Home > Work > Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places
21 " Here, then, is a central paradox in the way that ghosts work: to turn the living into ghosts is to empty them out, rob them of something vital; to keep the dead alive as ghosts is to fill them up with memory and history, to keep alive a thing that would otherwise be lost. "
― , Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places
22 " Based on a folk belief that ghosts who lived in the trees would try to enter the house at night via keyholes, an upside-down lock was a means to confuse the ghosts and keep them out. "
23 " People afflicted with all manner of disease came to California, but consumptives most of all; stories were told of tubercular cases, or “lungers”, as they were known, miraculously healed simply by breathing the dry, warm air of the West. "
24 " Ghosts bridge the past to the present; they speak across the seemingly insurmountable barriers of death and time, connecting us to what we thought was lost. They give us hope for a life beyond death and because of this help us to cope with loss and grief. Their presence is the promise that we don’t have to say goodbye to our loved ones right away and that—as with Athendorus’s haunting—what was left undone in one’s life might yet be finished by one’s ghost. "
25 " The archetypal haunted house story is fundamentally about class: new money who doesn’t understand the land or the people or the history blunders into the landscape, attempting to buy his way into a community, blithely oblivious to the locals. A legend goes unheeded, a terrible secret is unearthed, sacred land is disturbed, and so forth. The townspeople grow resentful because, by the force of economics, they are imprisoned by the rich and their folly. "
26 " For better or worse, the language of hauntings and ghosts is a convenient metaphor for a whole host of problems not connected to the supernatural, and the recourse to such vocabulary becomes a means to process or make sense of experiences that can otherwise seem overwhelming and mystifying. "
27 " We like to view this country as a unified, cohesive whole based on progress, a perpetual refinement of values, and an arc of history bending toward justice—but the prevalence of ghosts suggests otherwise. The ghosts who haunt our woods, our cemeteries, our houses, and our cities appear at moments of anxiety and point to instability in our national and local identities. "
28 " the history of America’s ghost stories is one of crimes left unsolved or transgressions we now feel guilty about. "
29 " Assume, then, that every nightmare you’ve ever had in a hotel was a cry for help, some violence from the past reaching out to you. "
30 " It was precisely these kinds of rituals and rites that the slaver meant to rob his victims of, stripping them not only of their life but also of their memory in death. "
31 " The haunted house is a violation of this comfort, the American dream gone horribly wrong. "