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Colin Dickey | Longreads | October 26, 2023 | 15 minutes (4,149 words)

Let me tell you a ghost story.

My street—East 21st Street in Brooklyn, on the border of Flatbush and Ditmas Park—is filled with ghosts. A block up from me, in late 2020, there began to appear a series of strange signs in the Japanese elms that line the street. They were made from tile of marble, 6 by 18 inches, strung around the limbs of the trees that lined the block. Someone had used a Dremel to carve words and pictures on them. One in white marble read simply, COVID took you. May l❤️ve keep you forever. In the corner, a small heart with the street name, 21st, superimposed on it. Another, in blue marble, had the faces of three middle-aged Black men, and read For the ones we lost, the two first. A third, in black, was hung vertically; on it, written in cursive: For the stolen ❤️s of COVID, for the ❤️s stolen by COVID of Two First, Amen. 

I walked by these memorials several times a day; I didn’t always need to, but I realized at some point I was altering my path to see them. They haunted me, in the sense that we often mean that word. “Haunted” as in a haunting melody, a haunting story—a thing that you cannot stop thinking about, that follows you like a ghost through your waking hours. Haunting like Hamlet’s father, reminding you what’s left undone, haunting like a vague blur, a noise or a whispered word, reminding you that the borders between us are porous, sometimes nonexistent. I saw the faces Dremeled into the marble—who were they? What stories did they leave behind?

By that point, I’d been thinking about ghosts, more or less nonstop, for months. In February of that year, I had been contacted by a magazine editor preparing a big summer issue on movies about New York City; would I, she inquired, be interested in writing about Ghost and Ghostbusters? I jumped at the assignment and the opportunity to write once more about this city I love and what haunts it. So I started writing about these two films. I wrote about them as the news each day got stranger and stranger, I wrote about them as a friend predicted “summer is going to be canceled,” I wrote about them as the city emptied out. I wrote about them after the magazine shelved its summer movie issue, I wrote about them after the editor stopped returning my emails. I kept writing; I wrote about them in cafés that were almost entirely empty, and I wrote about them at home when I realized it was no longer safe to write in cafés.

The usual idea behind a ghost is that they’re someone you shouldn’t normally see, someone who, due to some cosmic accident or injustice left unaddressed, has become visible again. The same, I understood, came to be true of pandemics: they are invisible until they suddenly become visible. The 1918 Spanish Flu had been more or less forgotten by history, a mere footnote to World War I, until we had our own pandemic and suddenly we couldn’t stop seeing the Spanish Flu everywhere. And watching these movies about ghosts as a new and terrifying reality loomed, I realized there were things there all along that I’d never noticed, that had, all at once, become all I could see.

So much lurks in the shadows of Jerry Zucker’s 1990 film, Ghost. At first, there is only Patrick Swayze’s character, Sam Wheat. The film’s title, after all, is singular. It’s hard not to root for him: he’s likable, successful, and has just started a promising ceramics internship before he’s tragically murdered by a hitman hired by his scheming business partner Carl Bruner. Once it’s clear his girlfriend (Demi Moore’s Molly) is also in danger, he enlists Whoopi Goldberg’s huckster psychic, Oda Mae Brown, to help save her from murderous  Carl. 

Sam sees himself as uniquely important. At first, he’s the only one Oda Mae can see, but after he unlocks her “gift,” she’s beset by ghosts, all trying to reach loved ones. (At one point she barks at him, “Did you tell every spook in the world you met about me? I got spooks from Jersey coming in here.”) But Sam can’t see beyond his own problems, even in death, and forces her to shoo these other souls (almost all of whom are Black or Latino) so she can focus on his problems. 

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In those early, terrible days, it became harder and harder not to see what Oda Mae saw, or forget these other ghosts as simply extras in Sam’s story. Who were they? What were their stories? We never truly know. The only other ghost whose story we get is Vincent Schiavelli’s subway ghost, who tells Sam, “Yeah someone pushed me. . . . What, you don’t believe me? You think I fell? You think I jumped? Well fuck you! It wasn’t my time! I wasn’t supposed to go! I’m not supposed to be here!” Beyond that, though, all we’re left with is the tantalizing idea of a city of ghosts, none of whom will get a chance to tell their stories.

In addition to the spirits that make brief cameos in Ghost are still others, even more obscured but no less vital. Sam Wheat, after all, is not the first to haunt 104 Prince Street, the loft he and Molly share at the beginning of the movie. In the film’s opening credits, a camera pans through the dusty, as-yet-undiscovered attic space: soft light catches dust in the air as we see dress forms and covered furniture, draped with sheets to suggest ghosts waiting to be found. Who might they be?

By 1990, the year the film was released, it was clear who these spectral traces belonged to—even if moviegoing audiences did not want to name them outright. A block from Sam and Molly’s fabulous loft is the former home of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. During the AIDS pandemic of the ’80s, Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman worked tirelessly to rescue and safeguard LGBTQ art—including, likely, the same detritus that Molly and Sam toss out to make way for her own sculpture. Indeed, clearing SoHo of its longtime gay population lurks in the background of Ghost like a ghost haunting Manhattan. As Sarah Schulman writes in The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation, “The process of replacement was so mechanical I could literally sit on my stoop and watch it unfurl. . . .Many died in their apartments. It was normal to hear that someone we knew had died and that their belongings were thrown out on the street. I remember once seeing the cartons of a lifetime collection of playbills in a dumpster in front of a tenement and I knew that it meant that another gay man had died of AIDS, his belongings dumped into the gutter.” You can watch Ghost now and feel this presence, even if it’s never named as such—how did Sam and Molly luck into such a cavernous loft in SoHo, its previous owner apparently vanishing, leaving a lifetime of possessions still lingering in the attic?

In 1990, though, no one wanted to think about this, especially not in an Oscar-winning major motion picture. If these ghosts are referenced at all, it’s as a joke. In an early scene, Sam and Carl do a routine in a crowded elevator: Carl begins coughing (visibly not covering his mouth), and complains to Sam about some mysterious but highly contagious illness that’s affected his penis. AIDS isn’t named outright, but it’s clear from the horrified looks of the others in the elevator what they’re afraid of catching—all to the delight of Sam and Carl as they exit the elevator and laugh their way down the hall.

It’s just a joke, but it became hard to unsee, particularly as I thought more and more about uncovered coughs, about social distancing, about the proximity to illness, about the dead left behind who would go uncounted and un-remembered.

Lucy Sante notes in Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York that the “ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes.” Rather, “New York’s ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.” To watch any ghost story set in a city like New York requires this kind of sensitivity, an awareness that every building is haunted, and that these hauntings happen in layers: as much as each generation tries to wipe out the traces of those who’ve come before, those memories are always there. Ghost is a story about haunting that’s haunted by a pandemic just out of sight—and to watch it as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded was to be reminded that cities have always been made and unmade by their plagues and epidemics, and it will always fall to the spirits to tell the whole story.

Ghost stories always used to work like this: the ghost lingered because something was left undone, or because the living forgot something or someone that should not have been forgotten. Ghost is atypical in this regard; it follows the same track as A Christmas Carol, Lewis Allen’s 1944 classic The Uninvited, and the 1980 George C. Scott vehicle The Changeling. These stories have their moments of terror, but they’re ultimately comforting stories about making the past whole. A justice is rectified, a wrong avenged, a restless spirit comforted at last. The ghost story ensures that even if one doesn’t have a satisfying conclusion in life, there may yet be narrative resolution waiting after death.

This works well for a single ghost, but what about a city? How to make each and every one of these stories whole? What do we do when there are whole cities full of ghosts, each one with their own unique story to tell, each one with something left undone? There is so much left undone when it comes to the dead. They bustle and jostle, they howl and they carouse and they interrupt and demand your attention. They never sleep, the dead. How to imagine the work of Oda Mae, beset with spooks, each with their own unfinished narrative, needing a slow and careful expiation to make the past whole so they can rest? 

One death is a tragedy, but as the bodies pile up, the ghosts and their stories become a problem to be dealt with en masse rather than one at a time. Ghost is rare as a New York City movie about a haunting that doesn’t stress exorcism, since usually ghosts are evicted against their will, like so many poor, queer, black, and brown tenants, their presence erased and their homes disinfected. It’s perhaps why the city’s most famous ghost story focuses not on ghosts like Sam but on the janitors sent to clean them out: 1984’s Ghostbusters.

Ghostbusters is the perfect fairytale of New York: a libertarian fantasy from the Reagan ’80s where the main villain is an EPA official and the all-powerful mayor has to turn to ordinary working Joes to save the city. (And after the bumbling government official shuts down the containment grid and unleashes these imprisoned spirits back into the air above Manhattan, you’re reminded that this, too, is a story about an airborne plague threatening to wipe out the city.) Their iconic coveralls are meant to remind us that the dead of New York are nothing more than pests to be exterminated. The fledgling start-up gets its start ridding the upscale Sedgewick Hotel of its iconic green ghost (later named “Slimer”), and much of their clientele appears to be the affluent, as they cleanse Central Park West condos. The moral of Ivan Reitman’s blockbuster is that the best thing for the city is to let unregulated small businesses wreak havoc and extort payments, mafia-style. (Who are the Ghostbusters, but a protection racket? After all, when the Sedgewick Hotel manager balks at the exorbitant fee, Bill Murray’s Venkman offers to release the ghost back in the now-destroyed ballroom.)

As befitting pests and vermin, hardly any of the ghosts in the Ghostbusters franchise get a backstory; they are nameless squatters and vagrants, marginal figures to be vacuumed up and put in deep storage. Who, for example, was this green gluttonous ghost in their previous life? Presumably someone with a soul, with a family, with a place in New York’s history? Like Patrick Swayze, someone capable of feeling love and longing even in the afterlife, someone with regrets and rage and confusion—someone who deserved an end more dignified than being trapped in a box by three fools. It feels absurd to try to empathize with this gross green thing, but why not? Ghosts were people, too. 

Our two options, it seems: the individual drama or the infestation. The solitary tragedy, the individual whose life we rescue from oblivion. Or: the mass to be removed, as quickly as possible. Ever since February 2020, as I’ve revisited these two movies a dozen times, I’ve asked myself in a hundred different ways: is there any way to write about death that is not as a single tragedy or as a mass cleanup operation? I care about ghost stories because I believe in them another possibility for storytelling, for understanding the past, and for processing grief. The ghost, perhaps, need not be exterminated or expiated. The ghost may not be a problem to solve. The ghost might be merely a gift.

Sam Wheat’s ghost is the kind Hollywood prefers: translucent and a little gauzy, but with a definite shape, features, and personality. They’re easy to visualize and demonstrate, and this form allows a star like Swayze to continue to be on-screen without being disfigured in some way. But as paranormal investigators (along with anyone else who’s ever reported an experience with the supernatural) will tell you, such a manifestation is exceedingly rare in the world of ghost hunting. What people describe instead again and again are invariably sounds, words, maybe a blur of color. Presence without shape. The ghost is disembodied: it does not have discrete form. It is not singular. 

In Ghost and Ghostbusters, the city and its multitudes are just the backdrop from which the narrow few protagonists emerge. But the reason I’m drawn to ghost stories is precisely because by its very nature the ghost blurs the edges of the individual. It flickers. It is and is not any kind of identity. It is and is not the subject of its own story. There’s possibility there.

To say I neither believe in ghosts nor fully embrace skepticism is also to say that I no longer believe that each of us is a discrete entity unto ourselves. The boundaries that separate you and I are porous, our lives not entirely our own. There is a line in John Berger’s 1972 novel G. that’s used as an epigraph in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, and again in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. In Berger’s G., the Casanova-esque protagonist is in the Alps as a friend attempts to pilot the first solo flight over the mountain range, but G is hardly paying attention, instead attempting to seduce a housecleaner. In Berger’s description of the seduction comes this line: “Never again will a single story be told as if it is the only one.”

I found the line first in Ondaatje’s novel, then traced it back to Berger, only to see it reappear in Roy’s when I read it after it won the 1997 Booker Prize. All three novels move between characters as they traverse past and present, reminding you that you can never tell the story of a single life without also telling the stories of all the lives that intersect. 

But ever since late winter 2020, whenever I read a story of a single individual in a novel or an essay or a news report, all I can think about are the ghosts at the margins, those begging  to speak. Every story of a single person is already embedded in a larger story, one where the writer has decided—consciously or not—to reveal or hide those other layers. It’s still the case, of course, that writers will attempt to tell a single story as though it is the only one. But having lived in this pandemic, I now see how impossible it is to read a single story as though it were the only one. Our duty these days is to enter the world of story aware of the ghosts in the background, to always be seeking their stories as well, coaxing them out.

More and more, to write solely about oneself these days has begun to feel to me like Sam Wheat bypassing the other ghosts in Oda Mae’s waiting room. A “post” pandemic means going back to our old ways when we could imagine ourselves as discrete individuals. But we are never going back; our lives are too interlaced now. Surely, by now, there are other ways to tell stories, other ways to acknowledge the other souls in the room alongside you and me, writer and reader, ghost and medium?

I went back, day after day, to the block where the trees were strung with memorials. The white one, which reads COVID took you. May l❤️ve keep you forever, called to me, demanding to be witnessed again and again. A sentiment so simple, and yet it ached with pain and longing and a story that I did not know, could not know. The first time I saw it, I broke in two. I stood there on the sidewalk and started to cry, crying for all that loss, all the grief from the entire year spilling out of me. In ways I still can’t put into words, it changed me, changed how I saw the city, changed how I saw those years. Not a day went by when I didn’t think of those signs, and the stories—unknown to me—behind them. This is what I mean by haunted. This is what I mean by a ghost story.

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And then, in early 2023, I was walking home one night and discovered to my horror that the white sign had been split in half, its two marble halves dangling from the wire that bound it to the tree. It was hard to imagine such an act—to imagine vandals so unthinking, so malicious, that they would destroy such a thing. Perhaps to console myself, I imagined it was some sort of horrible accident, that someone had backed up against it, or perhaps a fight where someone had been thrown against the tree. These objects were sacred. I couldn’t imagine anyone doing such a thing on purpose.

The blue one came down not long after. I don’t know if it was also broken, or if its creator feared for its safety. The vertical one remained; it would be months before I would learn why. 

How will we ever be the same again? To treat a death in isolation, to treat a story as though it is the only one—these are choices. They are forms of active denial, active forgetting, active erasure. You cannot tell a narrative of those years—of these years—as a single story, as a personal narrative of an individual. Our lives have always been intertwined, but “how to live?” is no longer a question that one can answer solely for oneself.

As the world tries to move on from a pandemic that has left us all scarred and traumatized, you can expect more ghost stories, because they’re one of the few available modes we have for dealing with the unresolved. Expect a language that allows us to see grief as a fleeting shadow out of the corner of one’s eye, there and beckoning, waiting for us to be ready. But beware the sleight of hand that would use a ghost to tell a single story, a homogenized or sanitized version, a discrete narrative. 

It was sometime in the summer of 2023 that I saw the fourth sign—not on a tree, but on the stoop of a brownstone on the same block. A larger slab, but the same carved sentiment: For the ❤️s stolen by COVID-19 of the Two-First. Leaning on the steps, nearly obscured by a garden in full bloom. Suddenly, it felt like I had the key to it all. An address, perhaps the artist behind the signs I’d come to know so well. On a late summer day, I happened by while the building’s occupants were out front, gathering herbs from their garden to give to a neighbor who was standing on the street with a granny cart. I asked them—their names were Emily and Andy—if they were the ones who’d made the signs that were hung from the trees.

“No,” Emily told me. But they knew who made them. Amber had lived in one of the apartment buildings on the block but had since moved to California. The mosque on the corner, they explained, was undergoing a renovation when the pandemic halted construction. That was where the marble tiles had come from: discarded building materials. Amber had taken a few of them and carved the memorials, and then hung them on the trees. 

“This block alone lost 13 people to COVID that first summer,” Andy told me. “And all while people on the television were saying it was made up.” One woman, he said, pointing to a house near the end of the block, survived both World Trade Center attacks, and then died of COVID, her first year into retirement.

He kept on gathering parsley while his neighbor waited patiently, happy to talk but focused on this act of generosity. Emily was picking spinach for a friend; she offered to let me have some as well, anytime I wanted to pick the leaves I was welcome. Our conversation was punctuated by the matter at hand: “Do you want some mint as well?” he asked the woman on the street, who nodded. Emily explained that the sign on their own stoop was not Amber’s work; Emily had made it herself, inspired, a way of keeping the story going, a way of keeping the ghosts alive.

I felt sheepish interrupting them at their work, this act of care for the living that is just as vital as the care we offer the dead, so I left shortly thereafter. But at the end of our conversation, Andy explained to me how the memorials had broken. It hadn’t been vandals as I’d feared, or even an accident. When they’d been hung around the tree limbs, Amber had bound them tightly with wire. But it had been over two years—the trees had grown, slowly, steadily, stretching the thick wire until something had to give, and the marble broke in half. The one hung vertically stayed only because the wire was looser and there was less tension on the brittle marble. What I’d thought was carelessness, or desecration, had been instead the stubborn reality of life going on, even at the expense of our memorials to the past. When I went back to the trees the next day, I saw how thoroughly the limbs had grown around the wire, still there—a vestigial remnant now bound inextricably to this living, growing thing. There may come a time when no one knows the story of that wire, how it got there, what it once held. But it will remain there nonetheless, a presence without a shape.

A slender thread—thin and sharp as a steel wire—connects each of us to these lives we lost, people we don’t know, will never know, but who stay with us every day. It connects you to the ghosts all around us, the ones that remind you that you are not singular, that you are not just the protagonist in your own story, that your own story is a part of a million other stories. That’s what makes a city a city—it’s that slender thread that holds us, the living and the dead, holding us even after we break.

The slender thread that reminds us that never again will a single story be read as though it were the only one.

Colin Dickey is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, and, most recently, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

This complexity could be why we can’t look away from the story of the Bell Witch amid all the other ghost stories that drift in and out of the American consciousness. Storytellers look for explanation, resolution, clarity. The only clarity in the story of the Bell Witch and its endurance over more than a century is the way it taps into white, male American anxieties, anxieties that are of culture’s own making.

Colin Dickey | Longreads | March 2022 | 24 minutes (4,226 words)

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Two men are dead in a cabin on the side of a mountain — how did they die?

There is a whole host of questions like this — riddles that get grouped under the category of “lateral thinking puzzles.” Another: A man walks into a restaurant and orders the albatross soup. After finishing the soup, he leaves and commits suicide. Why? Or: There is a dead man, naked in the desert, holding a straw. How did he die? You can only ask yes-or-no questions, and the goal is to figure out the precise story. Many of these involve a dead man in one form or another. There is a dead man with a hole in his suit — how did he die?

Sometimes, the mechanism of the answer is something ludicrously complex, a thing that must be pieced out bit by bit. Several people were in a hot air balloon that drifted into the desert and started to lose altitude because of the heat and air pressure. They threw everything they could overboard, including their clothes, but when that wasn’t enough they drew straws to see who would jump overboard to save the others. Other times, though, the solution is simpler, but requires retooling your perspective. You hear “hole in his suit” and you think of a three-piece suit and your mind goes to a bullet wound. Once that image is set in your mind, it can take some work to dislodge it. You don’t necessarily think: “space suit.”

You hear “cabin on the side of a mountain” and you think of a small building built of wood and brick. Smoke out of the chimney from a pleasant fire. You don’t necessarily think: “airplane.”

***

Cabin is one of those words that seemed unremarkable to me until I spent some time thinking about it. It is a small room, a compartment, but beyond that it splinters in different directions. A cabin is a thing in the woods, remote, isolated — a place to escape to or where one goes to live simply. It is also a compartment on a ship, a private room in a large, more complex vessel. Or it is the main body of an airplane, where all the passengers (as well as the crew, if it’s a small aircraft) sit together. The kind of thing that you might find strewn on the side of a mountain.

Knowing the reason those two dead men are in that cabin on the side of the mountain answers some questions but not all. It doesn’t tell us why the crash happened, who was responsible, or anything about the lives of these two dead men. The lateral thinking puzzle is not truly interested in these questions.

***

I separated from my wife of 20 years at the end of 2019. We had previously lived in Brooklyn but had moved upstate to Dutchess County, New York, for several years — when people asked me why we moved, I often replied that it was the result of “a series of irrevocable decisions.” There, everything had fallen apart, and at the beginning of 2020 I moved back to Brooklyn, to an apartment a few blocks from where we’d lived together before. Upstate, we’d had a large house and plenty of room; now I was on the fifth floor of an apartment building, once again sharing walls.

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I wanted very much to focus on myself. Now that I was, for the first time in decades, not bound by another person’s decisions and wants and happiness alongside my own, I could look inward and try to understand what I needed and what I wanted. The old me had died, I told myself. I could now be whomever I wanted. I made a decision to live more deliberately, to take some control over my life that I felt had been lacking. I was going to spend some time and really focus on figuring out exactly what had gone so wrong, how things had turned out so poorly. But I also decided to be more open to experience, to consider possibilities, to let myself be carried along by the moment if it meant new chances, new ways of being.

I only had about a month of this before the world came crashing to a halt and I found myself largely trapped inside for the next few months. Trying to merely stay alive, I made decisions that would have lasting impacts out of sheer reaction. I saw my day-to-day life as from a distance, a sort of eerie remove, as though it was happening to someone else. I established new patterns as a way of asserting some kind of order on the chaos and anxiety I felt, then watched myself as though someone else was going through those motions.

To be in a cabin on a plane, together with your fellow passengers, or to be in a cabin on a ship, alone by yourself, is to be a passenger of some kind. To be in a cabin in the woods is to be going nowhere at all — though, at least since Thoreau, to be in such a cabin is to be, on some level, on some kind of introspective journey, learning about yourself and how to live. I see now that at some point in those early months I began moving along three separate timelines. I was a hermit, ensconced in a cabin, trying to find myself; I was a passenger, moving along into the future without agency; and I was alive amidst a wreck — everything around me crashed, everything broken.

***

There is a specific cabin on the side of a specific mountain that I think about often. It is the cabin of a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30, Air New Zealand Flight 901, which sits on the side of Mount Erebus, as it has for over 40 years. In 1977 Air New Zealand began operating sightseeing tours over Antarctica: The flight would leave Auckland at 8:00 a.m., fly a loop over the continent and return to Christchurch at 7:00 p.m., refuel, and return to Auckland. An experienced Arctic explorer on board would act as a guide during the trip, pointing out landmarks and features of the continent.

The approved flight plan involved flying directly over the 12,448-foot Mount Erebus on Ross Island, the second-highest peak in Antarctica, but due to a transcription error, the actual flight path used by most of the sightseeing flights involved flying down the length of McMurdo Sound, some 27 miles west of the mountain. A few days before the accident, another pilot noted this discrepancy, leading Air New Zealand to update the flight plan, albeit incorrectly.

On November 28, 1979, Flight 901 proceeded along a route that the pilot and copilot believed to be along McMurdo Sound, descending to 1,500 feet. Despite the crew being aware of visual landmarks all around them, they did not realize that their new path put them on a course to Mount Erebus and they did not see the mountain directly in front of them. A condition known as “flat light” or “sector whiteout” had occurred, where the mixture of snow on the ground, clouds, and light conditions caused the pilots to lose depth of field; they were unable to distinguish the mountain from the horizon all around them.

At some point, in those final moments, that horrifying trick of perspective revealed itself: The empty white horizon was in fact, a mountain. It was too late to pull up. At 12:49 p.m. the plane crashed into the side of Mount Erebus. All 257 people on board were killed.

Because of the expense and feasibility of a large-scale salvage operation, most of the wreckage is still on Mount Erebus. The bodies have been removed, but the cabin remains on the mountain.

***

Mount Erebus is an active volcano, and one of the more geologically important sites on the planet. It was named by Sir James Clark Ross, who named it after his ship, the HMS Erebus. Built in 1826, the Erebus had begun its service as a warship, but after two years it was refitted for Arctic exploration, alongside the HMS Terror, which had shelled Baltimore during the War of 1812. The two ships left Tasmania in November of 1840 and spent the winter exploring the island that would later be named for Ross; the two ships would make several subsequent expeditions back to Antarctica in the ensuing years. Then in 1845, both ships were outfitted with steam engines and used by Sir John Franklin in his doomed expedition in search of a Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic. Franklin sailed in the Erebus, in command of the entire expedition, while Francis Crozier captained the Terror. The two ships were last seen by Europeans entering Baffin Bay in August of 1845 by whalers, wherein they disappeared into the Canadian Arctic. The mystery captivated the British public, and multiple expeditions were launched in search of the Franklin Expedition. Eventually it became clear that all 129 men on board had been lost.

Those men died beholden to a fantasy of British imperialism, sleepers all sharing the same dream. But as the reality that no one had survived the Franklin Expedition sank in among the British populace, it became increasingly important to understand how they died. Local Inuits who had witnessed the Franklin Expedition reported that they had descended into cannibalism near the end, an accusation met with widespread condemnation tinged with racist vitriol. Charles Dickens accused the Inuits of having murdered the sailors themselves; “We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel,” he wrote. Britons refused to believe that these men, bereft, starving, lost, and hopeless, could behave as anything but stalwart embodiments of British ideals. It was important that the people of England be able to tell themselves that these men had died well. To believe in this neat and tidy fiction, it seemed, was more important than any reality — that they had died well meant that the expedition wasn’t a total loss, that there was still something that could be learned from it: about stoicism in the face of despair, heroism in the face of defeat. The truth was far less important than the lesson.

As for the doomed Flight 901, investigations would later suggest that the pilot and copilot of Flight 901 were not entirely in command. The original accident report cited pilot error as the cause of the crash, blaming the pilot’s decision to descend below the customary minimum altitude and his willingness to continue at that altitude after it became clear that the crew wasn’t entirely sure of their position. But a subsequent inquiry by Justice Peter Mahon cleared the crew of blame, and instead blamed Air New Zealand for altering the flight plan without advising the crew. This second report also blamed the whiteout conditions, what Mahon termed “a malevolent trick of polar light.” Mahon also accused the airline of a conspiracy to whitewash the inquiry; he charged it concealed evidence and lied to investigators.

This conspiracy accusation was subsequently dismissed by New Zealand’s Privy Council, but it still seems fair to say that the pilot and copilot of Flight 901 were not entirely in charge of what happened that day, constrained, as they were, by faulty information, flight plans, data and computers, to say nothing of the weather — all of which conspired to prevent them from fully understanding what was happening as they flew into the Antarctic wilderness. Most importantly, the inquiry failed to ascertain how the crew and passengers of Flight 901 died; it attempted to provide a narrative, one that could perhaps lead to some kind of closure — instead what it found were contradictions, lies, and ambiguity.

***

In those early months of the pandemic one of the few things I learned was how a single life can split into a series of paths simultaneously. There were times I felt absolutely in control, and times like I was swimming through an endless chaos. I remained in my tiny cabin of an apartment while I hurtled through space, both in and out of control at once. I learned that there is not a single narrative; that at some point in your life your story can splinter and divide and run in parallel tracks. Elements from one of your stories can affect all the others. At some point, you hope, these tracks will combine again. Often this can take years. Often it never happens at all.

The lateral thinking puzzle, on the other hand, only works if there is a single solution. The cabin is an airplane cabin, it is nothing else. If it is this then the solution is evident. If it is not, then the question — how did these men die? — becomes more urgent. Bear attack? Starvation? Cabin fever? We don’t know, cannot know.

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As we sped into the unknown in those early days, all we wanted to know was who was spared, and for how long? Who died and how did they die? We knew there was a disease but we didn’t understand how it worked. We knew there were precautions that could keep you safe but we didn’t know which ones worked and why some people who followed them still got sick. Lives were wasted and lost less because of the disease itself and more because of a fealty to a broken set of ideas, a belief in a certain way the world worked that could not be altered. That the economy should be our primary concern, that businesses should stay open at all costs. That it wasn’t the government’s job to intervene. That personal choice was more valid than collective action. That change was not required. And tens of thousands of people were carried along to their graves in service of these beliefs.

***

You come outside your Brooklyn apartment one morning in April 2020, and the entire street is roped off in police tape. Across the street from your front door, there is a woman’s body in the trash. How did she die?

April 2020 is when everything seemed to have crashed, when there was nothing but wreckage. Through the middle of March, I had watched warily at the unfolding news, still trying to cling to some measure of hope; by the end of March the reality had begun to set in and everything seemed strange and emptied. It began a period when I literally could not imagine life beyond the next two weeks — I couldn’t see ahead in my life, as though I had entered a fog that obscured the future entirely. By April, there was nothing but the monotony of days, the litany of body counts and infection rates, and whatever grim rituals could be done to ward off despair and hopelessness.

And then on a bright, spring Wednesday morning I came outside to find that a body had been discovered across the street: a woman who’d been wrapped in a black and white tarp and left in a pile of trash.

The cops were still on the street, and I approached the one wearing a mask, speaking loudly so he didn’t have to get close. When I asked him what happened, he replied, “They’re doing an investigation.” “Did someone die?” I asked him. “Honestly,” he replied, “the news knows more about it than I do. It’ll be on the news.” It seemed to be his job not to know anything, to studiously avoid knowing anything. “Can you tell me anything? Should I be worried?” I asked him. He repeated the line. “They just have to do an investigation.”

Behind my question was not merely idle curiosity; it was of utmost importance at the time to know how people were dying. Was this a homicide? Was I at risk for my safety? Did I need to change my patterns of behavior when I was outside — avoid certain street corners or neighborhoods or times of night? Was it a COVID death? Had the outbreak spread so far and wide that people were just simply giving up, dumping bodies willy-nilly? Was this body a harbinger of a complete breakdown in the city?

I walked a bit away, out of earshot from the first cop, and put the same question to another cop. “It’s just that it’s suspicious, is all,” he told me. “So they have to do an investigation.” There was, I’m sure, a low note of panic in my voice. “But what was it? Someone was murdered? Was it homicide?”

“It’s just suspicious,” is all he would say. Neither officer was willing to even state the basic fact that I already knew. Neither was willing to name the antecedent to that pronoun, “it.” The death itself. Neither would even cop to the basic fact that there was a body.

A few days later, I learned from the news that it had not been a homicide, nor had it been related to COVID-19. The woman was believed to have overdosed and the man she was with had panicked, dumping her body rather than calling the paramedics. This man was later charged with concealment of a corpse — a law passed in New York in 2015, referred to as “Amanda Lynn’s Law,” after Amanda Lynn Wienckowski, a 20-year-old woman who was found dead in the trash in Buffalo in 2009. (Wienckowski’s death had also been ruled an overdose, but a private autopsy paid for by the family concluded that she had been strangled, leaving unresolved the question of how she died.) After that, the story dropped out of the news.

Having the solution to the puzzle solved nothing for me. It was, on a brutal level of reality, the best case scenario for discovering a body in the trash: It wasn’t a homicide, and it wasn’t related to the ongoing pandemic (at least not explicitly so). The fact that it was neither meant that my personal safety wasn’t any more or less impacted by this gruesome discovery. And yet, very little changed for me. I wasn’t reassured. Knowing the cause of death changed nothing. Could she have been saved? Did he try to save her? Why was she there? Was it all a terrible accident? Did she want to die? Why did he panic? Why couldn’t he have tried harder?

How did she die?

***

My own life went on. I tried not to think about her, that body in the trash, that woman whose name was never revealed. But she remains there, carried with me, nameless but insisting. I still pass the spot where her body was found several times a day. There is no memorial there, nothing to commemorate what happened; you’d have to have been there at the time to know it happened at all.

My street is filled with ghosts. There are memorials for others up and down the block: piles of candles and fading flowers, graffitied “RIPs” on the sides of buildings, laminated sheets of paper with smiling faces above dates tacked to trees. So many ways to be confronted with the same questions: Who was saved, and who was doomed — and how did they die?

For the families, and sometimes the police, there is nothing academic about these questions — they need to be answered, one way or another. But what about for the rest of us — the bystanders, who know a death has happened but aren’t involved directly? We who are too far removed personally to ever know the story, but also too close in physical proximity to ever forget that something has happened?

To live in a city like New York during a catastrophe is to be reminded a hundred times that you will never know the answer to these riddles, that the work of living through such times is to carry these unanswered questions with you, to never dismiss them. Sometimes the work we do for the dead involves fighting for justice. Sometimes it involves remembrances and testimonials and obituaries. Sometimes it involves asking questions that you cannot answer. Our obligation to the proximate dead is both very little and more than we can possibly hope to achieve; we ask the questions knowing there are no permanent or stable answers, only the questions themselves and the endless attempts to answer them.

***

The term “lateral thinking” was first coined by Edward de Bono in 1967, where he argued that the key was the switch from familiar patterns of thinking to different and unexpected perspectives, allowing for new insight. Rather than using critical faculties, reasoning out the true value of statements and attempting to understand and correct errors, lateral thinking is designed to radically break one out of established patterns and broaden one’s tools for problem solving.

De Bono published multiple books on his concept. He made a name and a career for himself, but he could never quite articulate how the process worked. He offered inspiring examples from the world of business and culture but hesitated to provide a roadmap for how the reader could imitate such successes. “No textbook could be compiled to teach lateral thinking,” he wrote in 1970’s Lateral Thinking: A Textbook in Creativity. As with other self-help gurus like Malcolm Gladwell, de Bono mainly offered a satisfying narrative built around sudden eureka moments that ignored the way solutions are usually found: communal problem-solving, trial and error, and dogged work. Less a significant contribution to cognition and more likely a pseudoscience that appealed to the CEOs who hired him to give presentations at their Fortune 500 companies, lateral thinking is a buzzword and a magic trick, obfuscating the stubborn work of thought behind ersatz epiphanies.

Lateral thinking presents itself as finding a novel solution — you reframe your perspective and you see it, there it is: The proper way to go. But sometimes there is no proper way to go, there is no trick of perspective that makes everything clear. I imagined, in those early days — and in the many, many days since, that if I spent enough time looking at what had happened to my life, if I turned around the question in my mind long enough, the answer would come clear and a simple solution would present itself. But I have never found this to be the case.

When I teach beginning students how to write a personal essay, I usually tell them there is a standard structure they can follow. There is a past self, the one who experiences the events in question, and a current self, the one writing about these experiences afterward. The essay is a dialogue, I tell them, and it is built around the difference between these two selves. The current self has learned something, understands something, and is communicating that takeaway to the reader.

The essay tries to answer the question: How did you live? You went through something, you were changed in some way, you came out the other side. How did you do it? What did you learn? The perspective, the reframing has happened, and now the writer sees clearly. What was ambiguous or uncertain is now resolved.

It’s a neat structure and makes for a satisfying read, but most of the time it’s a trick. You write a triumphant essay about getting over an ex and you’re still thinking about them months later. You write about meeting the love of your life and by the time the essay is published you’ve broken it off with them. You write an essay about what you’ve learned about yourself and you’re the same enigma the next day.

I’ve always distrusted the form of the personal essay because I recognize the lie here, recognize how easy it is to put together a satisfying narrative conclusion about an incident in my life, one that delivers on a certain promise made to the reader — a satisfaction entirely built on smoke. These neat, pat resolutions at best can only describe one facet of one’s life, at one particular moment. Meanwhile the rest of you — these parallel lives — remain messy, untidy, ambiguous, complicated.

Enough time has passed since those early days of 2020 — and I’ve spent more than enough time thinking and puzzling on them — that by now I assume I should know something, I should be able to offer a takeaway of some kind. What those days meant to me. What I see now that I couldn’t see then. How I was changed. How I was saved. How I lived.

But none of this is true. All that I find I can do is keep adding new layers to the same question, one on top of each other. The only thing that feels true about myself is the series of questions I’m constantly asking myself, that never get answered fully but get asked again and again in an ever-evolving light. How did they die? How did I live?

***

The mountain reveals itself and the plane crashes. The ship reaches its destination and the passenger disembarks. The hermit, enmeshed in solitude for long enough, has an epiphany. The inquiry is finished, the cause of death announced. The pandemic winds down. The essay reaches its conclusion.

You think that something has ended here, but it’s just a trick of perspective.

***

Colin Dickey is the author of four books of nonfiction, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, and The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained.

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

This week, we’re sharing stories from Ta-Nehisi Coates, Katie Engelhart, Katy Vine, Zach Baron, and Colin Dickey.

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1. The Life Breonna Taylor Lived, in the Words of Her Mother

Ta-Nehisi Coates | Vanity Fair | August 24, 2020 | 26 minutes (6,720 words)

“She started walking early—like at nine months, so she was just a little person early. I always say she had an old soul. She liked listening to the blues with my mother. She would sing me the blues. It was hilarious. She used to sing ‘Last Two Dollars.’ That was her song.”

2. What Happened In Room 10?

Katie Engelhart | The California Sunday Magazine | August 23, 2020 | 64 minutes (16,178 words)

“The Life Care Center of Kirkland, Washington, was the first COVID hot spot in the U.S. Forty-six people associated with the nursing home died, exposing how ill-prepared we were for the pandemic — and how we take care of our elderly.”

3. The Wildest Insurance Fraud Scheme Texas Has Ever Seen

Katy Vine | Texas Monthly | August 19, 2020 | 26 minutes (6,633 words)

“Over a decade, Theodore Robert Wright III destroyed cars, yachts, and planes. That was only the half of it.”

4. The Conscience of Silicon Valley

Zach Baron | GQ | August 24, 2020 | 20 minutes (5100 words)

“Tech oracle Jaron Lanier warned us all about the evils of social media. Too few of us listened. Now, in the most chaotic of moments, his fears—and his bighearted solutions—are more urgent than ever.”

5. How the Spirit Mediums of New York Are Dealing with Mass Death

Colin Dickey | The End of the World Review | August 24, 2020 | 8 minutes (2,025 words)

“A few months into the pandemic, I started contacting spiritual mediums….As we go forward attempting to rebuild our country and our communities in the wake of this destruction, that will not just involve burying the dead—it will involve finding the means and the rituals to make sense of this loss.”

Colin Dickey | Longreads | March 2019 | 15 minutes (3,788 words)

A month after we bought our first house in 2009, our friend Vanessa came over for her first and only visit. She was moving with great difficulty by then, and the three steps up to our front door were treacherous. When she made it to the chair closest to the door she sat down with visible relief. Scleroderma is a perverse disease where the body manically over-produces collagen: it gets in your joints, making moving painful, and at its worst overtakes the body’s organs themselves. It makes one’s movements slow and measured, as though suffering from advanced age or arthritis — and yet, as Vanessa was fond of pointing out, it also makes one’s skin smooth and radiant. It is as though one is simultaneously aging forwards and backwards at once.

“Is that a linden tree?” she asked, looking out the window. Now having sat down again, her eyes were flashing around the room — she was still very much alert and alive, still very much a moving part of this world.

I told her I didn’t know — I’ve never been good at identifying or remembering trees. I couldn’t tell you the difference between an oak and an elm, a maple or a poplar.

“I’m pretty sure,” she said, “that it’s a linden.”

She died a few weeks later. In the months that followed, I spent a good deal of time looking out the window at the linden tree.

***

The linden’s leaves fell. They fell everywhere. In fall of course, but also in summer, in spring, in winter. They fell to make way for new leaves, and the piles gathered on the concrete of the side yard, nowhere to decay into. We’d rake them into piles or into the compost bin and then more would fall.

Only belatedly do I recognize that many of my early memories of Vanessa involve her dancing. Dancing was the first thing she lost.

As new homeowners Nicole and I were quickly learning that without almost constant attention, the trees, the plants, the weeds, all would cover over us entirely. Keeping the kind of manicured foliage I used to take for granted is an almost Herculean effort. It was our first home, and the first time we understood that the plant life contained within the lot of our house was our responsibility, for good or for ill. And we could not keep up with it — leaves fell and accumulated, branches shot out over neighbors’ property lines, the weeds and the grass in the backyard would, if not attended to, overtake the flagstone path and everything else within weeks. The plants could not be contained.

The overgrown yard usually signifies some kind of neglect, of a homeowner having given up on appearances. It’s odd that we’re trained to not see it as it really is: the bursting of life, the overflowing of living things whose vitality can’t be stopped.

Later that fall I watched Fritz Lang’s Siegfried for the first time — the first of two films he made in the ’30s that borrow from the same source material as Wagner’s Ring cycle, films that Weimar film critic Siegfried Kracauer would later take as an almost exemplary foreshadowing of the Nazi’s Nuremberg aesthetics. After slaying the dragon, the hero, Siegfried, touches its blood and discovers he can hear and understand the language of the birds of the forest, who bid him to bathe in the dragon’s blood to become invincible. As Siegfried moves to immerse himself in the dragon’s blood, a single linden leaf falls from the trees above and lands on his back, leaving one spot vulnerable — it is here, in this one spot covered by the linden leaf, he will ultimately be murdered by Hagen, his betrayer.

Do the birds not know this will happen? How can they not see the leaf fall and warn Siegfried? Do they know full well? Do they lie to Siegfried about his invulnerability, promising him immortality only so that he’ll lower his guard later, stabbed in the back?

In birdsong we are promised immortality; it is the slow decay and excess of the vegetable world that undoes this.

***

“Tilias, especially the species of western Europe, have for centuries been favorite shade and ornamental trees, particularly in Europe at the period when the formal style of gardening, under the inspiration of Le Nôtre, prevailed,” writes Charles Sprague Sargent in The Silva of North America, published in 1890; “and avenues of Lime-trees were long considered an essential feature in every park and town of central and northern Europe. The ability of the Lindens to thrive with severe pruning renewed year after year fit them for the decoration of formal gardens, and their free habit when allowed to grow naturally makes them desirable park and roadside trees.”

Perhaps it is this facet of the linden — its adaptability to human intervention, and its ability to engage and respond to human aesthetics and popular taste — that have led to humans imbuing the tree with so many different symbolic meanings. It’s not just Siegfried; linden trees have had a long history in literature and mythology, particularly in Germanic folklore — the tree, art historian Michael Baxandall reports, has long been “an object of magico-religious interest.” Lime groves were treated as holy places of pilgrimage, their seeds eaten by pregnant women, their bark applied to the body to enhance both strength and beauty.

Its role is often standing at the literal center of town and culture: ancient lindens were planted in the center of Germanic towns, dedicated to the fertility goddess Freya before later being re-consecrated to the Virgin Mary. In time they would be the center around which local politics and law revolved, where courts and executions were held. As they aged, unchanged, they became symbols of longevity, a symbol of nationalism and of old Germanic culture. This location of the linden tree, both the literal and figurative center of town, offers it seeming endless possibilities of signification. As Baxandall concludes, the lime tree also had “broadly speaking, festal associations: as Hieronymus Bock said, it was a tree to dance under.”

***

I’d gone to graduate school with Vanessa’s twin sister Chandra, but how we really all got to know each other was via the bar down the street from our apartment, which in the summer of 2006 had an inexplicable happy hour where all drinks were $2.50 from 5 to 7, so Nicole and I, and Vanessa and Chandra, and whoever else was available would meet after work and each drink four Manhattans (even with a generous tip only $15) in two hours and then make dinner together. Nicole and I were getting married and were trying to keep our wedding small but somewhat last minute invited Vanessa and Chandra because they were good people and fun to drink with and knew how to have a good time. They’d also connected us with their friend, a wedding photographer who gave us a steep discount, which is also why perhaps they’re in so many of the photos from that night. Except for maybe my mother, no one at that wedding had more fun dancing than the two of them.

The first time I understood that there might be something wrong with Vanessa was a year later at a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, where live musicians performed classics from Bollywood cinema. I can no longer remember the performers but I remember how jubilant the crowd was through the whole night. At first it was kind of a nervously contained tension, but when the band broke into A. R. Rahman’s “Chaiyya Chaiyya” the audience erupted into motion, spilling out into the aisles, as though the entire place had been afflicted with St. Vitus’s Dance. The moment was infectious, the entire crowd undulating with joy. Only afterwards, during the intermission, when I saw Vanessa visibly struggle with the Bowl’s gentle concrete steps, did I have the first inkling that the soreness she’d lately been complaining of was something far more serious. And only belatedly do I recognize that many of my early memories of Vanessa involve her dancing. Dancing was the first thing she lost.

***

Ian Bostridge notes that the linden tree — or at least its derivatives — also plays an important role in perhaps the most famous scene in all of literature, in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, at the heart of the literature of memory and remembering. Proust’s famous involuntary memory has long been associated with the madeleine, but the cookie alone is not enough. Marcel’s memories are triggered by the madeleine dipped in tea, and while we think of it as the “madeleine scene,” the true star is the tea: “Clearly, the truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me,” he explains after it has first triggered the hint of memory. “The drink has awoken in me, but does not know this truth, and can do no more than repeat it indefinitely.” Bostridge explains that the tea in question is actually tilleul, an herbal tea made from the blossoms of linden trees, a word that has no clear English translation (thus translators render it sometimes as “lime-blossom tea”), and that we might include Proust’s masterpiece among those other cultural artifacts inspired by the linden tree.

But it’s not entirely clear to me whether or not that’s accurate. Proust repeatedly uses the word thé in his famous Madeleine passage, not tilleul, a kind of tisane, or herbal infusion. Only as his memories start to come into focus does the lime blossom make its appearance: “And suddenly the memory appeared. That taste was of the little piece of madeleine that on Sunday mornings at Combray…[that] my aunt Léonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime blossom.” What to make of that “or”? Were there two distinct beverages, tea and tilleul, sometimes one and sometimes the other? Or is Marcel suggesting that it could have been either, that he doesn’t quite remember?

By the next paragraph, we have moved from thé to tilleul: “And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea that my aunt used to give me.” But then, in the final line of the passage, there is a reference only to “ma tasse de thé,” “my cup of tea.” It seems as though Proust uses these two words — thé and tilleul — as interchangeable synonyms, in the way Americans treat herbal infusions as the same as tea itself. Later, though, he will clarify: normally his aunt drank tea, but if she was “agitated,” she would ask for the herbal infusion tilleul instead. Yet his slight imprecision, and the way that one beverage gives way to another, hints at some deliberate obfuscation on his part. These questions, I suppose, are a bit trivial, and probably irrelevant — but then again, this is the most famous passage in the history of literature on the subject of memory, so perhaps a question as to what, exactly, Marcel remembers about that famous beverage is actually of great importance.

***

I learned all this about lindens only much later, some of it through research, some of it just happenstance, the way random facts and folklore tend to gather in the eaves of memory. I have no idea how much of this Vanessa might have known herself, had I asked her on that day more about linden trees. She was not an academic but moved among them, and had the same intellectual curiosity. What she knew of trees, their morphology and taxonomy, their cultural history — I never thought to ask.

As new homeowners Nicole and I were quickly learning that without almost constant attention, the trees, the plants, the weeds, all would cover over us entirely.

I began to research information about the history of the linden tree, its various appearances in literature and folklore, almost as a means of recapturing that moment with Vanessa, keeping it alive. Delving into the tree’s history, something I’d never otherwise given much thought to, became a way of remembering a friend looking out the window on a late spring day. This was not, as Proust would have it, in some kind of memoire involuntaire, but something deliberate.

This work has not been constant or all-encompassing; I have not devoted myself to understanding this tree. Rather, it’s something I take up in spare moments, between projects or when I’m otherwise idle — a few facts here, a book unearthed there. Only after I’d been working in this way for a few years did I understand that it was a way to recall that moment, something that otherwise might have easily slipped away: research as a means of actively remembering.

In fact, while I’d been keeping notes about linden trees for several years, it wasn’t until I came across the English translation of César Aira’s The Linden Tree that it finally seemed time to gather them all into one place. Aira’s slim novel opens with a description of the plaza in the Argentine town of Pringles, where there sits, among lines of linden trees, one in particular that by some quirk has grown to gargantuan size, “a monument to the singularity of our town.” Like that centuries-old Germanic tradition, there is an invocation of the linden tree as the center of town, the town’s identity. In Aira’s novel, though, it is also a story of Peron and a political landscape unique to Argentina: in the novel’s opening pages the tree is cut down, “in an irrational act of political hatred.” A boy whose family is associated with Peronistas is pursued by a band of fanatics and takes refuge atop the Monster Linden Tree; enraged, the mob below cuts the tree down. “‘The Peronist Boy’: how absurd! Children can’t be identified politically; they don’t belong to the left or the right. He wouldn’t have understood what he was representing. The symbol had infected him like a fateful virus.”

True, also, of the linden tree itself, which has come to bear all manner of symbolism implanted on it, while itself remaining ignorant to each and every last one of these uses. The tree itself has no use for magico-religious meaning, modernist films and novels, nor of the vagaries of politics, be it fascism or Peron’s populism. The tree has no relation to, nor interest in the research I’ve done, the memories that I associate with it. But then, without these human symbols, would we have so loyally planted so many linden trees in Europe and in the Americas? If the tree was not so adaptable to human needs, would it have flourished as readily as it has?

And certainly there are aspects of the linden which are not symbolic, which are instead chemical, pharmacological. In Aira’s novel there is (as there is with Proust) the tea: the narrator’s father collects the blossoms from these linden trees, using them to make the same tea that helped trigger Proust’s memories.

But unlike for Proust, in Aira’s novel the tea is not an occasion for remembering so much as it an occasion for confusion. “The linden’s calming properties are universally acknowledged, but I’m not sure that they reside in the flowers, which grow in little bunches and are yellow in color, barely distinct from the green of the leaves. I seem to remember that the flowers close to form a fruit, which is like a little Gothic capsule. Or maybe it’s the other way around: the capsule comes first and opens into a flower… Memory might be playing tricks on me…” This initial confusion, this misremembering, is met with a further desire not to know, as though there is also in the linden something about forgetting. “It would be easy to clear this up, because linden trees haven’t changed, and here in Flores, where I live, there are plenty that I could inspect. I haven’t (which shows how totally unscientific I am), but it doesn’t matter. I can’t remember if my father used the flowers or the leaves or the little capsules; no doubt he did it in his own special way, as he did everything else. Perhaps he had discovered how to extract the maximum benefit from the linden’s well-known calming properties; if so, I have reason to regret my distraction and poor memory, because whatever the recipe or method was, it died with him.”

The linden, for Aira, seems to invoke remembering at the same time it distorts and eschews it — no sooner has memory been triggered than there is some part of us that doesn’t want to know, that prefers the calm of forgetting.

***

I began writing this essay two years ago, but struggled with it, because at some point I realized it needed to be about Vanessa, not linden trees. And I realized that I didn’t have very many specific memories, anecdotes, or stories I could tell about her. The reason the Hollywood Bowl memory is clearer than others, perhaps, is because it was the first time I noticed something was wrong, but the rest of the memories were of a more ordinary kind, the simple and mundane acts of living life. These memories don’t have much of a point, or a story too them, and they don’t make for interesting things to write about in an essay. But nonetheless, they happened.

Inevitably, as someone leaves your life your memories become fragmented, little glimpses of memories, little shards you try hard to grasp. You try to build these into little narratives, because the telling is always easier to remember than the memory itself. Storytelling is the best and only mnemonic we have against death, but it is also a betrayal. The story distorts those memories, eventually taking them over entirely, but it’s what you have, and what you manage to keep as the other things recede. So when I tell you stories about Vanessa, understand that they are not memories; they are stories.

Inevitably, as someone leaves your life your memories become fragmented, little glimpses of memories, little shards you try hard to grasp.

During those last few years she kept losing weight. We’d meet semi-regularly on Saturday afternoons for ice cream at Scoops, which is legendary among Angelenos for its endless variety of flavors. Butterscotch green tea, smoked gouda melon, maple horchata. There’s a whiteboard on the wall where people can post ideas. No one eats at Scoops without sampling as much as possible. Scoops was one of those few unabashed pleasures she could indulge in, worth driving crosstown for, the perfect Saturday afternoon activity no matter the season. And every week a little smaller, her skin a little brighter.

Scoops is on a mostly residential street behind a community college, which is to say parking is scarce at best. Los Angeles is a city of cars, but it is also a city of hunting for parking. Even if you don’t walk as much as you do in other cities, you can end up walking a few blocks from wherever you’re able to find parking and wherever you’re trying to get to. Which is a thing you don’t notice until you can’t move more than a few feet without immense difficulty.

This is how a disease overtakes your life: one at a time, it robs you of pleasures. At first the big things, but soon it’s the simple things, too. The little gifts you give yourself that help you to keep on going. Scleroderma took these from Vanessa, too. One at a time, until they were all gone.

***

In Schubert’s Winter Journey, the song “Der Lindenbaum” returns again to the linden tree, the rustling of the leaves a reminder to the singer of a gentler time of youth (“I dreamt in its shade / So many a sweet dream. I cut into its bark into its bark / So many a word of love; / In happiness and sadness it drew / Me back to it again and again”). In this, nothing too surprising, just the simple nostalgia of youth. But the song goes on: a dark, winter night (“even in the dark / I had to close my eyes”), the singer once again passes the old linden trees, whose branches rustle, calling out to him: “Come here to me, old chap, / Here you find your rest.” The singer refuses this call (“My hat flew from my head, / I didn’t turn back”) but the message is clear. Schubert’s linden calls out for death, to encourage you to lie down in the snow in the dark, dark of winter, to give in to its narcotic embrace. To finally give up. But it also does so by asking you to remember, to return those old memories, to keep them alive even as you give up on your own life.

“Words, in fact, are incidental,” Aira writes; “they are formulae for remembering things; we manipulate them in combinations that give us an illusion of power, but the things were there first, intractably.” The linden tree on our property, like our other trees, grows ferociously. Those who prefer to think of Los Angeles as a waterless desert wasteland have little conception of how ruthlessly plant life grows here, how slick the streets can get with the sap of dropped seedpods.

There is another tree next to our driveway that grows freakishly fast — its limbs spread out over our neighbors’ car park as well, and it drops fat, sticky bombs of sap that stick to cars and eat gradually into the paint. After the neighbors politely complained, we had it cut it back, stripping it so bare it became an eyesore — but within a few months it had grown back, as though we’d never touched it, a monster of foliage bursting out into the street. That life could flourish so incessantly here is anathema to many people’s conception of Southern California, and one of its many hidden pleasures.

Because our lot is small, it means the trees on our property are always pushing up against our house and the neighbors’ house. It’s illegal in California, land of wildfires, to have a tree actually touching a structure, which means at least once a year we have to pare back the trees. So after a few years of doing it ourselves we hired a tree surgeon to prune the trees, hoping to redirect them so their growth wouldn’t be so dangerous or destructive. When he arrived, he identified the three trees: the olive in the back, the Chinese elm in the front yard — and, of course, the linden tree. Which, he told me, was not actually a linden tree at all.

“Are you sure?” I asked him. “I was pretty sure it was a linden tree.”

No, he corrected me, it’s not a linden. He gave me the actual name of the tree, but I’ve long since forgotten what it was; to be honest, I forgot it almost as soon as he told me it. In the years since I’ve never thought of that tree as anything other than a linden tree. It is, after all, in these little acts of misremembering, in the not wanting to know, that we keep alive the memory of those who’ve left us.

* * *

Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, along with two other books of nonfiction. He is currently writing a book on conspiracy theories and other delusions, The Unidentified, forthcoming in 2020.

Editor: Sari Botton

Colin Dickey | Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places | Viking | October 2016 | 10 minutes ( 4,181 words)

Below is an excerpt from Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places. In this excerpt, Dickey sleeps over in the purportedly haunted Lemp Mansion in St. Louis, Missouri, the historic home of a 19th-century beer brewer whose suicide sent a family into a tailspin of horrific tragedy. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor A. N. Devers.

* * *

It is, quite literally, a dark and stormy night. A summer storm has settled over St. Louis: gray­-black clouds turning the air yellowish and electric, the rain pulsing down in waves. The sprint from the parking lot to the front door of the Lemp Mansion—no more than fifty feet—leaves you soaked. The thunder is following on the heels of the lightning; it is right above us. In the bar the stained ­glass portraits of William Lemp, Jr., and his first wife, Lillian Lemp—the Lavender Lady—flicker to life from the lightning outside with disturbing fre­quency, the accompanying thunder coming fast afterward. It is the perfect night for a ghost hunt: the air already electric, everyone already a bit on edge. In his portrait, William Lemp looks prematurely old; the glass art­ist has added shading to his face to give the appearance of three dimen­sions, but the result instead is that he appears haggard, black pits around his eyes, deep creases in his skin.

As if he knows he’s going to die.

The owners of the Lemp Mansion seem quite content to capitalize on the building’s repu­tation. Ghost hunters come here regularly to take tours, use KII meters and ghost boxes, and record for EVPs (electronic voice phenomenon) and orbs. I’m here for one such tour, led by a local ghost-­hunting group. I’m also here to spend the night, since the Lemp Mansion operates as a bed-­and-­breakfast—though I won’t be able to get into my room until 11 p.m. My room, the Elsa Lemp Suite, is itself part of the tour: the most haunted room in this most haunted house.

The Lemp family story should be remembered as your classic rags-­t0-­riches success story: Johann Adam Lemp emigrated to America from Germany in 1838 and within a short time had grown a prosperous business selling beer. At the time the only beers available in America were strong English ales, and Lemp, along with John Wagner in Philadelphia, is credited with introducing the lighter, German­-style lager beer that has since become ubiquitous in the United States. Lemp’s beer caught on quickly, particularly in the German immigrant community of St. Louis, and by 1850 he was shipping four thousand barrels of beer annually. Prior to electric refrigeration, Lemp had found that the natural caverns beneath St. Louis provided a stable and year­-round cool environment, which al­lowed him to ramp up production without fear of spoilage. His success was mirrored by constant rivals Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch, whose Budweiser beer would play second fiddle to Lemp’s Falstaff brand well into the early twentieth century. Johann died in 1862, but the company soldiered on under the direction of his son, William, who con­tinued to grow the brewing juggernaut, which, by the dawn of the twen­tieth century, seem destined to endure forever.

Your feet feel a bit unsteady, but that’s probably because, after more than a hundred years, the staircase and the floors have begun to slope slightly as the foundation of the house has become uneven.

The first suicide in the Lemp Mansion happened in 1904. Three years earlier, William’s twenty-­eight­-year­old son, Frederick, who had been groomed to take over the family business, died suddenly from heart failure, leaving William distraught. When William’s closest friend, Freder­ick Pabst (of the blue-­ribboned Pabst Brewing Company), died a few years later, on January 1, 1904, it sent William over the edge: he shot himself in the head just over a month later in the mansion the family had occupied since 1876. William’s successor, William Jr. (Billy), lacked his father’s head for business; he spent lavishly, and the business floundered. His marriage to Lillian fell apart, and the couple’s messy divorce in 1906 made head­lines. But the real crippling blow to the Lemp brewing empire came in 1919, with the passage of Prohibition. Billy shuttered the company with­ out notice, and within two years both he and his sister Elsa had killed themselves. The family retired from the public eye, out of the beer busi­ness for good, almost forgotten, until another of William Sr.’s eight chil­dren, Charles, followed in the footsteps of his father, brother, and sister, killing himself with a revolver on May 10, 1949. (Tradition holds that Charles shot his dog before himself, though this is nowhere mentioned in the police reports of the incident.)

Charles Lemp was the only one to leave a note, which read simply, “In case I am found dead, blame it on no one but me.” But most have instead chosen to blame a curse of some kind, a curse under which the Lemp family suffered, unable to shake the fate that awaited each in turn. In the Haunted Lemp Mansion board game, players move through the mansion while collecting various strategy cards; if a player collects both a “revolver” card and a “bullet” card and then happens to land on a “suicide” space, he’s out of the game—an oddly tasteless reference to the gruesome series of tragedies that repeatedly befell the House of Lemp.

Unlike the Winchester Mystery House, with its sprawling, formless labyrinth of rooms; the George Stickney House, with its rounded corners; or the House of the Seven Gables, with its secret staircase, there is nothing particularly odd—architecturally speaking—about the Lemp Mansion. It is large, to be sure, and stately, but its outer construction is straightforward, and its rooms are laid out in a fairly sensible order. Its additions over the years increased its size, but its overall shape and appearance don’t suggest anything out of the ordinary.

And yet the mansion itself—far more than the neighboring brewery, the caves below the city where the fabled Falstaff beer was once stored, or the other homes the Lemps have owned through the years—remains in­ extricable from the family and its curse. This is how we tend to think of old, august families that have lasted through the generations: there should be one central, ancestral home, a single estate that embodies the bloodline.

As I hold my camera on the window, a strange light moves across it, a wave of light that holds, then passes by and disappears.

It’s an idea ingrained in the very word “house,” with its dual meaning as both building and family. And like Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher, the House of Lemp seems to have failed. In Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” house and House are conjoined so tightly that when Roderick Usher’s sister, Madeline, seems to rise from the grave to carry off her brother (the last surviving member of the Usher family) to his own death, the house itself collapses, supernaturally torn asunder, and crum­bles into the swamp just as the narrator escapes. But unlike the house of Usher—and despite the tragedies and calamities that have befallen its occupants—the Lemp Mansion still stands.

* * *

The rain is deluging the streets outside, and we gather in one of the din­ing rooms on the first floor, where there are light snacks and infrared camcorders. My friend Elizabeth has joined me for this tour, and we wait along with the other guests—there are maybe twelve of us total—who range from college age to mid­forties, and altogether we are a fair enough cross section of the general population. It’s hard to read the faces of the other people on the tour, or discern their interest in ghosts or this house. As we settle in and munch on our celery sticks and slightly stale cookies, the guide gives us a brief rundown on the history of the house. In our hands are ordinary camcorders to which infrared rigs have been attached, and we’re instructed how best to hold them so our arms won’t get tired, as well as other basic tips, such as don’t pan too fast through a room or the image will blur, and don’t look through the viewfinder while going up or down stairs or you’ll get vertigo.

After the guide finishes with the instructions, we gather our equip­ment and head toward the stairs. You feel a bit dizzy, but you tell yourself it’s probably because you’re looking through the infrared camera’s view­ finder too much. Your feet feel a bit unsteady, but that’s probably because, after more than a hundred years, the staircase and the floors have begun to slope slightly as the foundation of the house has become uneven. All your hairs are standing on end—probably, you tell yourself, from the storm outside. It’s time to go upstairs.

* * *

Ghost hunts without technological devices these days are almost unheard of; one could almost say that ghosts don’t exist without the technology that re­ cords them. But though the devices have gotten more complex, the spirit world has long been intertwined with technology. In 1884 Samuel F. B. Morse demonstrated the first use of the tele­graph; despite its very straightforward technical workings, here was a m­achine that could send and receive disembodied messages over great distances—as though they’d come from another world. The parallels between Spiritualism and telegraphy were immediately drawn, and early publications, such as the Spiritual Telegraph, attested to this very simple analogy: just as the telegraph could send and receive over great distances, the Spiritualist could send and receive across the divide of life and death. Four years after the telegraph’s invention, the table raps that famous Spiritualist Fox sisters claimed allowed them to talk to spirits, after all, were themselves a form of Morse code. Media and medium were two sides of the same coin.

It’s not that a belief in ghosts began in 1848, of course, but the Spiritualist revolution reformulated how we believed in ghosts. No longer were they purely emanations of terror; now a direct communication with the dead could be established through technology. This has largely continued through all subsequent technological advancements: nearly every major communication technology has sooner or later been appropriated by ghost seekers.

There is photography, of course: pioneered just prior to the telegraph, it came into its own in the second half of the nineteenth century and be­ came one of the prime means of documenting ghosts (though from the very beginning the veracity of spirit photos was questioned by skeptics). Radio and television, too, were seen as receptors for spirit messages from the beginning, with ghosts frequently discerned through static and failed connections. The introduction of consumer magnetic tape recordings in the 1940s and ’50s spurred yet another revolution in communicating with ghosts; with recording now significantly cheaper and more portable, ana­log tape (with its added bonus of tape hiss and other audio imperfections) put the voices of the dead in the hands of the masses.

In the late 1950s Swedish painter and documentary filmmaker Fried­rich Jürgenson decided to record birds singing in his garden; while playing back the recording, he unexpectedly heard on the tape the voice of his dead mother calling his name. He spent years making further recordings and researching the technique before publishing Radio Contact with the Dead in 1967. Jürgenson’s work was followed and greatly expanded by Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive, who published his extensive documentation of EVPs in his Unhörbares wird Hörbar (The Inaudible Made Audible), published in English in 1971 as Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead. Raudive reported his lengthy experiments with EVP and transcribed some of the more disturb­ing communications he received. “Here is night brothers, here the birds burn,” one voice told him one night. Another came through the wire to tell him: “Secret reports . . . it is bad here.”

Raudive claimed that his work would lead “to empirically provable reality with a factual background,” but skeptics point to the degree of leeway he gave his spirit voices in their attempts to communicate. He explained that spirits talked in multiple languages, even in the same sentence; that they could speak in languages they hadn’t known in life; and that they sometimes spoke backward. Considering all these allowances, it’s not ter­ribly surprising that Raudive could discern so much chatty conversation from the dead. If you’re looking for spirit voices, you can find them in just about any string of gibberish or noise if you listen hard enough.

Perhaps it’s less important whether one believes than why he believes.

Jürgenson used EVP as many Spiritualists did: to contact lost loved ones, to be reassured that they were okay and in a better place. The search for ghosts often takes this form: of a kind of mourning, a working through of grief and loss. We look for the ghosts of those whose deaths we have not yet gotten over, as though we need their blessings to let them pass on.

* * *

There is no sense of grief or loss—at least nothing outwardly visible—in any of the people climbing the Lemp Mansion’s stairs with me. If any­ thing, the vibe is of veiled thrill seeking and vague curiosity. Near the top of the stairs is the Elsa Lemp Suite, where I’ll be staying the night in a few short hours. Elsa was the youngest of William Sr. and Julia Lemp’s eight children, born in 1883, when Julia was forty-­one years old. Elsa married the vice president of a metal company, Thomas Wright, in 1910, but by all accounts the marriage was troubled. After losing their only daugh­ter in childbirth, Elsa filed for divorce in 1919, citing mental anguish and abandonment. After their separation, Elsa, the wealthiest woman in St. Louis, changed her will to write Thomas out of it entirely. But just thirteen months later they were reunited and they remarried on March 8, 1920. Twelve days later Elsa killed herself with a single self-­inflicted gun­shot wound to the heart.

The unassuming suite that bears her name, hers when she was a child, looks out to the north, with St. Louis spilling out before it. But though Elsa succumbed to the same “curse” as did her brothers and father, you will not find her ghost here. She died in her own home, at 13 Hortense Place, some seven miles from the Lemp Mansion. The ghosts that haunt this room date from a period in the mid-­twentieth century when the house was used as overflow housing for a local pediatric hospital. The spirits of termi­nally ill children, they’ve been known to engage in mischievous behavior: pulling at the sheets while guests are trying to sleep or tugging at their legs as if they were by their feet.

Nearly every room in the house, it turns out, has a story. In Charles Lemp’s bedroom, sometimes small items will move about the room without warning. In another bedroom, a smell of raw sewage sometimes emanates from nowhere, indicating that the spirits of the house don’t like you. Through the hallways roams the spirit of a young child whose iden­tity has never been completely verified. A shadowy figure lurks in the basement, and an unknown man has been seen sitting down for a meal in the first­-floor dining room, only to vanish when approached. With this many stories, I half expect a scene out of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, with rooms of translucent figures cavorting and mischief making—but so far, even with the spooky weather outside, we’ve seen nothing.

Then at some point I find myself alone in the Elsa Lemp Suite while the other guests are investigating other rooms. All the lights on the floor have been shut off, and the only way to see anything is through the infrared camera. I run the camera over the room, pausing on a small window air conditioner that’s rumbling slightly under the stress of keeping the room cool. As I hold my camera on the window, a strange light moves across it, a wave of light that holds, then passes by and disappears.

It could have been car headlights passing by outside, except that I’m on the third floor and the light would have to have been coming from behind me, where there are no windows or other sources of light. No one is nearby that I can see, and no other explanation offers itself. I keep the camera focused on the air conditioner, seeing whether the phenomenon will repeat itself. For a minute I watch the machine soldier on stoically, but the light doesn’t reappear and nothing else happens.

Viewing a dark mansion through an infrared lens is undeniably eerie, no matter who you are. The realm of otherwise mundane objects takes on a pall. People’s irises turn ghostly white, so that the folks standing next to you—living, breathing, and very much alive—look like hollowed­out zombies. Things that are still in normal light pulse faintly in infrared; they seem like they could come alive at any moment.

It’s not just the infrared; walking around the mansion, I see how the viewfinder of a camera can change the landscape. The way a camera can single out a specific object for our attention makes us presume that something specific is going to happen. The more ordinary the object and the longer the wait, the more our expectations heighten. You tense up.

Horror movie premises so often involve a perfectly innocuous object turned malevolent—a house, a toy, a child. I discover that holding the camera for a long five seconds on an object is usually enough to make it unnerving, and I begin to question the light that I saw playing out over the air conditioner. Perhaps it was just my expectation of something, but stand­ing alone in a pitch ­black room of an old mansion, with nothing for illumi­nation but an infrared camera, thunder rolling through the distance—it becomes unnerving very quickly.

* * *

We’re now on the second floor, in one of the large middle bedrooms. Be­cause houses were taxed based on the number of bedrooms, the Lemp Mansion, as was the custom at the time, has overly large bedrooms separated in the middle by pocket doors (once the doors were fully closed, two bedrooms could be had for the price of one). Supposedly ghost hunters have gotten strong electromagnetic pulse (EMP) readings from the center of this room, supposedly this is significant, supposedly the distant sound of a dog can be heard on some recordings. The infrared cameras, we’re told, can pick up organic matter that’s otherwise invisible on carpets. And sure enough, panning a camera down to the floor reveals stains in blotches and clumps. This is the room where apparently Charles Lemp shot his dog, and it’s strange to look down and see beneath your feet what looks like the poor animal’s blood, as though it was killed only yesterday.

But it’s probably not blood: without the camera, the stains look more like ground ­in dirt than spectral blood. Despite the great legends of the Lemp Mansion, it becomes clear that the terrifying experience always happens on some other tour, some other time.

It’s at this point that my friend Elizabeth reveals a secret: if you toggle your infrared lights on and off while standing near someone else, the inter­ference will cause orbs and shadows to appear on the person’s video. You can, in other words, create your own ghosts. The light I saw moving across the air conditioner in the Elsa Lemp Suite may very well have been this. Perhaps someone passed by me in the hallway while I wasn’t looking, and some unintended interference on their part was enough to create a momen­tary play of light—one that I was all too ready to accept as paranormal.

No matter how hard we look, it seems, the ghosts won’t materialize on demand. Why should they? Moving through these rooms supposedly haunted by the Lemp family, the other people on the tour are eagerly hunting for orbs and shadows, evidence of the ghostly presence of the Lemps and their supernatural curse. But it seems equally plausible to read their story as a history of family mental illness, perhaps a clinical depres­sion or bipolar condition passed down through William Sr.’s genes to his doomed children, children who lacked the cultural or medical support to combat this neurological condition. The tragedies of the Lemp Mansion might have been entirely a matter of brain chemistry, attributable to noth­ing other than a lack of timely medical intervention.

* * *

In 1901 a man in a black suit entered a downtown jewelry store and identi­fied himself as William Lemp, Jr. He asked for the largest sunburst dia­mond in the store, then told the owner, “I will take it with me now, and you may send the bill to the brewery.” He pawned the diamond and was never heard from again. In 1915, according to historian Davidson Mull­gardt, a woman named Mrs. Fannie Zell had herself sent flowers from Billy, Charles, and their brother Edwin Lemp to convince others that she had admirers among the rich and powerful.

And then there’s the curious case of Andrew Paulsen, who appeared in St. Louis in 2010 claiming to be one of the last living descendants of the Lemp family. He had a key to the Lemp mausoleum, along with a painting by Louise Lemp (one of Billy’s nieces and an established artist) and other assorted memorabilia, including housewares he claimed were from the family, which he began selling on eBay. “Our desire and passion is to let the wonderful people of St. Louis and the world know there is a Lemp descendant who is willing to share never before told stories of the famous Lemp family of St. Louis,” his business partner, Cheryl Sochotsky, wrote on their Website, Lemp Treasures. He began giving tours of sites in St. Louis and attracted admirers among those obsessed with the Lemp family.

But in short order Paulsen’s story began to unravel. The woman he claimed was his mother—Anne­-Marie Konta, granddaughter of Annie Lemp (Elsa’s eldest sister)—died in 1973, thirteen years before Paulsen was born. As people began asking questions, he was unable to provide anything like proof that he actually descended from the Lemp family. When St. Louis Magazine reporter Jeannette Cooperman asked him for some kind of confirmation, he stonewalled, then threatened legal action. Why someone would concoct an elaborate fiction solely to hawk some meaningless housewares online for a few bucks is a mystery, but just one more example of someone trying to capitalize on the long, sad history of the Lemp family.

It does speak to the aura surrounding the family, which has not dimin­ ished along with their fortunes. In some ways, the dramatic ending of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” seems overly optimistic and convenient: with Roderick’s death and the end of the family line, the house falls into the swamp and the name vanishes as well. In reality, decline is much messier, and even though the House of Lemp has lost its former glory, the house and the name still linger, drawing an odd breed of revenants along with the ghost seekers.

After the tour one of the dining room servers stops us in the hall. “Did you see anything?” she asks, excited. She has been working here for only three weeks and hasn’t experienced any haunted moments, though she’s hoping to. She has no doubt in her mind that the house is haunted; after all, she’s seen ghosts all her life. She was seven or eight, she says, when she first saw one, on her family’s land, which had once been a plantation: a young girl, pale, running, terrified, always returning near her birthday. The server didn’t ever try to figure out what the story was: “I figured it wasn’t my business. She wasn’t hurting anyone.” Her face now is full of excitement: how lucky we are to have had the chance to commune with the spirits in such a legendary place. How could we have failed to see at least one?

Spend enough time debunking the legends associated with haunted places, trying to see past it all—the marketing, the dubious electronic devices, and all the other trappings—and you sometimes forget how real, and 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.

The hunt finally over, I retrieve my bags from the foyer and head back up to the Elsa Lemp Suite, hoping for a good night’s sleep in the most haunted room of the most haunted mansion in the country. By now I’ve been awake for almost nineteen hours, having woken up at four thirty in the morning to make my flight to St. Louis. I am thoroughly exhausted, and though I toy with the idea of staying up to see what happens through the night, the truth is, I pass out in minutes. If ghosts swarmed about me that night, they did not trouble my sleep.

* * *

From the book Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey, to be published on October 4^th by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Copyright © 2016 by Colin Dickey.

In The Paris Review Daily, Colin Dickey searches for a house among foreclosed properties, and finds uncanny forces at work:

My wife and I walked, zombie-like, through home after home, throughout that stifling summer, into homes that had been closed against the light but bristled with claustrophobic air. We took to nicknaming these places: the Flea House, after whatever it was that bit our realtor; the Burn House, with its charred patches of wall and blackened carpets; Tony’s House, after the name on the novelty license plate still stuck to a bedroom door, a detail particularly creepy amid the otherwise empty gloom of the house, as though Danny Torrance would big-wheel down the hall at any moment.

For the most part, these homes were on regular streets, among other unexceptional homes. It was strange to find them in Los Angeles; the haunted house is usually built outside of some small town, a nightmare in the wilderness that beckons just beyond some tiny hamlet. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, as Eleanor Vance makes her way to Hillsdale, Illinois, she’s told not to ask about Hill House: “I am making these directions so detailed,” Dr. Montague writes to her in a letter, “because it is inadvisable to stop in Hillsdale to ask your way. The people there are rude to strangers and openly hostile to anyone inquiring about Hill House.”

It’s a common trope: the unaware traveler and the wary, even hostile townspeople. Why, in all these stories, do the poor townspeople hate the haunted mansion? Well, because they’re poor. They can’t afford to move away, to uproot their families, even after some rich eccentric has unleashed an unspeakable evil just beyond the town limits. “People leave this town,” a Hillsdale resident tells Eleanor, “they don’t come here.” The archetypal haunted house story is often really about class, about the rich who don’t understand the land or the people or the history and blunder into the landscape, attempting to buy their way into a community, blithely oblivious to the locals nearby. The town grows resentful because, by the force of economics, they are imprisoned by the rich and their folly—haunted by forces beyond their own control.

Read the story here.

Photo: US National Archives, Flickr