For such a young country, the United States is an unusually haunted place. Sociologist Judith Richardson points to the Hudson River valley from Manhattan up to Albany as a uniquely haunted sphere, one steeped in literature and folklore even beyond the persistent headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow fame. Ghosts are both remnants of history and witnesses to it. In a region like New York, marked by nonstop waves of immigration and change, in which it can be argued, as Richardson does, that the signal experience is of a stranger newly arrived in a forbidding landscape, ghosts both invite our terror and reassure us that others have trod our path before. In that sense, the ghost represents a curious contradiction in terms: extant and illusory, terrifying and reassuring. Their spectrality enables them to contain several ideas at once, embodying our slippery, overlapping cultural feelings about history, place, and time.
Ghosts are tied inextricably to a specific place, oftentimes a site of transition and change. Folklore regularly locates ghosts in conveyances—at a crossroads, on a bridge, near a river, in the backseat of a car. But the most haunted realms in literature are, of course, houses, sometimes of such specific character that they bear names themselves: Usher, Hill House, Bly. Houses imprison ghosts, perhaps, as bodies contain souls; ghost is the name we give to an innervating sense of an object’s, or place’s, persistence through time. Ghost stories are how we forgive houses for daring to outlive us.
In the same way, certain places can be said to be haunted by our imaginations of them. Both Annie (whose Dutch name, Annatje, is an homage to the folktale of a murdered servant dragged screaming behind a horse in the Hudson River valley) and Wes move through a New York City that is in some sense impossible to see. Annie sees the city as she remembers it being, while Wes sees the city alternately as his father has told him about it and as he’s experienced it in movies. Memories, while true, are impermanent, and film, while permanent, is untrue. The real place lies somewhere between these layered images, these overlapping specters of the city as it never was.
History, too, struggles with ghostly narratives, as forgotten and overlooked ideas refuse to disappear completely, instead bubbling just under the surface of that which is remembered. New York’s financial involvement with slavery, for example, was something of a historical ghost until recent excavations have returned that fact to light. Academic history, even when revisionist, is typically bound by a rhetoric of power. Only select perspectives last: perspectives of the literate, the rich, the powerful. But silenced voices have a way of refusing to lie dormant as our culture marches away from their moment in time. They instead become folded into us, lingering on the periphery of our experience. Haunting us.
The haunted self, the haunted house, and the haunted city: When we talk about ghosts, then, we’re not just dealing with sheets and chains and Scooby-Doo. Ghosts are the language we have come up with for talking about ideas that influence us even in the absence of our conscious awareness. A whiff of cologne might conjure the specter of our first love, a certain quality of light in summer might be the ghost of our childhood home, and something as innocuous as a traffic pattern might be the lingering scar of a city’s entire reason for being. We can all point to things that have made us what we are, but there are many more things we can’t point to, because they are invisible. We’re surrounded by ghosts all the time. In a sense, we’re ghosts ourselves.
As I showed the home inspector to the door after he declined my offer of coffee, he reassured me once again that I had nothing to be worried about. Some ineffable quality of my house met with his experienced approval, which of course made me happy. But as I shut the door behind him, I had to reflect that in a way he was wrong. Certain smells will always transport me to July 4 celebrations in this house. Its staircase was moved by people I never met, to a place of their choosing, for reasons of their own. It stands on a street with a name changed out of revolutionary zeal over two hundred years ago.
My house is definitely haunted. And I bet yours is, too.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank first and foremost my incredible editor, Jennifer Besser, for guiding this project from its inception through many close revisions into the weird and wonderful story it has become. I’m grateful also to my agent, Suzanne Gluck, for whom I would take a bullet, together with all her colleagues at William Morris Endeavor, most particularly Clio Seraphim, Laura Bonner, and Ashley Fox. I feel so fortunate to be published by the incredible group at Penguin, whose commitment to quality literature for young adults makes our culture better. My thanks to all of them, but especially Don Weisberg, Marisa Russell, and the amazing Andrea Lam over at Penguin for grown readers.
A number of people graciously lent their expertise to this story so that I could attempt to write with authority about things of which I understand but little. Kaye Dyja provided laser-eyed commentary on teenage slang and point of view. Professor Rosanne Limoncelli graciously took the time to show me around Tisch and give me insight into the in-jokes and everyday lives of the NYU film program (but I hasten to add that any mistakes, be they technical or psychological, are mine). The excellent Andrew Semans read and reread chapters to correct my misapprehensions about films and the teenage boys who make them.
Many friends and colleagues supported me during the writing of this project, and I’m grateful to all of them for keeping me sane. Particular thanks are owed to Sibyl Allston, Irina Arnault, Sandy Barry, Julia Bates, Shaine Cassim, Michael Deckard, Heather Folsom Prison Blues, Julia Glass, Connie Goodwin, Will Heinrich, Jon Harrison, Eric Idsvoog (my secret weapon), Juliet Mabey, Veronica McComb, Jane Mendle, Ginger Myhaver, Matthew Pearl, Brian Pellinen, Eric Reid (my weapon of secrets), Colleen Rowley, and George Spisak. Thanks also to Annabel Teague for being an early teen reader, Eli Hyman for crushing the 10 percent, Phyllis Bloom for being my tireless street team of one, and Ruth Ferguson and Peter Wright for telling me about the footsteps in the dust on their stairs to nowhere. My love and thanks also to the denizens of the Springfield Street Table, the Tuesdayistas, the Ménage, the Third Sarah Battle Whist Club of Boston (Ithaca Chapter), and End Times Island, without whom my year would be a bleak vista indeed.
A number of institutions and scholars also made the historical aspects of this book possible. I would like to recognize in particular the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition Slavery in New York from 2005, and its attendant exhibition catalogue and website, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2001 Art and the Empire City. The Merchant’s House Museum’s meticulously preserved 1830s interior allowed me a clear imagination of the inside of Annie’s house, and I’m grateful to them for working to preserve the rare heritage of nineteenth-century architecture in New York City. Both the New York Marble Cemetery and the New York City Marble Cemetery remind us of all the New Yorkers who have trod the streets before us. I’m grateful also to Judith Richardson for her terrific book Possessions: The Uses of Haunting in the Hudson River Valley, which first spurred my interest in thinking about ghosts in New York, and to Siddhartha Lokanandi for bringing it to my attention.
Thank you to Rand Brandes and the Lenoir-Rhyne Visiting Writers series for hosting me as writer in residence during the final edits and revisions of this book, and to the American studies program at Cornell for offering me the opportunity to teach a class on ghosts in American culture as this book was first percolating. My most profound thanks to the undergrads at Lenoir-Rhyne University and Cornell who consented to think, talk, and write about ghost stories with me, and to the readers kind enough to encourage me to keep writing.
Finally, my gratitude as always to my parents, George and Katherine S. Howe, for meeting my career choice with just the right combination of bemusement and pride, and of course, to Louis Hyman. Boo.
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