Thread by @Delafina777

Let's talk about ghosts, because the air is full of freezing mist and the wind is howling around the corners of the house and things are moving eerily in the back yard.

They're probably just noises. gizmodo.com/some-ghosts-ma…

But more to the point, they appear to be socially constructed. You should read Ghostland, by Colin Dickey, which is, on its face, a book about haunted places but actually a book about cultural narratives. amazon.com/Ghostland-Amer…

Because when I say "let's talk about ghosts," I mostly mean let's talk about Ghostland and its implications. Dickey's a subtle writer. I am not subtle.

And I'm going to start by talking about a bit in the middle of the book, about Shockoe Bottom, VA.

Seriously, read the book, though. I *think* I got it for @FWesSchneider as a gift, he told me I needed to read it and lent it back to me, then I forgot and asked him if it was good a couple years later and am now rereading it again.

@FWesSchneider But anyway, Shockoe Bottom. It's a neighborhood in Richmond, and it is HELLA haunted. Women in period dress in the pub, gauzily-dressed ladies of the night in a former brothel, a man wandering the kitchen.

@FWesSchneider Ghosts all over the place. And according to local historian and paranormal investigator Pamela Kinney, that's because Virginia's home to some of the earliest settlements in America.

@FWesSchneider By which she means, of course, the some of the earliest *European* settlements in America.

@FWesSchneider Some other stuff that's happened in Shockoe Bottom, or at least right next to it, in what's known as the Devil's Half Acre: some of the busiest slave markets in the South. Tens of thousands of human beings sold, tortured, imprisoned, killed, and buried there.

@FWesSchneider A common factor in ghost stories is tragedy--that those treated unjustly, those killed horribly, those who suffered, those who have unfinished business are those most likely to cling to places as ghosts.

@FWesSchneider So as Dickey researched the many ghosts of Shockoe Bottom, he began to be haunted (sorry) by a question:

Why are the ghosts of this slave-trading hot spot so overwhelmingly white?

@FWesSchneider gotta eat dinner, bbiab

@FWesSchneider So yeah, only New Orleans beat out Richmond in terms of the number of enslaved people trafficked through it. It was apparently also the originator of slavery futures speculation and price manipulation. The first to really make a whole economy out of it.

@FWesSchneider The human misery in evidence there *staggered* foreign observers. Every inch of the place is haunted by that history...

...just not in the form of ghosts.

@FWesSchneider Scott and Sandi Bergman own a ghost tour business in Richmond, and wrote "Haunted Richmond: Shadows of Shockoe," a book which promises that "These stories and more await as you discover the mysterious, tragic and terrifying events of Richmond’s dark past."

@FWesSchneider Yet Dickey notes that slavery is curiously absent from their list of historic tragedies. When describing the hauntings of a local pub, they admit to being at a loss as to why it would be haunted.

It's mere steps from the site of a major slave-trading office and Lumpkin's jail.

@FWesSchneider In Monticello, there are numerous reported sightings of Thomas Jefferson's ghost: a serene, reassuring, benevolent presence.

Yet popular ghost stories about Monticello lack ghosts of any of the slaves who lived there.

@FWesSchneider Occasionally you'll get a story about a Black plantation ghost, like Chloe, a young woman who haunts the Myrtles plantation in Louisiana. She's a highlight of plantation tours.

She was 13 or 14 when the man who owned the plantation claimed her as his mistress.

@FWesSchneider I won't go into all the tawdry details of the story--the cliche of the "tragic mulatto", Chloe as a Jezebel figure, etc.--for reasons that will become clear in a minute.

She was supposedly executing for poisoning her captor's wife and children.

@FWesSchneider The thing is, there are no records of a slave named Chloe ever living on the plantation, and nobody in the family died from poison.

So why is this story about a Black ghost acceptable--a favorite of tourists, even--while the tales sold in Shockoe Bottom are white ghosts?

@FWesSchneider Of course, if you check the records of the Works Progress Administration, which began collecting stories of former slaves in the 1930s, there are Black ghosts in Richmond.

@FWesSchneider John May, who was beaten to death by two white men, haunted them incessantly for the rest of their lives. Parents warned their children that a particular wagon belonged to "Dry Head and Bloody Bones," who snatched children.

It belonged to a slave hunter.

@FWesSchneider So why aren't these stories being told on ghost tours?

Natives have a more prominent place in American ghost stories in the form of the popular horror trope of the Indian Burial Ground.

The burial grounds exert a malevolent but strangely impersonal force.

@FWesSchneider When individual ghosts show up, they're often romanticized: the beautiful Indian Maiden who pined away for the lover she wasn't allowed to be with.

@FWesSchneider Or they're made ahistorically cruel: the house of Amityville Horror fame was supposedly built on a site the Natives of that area had used as an enclosure to allow the sick, mentally ill, or elderly to die of exposure.

As if they would have done any such thing.

@FWesSchneider Stephen King's Pet Sematary is, of course, the example par excellence of the Indian Burial Ground trope, so much so that *parodying* it has become a cliche in and of itself.

And if you're wondering if there was a point to this thread, we're about to get to it.

@FWesSchneider When King was writing it, his home state of Maine was engaged in a legal battle with the Maliseet, Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy bands of the Wabanaki Confederacy. They sued the state over lands to which, by federal law, they were entitled, which came to about 60% of the state.

@FWesSchneider Had they succeeded in reclaiming it, about 350,000 people would have had to be resettled, so the case loomed large in the imaginations of a lot of Maine's white residents.

@FWesSchneider Yet in King's book, though the legal disputes are explicitly referenced, the Natives (and the burial ground) in question are the Micmac, not the Wabanaki--a people who lived primarily in Canada, not Maine.

@FWesSchneider Jud Crandall, the lovable, wise, and paternal old neighbor character who utters most of the book's wisdom and is probably the closest thing to an author mouthpiece in it, muses on the very nature of land ownership:

@FWesSchneider "Now the Micmacs, the state of Maine, and the government of the United States are arguing in court about who owns that land. Who does own it? No one really knows, Louis. Not anyone. Different people laid claim to it at one time or another, but no claim has ever stuck."

@FWesSchneider He adds, "The Micmacs knew that place, but that doesn't necessarily mean they made it what it was. The Micmacs weren't always here."

How very convenient.

@FWesSchneider Side note before I wrap this up: it's notable that the "acceptable" stories--the ones told on tours, in ghost story books that double as tourist guides, featured on tourism web sites--about Black and Native individual ghosts usually involve young women, and are tragic, not scary.

@FWesSchneider So why are the ghosts of Shockoe Bottom so white? Why does Pet Sematary invoke a real-life court case but change the identity of the Native people involved? Why are Black ghosts tragic young women, and Native ghosts the faceless, indistinct power of a burial ground?

@FWesSchneider Well, because horror stories exist as much to comfort as they do to scare.

The dead can't speak for themselves, and the living may choose not to forgive, but in stories, ghosts can be made to do and say whatever the teller might wish.

@FWesSchneider We can't get away with completely ignoring the horrors of the past, so instead ghost stories allow us to pantomime acknowledging responsibility, without sacrifice or any real reckoning.

@FWesSchneider We might have reason, if we were to genuinely believe in Black ghosts hanging around the sites of slave auctions, or Native ghosts on their stolen land--spirits of real individual people with reason to be furious--to be genuinely (rather than pleasantly) afraid.

@FWesSchneider So the ghosts of the peoples we European-descended settlers have genuinely harmed, show up instead as nonthreatening, tragic, romantic figures like sad (and desirable) young women. When cruelty occurs, it is individual--this *particular* plantation owner--not systemic.

@FWesSchneider Or they show up as faceless, malevolent powers that rightfully should be laid to rest so innocent white people can get on with their lives. Demonic forces vs. families, usually, and almost always with the safety of (white) children at stake.

@FWesSchneider Jud's soliloquy puts it all in comforting perspective: no one REALLY owns this land, and the Natives from whom it was taken were just one among many peoples who've sojourned here. The question of rights is blown away like dandelion fluff: it's merely natural change.

@FWesSchneider Our obligation, if it exists, is only to the dead, who aren't in any position to say they're not satisfied after we "lay them to rest" by reburying their bones, returning an artifact, speaking an apology. After that we can wipe the grave dirt off our hands and go on about our day

@FWesSchneider No need for messy reckoning with the effects of the historical injustice on their living descendants, or too much thinking about dismantling the systems built upon those graves.

@FWesSchneider We can turn the victims into voiceless puppets who can be made to grant forgiveness for whatever effort *we* feel is enough...

...and to smile as they disappear.

@FWesSchneider Anyway, read the book.

@FWesSchneider (I can't get everyone to read the books I think everyone should read just by saying "read the book" so I live in hope I can tempt people into it with Twitter threads.)