Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016)

IV

USELESS MEMORY

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

HILLSDALE, USA

The road to Hill House leads through Hillsdale. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor Vance is given detailed instructions on getting to the eponymous mansion and is advised explicitly not to ask about the mansion once she gets to the small town closest to her haunted destination. “I am making these directions so detailed,” Dr. Montague writes to her in a letter, “because it is inadvisable to stop in Hillsdale to ask your way. The people there are rude to strangers and openly hostile to anyone inquiring about Hill House.” And it’s true: the people of Hillsdale feel an immediate distrust of this mousy Eleanor Vance who’s preparing to spend several months at the haunted mansion.

In Jackson’s novel Hill House’s creator, Hugh Crain, materializes almost from nowhere, without a backstory and certainly not as a citizen of Hillsdale—his decision for choosing Hillsdale remains a mystery. Though Crain builds Hill House for his wife and family, his wife dies minutes before first laying eyes on it, as the carriage taking her to her new home overturns in the driveway. Bringing up his two children alone in the murky mansion, Crain eventually marries twice more, though both subsequent wives also come to untimely ends: the second from a fall, the third from consumption. It’s not clear why things go so horribly wrong, only that Crain’s house unleashes some unspeakable evil, or is itself that evil—an evil that lingers long after he himself is dead. Stuck with a darkness on the edge of town, the people of Hillsdale must contend with this new architectural evil perpetually on their periphery.

Why do the poor townspeople hate the haunted mansion? Well, because they’re poor. They can’t afford to move away, to uproot their families, even after some rich eccentric has uncorked some terrible spirit just outside town. “People leave this town,” a Hillsdale resident tells Eleanor, “they don’t come here.” 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.

Shirley Jackson never specifies exactly where Hillsdale is, or even in which state it can be found. Take “Route 39 to Ashton,” Dr. Montague’s letter instructs Eleanor, “and then turn left onto Route 5 going west”—that’s about it. For a long time I’d assumed it was in New England; Jackson was living in Vermont when she wrote the novel, and that’s where director Robert Wise sets The Haunting, his adaptation of the novel: in “the most remote part of New England.” But while there are about a dozen Ashtons throughout the country, none are in New England. There is, however, an Ashton, Illinois, right near the intersection of State Route 5 and State Route 38.

So Hill House might actually be in the Land of Lincoln. If you look closely, though, every state has its Hillsdale: a town beset by a local haunting, a paranormal real estate problem, a conflict between the haves and have-nots that plays out in supernatural terms.

As Salem has taught us, nothing brings out ghosts like property disputes. Events played out similarly sinister in Nyack, New York, a few decades ago. Helen Ackley had advertised her house as haunted for more than a decade before she put it up for sale in 1989; for years she had opened it up for local walking tours of haunted Nyack, and it had once been featured in Reader’s Digest. But it was only after Jeffrey Stambovsky bought the house that he became aware of the rumors and the house’s reputation. Stambovsky, who’d lived in New York City and wasn’t up to speed on local lore, argued that the presence of ghosts lowered the value of the house, and he sued Ackley for failing to inform him of its haunted past.

West Virginia’s Greenbrier Ghost would not be the last instance of the supernatural entering into American case law, and Stambovsky v. Ackley worked its way slowly through the courts. After a lower court dismissed Stambovsky’s claim under the principle of caveat emptor (as the buyer of the home, it was his responsibility to do his due diligence), he appealed, and in a New York state appellate opinion, Justice Israel Rubin finally agreed with him.

Rubin’s decision began by more or less sidestepping the question of whether or not the house was actually haunted: “Whether the source of the spectral apparitions seen by defendant seller are parapsychic or psychogenic,” Rubin wrote, was irrelevant, since Ackley had repeatedly advertised her house as having ghosts: “defendant is estopped to deny their existence and, as a matter of law, the house is haunted.”

Rubin recognized Stambovsky’s predicament: though it was reasonable to expect the buyer to check for termites, water damage, and other possible faults, it struck him as unreasonable to expect a buyer to check for paranormal problems. “From the perspective of a person in the position of plaintiff herein, a very practical problem arises with respect to the discovery of a paranormal phenomenon: ‘Who you gonna call?’” Rubin wrote, clearly having fun with his decision. Imagining prospective buyers having to hire not just a structural engineer and a pest-control consultant but also a ghost hunter, the court concluded that “the notion that a haunting is a condition which can and should be ascertained upon reasonable inspection of the premises is a hobgoblin which should be exorcised from the body of legal precedent and laid quietly to rest.” Narrowly tailoring his decision, Rubin did reject Stambovsky’s claim that Ackley had acted fraudulently, arguing that any attempt to recover actual damages from Ackley hadn’t “a ghost of a chance.” But, “moved by the spirit of equity,” Rubin ordered the contract voided, awarding Stambovsky his original down payment.

Almost twenty years later the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would take on many of the same issues, though they would reach a significantly different outcome. In 2008 Janet Milliken sued the previous owners of her home in Thornton. The home had been the scene of a gruesome murder-suicide; it was subsequently bought cheaply at auction by Kathleen and Joseph Jacono, who renovated it and then resold it to Milliken. Milliken, who’d moved from California with her two young children after her husband’s death, had no idea of the house’s gruesome past and soon found her family beset with a number of ghostly encounters. After finally learning the true history of her house, she brought suit against the Jaconos, claiming that they’d purposefully withheld information that materially affected the value of the house.

Milliken v. Jacono went all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and as part of her case Milliken brought in Randall Bell, a California appraiser whose specialty was consulting on properties that were “psychologically stigmatized.” He’d first come to fame assisting with the sale of the condo where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman had been murdered. He’d also consulted on the house where Sharon Tate and four others were murdered by the Manson family, JonBenet Ramsey’s former house, and the Rancho Santa Fe mansion where thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed suicide, as well as other places that bore the stain of a violent, sensationalized past. Bell himself doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he recognizes that the perception of ghosts or a history involving violence can affect a home’s resale value. “A haunted house is a perception,” he’s said. “If a property is perceived as haunted, it’s haunted. If you don’t think it’s haunted, it isn’t.” Bell, along with Milliken’s lawyers, argued that whether or not ghosts were really haunting the house was irrelevant; what mattered was that the house’s history was affecting its price, and that the Jaconos had been obligated to disclose this during the sale.

Ultimately the court sided with the Jaconos, not Milliken. “One cannot quantify the psychological impact of different genres of murder, or suicide,” it wrote in its opinion. Psychological stigma, no matter its subjective effect on some, presented the court with such a slippery slope of possibilities that there was no way for them to contemplate it as a material defect: “Does a bloodless death by poisoning or overdose create a less significant ‘defect’ than a bloody one from a stabbing or shooting? How would one treat other violent crimes such as rape, assault, home invasion, or child abuse? What if the killings were elsewhere, but the sadistic serial killer lived there? What if satanic rituals were performed in the house?” Unlike the New York court, the Pennsylvania justices put the onus entirely on the buyer: caveat emptor—buyer beware.

If Milliken v. Jacono was expected to settle, definitively, the question of whether ghosts can affect property values, it most assuredly has not, and the belief that a building’s reputation as haunted can have a legitimate impact on its value has resurfaced over the years in sometimes unexpected ways. In Brooklyn the former Caledonian Hospital, overlooking the south side of Prospect Park, was transformed in 2014 into a luxury rental property, and almost immediately the ghosts moved in. Stories of strange smells, unexplained sounds, and other haunted phenomena began to emerge, and three doormen quit over the course of six months. One doorman who’d quit reportedly told a neighbor that 123 on the Park, as the building’s now known, is “a messed-up place to work because it’s haunted.” The managing director of the property group that manages the building confirmed to local papers that there was high staff turnover and that there have been issues in renting units.

But these unexplained spirits may have a more predictable origin. Writing for Gothamist, Lauren Evans wondered whether the ghosts were themselves “understandably perturbed by the gentrification of their longtime home” and had “organized to retaliate.” When she poked around the property trying to verify the haunting, she was told by employees that the ghost rumors had been started by neighbors, who were concerned that the high-priced apartments would drive up their own rents. Meanwhile, prospective renters at 123 on the Park have themselves apparently tried to use the ghosts as a bargaining chip, asking for reduced rents since their apartments already have occupants. In landscapes such as New York City, where real estate and issues of gentrification are already fraught, it doesn’t much matter if the ghosts are real or not; what matters is the financial leverage they may provide.

I’d felt this myself firsthand when my wife and I were searching for our first home, in 2008, when the country’s real estate market was in free fall. In many of the strange houses we looked at, I felt the hints of lives left behind by the foreclosure crisis, and the odd, haunting feeling such traces could engender. But nowhere did I feel it as strongly as in the one house we came to call the Happy Murder Castle.

Standing midway up the side of a hill off Alvarado Boulevard in Los Angeles’s Echo Park neighborhood, even from a distance it stood out against the other homes. Driving up to it, we could see the faux flagstone that had been painted on some, but not all, of its walls. It was just up the street from an elementary school and might have once doubled as an unlicensed day care; perhaps the castle look had seemed inviting to children at one point. The citrus trees on the property were untended and filled with ripe and rotting fruit, and from those trees rose the back bedroom, complete with plywood crenellations to complete the medieval tower aesthetic. Meanwhile, the front of the house still bore the evidence of its former life as a 1920s bungalow. This was an architectural version of The Fly: two incompatible species gratuitously grafted together, resulting in an utter monstrosity.

As we walked in, we found another couple on their way out. They smiled grimly and said merely, “Hope you brought your mask,” on their way past us. The owners, we learned, had left the taps dripping, so that pools of black mold festered beneath the sinks, but that was only the beginning. The house had once been half its current size, and the additions boggled the mind: the only door to the backyard was through a bathroom, and off the kitchen was something too wide to be a hallway, too small to be a room. This “room,” in turn, led to that back bedroom tower, which amazingly had a ceiling painted with a marginal trompe l’oeil: scarf-draped cherubs blowing trumpets amid wispy clouds. It was hard to imagine how anyone could have made a home here, but we walked through it anyway, drinking in its distorted weirdness, its history measured out in garish juxtapositions. We were about to leave when our real estate agent noted something we’d overlooked: scrawled in pencil on the living room wall were the words A MURDERER LIVED HERE.

The feeling I got from the house stayed with me for weeks, even after we’d ended our search. (We didn’t put in an offer on the house, unsurprisingly.) The Happy Murder Castle was disquieting, uncanny, possessed of an uneasy sense I’ve rarely felt in any structure; I’ll admit there are times I’m tempted to call it haunted. We tell ourselves ghost stories perhaps because we truly believe in the paranormal—or perhaps because we just need a word, a term, a story for that vague feeling that would be too silly to admit in other terms.

After our trip to the Happy Murder Castle, I Googled the address, along with “murderer,” “killer,” “child molester,” every combination I could think of. I came up with nothing. Unlike in Pennsylvania, in California a real estate agent has to notify you if a death has occurred in a house within the past three years, but that wouldn’t include a murderer who lived there and did his or her killing elsewhere or a murderer who was never caught. It’s possible, I suppose, that a murderer really did live there. But the truth is likely far more obvious, more quotidian, more biting. These were homeowners who bought at an inflated price before the market crashed and now found themselves underwater; they finally lost their home like so many thousands of others. Those penciled words were, like the black mold, likely an attempt to make their home as unappealing as they could, an albatross around the neck of the bank that had taken it from them. Forced out, the home’s previous owners’ memories linger in that house—bitter and spiteful spirits, mingling with a sense of melancholy and regret.

Wherever they are now, who can say. But this, too, you could say, is part of the American story, as we have always been people who move on, leaving behind wreckage and fragments in our wake. We will continue, despite our best intentions, to make haunted houses and cities, for we are endlessly mobile, leaving a pockmarked landscape of abandoned places in our wake. Like hermit crabs, Americans tend to abandon one home for the next, leaving behind a former dwelling to be either repurposed by its next occupant or left as detritus.

“We left the valley with reluctant feet, looking backward at every turn in the steep grade, much as our first parents must have lingered on the confines of Eden,” a correspondent for the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote in 1875, signing her dispatch with only the name “Abigail.” A travelogue through eastern California out of the Sierra Nevadas, Abigail’s short article offers an early perspective on the changing nature of the country in the wake of the early mining booms. “We ate our first lunch under a great Sequoia tree, named ‘Illinois,’ and sped down into the Valley of the Stanislaus, and up to Sonora, through the deserted mining towns, like the ghosts of their departed prosperity. The country is ruined now for all agricultural purposes for ages, every inch of soil having been washed away, only the unsightly piles and ridges of stone and washed gravel left. The gold was dearly purchased at such a price.”

Abigail’s article, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the earliest use of the word “ghost” to denote an abandoned town. “Ghost town” would find increasing favor in the lexicon, particularly starting in the 1920s, as the last vestiges of the boomtown West dried up. In his 1931 popular history of mining in California and Nevada, Here They Dug the Gold, George F. Willison wrote, “Today all lie ghost towns smelling of the long slow processes of ruin and decay,” cementing the term as an idiom that has since become ubiquitous. As more and more of these towns dried up, confronting us with a strange new landscape, a term was needed, and the language of ghosts presented itself.

Many ghost towns, naturally, also claim to be haunted. The ruined town of Garnet, Montana, is one, named for the rich vein of gold, the Garnet lode, that birthed it. Its population peaked at a thousand residents in 1895, but within ten years it had dwindled to less than two hundred. A fire destroyed the business district in 1912, and the last resident died in 1947. Given over to the elements, the remaining buildings gradually fell to ruin until preservationists, along with the Bureau of Land Management, stabilized the remains and opened the town to visitors. When the tourists are gone, though, the ghosts appear—so says resident ghost historian Ellen Baumler. Officially employed as the interpretive historian for the Montana Historical Society, Baumler writes books on Montana’s haunted past on the side, and she cites Garnet as among many ghost towns that now have spirits. “Sometimes, in the deep winter quiet, a piano tinkles in Kelley’s Saloon and the spirits dance to ghostly music,” she writes in her Montana Chillers. “Men’s voices echo in the empty rooms. But the moment a living, human hand touches the building, the noises stop.”

Ghost towns feel haunted because, even if they will never again host living society, they remain filled with hints of those who once lived there. Our imaginations cannot help but project onto these ruins the ghosts of the people who’ve left indelible traces, and these spirits can spring to life with just a shift in the wind, a creaking board, or a distant animal call. Far more comforting, after all, to believe that someone—even if not someone living—is still making use of these shacks, saloons, and general stores.

Americans aren’t the only people to leave behind ghost towns, but we are particularly adept at it, as our peripatetic nature drives us from claim to claim, stake to stake, leaving behind not much but rubble and clapboard houses. The ghost town has become a defining feature of the West and its mythology, and as the country’s manufacturing economy fell on hard times, it became the defining feature of an emptied-out rust belt. In the early years of a new century, we’re poised to see more and more ghost towns emerge. As places like Manhattan and San Francisco become uninhabitable to all but the richest 0.01 percent, driving out even their own service workers, internal migration will continue and new places will become abandoned. A 2014 article in the New York Times suggested that as global warming increases, Americans will empty out the Southwest in favor of places like Maine, Oregon, and Alaska. Spurred by a global warming dust bowl, we’ll move north, and in time Phoenix, Sacramento, and Los Angeles may come to be as ghost-haunted as Detroit seems now.

We live among the undead, in cities of ghosts. The buildings that used to have meaning and purpose—not only houses but banks and government buildings—have been emptied of what they once meant, and yet they remain, haunting us. Those of us who can, leave, moving on to new cities that we hope are not yet beset by the dead. Those of us who can’t, like the residents of Hillsdale, Illinois, remain behind, haunted by forces larger than ourselves, imprisoned by the folly of the rich who have unleashed some unspeakable dread from which we cannot escape.