Review: Dickey, Ghostland (2016)

[truepenny]

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a book I wish had been written twenty years ago, so I could have used it in my dissertation. Dickey is talking specifically about ghost stories and the cultural work they do and would have been a great source for my chapter on non-theatrical ghosts, which, to be perfectly honest, could have used the support.

I loved this book. Dickey looks at haunted places: houses, hotels, brothels (the bit on Mustang Ranch was great), bars, prisons, cemeteries, a park under a bridge. He has a wonderful section on New Orleans. He is probably the only person I will ever find using Katie Letcher Lyle's book about Zona Heaster Shue, The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives, as a secondary source. Dickey is terrier-like in his determination to dig out the facts behind ghost stories. Not surprisingly, most of the time he finds there AREN'T very many facts and most of them have been twisted out of true by the needs and tropes of the ghost story as a genre. (The section on the House of Seven Gables was marvelous, as was the section where he asks why all of Richmond's Shockoe Bottom ghosts are white, when the slave markets are RIGHT THERE.)

Dickey, while explicitly stating that he isn't interested in whether ghosts are "real" or not, is nevertheless very respectful of the beliefs of the people he talks to and very willing to admit when he himself feels something unheimlich (really, I could SO have used this book when I was writing my dissertation in the early 'oughts.), and quietly disapproving of people, particularly the legions of paranormal investigators trying to make the big time, who are seeking to capitalize on something that Dickey sees as being about tragedy before it's about anything else. Tragedy and history and our need to tell stories to ourselves to make sense of the unexplainable.



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