Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

One of NPR's Great Reads of 2016

â€œA lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting storiesâ€¦ absorbingâ€¦[and] intellectually intriguing.â€â€”The New York Times Book Review

An intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history,Â GhostlandÂ takes readers on a road trip through some of the country's most infamously haunted placesâ€”and deep into the dark side of our history.

Colin Dickey is on the trail of America's ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie homes," Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. Some have established reputations as "the most haunted mansion in America," or "the most haunted prison"; others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget.Â Â Â
Â Â Â Â With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the livingâ€”how do we, the living, deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed, for whatever reason, haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are madeâ€”and why those changes are madeâ€”Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved.
Â Â Â Â Spellbinding, scary, and wickedly insightful, Ghostland discovers the past we're most afraid to speak of aloud in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.
Country USA
Manufacturer Penguin Books
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2016-10-04
UnitCount 1
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Penguin Books
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2016-10-04
UnitCount	1
Format	Kindle eBook

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

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