Ghostland

An American History in Haunted Places

By: Colin Dickey

Narrated by: Jon Lindstrom

One of NPR’s Great Reads of 2016

“A lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories…absorbing…[and] intellectually intriguing.” —The New York Times Book Review

From the author of The Unidentified, an intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history that takes readers on a road trip through some of the country’s most infamously haunted places—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.

With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living—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 made—and why those changes are made—Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved.

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.

A fluffed-up college essay writ large.

The basic premise of telling a scripted ghost story or haunting, then analyzing the cultural forces behind said story and the actual facts to give a more realistic interpretation of the situation is enough to drive a book. An "Adam Ruins Everything" exclusively for ghosts.

Unfortunately the writer is incredibly fond of re-stating ideas with increasingly flowery paragraphs, as if one is reading a book that had a minimum word requirement and the author only had 2/3rds of said requirement the night before sending it out.

There are some delightfully fascinating segments, especially if the psychology of haunted houses and ghost stories fascinate you. Unfortunately there are vast swaths of Ghostland so boring I caught myself tuning out the narration as unimportant noise for half an hour or more, only to discover I'd missed nothing important.

Not what you might think...

If you are looking for ghost stories collected across America to get a few scares from-
this is not that book.
I love collections of ghost stories from different regions of the country. This book- well written and researched- is not that book.
The author debunks ghost stories and breaks them down into sociological facts. At first, I was put off by the negativity and superior attitude the author projects in explaining away those collected tales.
As I continued, I found that the explanations, while often sad and very often exposing the worst nature in those living to tell the tales- it was very interesting and informative.

A little mislabeled by highly worthwhile

This is NOT a collection of ghost legends taken at face value and recounted for love of the subject. It’s a sceptic’s reflections on the psychological origin of a mythology, and an indictment of supernatural thrill seeking, sometimes gentle and sometimes not. That said, the history here is truly fascinating, and the exploration of what it means to be haunted is thought provoking and worthwhile, no matter your take on ghosts.

The performer is great when simply reading the author’s text, but he insists on “doing voices” complete with regional accents whenever the author quotes another source. To me, this feels unnecessary and inappropriate in a nonfiction book, and in the many cases where the original speaker is of a race or culture different from the performer’s own, it comes across as arguably offensive. I’m admittedly not a fan of audiobook readers putting on performative voices for individual characters in novels, but even if you like that practice, a quoted source in nonfiction is not a “character.”

Not What I Expected

This really sells itself as a book that would walk through famous haunted places in the US, and it does to an extent. The author sets up places that he will provide the history and if it seems these places are haunted, but he jumps around a fair amount on the places. He will start to talk to haunted houses or institutions and then jump to some place else coming back to the original place later sometimes. He also goes off on really long tangents that really do nothing in terms of the place he is talking about. He then slides in social/political undertones, sometimes making it more than undertones to straight in your face. He might do this to make the book longer, but I would rather have had him just include more haunted places than these long drawn out social histories. It is just not what I think you would expect.

It’s about the things that SHOULD haunt us!

If you want regular ghost stories you might not like this. The injustices, atrocities and cruelty of human nature behind each popular “haunt” shows us what is really scary….