GHOST WRITER
Haunted houses can help us confront the past, author says
Haunted houses tell us a lot of stories. But those stories are not just about ghosts.
Colin Dickey, the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (Viking, 2016), went around the country visiting haunted houses to see if they “could tell us something about who we are as a country, or as a people, or how we understand the past.”
In an interview for the travel podcast Get Outta Here, Dickey said ghost stories help us “talk about things in the past we might not otherwise have confronted.”
It might be a place with a violent or brutal history like a prison or asylum, or just an old building with creaky stairs and dark hallways where someone’s life took a tragic turn because of the death of a child or an unrequited love.
DARK SIDE OF HISTORY
Examples of places with a disturbing past that bill themselves as haunted attractions include the LaLaurie Mansion in New Orleans, where slaves were treated with extraordinary brutality, or Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, an abandoned prison. Dickey describes Eastern State as “a brokendown castle with stone crenellated towers” where “it’s easy to imagine” a history of “atrocities and violence.”
“Ghost stories in many ways are a way for us to approach our own history,” Dickey said, “and our own history is complicated.”
WINCHESTER HOUSE AND THE LONELY WOMAN MYTH
Dickey also noticed that haunted stories sometimes revolve around women who never married or who were widowed young.
Sometimes these women were viewed as having been frozen in time, living out their lives in a decaying house.
But he says the facts often tell a different story, suggesting that these individuals may have been viewed as odd or even spooky because their lives as single women didn’t fit cultural norms for marriage and child rearing.
The Winchester Mystery House, a 161-room mansion in San Jose, Calif., which Dickey visited often growing up, is a good example.
Sarah Winchester’s father-inlaw developed the Winchester rifle, so she and her husband were wealthy heirs. Their only child died in infancy, and Sarah’s husband died soon after.
Dickey says stories often paint her as having lived out her life in perpetual grief, haunted by the ghosts of everyone who’d ever been killed by a Winchester rifle, and “building this labyrinth to keep them at bay,” Dickey said.
But Dickey says the truth differs from the legend.