"Ghostland" by Colin Dickey

I am reading late into the early morning hours on almost every hot summer night these days.  It is quiet.  Maybe too quiet.  It is a good time to get in touch with the spirits, the ancestors, the voices we hear, or think we do.  So I came to pick up a book I found disturbing and enlightening when I read it a few years back.  I began to page through and look at some of the marginalia and highlights I found previously to see if they hold up now.  Our reading shifts over the years; we get different ideas on second or even third readings.  So it is with Colin Dickey’s Ghostland:  An American History in Haunted Places (Viking, 2016).

Early on in the book, Dickey advises that 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 hospitals.”  I remember finding this to be true of Civil War battlefields.  The museums attached to them were interesting, but I could feel the presence of ghosts when walking the rolling hills of Bull Run.  This was especially true at dusk, the most haunted time.  The division between day and night dissolves.  The portals to that netherworld crack open and the living and the dead pass through.

Why do we have such a fascination with ghosts and their stories?  We imagine the dead back to life.  Ghosts are as much a construct of the one who has crossed over as our own imaginings.  Although we cannot prove the existence of ghosts, human fascination with the dead and the spirit world dates back to our earliest cultures.  Ancient Greeks and Romans wrote about spirits.  Dickey writes that “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 don’t have to say goodbye to our loved ones right away and that…what was left undone in one’s life might yet be finished by one’s ghost.”

Wishful thinking?  Some people we will always wish to have one more conversation; others we will be glad to send off with a wave and a shovel of dirt.

Dickey covers the haunted places in America—Salem, Massachusetts, the Winchester House in California, a whole assortment of bars, restaurants, hotels, prisons, graveyards, and entire cities and towns.  He also discusses séances, spiritualists, the occult, and other forms of summoning and reveling with the dead.  What I liked about the book when I first read it is the way he brings a level of objectivity to the study.  He is not here to ridicule or denigrate.  He presents the legend, the attributes, and the debunking if that is possible.  He recognizes, with a clarity of vision, the human preoccupation with ghosts and hauntings, and explores the myriad phenomena of outstanding cases.  There is no judgment implied or asserted.  He weaves in literature and writers who play a part in voicing the need to commune with the past, like Nathanial Hawthorne, Shirley Jackson, and Sigmund Freud.  He segues into a discussion of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, and the power of the Transcendentalists who believed ardently in an Over-soul, energy that encompasses all life beyond any Protestant or Christian belief, and which has more in common with eastern religious traditions.

He comes to the conclusion that “The search for ghosts often takes this form:  of a kind of mourning, a working through of grief and loss.  We look for ghosts of those whose deaths we have not yet gotten over, as though we need their blessings to let them pass on.”  Despite all the charlatans and snake-oil salesmen who have been debunked over the years, Dickey reminds us “how real, how persistent, the belief in ghosts is for many of us.  A belief that in various ways, and for various people, gives an explanation and a meaning to experiences that can’t be explained away easily.  A belief that can help us mourn and give us hope.”

One of the more Los Angeles stories that Dickey tells concerns the Cecil Hotel (now called Stay-On-Main) where Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger, infamous serial murderers, stayed.  The hotel has a history of ghosts, demons, murderers, and strange inhabitants.  In 2013, Elisa Lam, a student from Canada vacationing in Los Angeles, stayed at the Cecil.  She is seen on security camera hiding from someone in the elevator and displaying very bizarre behavior in the hallways.  She disappeared without a trace until residents began complaining about the smell and color of the tap water.  Upon investigation, police and fire officials discovered Lam’s nude body in the hotel water tank on the roof.  The coroner determined she either accidentally or deliberately fell into the tank and died, leaving several unexplained aspects regarding her death.

Colin Dickey comes to the conclusion that “Our belief (or lack thereof) in ghosts ultimately reflects the way we face death.  Those of us who fear mortality can often find comfort in a belief in life after death, and those whom we fail to mourn properly may return to haunt us.”  Whatever the case, ghosts and phantoms roam these hot summer nights, and those of us up reading into the early hours can expect some conversation, some unexplained shadows at the periphery of our field of vision, voices in the dark, and strange lights in the sky.  We are human, and we are enthralled with such stories.