And it happens around the same time that there is a fairly large court case involving the Passamaquoddy Indians in Maine. But what I found when I actually started doing the work is that this is actually - the sort of stereotypical version - is pretty recent and it doesn't start really until the late '70s and the early '80s.

Particularly as a child of the '80s, I really grew up with that narrative almost to the level of a cliché in things like horror movies like The Amityville Horror and Pet Sematary. On the origin of the Native American burial ground trope in ghost stories Your purchase helps support NPR programming. There are monuments and there's a trail you can walk.īut what seemed to me really fascinating is that I went into this book thinking that ghost stories would express the kind of unspeakable things we might not otherwise say, and Richmond has sort of turned out to be the opposite - that the ghost stories in Richmond kind of construct a more genteel vision of the past where terrible things happened but they were often accidents and, you know, things that didn't reflect, say, poorly on the history of the city as a whole.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Ghostland Subtitle An American History in Haunted Places Author Colin Dickey I mean, obviously, there's great historical work being done, there's great archaeological work that's being done. It's not that it's like some deep, dark secret. And there's really not a lot of ghost stories about the slave trading markets that enter into the folklore of Richmond despite the fact that untold cruelties happened there. And it was fascinating to see the way that when Richmond sort of tells the stories about all of the tragedies that have taken place in Shockoe Bottom - at least as far as the ghost stories go - they seem to leave kind of the most glaring example out. But the city's countless hauntings rarely acknowledge Richmond's history with slavery.īut Shockoe Bottom has this other history, which is, outside of New Orleans, it was the most heavily populated slave trading market.

There seem to be ghosts everywhere in Richmond's Shockoe Bottom neighborhood (if you believe the stories).

Ghostland an american history