Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016)
II
AFTER HOURS
bars, restaurants, hotels, and brothels
Houses are by no means the only haunted places in America. Hotels, bars, bookstores, restaurants—all manner of businesses, really—also attract the supernatural. If a haunted house is unnerving because homes represent safety and security that’s upturned by the presence of a ghost, the haunted business is the inverse of this: the place where we are the ones who don’t belong—places we pass through, spending a great deal of time in without ever thinking of them as “home.”
A hotel room, for example, is meant to mimic your own bedroom: bed, television, nightstand—it’s all there. But it’s not yours: not your bed, not your chair, not your taste in tasteful art. You’re only the latest in a long string of folks who have slept on those sheets and used those towels, a fact hotels (at least the nice ones) take great pains to hide from you. Hotels are unheimlich in the truest sense of the word: like a home but stubbornly not.
The ghosts of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, like to remind you that you’re not the first to stay there. If the guidebooks are to be believed, guests have reported spectral figures in tuxedos and 1920s-era gowns moving about the hallways and ballrooms, raising champagne toasts and carousing through the night. Built in 1909 by industrialist Freelan O. Stanley (creator, with his twin brother, of the Stanley Steamer automobile), his namesake hotel was advertised as the first to “heat, light, and cook meals exclusively with electricity” and offered opulence and mountain air to the well heeled. A four-story Colonial Revival nestled among the mountains just outside Rocky Mountain National Park, the hotel has seen its share of ups and downs over the years but has always been a popular destination for those seeking luxury in the Rockies.
The stories of the hotel’s haunting are in themselves unremarkable, and the kind of thing you’d hear about in dozens of hotels across the country: mysterious children running down hallways, the piano playing itself in the dead of night. That anyone cares about the Stanley’s ghosts at all is thanks to the imagination of one guest in particular and the novel it spawned: The Shining.
Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha, came to the Stanley the night before Halloween, right as the hotel was closing for the season. “We found ourselves the only guests in the place—with all those long, empty corridors,” King writes. Alone in an old hotel, he was inspired. “Except for our table all the chairs were up on the tables. So the music is echoing down the hall, and, I mean, it was like God had put me there to hear that and see those things.”
That sense of emptiness is key to a good haunting. Few things are more unsettling than being somewhere emptied out, after everyone else has left. If you’ve ever worked a closing shift, or as a security guard, you know the way a place can change after the doors are locked and the lights are dimmed, when the lighting so carefully designed to spotlight the latest gadgets goes slack, when the mood lighting gets moodier. It’s as though you don’t belong there. The Moravian Book Shop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—the oldest bookstore in the country, founded in 1745—has a ghost that manifests only after closing. A longtime employee, Jane Clugston, told The Guardian that she saw a dark figure in a back hallway of the bookstore one night as she was closing up. The figure walked into the kitchen, and Clugston followed her, only to discover that the stove and fan had been left on. “I don’t know why this person, ghost, spirit drew us back there, but I guess to turn off those appliances,” Clugston said. “I’d never thought of it until I told someone else and they said a ghost led you back there. But in that back hallway a lot of people have said that they’ve felt things and they’ve seen things.” As with King’s story of his time at the Stanley, things get eerie when the lights go down.
Once you start looking for them, you notice that haunted businesses can come in all shapes and sizes—even brightly lit, happy places that sell toys. Though I grew up near the Winchester Mystery House, the haunted spot where I spent far, far more time as a child was down the road in the opposite direction. The Toys “R” Us in Sunnyvale, California, has a long history of haunting, all of which revolves around a former ranch hand who died pining for his true love. Johnny Johnson, as he’s known, worked on Martin Murphy’s massive wheat plantation, on land that’s now the city of Sunnyvale. He was killed in some sort of machinery accident in 1884, when the artery in his leg was severed and he bled to death on the spot where the toy store was eventually built, and now he floats amid the board games and stuffed animals, setting off remote-controlled cars and spilling basketballs.
Reports of Johnson’s ghost have fluctuated since the toy store was built in the early 1970s; he was popular in the late ’70s and again in the early ’90s. As the landscape around it has changed through the years, the store has sat alone, unchanged by time or renovation. A stucco brick of a store, with no windows and only a few sets of doors, it might as well be an Egyptian tomb, sealed to the external world, if not for the iconic, brightly colored letters inviting children of all ages into its darkened doors. A former employee delightfully named Putt-Putt O’Brien told the Chicago Tribune in 1991 that she saw Johnson’s ghost once. She described him as a young man, likely in his twenties or thirties. Wearing a work shirt, knickers, and a gray tweed snap-brim cap, Johnson walked past her once while she was working. She also told the paper that she’d heard horses galloping through the store.
“He’s a classic case of a ghost caught in a time warp,” says Sylvia Browne, a world-renowned psychic who has made her name investigating places like my local Toys “R” Us. “He’s hard at work at his handyman job, tending to the Martin Murphy ranch that thrived on the same land a hundred years ago. He can’t figure out for the life of him (excuse the expression) where all these loud, rambunctious children keep coming from who tear up his freshly planted vegetables, having no clue that the children are actually playing up and down the aisles of the toy store that sits there today.” According to Browne, Johnson had fallen in love with his boss’s daughter, Elizabeth Murphy, and was heartbroken when she married an East Coast lawyer and left for Boston. A short time later, he gravely injured his leg in the accident that killed him, and now his ghost limps through the toy store’s aisles, still tending to work he believes is left undone.
Browne’s fame is bound up in Johnson’s, since Browne hosted a séance in the Sunnyvale Toys “R” Us in the late ’70s specifically to commune with him. She had been giving psychic readings for only a few years at the time, and the ghost of Johnny Johnson—and the subsequent attention the event attracted—helped jump-start her career. In an infrared photo taken during the séance, one can see the cluster of people gathered around in a circle, their bodies colored white and gray, as one would expect of warm bodies caught in infrared. Standing at the edge of the group, a figure leans against the wall; his hands might be in his pockets, or it could be that his thumbs are hooked in his belt loops in stereotypical cowboy fashion. Unlike the warm, light bodies of the people in the foreground, the figure in the distance appears to have no body heat whatsoever—he is an almost completely black silhouette.
In an age when anyone can digitally manipulate a photograph in seconds, it’s easy to dismiss how captivating such a photo could be, ostensibly offering definitive “proof” of a spirit. It helps that infrared photography is often misunderstood by the public. One might assume, for example, that the figure in back is black because he’s not giving off any body heat, but infrared film isn’t the same as thermal imaging and doesn’t capture heat. Whoever this figure is, he’s likely simply too far from any available light source to be reflecting any infrared waves back at the camera. A simpler explanation, to be sure, if also a lot less fun.
The whole event, including the mysterious photograph, was featured on the 1980s TV show That’s Incredible, establishing the fame of both Browne and Sunnyvale’s Toys “R” Us. Coming at the dawn of the syndicated daytime talk show, Browne came to popularity in a tabloid-hungry era when media outlets were more and more willing to showcase fringe beliefs in order to give their audiences something salacious. The story also gained traction because it suggested that anywhere could be haunted—not just creepy old Victorian mansions or derelict graveyards. Even a seemingly anodyne toy store might have a deeper story. (As if to prove the point, in the wake of Sunnyvale’s fame, numerous other Toys “R” Us stores, from San Bernardino, California, to North Bergen, New Jersey, have also been known to house spirits.)
Browne went on to become a best-selling author who, by the end of her career, was charging hundreds of dollars for psychic readings and appearing regularly on The Montel Williams Show to communicate with the beyond. But paranormal reports involving Browne might best be taken with a grain of salt. Though she often claimed to have helped law enforcement with missing persons cases, independent analyses of her work have determined that her advice was always either too vague to be useful, of no help at all, or an actual hindrance to investigations. She developed a notorious record of being wrong, telling families that their missing loved ones were alive when they were already dead and vice versa.
She never forgot Johnny Johnson, though, and made regular trips to the Toys “R” Us to stay in touch. According to her 2003 book Visits from the Afterlife, she repeatedly tried to convince Johnson that he was dead and that if he wanted to be reunited with his lost love, all he had to do was “go to the light of God that was waiting for him.” But Johnson had no interest in following her advice: “He got so tired of hearing it that one day he snapped at me and said, ‘If you don’t stop telling me I’m dead, I’m never going to talk to you again.’ I decided that keeping the lines of communication open between us was better than nothing, so I’ve never mentioned it again.”
An informal poll I took of workers at the Toys “R” Us in December of 2015 confirmed that nearly everyone who works there is aware of the ghost of Johnny Johnson, but no one I spoke to claimed to have personally seen anything of him. I myself can’t recall any paranormal sightings from my childhood visits. But I would have felt differently, I think, had I stayed the night and participated in a séance, particularly a séance filmed for national television. Primed for something to happen, expectant and a little on edge, in a building you only ever see during business hours that’s now darkened and newly unfamiliar—it’s natural that noises and lights in the dark would take on new meaning.
Commercial spaces are designed to be navigated in a very specific way, to entice a purchase and then to facilitate customers getting out of there. There are myriad techniques, refined through decades of research, to accomplish this: fast food uses bright colors—mainly red and yellow—which work to activate hunger and grab your attention; furniture showrooms like IKEA use their layouts to guide you through a scripted experience; big-box retailers line the checkout aisles with impulse buys. Perhaps, most obviously, one thinks of casinos, where every detail is managed to create a specific kind of psychological effect once you step inside the doors. Some proponents have long argued for casino layouts that are dark and confusing, that encourage a labyrinthine disorientation so as to keep people gambling and discourage them from leaving. Others favor a bright, airy landscape with high-end decor to give players a sense that they are themselves high rollers and embolden them to spend lavishly. Either way, what’s clear is the amount of energy devoted to using a building’s architecture, layout, decor, music, even scent, to craft a specific, highly engineered experience.
It’s when this script breaks down that we start to see ghosts. They overrun places like the RMS Queen Mary, built to embody the grand opulence of an age, now a struggling tourist attraction in the harbor of Long Beach, California. It’s operated mostly as a hotel these days, going through a succession of owners who’ve yet to make a profit on the enterprise. When my wife and I stayed on the Queen Mary one summer Sunday night, we found its ornate detail still relatively intact, including the lovely Observation Bar and Art Deco Lounge. There, deep wood fixtures are overseen by a backlit mural of Jazz Age flappers, and plush red leather chairs offer a glimpse of an age of glamour long past. On a ship from the 1930s, designed for opulence and for more than two thousand passengers, we walked the halls encountering almost no one else except a few who did occasionally materialize, jarringly out of place in shorts and flip-flops. Like the Stanley Hotel, closed up for the season, the Queen Mary seems to be waiting for something, though for her the spring will never arrive.
Ghosts move into places such as these: businesses that have fallen on hard times, places where the façade has started to fall away.
CHAPTER SIX
A DEVILISH PLACE
Richmond, VA
There are ghosts everywhere in the historic Shockoe Bottom neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. The upscale restaurant Julep’s is thought to be haunted by the ghost of a gunsmith’s apprentice, Daniel Denoon. His boss, James McNaught, shot Denoon over a disagreement while Denoon was climbing the stairs. The staircase his body fell down was later converted into a storage closet, but employees report hearing the thump of a body falling in it from time to time. Tiki Bob’s Cantina, a bar on Eighteenth Street, is now closed, but in its heyday it was home to bikini contests, Jell-O wrestling—and the spirit of a knife-wielding fishmonger.
At the ornate Main Street train station, workmen and security guards have heard footsteps through the empty halls late at night. Next door Rosie Connolly’s Pub is haunted by several ghosts: one, a woman in period dress who vanishes when confronted; another, a man often seen in the kitchen, whose past is similarly unknown. Over on East Cary Street the building standing between Fourteenth and Fifteenth streets is supposedly built on the site of a brothel that dates back to the early 1800s; on its upper floors spectral women clad in gauzy dresses wander. Staff are known to hear their names called, only to turn and find no one there.
It’s hard to find a building in Shockoe Bottom that doesn’t have a ghost story attached to it. Local historian and paranormal investigator Pamela Kinney speculates that this is because Virginia was home to the earliest settlements in North America. Which makes sense so long as we all agree that by “settlements” we really mean “settlements of Europeans.” Which is to say, the kinds of ghosts you look for, and the kinds of ghosts you see, depend on your frame of reference. For when I began to tally the supernatural records of the area at the heart of Richmond, a simple fact emerged: the ghosts of Shockoe Bottom are overwhelmingly white.
This is curious, because if you walk just a little way away from the haunted bars and shops, down by the freeway you’ll find the Devil’s Half Acre. For decades black men, women, and children were brought here, imprisoned, and tortured while they waited to be sold to planters and speculators. Dozens of slave traders had offices here, where slave auctions were widely advertised and men came from all over the South to make their fortunes on the backs of those enslaved. Tens of thousands of men’s and women’s lives changed hands here in the years leading up to the Civil War; all the activity centered on Wall Street, in the heart of Shockoe Bottom. Today Wall Street is gone, replaced by the freeway, though the rest of the area remains mostly unchanged. While it’s difficult to estimate how many people lost their lives in the slave pens of Shockoe Bottom, hundreds of sets of human remains have been found in the nearby slave burial ground.
We typically think of ghost stories in terms of the remnants of a terrible tragedy, a past we cannot escape, or a justice unavenged. Why, then, in a place that should be so haunted by the legacy of such a terrible injustice, the scene of countless deaths, should there be nothing but white ghosts?
Given its low elevation and proximity to the James River, the Bottom became an ideal place for trading, easily facilitating the loading and unloading of cargo. Alongside tobacco, cotton, and other goods, slavers traded men, women, and children. After the transatlantic slave trade was banned, in 1808, traffic in enslaved individuals in Richmond actually increased; after New Orleans, this was the most heavily trafficked slave trading area in the United States.
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, much of the South was sick with “Alabama Fever,” the idea that any (white) person could get rich by buying frontier land and putting enslaved people to work with cotton—a fever from which Northern traders, even those who on the surface were fervently opposed to slavery, nonetheless benefited greatly.
The human capital that was lost here in Shockoe Bottom is staggering. Only New Orleans had a larger volume of human beings been bought, sold, or hired out for temporary work. What’s more, Richmond was first in the nation for slavery-related price manipulation and futures speculation. It was, in other words, not just where men, women, and children were bought and sold but where the entire economic foundation of the industry of slavery was built.
The cruelty on display in Shockoe Bottom was starkly evident to foreign visitors. In 1842 Charles Dickens came to Richmond on a tour of America, and despite being taken with the city itself, “delightfully situated on eight hills,” he was horrified by the barbaric acts he witnessed at Shockoe. In his American Notes he excoriated the men and women who profited from Richmond’s slave trade, namely
owners, breeders, users, buyers and sellers of slaves, who will, until the bloody chapter has a bloody end, own, breed, use, buy, and sell them at all hazards: who doggedly deny the horrors of the system in the teeth of such a mass of evidence as never was brought to bear on any other subject, and to which the experience of every day contributes its immense amount; who would at this or any other moment, gladly involve America in a war, civil or foreign, provided that it had for its sole end and object the assertion of their right to perpetuate slavery, and to whip and work and torture slaves, unquestioned by any human authority, and unassailed by any human power.
As Dickens rightly noted, such people, when they speak of “freedom,” “mean the Freedom to oppress their kind, and to be savage, merciless, and cruel.”
“The exposure of ordinary goods in a store is not more open to the public than are the sales of slaves in Richmond,” remarked Frederick Law Olmsted, the great architect behind New York’s Central Park. While touring Richmond in the 1850s, he happened upon a commission agent’s office, empty save for
three negro children, who, as I entered, were playing at auctioneering each other. An intensely black little negro, of four or five years of age, was standing on the bench, or block, as it is called, with an equally black girl, about a year younger, by his side, whom he was pretending to sell by bids to another black child, who was rolling about the floor. My appearance did not interrupt the merriment. The little auctioneer continued his mimic play, and appeared to enjoy the joke of selling the girl, who stood demurely by his side.
Among those unfortunate enough to find themselves imprisoned in such a hell was Solomon Northup, a freed Northerner who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. As he later recounted in Twelve Years a Slave (later adapted into an Oscar-winning motion picture), Northup was held in Richmond on his way from Washington, D.C., where he’d been kidnapped, to New Orleans, where he’d later be sold. He described how, on reaching Richmond, he and his fellow captives “were taken from the cars, and driven through the street to a slave pen, between the railroad depot and the river, kept by a Mr. Goodin.” Northup describes a surreal scene, one where “there were two small houses standing at opposite corners within the yard. These houses are usually found within slave yards, being used as rooms for the examination of human chattels by purchasers before concluding a bargain.”
Northup soon found himself chained to a man named Robert, “a large yellow man, quite stout and fleshy, with a countenance expressive of the utmost melancholy. He was a man of intelligence and information.” Robert had been born free, like Northup, but had been “seized at Fredericksburgh, placed in confinement, and beaten until he had learned, as I had, the necessity and the policy of silence. He had been in Goodin’s pen about three weeks.” Northup did not stay long in Richmond before being moved farther south, to New Orleans. By this point Virginia had less need for slave labor for its own sake, and Richmond functioned more as a market for buying and selling people, like Northup, who would end up in the South and the West.
At the center of this activity was slave trader Robert Lumpkin’s jail complex. To reach his half acre of land, you had to either descend a sandy, irregular embankment from Broad Street that descended dangerously down one hundred feet to the floor of the Bottom, or enter via Franklin Avenue, an untidy, crooked lane that worked its way down. Lumpkin’s house on the property was bordered by a fence that stretched ten—in some places twelve—feet high. Nearby were several squat brick buildings where he kept enslaved men and women waiting to be sold. In the center of the complex, its focal point—a nightmare of torture and misery—was the low, rough brick building that served as Lumpkin’s jail.
As abolitionist minister James B. Simmons would later remember, “In this building Lumpkin was accustomed to imprison the disobedient and punish the refractory. The stout iron bars were still to be seen across one or more of the windows during my repeated visits to this place. In the rough floor, and at about the center of it, was the stout iron staple and whipping ring.”
Accounts like this, from foreign observers, from the enslaved men and women who spent time here, and from the wardens themselves, helped cement Lumpkin’s jail as a truly horrific place. Among the many who were whipped in it was the Reverend Armstead Mason Newman, who was taken to the jail in 1862, when he was just a child. “On the floor of that room were rings,” he later recalled; his hands and feet were stretched out and tied to the rings, leaving him spread-eagled and facedown on the floor, while a “great big man” stood over him and flogged him.
Simmons referred to the complex as a “place of sighs.” In its time it was known more generally—throughout the country—as the Devil’s Half Acre.
In their collection of ghost stories, Haunted Richmond: The Shadows of Shockoe, Scott and Sandi Bergman write of Shockoe Bottom’s rich and complicated history, particularly as “the epicenter of some of the most profound and tragic events in United States, Virginia, and Richmond history.” But in their subsequent list of these tragic events, slavery is absent: “The area surrounding the Shockoe Valley has been the backdrop for the destruction of indigenous peoples, a revolution, the birth of a nation, foreign and domestic wars, famine, disease, floods, fires and engineering disasters, to name some of the causes of turmoil, tragedy and trauma experienced in the capital city.” After recounting the ghost stories of Rosie Connolly’s Pub, the bar housed in the building once known as the Railroad YMCA, the Bergmans confess, “We have been able to find very little in the way of historical details of the Railroad YMCA that might help explain the identity of the reported ghosts.” And yet the land where the pub stands is steps from the former site of the Charles Hotel—where many traders, including auctioneers Benjamin and Solomon Davis, had their offices—and mere yards from Lumpkin’s Jail.
Rather than explore this complicated history and whether the ghosts of Rosie Connolly’s Pub might be related to the tragedy of slavery, the Bergmans tell stories mostly of mass-casualty accidents: the collapse of the Statehouse gallery in 1870 that killed sixty-two people and wounded another two hundred; the fire at the Old Richmond Theatre on December 23, 1811, that killed seventy-two; the Church Hill Tunnel Collapse in 1925 that killed four. “If a premature exit from this world is the primary reason for paranormal activity,” they note, “then it is no wonder that there are so many shadows to be found in Shockoe.” In Shockoe there is a hierarchy of shadows: those known to ghost hunters, whose stories are told to tourists, and those allowed to slip unseen into the fog of forgetting.
Ghost stories and haunted tales connect us to the past, to family and to our ancestors. The ghost stories of the South, particularly those that reach back to the antebellum era, establish a through line in a property or a place, giving our surroundings a depth and a richness that go beyond the present moment. As supernatural beings, spirits often come to represent some universal truth of the past. They turn space into time and can be a way of making a place stand for some transcendental value or universal ideal.
A good case in point is Thomas Jefferson, whose ghost can be found haunting his home, Monticello. There the president is heard whistling in the corridors or seen seated at his writing desk as the ghosts of his beloved mockingbirds flutter in cages around him. Tourists and workers on the property have spotted him in the entrance hall, eyeing distinguished guests, or beside his wife, Martha, at the dining room table, exuding charm and goodwill. Jefferson’s ghost is not in pain, nor is he anguished by some injustice never addressed. He is serene, patriarchal, and benevolent. His reassuring presence, real or imagined, connects us to the past, giving guests a sense of what it was like to live at Monticello two hundred years ago.
Of course, Jefferson did not live there alone; Monticello was populated by slaves. Despite his love of liberty and his eloquence in defending it, and despite the myriad apologists over the years who’ve attempted to mitigate or downplay his slave owning, Jefferson’s treatment of his slaves remains an inexcusable aspect of his legacy. He was never particularly shy or embarrassed about being a slave owner, as many others were; on the contrary, he repeatedly laid out lengthy justifications for the practice. In 1821 Jefferson lamented that “we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go”; if not for the traffic and exchange of slaves throughout the South, he worried, the enslaved would rise up and overthrow their white captors. Diffusing slaves’ numbers over as wide an area as possible was the only means of keeping whites alive. “Justice is in one scale,” he wrote, “and self-preservation in the other.” As Tiya Miles notes in her book Tales from the Haunted South, the consuming horror that animated most whites was “not a fear of ghosts but a fear of black rebellion.” The only way to keep alive the white world of Southern belles and elegant gentlemen was to deny the humanity of black people: their names, their identities, their families.
An advocate for liberty and equality, and yet a slaveholder, Jefferson embodies the contradiction of early America, particularly of the South. And for all its architectural beauty, Monticello bears the ineradicable stain of its origins in slave labor. Indeed, in 2002 archaeological evidence of a graveyard for Monticello’s slaves was discovered at the edge of the south parking lot, some two thousand feet from the main house. Monticello does now offer tours specifically addressing the plantation’s slaves, but so far no reports have emerged of any of these Americans reaching out from the afterlife.
If ghost stories depend on an ongoing oral tradition, passed from one anonymous source to another, embellished and refined through the telling, then they can only ever reflect the knowledge and the folklore of the people telling them. Does an absence of these ghost stories suggest that there is still, over a century later, a lacuna in the culture’s memory, a taboo about its past, a refusal to discuss certain things? What does it mean to whitewash the spirits of a city? Does Virginia have ghosts that it is still not ready to face?
The absence of black ghosts at Monticello is not unusual; you’re not likely to find them in most places in the South. The Myrtles Plantation’s Chloe is a rarity, and ghosts like her are vastly outnumbered by whiter shades. There’s a kind of effacement here, which in the end is not terribly surprising, since the work of slavery, after all, was to destroy the interior lives of those enslaved, marginalize their humanity, render them nothing but empty bodies. Slavers learned early on that the best way to keep the machinery of slavery in motion, and to make as high a profit as possible, was to break the individual into a series of component parts: height, age, price. In New Orleans one trader advised a new plantation owner, “It is better to buy none in families, but to select only choice, first rate, young hands from 16 to 25 years of age (buying no children or aged negroes).”
The Africans who were kidnapped and brought to the New World had, like every culture, significant ties to their ancestors and their burial grounds and derived no small portion of their identity from these kinships. Families broken apart and moved roughshod throughout the country obliterated connections to the past and to the dead. This was not unintentional; the forced migration of enslaved people, facilitated by the massive slave markets in places like Shockoe Bottom and New Orleans, stripped people of their humanity so as to maximize their profit potential.
Funeral rites, sacred burial sites, and even ghost stories—people of all stripes use these as a means of taking the sting out of death. They’re how we remind ourselves that after we’re gone we won’t be forgotten—a relative who tends to our gravestone and brings flowers to our grave keeps us alive year after year even after we’re gone. 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.
The goal in all these varieties of violence was to create what historian Edward E. Baptist calls “the new zombie body of slavery”: the body of the slave that could work but not feel, that would not be slowed down or deterred by such human qualities as memory, longing, despair, or fear. Slavery was designed to create bodies without souls, to exorcise out of men, women, and children their spirits, so that they would function as animate and obedient bodies.
And yet slave owners were never fully invested in completely robbing these men and women of their humanity; there were always aspects of a slave’s humanity that were retained for specific political and economic purposes. The most obvious example of this was the Three-Fifths Compromise built into the U.S. Constitution, which determined a state’s population by counting each slave as three-fifths of a person so as to increase the South’s number of elected officials in the federal government. That slave owners could not have fully dehumanized these men and women, because they were first and foremost people, is important, but it’s worth recognizing that slavery’s objective was to make them both present and absent simultaneously—to enslave someone was not necessarily to efface that person entirely but to render him or her a ghost.
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.
Once you start looking for ghosts that aren’t white, they’re easy to find. As Baby Suggs tells Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, “Not a house in the country that ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief.” In the 1930s workers under the Works Progress Administration began collecting stories of former slaves: everything from recollections of their day-to-day lives under slavery to questions about clothing, medicine, and firsthand accounts of slave auctions and mistreatment. The stories were compiled in seventeen states, from Indiana to Florida, and accelerated with urgency once it became clear that these firsthand accounts were quickly disappearing—more than two-thirds of the respondents were in their eighties when they were interviewed between 1936 and 1938. By the twentieth century America’s understanding of the history of slavery had become tinged with nostalgia via folklore involving contented slaves and benevolent owners, emphasizing agrarian life—typified by Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus folktales. The slave narratives collected by the WPA, on the other hand, sought a more neutral approach. Allowed to speak in their own voices, those interviewed as part of this project offered a largely untold version of the antebellum landscape.
Interviewers were given a list of questions to ask, and one of them—number 13—asked specifically about ghosts. Could the respondent remember the songs and stories of their childhood? Had she heard any stories about “Raw Head and Bloody Bones” or any “other ‘hants’ of ghosts”? Had he personally seen ghosts? Answers to the question vary: some interview subjects didn’t believe, some knew rumors of ghosts were just whites intimidating them, some spoke of ghosts as terrifying things, as comforting things, as exhausting things.
Jane Arrington of North Carolina told one WPA worker the story of John May, a slave who had been beaten to death by two white men named Bill Stone and Oliver May. After his death, she reported, “John May come back an’ wurried both of ’em.” He kept them awake, hollering and groaning all through the night, hounding them relentlessly. According to Arrington, it got so bad that other slaves became afraid of the white men, because the “ghost of John wurried ’em so bad.”
Another respondent, George Bollinger, spoke of a haunted Benton Hill in Missouri, telling the interviewer, “One night we was driving through dere and we heard something dat sound like a woman just a screaming. Old man Ousbery was with me and he wanted to stop and see what it was but I says, ‘No you don’t. Drive on. You don’t know what dat might be.’”
In these stories ghosts terrify, but embedded in the terror are cautionary tales. A woman named Florida Clayton recalled how, as a child, she and her peers would often see a covered wagon that would appear in Tallahassee, where she lived, always in some secluded spot. While the kids would be tempted to approach this mysterious wagon and investigate it, they were told by adults that inside was “Dry Head and Bloody Bones,” a ghost “who didn’t like children.” Only as an adult did Clayton learn that the wagon was in fact owned by a slave hunter, who would steal children and take them to Georgia to be sold, and that her parents and other adults had invented the Dry Head and Bloody Bones ghost as a means of protecting them.
A man named Thomas Lewis of Indiana once described a “place where there is a high fence” that was haunted: “If someone gets near, he can hear the cries of the spirits of black people who were beaten to death. It is kept secret so that people won’t find it out. Such places are always fenced to keep them secret.” He then recounted a story: Two men were out hunting nearby, and their dog began chasing something, running through the fence after it. As one of the men started to follow, his friend asked, “What are you going to do?” The other replied, “I want to see what the dog chased back in there.” His friend told him, “You’d better stay out of there. That place is haunted by spirits of black people who were beaten to death.” Isabelle Daniel of Missouri recalled one haunted tobacco factory that no slave would go near after nightfall: “When the nights were still and the moon was full,” she reported, “you could hear the ting, ting, ting, of the lever all night long and voices of the slaves crying out and complaining, and you knew there wasn’t anybody there at all, jest hants.”
Throughout, the WPA narratives reference “hags” and “witches” who would visit people at night, inhabit their bodies, and “ride” them all night, returning them in the morning. Silvia Witherspoon of Alabama put it succinctly: “How come I knows dey rides me? Honey, I bees so tired in de mawnin’ I kin scarcely git outten my bed, an’ its all on account of dem witches ridin’ me.” Ghosts steal one’s capacity to work.
Again and again, these ghost stories revolve around a tenuous and threatened connection to the past. Ghosts will emerge at times through the breakdown of family. One woman in Tennessee saw the ghost of a woman appear before her while she was giving birth. Not recognizing the apparition, she called out, “Who are you?” The ghost replied, “Don’t forget the old folks,” then vanished. That was when the young woman realized that it was the ghost of her own mother. A man identified only as Uncle Louis spoke of ghosts in terms closer to melancholy than fear. Ghosts, he claimed, are “sociable,” and they want to stay near living people. “When folks gets scared it hurts de haunt’s feelin’s an dey goes somewhere else.” If slave owners and traders sought, in a very real way, to obliterate memory and history for those they enslaved, then melancholic ghosts like the ones Uncle Louis saw may themselves be in search of their own pasts.
Folklore always bleeds and blurs, and it would be overly reductive to state a hard and fast distinction between ghost stories told by whites and those told by the black community. There are, of course, stories of black ghosts that serve the same function as white ghosts—marking a location, explaining the unexplainable, commemorating an event. But what is clear is that history is not just written by the victors; it’s written by the literate. The prohibition against enslaved Americans learning to read or write had the immediate purpose of denying them agency and keeping them under control, but in the long run it also meant that the stories, lives, and opinions of millions of Americans were lost to time.
Ghost stories, theoretically, should be an antidote to this. Based on oral tradition and handed down through the years, outside the purview of acceptable history, such folklore should—and often does—act as an alternative history, a record of the oppressed and forcibly illiterate, the marginalized.
But Shockoe Bottom’s ghosts show that this isn’t always the case, that precisely because ghost sightings are so ephemeral, and so vague, they can easily be attached to the dominant narrative and only that narrative.
“The legacy of Wall Street is a difficult history to commemorate, as it involves memories that are painful, controversial and unsettling,” Jack Trammell wrote of the Richmond slave trade. “People are interested in battles, campaigns, and military heroics; they are not as interested in what those campaigns were fought over.” And while I had assumed that ghost stories are one way to tell those stories that people don’t want to hear otherwise, as it happens, they are just as often used to reinforce those blind spots.
Once one of the main economic engines of the South, Shockoe Bottom now feels hollowed out, devoid of life and real commerce. Far from the universities, it doesn’t attract much in the way of a nightlife feel, though not for lack of trying. There are half a dozen bars, Thai food and by-the-slice pizza, a couple of vape shops, and a few nightclubs. Which is not to say that there haven’t been attempts to revitalize the area. For years the mayor of Richmond had pushed a plan to build a new stadium for the city’s minor league baseball team, the Squirrels, downtown on land adjacent to the Devil’s Half Acre. Meant to draw new life into a faltering part of town, the plan succeeded mainly in drawing ire from preservationists and those worried that such a massive construction project would obliterate valuable archaeological traces of the city’s past.
After the project was announced, an archaeological team largely funded by Richmond’s Slave Trail Commission set out to uncover the Devil’s Half Acre; through a careful study of old maps, they located the area where Lumpkin’s complex had stood, some of it now partially obscured beneath the freeway. But in December 2008 excavation work through the damp and muddy ground by the James River Institute for Archaeology, under the direction of Matthew Laird, unearthed the remnants of the jail. While the team didn’t find the expected implements of torture, such as whipping rings or iron chains, what it did find were unexpected hints of lives lived here—bits of tableware, including English china and earthenware and the remnants of a porcelain doll.
How does a city balance commerce with remembrance? The ghost stories that are told about Shockoe Bottom are not only harmless; they add a festive patina to the city’s bars and restaurants, an air of mystery and glamour. They invite you to spend an evening with an ephemeral time just out of reach, to add a small bit of wonder to an otherwise average night out. What they don’t do is speak to a past whose legacy can still traumatize. They don’t ask the patrons of Richmond’s nightlife to consider a complicated history; in particular they don’t ask the city’s white citizens and tourists to face difficult facts. For those who would rather not revisit those days, the city’s ghost lore makes it easy, turning our attention to murdered gunsmiths and fabled prostitutes. But that’s not to say that these other ghosts are not omnipresent. “I started weeping and couldn’t stop,” recalled Delores McQuinn, chairwoman of Richmond’s Slave Trail Commission, when those bits of china and porcelain doll were discovered. “There was a presence here. I felt a bond. It’s a heaviness that I’ve felt over and over again.”
Nor was she the only one to feel the ghosts of those who passed through Shockoe. When Lupita Nyong’o won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Patsey in Twelve Years a Slave, she opened her acceptance speech by invoking ghosts. “It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s,” she told the Los Angeles audience. “And so I want to salute the spirit of Patsey for her guidance.” Then, as she thanked the film’s director, Steve McQueen, she told him, “I’m certain that the dead are standing about you and watching and they are grateful and so am I.”
The dead are watching, whether or not we choose to listen to their stories.