joe. He has registered rather than transcended the major tensions of his time.
Yet on another level itispossible to articulate what for Biden is the elemental atom of political interaction: It is the communion of strangers on a train, who happen to pour their griefs out to one another because, after all, it’s easier with someone you don’t really know. Such an atom yields no grand vision of politics, and hardly meets our moment. But it still vibrates on a poignantly American frequency. Biden is the politician of fleeting but profound intimacy.
Consider one remarkable detail from his memoir. He gave a eulogy at the funeral of one of the two police officers killed in New York City in 2014; the remarkable thing is not the eulogy itself but what he tells one of the widows privately. Right now everyone is there for you, he says, but eventually they’ll go back to normal, and then grief will get harder: “After a while you’re going to start to feel guilty because you’re going to be going to the same people constantly for help, or just to talk.” So he gives her his private number: “When you’re down and you feel guilty for burdening your family and friends, pick up the phone and call me.” The reader glimpses a secret society of grievers:
I have a long list of strangers who have my private number, and an invitation to call, and many of them do. “Just call me when you want to talk,” I told her. “Sometimes it’s easier to pour your heart out to somebody you don’t know well, but you know they know. You know they’ve been through it. Just pick up the phone and call me.”
It is hard to imagine reaching for the phone to call, in a dark and lonely hour, the sitting vice president of the United States. And yet I hope this strange, beautiful story is true.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE NEW REPUBLIC
A Hero in the Midst of Cowards
The righteous rage of John Brown.
On December 1, 1859 in a Charles Town, Virginia jail cell, John Brown shared his final meal with his wife Mary.
“Cheer up,” he told her after a silent embrace that lasted for minutes. “Tell [our children] their father died without a single regret for the course he has pursued — that he is satisfied he is right in the eyes of God and of all just men.”
After an hour, the two said goodbye, and Mary went back to her accommodations to await the arrival of her husband’s body the next day.
In the morning, Brown woke and read from the Bible. He wrote one last letter to his wife and then scratched another short note, the latter of which he slipped to a jailer.
Brown had accepted his fate. If he were to die as a martyr for the cause of destroying chattel slavery, it was an end that he had accepted long before. His actions were, it seemed to some, divinely inspired, much like the enslaved preacher Nat Turner decades earlier, a time when John Brown was simply a young family man living in Pennsylvania.
During Brown’s trial, poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson had even written that the execution of John Brown would “make the gallows glorious like the cross.”
While many viewed Brown as a cold-blooded killer, treasonous, and perhaps even insane, some of his contemporaries came to his defense.
“A hero in the midst of us cowards is always so dreaded,” the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau wrote. “He shows himself superior to nature. He has a spark of divinity in him.”
Victor Hugo, the French author ofLes MisérablesandThe Hunchback of Notre-Dame, offered international support for Brown, arguing that his execution would be an “uncorrectable sin” for the United States. John Brown’s rage against the institution of slavery, while mercilessly violent at times, was righteous and therefore, his actions justified, his supporters believed.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE ERIE READER
A Murderous Gravestone Grudge Carved a New Law into Stone
When murder won’t rest in peace.
Up a gravel road running behind the Nelson’s Chapel church in Lenoir, North Carolina, sits a small cemetery. For about 50 years, one of the stones, marking the grave of twenty-five-year-old Lawrence Nelson, had a remarkable inscription beneath his name: “Murdered and robbed by Hamp Kendall and John Vickers, Sept. 25, 1906.” It’s not every day that a tombstone accuses people of murder.
Hamp Kendall and John Vickers had initially been imprisoned for Nelson’s killing—but it turns out both men were proven innocent. After their 1907 convictions, a fight followed over the next few decades about the men involved, the murder itself, and the accusatory epitaph that attempted to seal the blame in stone.
It turns outwords carved onto a tombstonedo matter. The fight surrounding this gravestone and the repercussions that followed have echoed far beyond the grave—and into the legal system today.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT ATLAS OBSCURA
The Book That Unleashed American Grief
John Gunther’s “Death Be Not Proud” defied a nation’s reluctance to describe personal loss.
The book was probably unpublishable. About that fact both the author and his longtime editor agreed. But the author was determined, and he had on his side a brilliant publishing record. For more than a decade, starting in 1936 with hisInside Europe, the reporter John Gunther had been a fixture on the best-seller lists. From the mid-1930s through the 1950s, no one, save the romance novelist Daphne du Maurier, had produced more American best sellers than Gunther.
Gunther’s unpublishable book was a memoir: an account of the death, in 1947, of his 17-year-old son, Johnny, from a brain tumor. Gunther had started writing while the experience of Johnny’s illness was still raw, finishing the book in a few weeks, six months after his son’s death. He’d set out with the idea of a privately circulated memoir, the sort of volume of remembrances printed in a few hundred copies that parents of soldiers killed in action sent to friends and relations. But as he finished the manuscript, he began to think it should be published for a wider audience.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE ATLANTIC
City, Island
What does the way we mourn, remember, and care for our dead say about us?
Starting in the 1870s, and every year for the past fifteen years, journalists have told and retold the “hidden history” of New York City’s Hart Island, a hundred-acre city cemetery off the coast of the Bronx. Some fields are rolling and green with little white plot markers. Others are fresh brown earth, where individual coffins are buried in communal graves. Where there are not bodies, there are dry stone walls, woodlands, wetlands, and nineteenth-century brick ruins ringed by salt marshes and rubble. For over 150 years, the cemetery has been run as an extension of the prison system, difficult to visit, and this fact tends to capture the imagination.
Stories about it have often circled the same details: An island prison for the dead!Boxes of dismembered limbs and Civil War soldiers and bones all clacking together, forgotten in the dirt on a mostly barren piece of land shaped like the top of what else but a tibia bone, ever shrouded in fog, capitula and patellae protruding from its eroding edges. When I first learned about it, young and wide-eyed, I thought of John Donne. Dylan Thomas. Charon and the River Styx. I couldn’t imagine anything so worthy of a headline.
This spring, while COVID-19 surged through New York City, many others felt the same way. As Americans watched the nation’s death toll approach one hundred thousand, sobering drone footage circulated of Rikers Island prisoners in white and orange jumpsuits stacking caskets on Hart Island, its hidden history rediscovered yet again, but this time it struck a chord that reverberated far beyond the five boroughs. More than one hundred news outlets, from New York and Los Angeles to Vancouver, London, New Delhi, and Adelaide, linked these “mass grave” burials to coronavirus deaths, invoking the island’s dark past as a place for New York’s poor and unclaimed. One essayist called the people buried there “nobodies.”
Even with all that coverage, there was scarce mention of the island’s significance to tens of thousands of living New York City families. It is, after all, the city cemetery. In recent years, between one thousand and twelve hundred New Yorkers have been interred there annually. About 1 percent of them are John and Jane Does, at least until they are not. Two out of five are unclaimed by next of kin, at least until they are not. Anyone who has mourned the death of someone at some point might find it tough to guess how many, if any, are forgotten.
As scholar James J. Farrell wrote, “Death is a cultural event,” and societies reveal themselves in their treatment of it. When I first read about this place, I wondered: What does an island for the marginalized dead say about the city of New York? In 2020, I wonder what calling thousands of New Yorkers “forgotten,” over and over again, says about us.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE BELIEVER
Remember You Will Be Buried
Tracing the American cemetery from the colonial age to the Gilded Age.
Tombstones have always been tools of memory. “If a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps,” Benedick warned inShakespeare’s sixteenth-century playMuch Ado About Nothing. And few want to be forgotten, as the rows of carved granite and marble that fill cemeteries across the United States attest—even if the methods of rendering that remembering into a symbol or setting have changed and the context of these memorials has altered enough to make it hard to understand what we were supposed to remember in the first place.
The image of cemeteries that people in the United States might be familiar with—verdant hills and quiet—is a product of changes in how the living chose to remember the dead that culminated in the nineteenth century. In previous centuries people were often memorialized as part of a collective, whether that was a church, society, or family. In the Victorian era, the emphasis was much more on the individual and their glory, both on this earth and in a believed next life. The American rural cemetery movement that established many of the spaces we know today expelled the dead from the urban centers. There they had been part of neighborhoods in churchyards, private burial grounds, and potter’s fields. The movement relocated burials to garden-like spaces where the dead could be mourned in rustic settings that didn’t impede city development. For the elite, this meant more space for elaborate memorials and mausoleums; for the middle class, there were the orderly lines of plain granite tombs promoted by the newly burgeoning funeral industry. For the marginalized, the public burial grounds were also pushed to the edges but often in more hidden areas, such as New York’s Hart Island, where they were interred in mass graves.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT LAPHAM’S QUARTERLY
Remembering When Americans Picnicked in Cemeteries
For a time, eating and relaxing among the dead was a national pastime.
Within the wrought-iron walls of American cemeteries—beneath the shade of oak trees and tombs’ stoic penumbras—you could say many people “rest in peace.” However, not so long ago, people of the still-breathing sort gathered in graveyards to rest, and dine, in peace.
During the 19th century, and especially in its later years, snacking in cemeteries happened across the United States. It wasn’t just apple-munching alongside the winding avenues of graveyards. Since many municipalities still lacked proper recreational areas, many people had full-blown picnics in their local cemeteries. The tombstone-laden fields were the closest things, then, to modern-day public parks.
In Dayton, Ohio, for instance, Victorian-era women wielded parasols as they promenaded through mass assemblages at Woodland Cemetery, en route to luncheon on their family lots. Meanwhile, New Yorkers strolled through Saint Paul’s Churchyard in Lower Manhattan, bearing baskets filled with fruits, ginger snaps, and beef sandwiches.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT ATLAS OBSCURA
History in the Face of Catastrophe
After my son died, how could I know anything for certain?
A little over a decade ago, I edited a collection in which North American historians of France explored their personal and professional relationships to the country they studied. Their essays made history come alive as a craft embedded within social forces, family dynamics, intellectual lineages, and political convictions.
Few of the contributors explored, however, the ways in which this craft and their relationships to the past were steeped in their emotional lives. The truth is, my co-editor and I did not steer them in that direction. The thought never crossed our minds, not even when one contributor, the medievalist John W. Baldwin, disclosed that his daughter, Birgit, had been killed by a drunken driver in 1988. After her death, Baldwin wrote, he and his wife “retreated to their house in Baltimore, pulled the blinds to their studies, and drowned their bereavement in work.”
The image of this bereaved couple in a darkened house proved so piercing that I could think of little else while editing Baldwin’s essay. And yet I never pondered the bigger questions at work in this passage. What does it mean exactly to drown one’s bereavement in work? What happens to our scholarship when catastrophe drags us into immeasurable depths and alters something fundamental in our emotional makeup? What happens to history (in this case) when work becomes a refuge, an escape, a way of structuring one’s days, or something else altogether?
This collectioncame out in December 2006. A year and a half later, my youngest son, Owen, died at the age of 8 during a rafting trip on the Green River, near the border between Utah and Colorado.
The outfitters’ brochure had advertised the four-day vacation as family fun for novice rafters and children age 7 and up. This seemed ideal for first-timers like us. That first morning, the Green was so still that we could almost see our reflections on the glassy surface. Mayhem hit after lunch, on a stretch known as Disaster Falls: lost paddles, three passengers in the water, overmatched guides, an 8-year-old boy sucked under. Like Baldwin, I returned to my office a few weeks after the funeral. I returned to my historical research, but without any of the necessity and pleasure I used to feel while combing through archives. I became a historian pro forma, absent from professional meetings, oblivious to the latest scholarship, unable to comprehend common phrases in my field, such as “the crisis of late modernism.” What could this mean? Why would people write such things?
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Collected and curated by Bunk History
