Hauntings Histories Campfire Tales What Ghost Stories Tell Us
Transcriber: May Stolze
Reviewer: Eunice Tan
Fifteen years ago,
I was doing my graduate research
on the lynching of Mexicans
and Latin Americans
in Gold Rush, California,
and I was having a very hard time finding
the evidence I needed to make my claim.
I don’t know how much
you know about lynching,
but they are by definition
public executions that happen
off the official record.
These deaths aren’t technically
sanctioned by the state,
and often towns and communities
would deny they even happened,
which made it harder
to prove that they did.
Still, even when the official record
refused an act of violence,
local lore often served
as an alternative archive,
a different way of recording history.
A ghost story about someone being killed
and coming back to haunt the town
was an important arrow,
a sign to look more deeply
into the history of a place.
Very often, if local legend
featured a story
about a ghost who had been hung
or murdered or lynched
and came back to haunt the town,
digging through the archive -
newspapers, letters, diaries -
would reveal that the event
or something like it
had actually happened.
So the ghost story was one way
that communities were holding
the violent history of a place,
passing down this story
from generation to generation.
Now, I don’t know if an actual ghost
was haunting any of these places,
but their history certainly was.
And this is pretty much my stance on it:
It doesn’t matter
whether or not a ghost is real;
the ghost story is.
And the fact that we maybe, kind of,
sort of believe a ghost might be real
is significant, and we should
pay attention to it.
I’m not the only one
who thinks this, by the way.
There is a whole field
of interdisciplinary research
called spectrality studies,
which is proof that academics
will think of anything.
So this idea was transformative for me
and not just in my research.
For most of my life,
I was terrified of ghosts.
I didn’t even want to hear a ghost story
because I didn’t want to entertain
the possibility that a ghost might exist.
And why not?
In popular culture, ghosts are portrayed
as mean, vengeful, destructive forces.
They’re terrifying at worst
and unsettling at best -
unexpected presences who show up
and demand your emotional
attention at any cost.
We are taught to be afraid of dying
and death and of the dead.
But when I stopped worrying about ghosts
and started worrying about ghost stories,
I found myself in a new relationship
with the world around me.
In addition to being a historian,
I’m also a performance maker.
And about five years ago,
I had the great honor of working
with Free Street Theater in Chicago
to create a performance
called “100 Hauntings.”
To make this performance,
we asked hundreds
and hundreds of Chicagoans
if they’d ever encountered a ghost.
We were interested in what I call
“ordinary ghost stories.”
So not the kinds of ghosts
who show up in urban legends
around a city’s ghost tour,
but the kind of ghost people say
they’ve just found in the bathroom,
right after signing the lease
on a new apartment.
Following my research,
we were interested in what
these ghosts might tell us
about Chicago’s hidden history,
but we were also interested
in the ghost story as a form.
Like no other kind of storytelling,
ghost stories ask us to gather round,
lean in and thrill at the possibility
that some very scary,
very chilling thing actually happened,
while at the same time being sure,
so sure, that it didn’t.
Right? Right?
I have found that almost everyone
has a ghost story.
Even people who say they don’t believe
in ghosts usually have a “Well …” story
about something they’re sure
has a rational explanation,
even if they’re not quite sure what it is.
And this not knowing
has left them unsettled,
with a feeling they can’t quite explain.
And this is what I love
about ghost stories,
how so often they get right to feeling.
Underneath the fun and chill of it
are complex relationships with life,
with death and with each other.
Whenever anyone asks me
and whenever anyone
tells me a ghost story,
I ask them two questions.
First, “What do you think
this ghost wanted?”
And second,
because most people are ambivalent about
whether or not the ghost actually exists,
I ask, “What is it
that you want from the ghost?”
The first question
is pretty easy to answer.
I have found that most ghosts
fall into one of three categories
and what they all want
is pretty much the same:
to be acknowledged.
The first type of ghost
is the kind I started studying.
These are “the furious returned” -
ghosts who have met a terrible end,
and they want us,
the living, to remember it.
These are your victims
of a great injustice.
Murders, most often,
but also things like factory fires
and mysterious deaths in jail.
I’ll give you an example.
Once, in a story circle
for our show “100 Hauntings,”
a man told us a story
about going as a teenager
to break into an abandoned mental hospital
on the northwest side of the city.
Now, we’d never heard
of this mental hospital,
and honestly, it sounded like any
“Teenagers breaking into a mental
hospital” story you’ve ever heard:
a wheelchair mysteriously following them,
doors slamming shut, creepy laughter.
But remember, these kinds of stories
can be important arrows,
so we followed up.
And sure enough,
multiple city records show
that there was a poor farm, an alms house,
on the northwest side of the city,
which later became one of the largest
carceral mental hospitals
in the United States.
It was the kind of place where people,
mostly poor people and immigrants,
were locked up for decades,
often against their will.
It was also the kind of place
where when they died,
they were usually buried
in the back in an unmarked grave.
The Chicago Tribune reports
that as many as 38,000
unmarked graves are in the back.
And when the land
was finally sold to developers,
they had to stop one of the projects
because there were as much
as three feet of bones blocking their way.
Now, this is a really significant
piece of Chicago history,
but I’d argue it’s not well known.
Most people who live here
don’t know anything about it,
but the ghost story asks us to remember.
The second kind of ghost story
is probably the most common.
We’ll call them
the “leave me alone” ghost.
This is the kind of ghost
who just wants us, the living, to get out.
Usually people
experience this as bad energy
or a creepy, unwelcome feeling
in some parts of the house,
and people usually imagine
that this is a former resident
who’s not happy
that new people have moved in.
What’s interesting to me
about this kind of ghost story
is that you find it most often
in appropriated spaces -
think gentrifying neighborhoods
or the old “built on a sacred
burial ground” trope.
And here’s where I want to remind you
that it doesn’t matter
whether or not the ghost is real.
The ghost story is.
So maybe there really is a ghost
who’s trying to push us out,
or maybe there’s some part
of our unconscious
that’s grappling with whether or not
we have a right to be here,
whether or not we really belong.
Sure, we live here now. But should we?
What happened to the people
who came before?
The third kind of ghost is my favorite.
I’ll call them “are still with us.”
These are your beloved grandparents,
a child still playing with a ball
up and down a hallway,
the elevator operator
still showing up to work.
Sometimes these ghosts
are strangers to us.
They’re not people we used to know,
but they’re not bothering us
or meaning us any harm.
They’re just kind of there.
I’ll give you an example.
Many people believe that the building
where my theater is located is haunted.
I’ve not experienced this myself,
but I can’t tell you how many people
have described seeing
exactly half a man sitting in our lobby.
He doesn’t interact with us
or disturb us in any way.
He’s just there.
Sometimes, though,
these ghosts are more active.
I’ve heard many stories from people
who thought their child
had an imaginary friend
until suddenly their child
knew how to play chess
or was singing songs
in a totally different language.
And here’s where these stories
get really emotional.
Often people are convinced
that this is some family member returned,
sent, coming to watch over them.
One woman told me a story
about her husband coming to visit
on a day when she was so sad
she didn’t know what else to do but cry.
Another woman told me she was sure
that a faucet turning on and off
in her bathroom was her sister
because it was so like the pranks
her sister used to play
when she was alive.
I love these kinds of stories
because they show us
how much we want to connect,
not just with the living
but with the dead.
Asking people for their ghost stories
can be bone-chilling fun,
but it also gets
at really intimate questions.
How do we feel about death?
What are we afraid of?
Who did we love so much
that we want them desperately to return?
How do we want to be remembered?
What do we wish we could change?
What and who is haunting us?
Despite what horror movies
and campfire tales would have us believe,
most ghost stories reveal a deep longing:
a longing for adventure, for meaning,
for connection, for a beyond,
a longing not to be forgotten
and a longing not to forget.
We’re living in a time
that feels exceptionally hard.
We’re divided from
one another by politics,
and the reality of a global pandemic
means that many of us have been away
from the people and places we love most.
So many of us are mourning
untimely deaths,
and grief is all around us.
Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re always
very good at grappling with loss
or talking about death
or talking about the way that our history
is still living in the present.
Ghost stories can be scary,
but so is being vulnerable,
so is any unknown.
So the next time you’re trying
to figure out a way to connect
and you’re not sure what to do,
let me offer this:
Try asking someone for a ghost story.
It’s sure to start a conversation.
Yeah, maybe they’ll laugh at you.
Maybe they’ll turn it back on you.
Maybe they’ll tell you a story
that makes the hair on the back
of your neck stand on end.
Maybe they’ll tell you
a story that makes you cry.
And maybe, if you’re really lucky,
they’ll tell you a story
that makes you wonder
what else you don’t know about a place,
about a history, about a people,
about each other and about yourself.
Don’t forget to ask:
What did the ghost want?
And more important,
what do you want from the ghost?