Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016)

IV

USELESS MEMORY

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

AMONG THE RUINS

Detroit, MI

The ghost of Daniel Scotten didn’t wait long to materialize. Prior to his death, in 1899, Scotten had been a titan of Detroit’s business community, beloved by everyone who knew him. He’d started the Hiawatha Tobacco Company and turned it into a massive enterprise, complete with a monstrous factory on Fort Street. Woodcuts of the building show a stately rectangular building with arched windows along its first floor and a giant American flag flying from the roof. In an age when factory owners could be less than humane toward their workers, Scotten built a reputation as a philanthropist, funneling his wealth back into the city, even leaving stacks of firewood out for workers or anyone else who needed them to get through the long Michigan winter.

Shortly after Scotten died, his factory was closed and put up for sale. Once a beacon of Detroit’s manufacturing success, it now sat dark and empty, an imposing tombstone to Scotten’s legacy, a leering monolith with an uncertain future at the dawn of the twentieth century. Two of his former workers were walking past it when they were confronted by what they later described as “the figure of a man, white and terrible,” which sent them both screaming in fright. Despite their terror, they recognized the ghost as their former boss, who bellowed at them, “Ever more must I walk until the smoke comes out of the chimneys of the old plant.”

By June of the following year, ownership of the factory had transferred to Scotten’s nephew Owen Scotten, who reopened the plant. The smoke of industry began once again spewing from its chimneys, and the ghost disappeared. It has not been seen since, not even after the company relocated to Buffalo, New York, in 1969, or after the Detroit factory was demolished in 1971—where it once stood, on the corner of Fort Street and Campau (since renamed Scotten Street), there’s now a parking lot.

One wonders if we’ll see the ghost of James Ward Packard on the city’s east side, roaming the grounds of the massive, forty-acre Packard Automotive Plant. The plant, one of the most modern factories when it opened in 1903, operated until 1958, when the Packard brand died, but continued to be inhabited by various other businesses until the 1990s. Since then it has stood vacant, looming, ghostly—a sprawling ruin, a symbol of devastation stretching twelve city blocks.

A number of investors have tried to purchase the property and revitalize it, but despite vague plans for the future, it remains a wreckage a half mile long, a playground for vandals and disaster tourists. And if the ghost of Packard is here, no one’s yet seen him.

Goethe wrote in 1827,

America, you have it better

Than our old continent,

You have no ruined castles

And no ancient basalt.

Your inner life remains untroubled

By useless memory

And futile strife.

That was then. Now, almost two hundred years later, we’ve started to catch up to old Europe. We have plenty of ruined castles now, plenty of wasted strife to call our own.

Detroit has its abandoned hotels and office buildings, towering over the skyline but emptied out within. The once-beautiful theaters of a golden age, neo-Renaissance temples that have been left to decay and deteriorate. In these formerly grand palaces, failing plaster now drips from gouged ceilings and the sweeping balconies and cornices lord it over trash and dust. One such place, the Michigan Theatre, was converted into a parking garage; its vaulted ceilings are still visible above the cars and trucks.

These buildings have become the playgrounds of urban explorers, who’ve taken to breaking in where necessary to see the insides of abandoned hulks and fallen beauties. Before it was boarded up, the Roosevelt Warehouse at the corner of Fourteenth and Marantette was a popular destination. In use as a book depository for the Detroit public schools when it was heavily damaged by fire in 1987, it was subsequently abandoned, the school district leaving behind a surplus of usable supplies, including hundreds of books. In the slow decay of the building, trees have sprouted from the wreckage and books and other supplies left behind, offering a particularly stark image of Detroit’s abandonment and, to some extent, its rebirth—or at least its reclamation by nature.

Detroit’s downtown is anchored by the mammoth Renaissance Center. It was designed by John Portman, the same architect who designed LA’s Westin Bonaventure, and the two properties are markedly similar, except that the seven-tower Renaissance Center is larger and its central core—a Marriott—is much taller. Inside, though, is the same style of confusing atrium, the same sense of a Piranesi prison come to life. But unlike the Bonaventure, the Renaissance Center isn’t haunted. Why would it be? There are so, so many other haunted buildings in Detroit.

Ghosts fester in places untended to, where the usual patterns of behavior aren’t or can’t be enforced. Where once-regular places become strange, where it’s no longer clear what a building’s function was. Where the shadows multiply and nothing restricts your mind from projecting your thoughts and dreams and nightmares onto the walls and corridors. New Orleans gets its haunted reputation in no small part from carefully scripted stories that have been cultivated over decades, a way of packaging the city’s history for tourists. Detroit’s haunting feels more organic, sprung from the wreckage like a ghost from the well at the bottom of some forlorn dungeon.

“In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting,” the German philosopher Walter Benjamin once commented. The ruin does not give history eternal life, he added; rather, it transforms the past into a thing that offers only “irresistible decay.” As moss and foliage reclaim the remains of an old statue or aqueduct, the normally sharp line between the works of humanity and nature blur. A young Gustave Flaubert wrote of the “deep and ample joy” that filled him upon seeing ruins and their “embrace of nature, coming swiftly to bury the work of man the moment his hand is no longer there to defend it.” A few decades earlier, the Reverend William Gilpin wrote similarly that “a ruin is a sacred thing. Rooted for ages in the soil; assimilated to it; and become, as it were, a part of it; we consider it as a work of nature, rather than of art.” Sacred and enigmatic, for centuries ruins have been seen as appropriate places for philosophical reflection; it’s not a coincidence that two of the best-known Romantic poems, Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” and Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” are both meditations on ruin.

In the same way that a ghost story told on a dark night might quicken one’s pulse, ruins have a strange attraction, an exhilaration that accompanies the melancholy contemplation. Faced with the pitiless passage of time, the reality of one’s own insignificance, we are awakened to our own death without actually facing a life-threatening experience. The eighteenth-century French writer and encyclopedist Denis Diderot spoke for many of us when he wrote:

The ideas that ruins awaken in me are grand. Everything vanishes, everything dies, everything passes, only time endures. How old it is this world! I walk between two eternities. Everywhere I cast my eyes, the objects which surround me announce an end and make me yield to that end which awaits me. What is my ephemeral existence in comparison with that of the rock which is effaced, this valley which is forged, with this forest that trembles, with these masses suspended above my head which rumbles. I see the marble tombs crumble into dust; and I do not want to die!

Detroit is filled with ruins like no other city. And certainly they are beautiful. The buildings that remain are primarily from a single period: the early decades of the twentieth century, when the rise of the automobile catapulted Detroit to the forefront of American consciousness. We may think of the city as a petrified ruin, but for the first century of its history, it focused on new construction instead of preservation. Very little of its architecture from the nineteenth century still stands; much of it was demolished to make way for the great Art Deco and Beaux-Arts landmarks of the early twentieth century, when the city was in its heyday.

So many people fetishize Detroit’s ruins in particular, because loving other ruins is often off-limits. “Is it unseemly now or ever to talk about the beauty of the World Trade Center ruins?” Sarah Boxer asked in the New York Times in 2002, and while the cultural consensus seems to be yes, Detroit is fair game, or so it would seem. Detroit has become our nation’s favorite morality tale: a series of ineffectual mayors, bad public policy, and servitude to unions have all allowed a popular conception that Detroit “deserves” its fate. Just as we once visited circus sideshows, gawking at the Bearded Lady and the Dog-Faced Boy—freaks whose display not only titillated but reminded customers that they were themselves normal—those of us who don’t live in the Motor City peer at its haunted architecture to remind ourselves that our lives are normal. An architectural freak show, these ruins are both cautionary tale and stone and copper mementos mori, reminders that we, too, will all one day age and die. The haunted theaters of Detroit entice outsiders because they suggest decadence, extravagant wasting. The Michigan Theatre that is now a parking garage—what can that mean except a perverse excess, as though Beaux-Art landmarks are so plentiful here that you can throw them away.

In 2009 Detroit-based writer and photographer James D. Griffioen complained to Vice Magazine about the prevalence of a certain kind of image of Detroit: one of blight and destruction and little else. Professional photographers from around the world had been contacting him, asking for tours of the city, but he soon sensed a pattern. “At first you’re really flattered by it, like ‘Whoa, these professional guys are interested in what I have to say and show them.’ But you get worn down trying to show them all the different sides of the city, then watching them go back and write the same story as everyone else. The photographers are the worst. Basically the only thing they’re interested in shooting is ruin porn.” The term Griffioen coined, “ruin porn,” caught on and has since become ubiquitous, a phrase describing a certain kind of approach to urban decay, one that for better or worse has become associated with Detroit. In these images the ruins of places like the Roosevelt Warehouse and the Packard Plant are captured in their eerie beauty.

In the past few years the subgenre of ruin porn has exploded; coffee-table books that depict Detroit’s abandoned spaces in lush, stunning photography have become a reliable industry. In works like Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s The Ruins of Detroit, and the architectural history Lost Detroit: Stories Behind the Motor City’s Majestic Ruins, by Dan Austin and Sean Doerr, Detroit is captured in its faded glory and displayed, like an anatomized corpse on a dissecting table, for the rest of us to gaze upon with awe and delighted terror.

A mile and a half from the train station is Detroit’s Masonic Temple, the largest such building in the country. A sixteen-story gothic behemoth with more than one thousand rooms, it was built by George D. Mason to display the pride of a city that had only recently begun to emerge as the manufacturing hub of an entire nation. As Detroit, and the Masonic lodge, have fallen on hard times in the past few decades, ghost stories have emerged about the lodge, including a popular one about Mason himself. As it’s told on one Web site:

Mr. Mason went slightly overboard when financing the construction of the building, and eventually went bankrupt, whereupon his wife left him. Overwhelmingly depressed about his financial and personal circumstances, Mason jumped to his death from the roof of the temple. Security guards claim to see his ghost to this day, ascending the steps to the roof. The temple, abundant with cold spots, inexplicable shadows, and slamming doors, is known to intimidate visitors with the eerie feeling of being watched.

A popular story, yes, but among the most patently false and easily disproved ghost stories out there. Mason was eighty-eight at the time of his death, from natural causes (as any quick Google search will tell you), which took place more than twenty years after the Masonic Temple was finished. And yet the story has cachet in part because it reflects a narrative that many have about Detroit: one of ostentatious overreach, folly, and death from financial ruin. So even though it’s obviously false, it still gets told and retold.

If the legend of Mason’s ghost reflects the downfall of the city, other ghosts stand guard trying to ward off further ruin. Such is the strange ghost of Colonel Philetus Norris, who appears at the haunted Two-Way Inn, several miles north of downtown. Even had he not returned as a ghost, his life would have been spectacular enough. Born in 1821 Norris served in the Union Army during the Civil War, rising to the rank of colonel and working as a spy in Confederate territory. After the war he served in the Ohio legislature before moving to Detroit, building the home for himself that is now the Two-Way Inn. He stayed in Detroit until he was hired to become the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park. In his later years he did ethnographic research for the Smithsonian Institution, dying in Kentucky and returning to Detroit only to be buried.

In photographs Norris looks every bit the Wild West mountain man, sporting a full, bushy beard and dressed entirely in buckskin. It’s this figure that has been seen repeatedly in the Two-Way Inn: the frontiersman image easily recognizable in the postindustrial landscape, an unlikely candidate for protector of the Motor City.

In most retellings of the story of Norris’s ghost, he’s credited with protecting the inn from arson, which has long been endemic in Detroit. As with Daniel Scotten, you could say Norris’s ghost is looking out for the city, acting as a steward against its decline, militating against its abandonment. It is rare for the supernatural to adopt such a civic responsibility, but here in Detroit it is perhaps essential.

Ghost stories like this reveal an evolving attitude toward buildings after their collapse. The remnants left behind after a ruinous rapture, they’ve become burdens a city must bear and a constant reminder of a past now faded. The ghost stories of Detroit that focus on its old buildings are of a different caliber from those that center on the gothic high-rises of Manhattan or Chicago, where land is precious and useless buildings don’t stick around. The reputation of the Merchant’s House in Manhattan comes in no small part from the contrast with the surrounding buildings: an anachronistic anomaly in a bustling, forward-looking metropolis. In Detroit the ghosts stand guard, preserving the past against the decay of the future. They command the living to reclaim the former pride of these factories and mansions, or, like Mason, they lament their own folly and hubris.

And then there is the curious figure of the Nain Rouge, the mysterious Red Dwarf that’s haunted Detroit for more than three hundred years. If Daniel Scotten and Philetus Norris are the supernatural defenders of Detroit, the Nain Rouge is the city’s assailant. If George Mason laments the end of the city’s glory days, the Nain Rouge celebrates it.

Stories of the Nain Rouge begin with the founding of the city. In 1701 Antoine Laumet de La Mothe Cadillac (the French explorer who would found Detroit) had been in attendance at a lavish ball in Quebec when a strange fortune-teller appeared. The author of the 1883 collection Legends of Le Détroit, Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin (about whom not much else is known), who tells the story that follows, described her as “a woman of unusual height, a dark, swarthy complexion, restless, glittering eyes, strangely fashioned garments yet in harmony with her face.” On her shoulder was perched a small black cat, which would lick her ear occasionally during her sessions, leading some to assume that the devil was whispering instructions through the body of the feline.

Finally she came to Cadillac, who bade her to tell him his fortune as well. “Sieur,” she told him, “yours is a strange destiny. A dangerous journey you will soon undertake; you will found a great city which one day will have more inhabitants than New France now possesses; many children will nestle around your fireside.” But as with Macbeth’s fortune, there was another side to Cadillac’s future: “Dark clouds are arising and I see dimly your star,” the fortune-teller went on. “The policy you intend pursuing in selling liquor to the savages, contrary to the advice of the Jesuits will cause you much trouble, and be the cause of your ruin. In years to come your colony will be the scene of strife and bloodshed, the Indians will be treacherous, the hated English will struggle for its possession, but under a new flag it will reach a height of prosperity which you never in your wildest dreams pictured.”

Confused, Cadillac pressed her for more information, and she ended her tale with this warning: “Your future and theirs lie in your own hands, beware of undue ambition; it will mar all your plans. Appease the Nain Rouge. Beware of offending him. Should you be thus unfortunate not a vestige of your inheritance will be given to your heirs. Your name will be scarcely known in the city you founded.”

That same year Cadillac founded the settlement that would in time grow to be Detroit, and as it flourished quickly, he became arrogant and proud, disregarding the soothsayer’s warnings. One night when he and his wife were out walking, on the path in front of them jumped “the uncouth figure of a dwarf, very red in the face, with a bright, glistening eye; instead of burning it froze, instead of possessing depth [it] emitted a cold gleam like the reflection from a polished surface, bewildering and dazzling all who came within its focus. A grinning mouth displaying sharp, pointed teeth, completed this strange face.” Unwisely, Cadillac struck the dwarf with his cane, shouting, “Get out of my way, you red imp!” The Nain Rouge responded with a fiendish, mocking laugh, then disappeared.

True to the fortune-teller’s predictions, Cadillac’s own fortunes soon fell precipitously, and in the years since, the Nain Rouge has become not simply a personal antagonist but a villain for the city as a whole. He is seen shortly before every major disaster that’s befallen Detroit. Just as Binghamton has its curse, Detroit has its Red Dwarf.

In another collection of folktales, Charles M. Skinner writes that the Nain Rouge was “seen scampering along the shore on the night before the attack on Bloody Run, when the brook that afterward bore this name turned red with the blood of soldiers. People saw it in the smoky streets when the city was burned in 1805, and on the morning of Hull’s surrender it was found grinning in the fog.”

Little record of the dwarf, a harbinger of tragic romanticism and falls from grace, can be found in the years of the city’s great boom. Only starting in the 1960s did the Nain Rouge supposedly return, making an appearance again shortly before the devastating race riots of 1967. In the decades since, he’s shown up again before major ice storms and other calamities.

Meanwhile, another class of ghosts has emerged here. Among the most iconic images of contemporary Detroit is Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s image of Michigan Central Station: their photograph takes the building head-on, cropping it so closely that there’s nothing else in the frame: no sky, no land, no other buildings. The building is imposing, and the impression it gives can be quite chilling. But what’s not captured in the image is what was happening behind them as they took the photograph. Across the street from Michigan Central Station is a row of shops and restaurants, including a barbershop and a real estate firm, a fancy espresso place, a barbecue joint, and a vodka bar.

The simple fact, after all, is that while ruin porn focuses on abandoned buildings, devoid of any humanity, Detroit is not empty. As historian Thomas J. Sugrue notes, “Detroit might be depopulated, but it’s not a blank slate. Over 700,000 people, more than four-fifths of them Black, call the city home. For them, Detroit’s ruins are not romantic: they are a taunting reminder of how the city has lost capital and jobs, and how many lives have been ruined in the process.” The images of emptied buildings have to efface blue-collar workers who are almost always just out of frame. They have their own stories, of course, these lives that exist just beyond the camera’s eye—and they haunt the aesthetic of ruin porn with their refusal to vanish.

Our ruins are not centuries-old testaments to the civilizations long gone; they are not the mysterious ciphers of Stonehenge or ancient Egypt. They have been birthed in modern memory, documented for all to see. And ruin porn photographs offer no way to understand the decline we’re witnessing; they’re anti-history, even as they embody the past and its decline. A ghost story’s reduction of a complex moment or the history of a building into a series of clichés is reproduced in beautifully staged photos that fetishize the past without truly representing it. Ruin porn is the visual analog of the ghost story.

Meanwhile, Detroit is still teeming with people. It’s one of the top twenty largest cities in America—more populous than Seattle, Denver, Boston, or Washington, D.C. It’s down from its historic highs of two million people, to be sure, and its massive size means a lower population density, but it’s by no means empty. On the contrary, on an early spring weekend, Detroit’s downtown struck me as a good deal more lively than Chicago’s Loop or downtown Los Angeles would have been at the same time. To see Detroit as a ruin—and as nothing but a ruin—is to see it emptied out of people. It is to erase some 713,000 residents from view. It is to transform them, against their will, into ghosts.

Sometimes, though, the ghosts fight back. Since 2010, on the first Sunday of spring each year a parade is held for the Nain Rouge, where he confronts the city and is symbolically driven out of town. Half Mardi Gras parade, half Burning Man (though nowhere near as large or elaborate or well attended), the Marche du Nain Rouge is a strange, if entertaining, way to spend a Sunday morning in March. Fire jugglers accompany a float made to look like a giant cockroach, on top of which stands the Nain Rouge himself—or at least an actor portraying him, in full black leather and an appropriately demonic red mask. From his perch he mocks the crowd to the strains of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” shouting, “You think you can defeat me! You’ll never be able to defeat me!”; “You thought you got rid of me but I’m back!”; “You won’t succeed, Detroit! I’ll make you fail!”

Parade goers wave signs blaming the Red Dwarf for their troubles (NAIN BROKE MY TIRE, read one) or in support of the antagonist (DON’T DREAD THE RED!; SUPPORT THE SHORT!; STOP NAIN SHAMING!), while he claims credit for petty annoyances: “I fed your dog chocolates!” or “I cc’ed the wrong e-mail to everyone you know!” But even here there can be a harder edge beneath the veneer. “I put all the toxins in the air and the lead in the soil,” he taunts. “I raised the parking ticket to $45.” He seems to ally himself with the Republicans in control of the state government (“I support right to work”; “I gerrymandered Michigan!”) as well as the new influx of white hipsters (“I think gentrification is excellent urban planning”; “I’m working on the new hipster political correctness”). The crowd on hand is overwhelmingly white, and young; participating in a public shaming of themselves, these gentrifiers perhaps hope to absolve themselves of some guilt. A carnivalesque scapegoat, the Nain Rouge can function as a release valve for pent-up annoyances and anxieties, which is the most you can hope for from any ghost.

It’s hard to know for sure what lies in store for a city like Detroit, one that has so much promise and potential and so many dedicated citizens but that still has so many obstacles standing in its way. It’s hard to know how much longer the Nain Rouge will return to pester the citizens and frustrate their dreams. From the rooftop of the massive Masonic Temple, the ghost of the building’s architect, George Mason, looks down on the city, watching. Once, years before, he was allowed to rest in peace, but then he was resurrected, not unlike the Nain Rouge, and remade into a symbol of the city’s tragic fortunes.

Perhaps, in the years to come, he may be able to rest in peace once more.