Colin Dickey - Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

A ugust 1933, a summers day in Manhattans Lower East Side. There are children playing outside on East Fourth Street; they are wild, they are shouting and running through the street, trying to gather up the last of the season before the fall sets in. There is nothing unusual about any of this. Then the door swings open at 29 East Fourth Street, and an old woman emerges onto the stoop overlooking the street, waving her arms wildly and shouting to the children to be quiet. The children and the adults all recognize her: Gertrude Tredwell, whos lived in the house for more than ninety years, born there in 1840, five years after her father purchased it. She is enraged; she tells them they are being far too noisy, they must calm down. The children quiet, turning toward the high staircase that leads to Gertrudes front door, looking up with fear at the old woman, who, satisfied, returns indoors and shuts the door.

Theres nothing unusual about any of thisexcept that Gertrude Tredwell has been dead now for several weeks.

It is not the last time Gertrude Tredwell will be seen at the house on East Fourth Street. In the months after her death, the house falls into the hands of a distant cousin; since by now most of the old merchant houses of lower Manhattan are gone, he decides to preserve the house as a museum, first opening it to the public in 1936. Over the years there are dozens of sightings of odd and inexplicable things happening in the house. In the early 1980s tourists come across the house and ring the bell. A woman in period costume tells them politely that the museum is closed for the day, and could they please come back at another time. Later, when they call the house to get the hours, they are told that the museum was in fact open when they came by and that, furthermore, none of the staff ever dresses in period costume. Gertrude has also been seen inside the house, sometimes humming, sometimes playing the pianoalways appearing as a frail, petite woman in period costume.

Nor is she alone. A visitor to the house in the summer of 1995 claimed that while upstairs she had a lengthy conversation with an older gentleman in a tattered suit and a heavy wool jacket smelling of mothballs, who talked to her of what the house was like to live in. After listening to him for a few minutes, she turned away for a moment, and when she looked back, he was gone. Later she identified the man shed seen from photographs:, whod died in 1921.

Ghost stories like these mean more than we are usually prepared to admit. If you want to understand a place, ignore the boastful monuments and landmarks, and go straight to the haunted houses. Look for the darkened graveyards, the derelict hotels, the emptied and decaying old hospitals. Wait past midnight, and see what appears. Tune out the patriotic speeches and sanctioned narratives, and listen instead for the bumps in the night. You wont need an electronic device to capture the voices of the dead; a patient ear and an open mind will do. Once you start looking, youll find them everywhere.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion once wrote, and that is just as true of ghost stories: we tell stories of the dead as a way of making sense of the living. More than just simple urban legends and campfire tales, ghost stories reveal the contours of our anxieties, the nature of our collective fears and desires, the things we cant talk about in any other way. The past were most afraid to speak aloud of in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.

Ghost stories are as old as human civilization, appearing in the earliest written epics and throughout the ancient world. In one of his letters the Roman writer Pliny the Younger describes a house haunted by a ghost , of extremely emaciated and squalid appearance, with a long beard and disheveled hair, rattling the chains on his feet and hands. The house remained vacant until the philosopher Athenodorus rented it; his first night he waited up for the ghost, writing in his study, until the apparition appeared.

Athenodorus, according to Pliny, was not in a hurry and, when confronted by the ghost, that he should wait a little, and threw his eyes again upon his papers. Eventually the philosopher allowed the ghost to lead him out of the house into the yard, where the ghost vanished. The next morning Athenodorus dug up the spot where the ghost had disappeared and found the remains of a skeleton in chains. He gave the long-neglected corpse a proper burial, and the haunting ceased.

Ghosts bridge the past to the present; they speak across the seemingly insurmountable barriers of death and time, connecting us to what we thought was lost. They give us hope for a life beyond death and because of this help us to cope with loss and grief. Their presence is the promise that we dont have to say goodbye to our loved ones right away and thatas with Athendoruss hauntingwhat was left undone in ones life might yet be finished by ones ghost.