"The good news: Nothing's really haunted except by the spirits we imagine for ourselves. suggest that by analyzing them we can learn a great deal about ourselves. Dickey visits with Salem's witches, spectral lights at a Nevada brothel and the eccentric widow who designed the sprawling, never-finished Winchester Mystery House. "For a relatively young nation, America is overrun with spirits. With Ghostland, Dickey achieves a capacious geographical synthesis that is both intellectually intriguing and politically instructive."- The New York Times Book Review The most fascinating moments in Ghostland are Dickey's etymological musings and his many turns down unusual paths of American history. In each chapter, Dickey spins riveting tales and then carefully unwinds these narratives, exposing the materials and motivations of their construction.
Ghostland amounts to a lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories, some better known than others. "The spectral map Dickey creates is as broad and packed as his book's title implies. 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. 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. 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. 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.
intellectually intriguing." - The New York Times Book Reviewįrom the author of The Unidentified, an intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history that 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.Ĭolin Dickey is on the trail of America's ghosts. "A lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories.absorbing. Description One of NPR's Great Reads of 2016
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