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Ghostland : an American history in haunted places / Colin Dickey.

by Dickey, Colin.

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Penguin Books, 2017.

133.10973 D551g

Haunted places -- United States.

Ghosts -- United States.

9781101980200 (pbk)

xii, 320 p. ; 22 cm.

First published in the USA by Viking Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2016.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Anatomy of a haunting (New York, NY) -- The secret staircase (Salem, MA) -- Shifting ground (St. Francisville, LA) -- The endless house (San Jose, CA) -- The rathole revelation (Georgetown, NY, and Bull Valley, IL) -- The family that would not live (St. Louis, MO) -- A devilish place (Richmond, VA) -- Baby (Reno, NV) -- Passing through (Los Angeles, CA) -- Melancholy contemplation (Moundsville, WV) -- The stain (Danvers, MA, and Athens, OH) -- Awaiting the devil's coming (Charleston, SC, and Douglas County, KS) -- Our illustrious dead (Shiloh, TN) -- The wind through Cathedral Park (Portland, OR) -- The wet grave (New Orleans, LA) -- Among the ruins (Detroit, MI) -- Hillsdale, USA -- Epilogue: Ghosts of a new machine (Allendale, CA).

"An intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history, Ghostland takes readers on a road trip through some of the country's most infamously haunted places -- and deep into the dark side of our history. Colin Dickey is on the trail of America's ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and 'zombie homes,' Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. Some have established reputations as 'the most haunted mansion in America,' or 'the most haunted prison'; others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget. With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living -- how do we, the living, deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed, for whatever reason, haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made--and why those changes are made -- Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved. Spellbinding, scary, and wickedly insightful, Ghostland discovers the past we're most afraid to speak of aloud in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark."--Publisher.

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