Ghostland : an American history in haunted places /
Material type: TextPublisher: New York, New York : Viking, [2016]Copyright date: �2016Description: xiii, 320 pages ; 24 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781101980194
- 1101980192
- 133.10973 23
- BF1472.U6 D53 2016
Item type | Current library | Home library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Standard Loan | Coeur d'Alene Library Adult Nonfiction | Coeur d'Alene Library | Book | 133.1 DICKEY (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610020537440 | |||
Standard Loan | Hayden Library Adult Nonfiction | Hayden Library | Book | 133.1/DICKEY (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610021314518 | |||
Standard Loan | Liberty Lake Library Adult Nonfiction | Liberty Lake Library | Book | 133.10973 DIC (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 31421000559147 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
One of NPR's Great Reads of 2016
"A lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories... absorbing...[and] intellectually intriguing."-- The New York Times Book Review
An intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history, Ghostland takes readers on a road trip through some of the country's most infamously haunted places--and deep into the dark side of our history.
Colin Dickey is on the trail of America's ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie homes," Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. Some have established reputations as "the most haunted mansion in America," or "the most haunted prison"; others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget.
With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living -- how do we, the living, deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed, for whatever reason, haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made -- and why those changes are made -- Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved.
Spellbinding, scary, and wickedly insightful, Ghostland discovers the past we're most afraid to speak of aloud in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 289-308) and index.
The Unhomely: houses and mansions -- The Secret Staircase (Salem, MA) -- Shifting Ground (St. Francisville, LA) -- The Endless House (San Jose, CA) -- The Rathole Revelation (Georgetown, NY, and Bull Valley, IL) -- The Family That Would Not Live (St. Louis, MO) -- After Hours : bars, restaurants, hotels, and brothels -- A Devilish Place (Richmond, VA) -- Baby (Reno, NV) -- Passing Through (Los Angeles, CA) -- Civic-Minded Spirits: prisons and asylums, graveyards and cemeteries, a park -- Melancholy Contemplation (Moundsville, WV) -- The Stain (Danvers, MA, and Athens, OH) -- Awaiting the Devil's Coming (Charleston, SC, and Douglas County, KS) -- Our Illustrious Dead (Shiloh, TN) -- The Wind Through Cathedral Park (Portland, OR) -- Useless Memory: cities and towns -- The Wet Grave (New Orleans, LA) -- Among the Ruins (Detroit, MI) -- Hillsdale, USA -- Epilogue : Ghosts of a New Machine (Allendale, CA).
Dickey, piqued by a house hunt in LA that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie houses", embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places.
Table of contents provided by Syndetics
- Author's Note (p. xiii)
- Introduction: Anatomy of a Haunting (New York, NY) (p. 1)
- I The Unhomely houses and mansions (p. 13)
- 1 The Secret Staircase (Salem, MA) (p. 21)
- 2 Shifting Ground (St. Francisville, LA) (p. 37)
- 3 The Endless House (San Jose, CA) (p. 49)
- 4 The Rathole Revelation (Georgetown, NY, and Bull Volley, IL) (p. 69)
- 5 The Family That Would Not Live (St. Louis, MO) (p. 81)
- II After Hours bars, restaurants, hotels, and brothels (p. 93)
- 6 A Devilish Place (Richmond, VA) (p. 103)
- 7 Baby (Reno, NV) (p. 119)
- 8 Passing Through (Los Angeles, CA) (p. 131)
- III Civic-Minded Spirits prisons and asylums, graveyards and cemeteries, a park (p. 151)
- 9 Melancholy Contemplation (Moundsville, WV) (p. 159)
- 10 The Stain (Danvers, MA, and Athens, OH) (p. 173)
- 11 Awaiting the Devil's Coming (Charleston, SC, and Douglas County, KS) (p. 187)
- 12 Our Illustrious Dead (Shiloh, TN) (p. 203)
- 13 The Wind Through Cathedral Park (Portland, OR) (p. 213)
- IV Useless Memory cities and towns (p. 225)
- 14 The Wet Grave (New Orleans, LA) (p. 233)
- 15 Among the Ruins (Detroit, MI) (p. 253)
- 16 Hillsdale, USA (p. 267)
- Epilogue: Ghosts of a New Machine (Allendale, CA) (p. 277)
- Acknowledgments (p. 287)
- Notes (p. 289)
- Index (p. 309)
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Dickey (Afterlives of the Saints) cites a statistic that 45 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, and 30 percent profess to have had firsthand encounters. Such undying fascination means there was no shortage of stories to choose from when Dickey spent several years traveling the country, listening to ghosts, and compiling, researching, even debunking plenty of not-so-supernatural tales. Through mansions, hotels, brothels, graveyards, and beyond, Dickey follows undead souls-revealing many kept alive through embellishment, even fiction, including the House of the Seven Gables (it had nine) and the "real" Annabel Lee (she didn't exist). His final section on "ruin porn," including New Orleans and Detroit, is especially haunting. With the supernatural as big business-ghost tours, ghost hunting, reality shows, societies-Dickey also reminds listeners to do their research. Regardless of whether you believe, Dickey reveals how ghost stories are more about the history they harbor and the living who tell (and sell) them. VERDICT Librarians, be warned: Jon Lindstrom's narration is serviceable enough, but his insertion of unnecessary accents proves so jarring, even inappropriate, that patrons may be better advised to stick to the page. ["Sophisticated readers with gothic sensibilities who enjoy literary histories, social commentary, and authoritative travelogs will find this a worthy title": LJ 9/1/16 review of the Viking hc.]-Terry Hong, -Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.Publishers Weekly Review
In the introduction to this illuminating study of so-called true hauntings and the American public's enduring fascination with them, Dickey (Cranioklepty) posits that "ghost stories reveal the contours of our anxieties, the nature of our collective fears and desires, the things we can't talk about in any other way." Grouping haunts into four categories-houses, hangouts, institutions, and entire towns-he shows how the persistence of these ghost stories, especially when their details change with the times, say more about the living than the dead. Noting how popular accounts of the ghost of Myrtles Plantation has shifted over the years from that of an abused slave to revenants from a Native American burial ground beneath the plantation, Dickey notes that "ghost stories like this are a way for us to revel in the open wounds of the past." Describing the ghost stories that cropped up in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's devastation, he writes that ghost stories "are how cities make sense of themselves: how they narrate the tragedies of their past, weave cautionary tales for the future." In contrast to many compendia of "true" ghost stories, Dickey embeds all of the fanciful tales he recounts in a context that speaks "to some larger facet of American consciousness." His book is a fascinating, measured assessment of phenomena more often exploited for sensationalism. Agent: Anna Sproul-Latimer, Ross Yoon Agency. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.Booklist Review
The keys to understanding this book come from its subtitle, with its reference to American history, and from the author's statement that he's not interested in proving the veracity of ghost stories but, rather, in exploring how we process stories about the dead. Ghost stories have been around pretty much as long as writing itself; Pliny the Younger, who died 1,900 years ago, wrote about a haunted house. Dickey focuses on several noted American ghost stories, showing how each of them provides insight into contemporaneous history. The Merchant's House, in New York City, was built by a wealthy family in 1832; it's allegedly haunted by the family, but it's also a museum a perfectly preserved family home that looks today exactly the way it looked nearly 200 years ago. Similarly, the House of the Seven Gables is both a well-preserved seventeenth-century mansion in Salem, Massachusetts, and the site of one of the most enduring ghost stories. A well-written, sensible book come for the ghosts, stay for the history.--Pitt, David Copyright 2016 BooklistKirkus Book Review
If you want to understand a place, ignore the boasting monuments and landmarks, and go straight to the haunted houses.So begins Dickeys (Creative Writing/National Univ.; Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith, 2012 etc.) exploration into the ghost stories of America and what they reveal about society. On his quest, the author examines every manner of haunted place, from houses like the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, which inspired Nathaniel Hawthornes Gothic romance of the same name, to haunted cities like New Orleans as well as asylums, cemeteries, battlefields, and haunted hotels. While not a new concept, Dickeys theme has been more extensively explored where fairy tales and general folklore are concerned. In each location, the author reveals not only the ghost stories of the site, but also, most importantly, the sites true history. This allows us to see how ghost stories often say more about the tellers than they do about the supernatural. Throughout history, ghost stories have been used to make money, offer a moral, mark a location, and explain the unexplainable, among many other functions. Interwoven throughout the narrative are the voices of writers and thinkers including Nabokov, Freud, Poe, Dickens, and Stephen King. Most revealing is the authors examination of the logical factors that contribute to hauntingse.g., hotels feel eerie because they are uncannily not home, and homes often feel haunted because they have been abandoned. While the histories of the locations are well-expressed, Dickeys personal experiences can feel flat. The investigation feels especially poignant when he connects the nature of ghost stories to issues like race. Places like Shockoe Bottom in Richmond, where hundreds of black men, women, and children were tortured and buried, should surely offer up their share of ghosts, but most of the spirits have been white. What does it mean to whitewash the spirits of a city? Dickey asks. Does Virginia have ghosts that it is not yet ready to face? An intriguing but somewhat uneven exploration of things unseen. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.Author notes provided by Syndetics
Colin Dickey grew up in San Jose, California, a few miles from the Winchester Mystery House, the most haunted house in America. As a writer, speaker, and academic, he has made a career out of collecting unusual objects and hidden histories all over the country. He's a regular contributor to the LA Review of Books and Lapham's Quarterly, and is the co-editor (with Joanna Ebenstein) of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology. He is also a member of the Order of the Good Death, a collective of artists, writers, and death industry professionals interested in improving the Western world's relationship with mortality. With a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California, he is an associate professor of creative writing at National University.There are no comments on this title.