American Ghost

by Hannah Nordhaus

  It had been an exhausting and jostling two-day train journey from Santa Fe. “Am tired when I write this at 11 o’clock at night—Have been sitting in lobby of Hotel all evening with a party of ladies and gentlemen who came with us on Pullman Sleeping Car—This morning at six got up to change cars at St. Bernardino,” Bertha wrote.

  The next day, Bertha took a carriage ride around Los Angeles. Like her mother, Bertha seemed to have a particular fondness for plants and flowers. “Saw palms, several varieties—the first palms I had ever seen and yet they looked as familiar as if I had seen them every day.” She spied her first century plants—tall, hobnailed agave spires that didn’t actually live a century, but could survive a good decade or three and flowered only once and died shortly thereafter. She saw pampas grass, and “the spruce tree in different varieties” clipped into hedges and arches and columns and gateways. She rode past orange groves and “smooth lawns with lines of calla lilies and great big bushes of geranium and climbing roses in full bloom at this season of the year”—winter! She found the homes that flanked those beautiful gardens less impressive. They looked “old, time-worn and faded,” she wrote. Perhaps they were, compared with her father’s nouveau-riche palace in Santa Fe.

  Bertha was twenty-one, the same age Julia had been when she’d married and made her journey to America. In photographs, Bertha looks remarkably like her mother—tawny-skinned, with the same intense, close-together eyes; thick, silky, dark hair; half-moon cheekbones; and an ample bust. But she was a modern girl with expectations that were very different from her mother’s at the same age. Julia had married a Jewish man from her small village in the old country and had subsumed her life into his; Bertha, nowhere near married, spent her time gallivanting with Santa Fe’s elite. “This time to-night,” wrote Bertha in Los Angeles, “might be at home at the Governor’s reception, where I suppose at this minute they’re having a goodly feast—Ah! for a word with _ _ _ _ .” She pined for a man whose name, even in the privacy of her diary, she wouldn’t reveal. “‘I shall never see my darling any more,’” she continued, quoting a popular song about a slave whose sweetheart is sold away. Bertha was full of longing and self-consciousness and drama. She was bursting with the future, and I found her words sometimes agonizing to read. I can only imagine that my own journals from that age would seem equally cringeworthy to descendants riffling through them a century from now.

  The day after her arrival, Bertha toured the Los Angeles basin. With her father and some friends they had met on the journey—a Mr. and Mrs. Crampton and a Mr. and Ms. K. Royce from Rutland, Vermont—she took the train to Redondo Beach to see “the Great Pacific for the first time.”

  Had an hour’s trip fraught with no special interest except for the beautiful mountains—They loomed up in the far distance, their bases hidden by thick mists, their tops seeming to float in air and looking like immense white clouds.

  Bertha clearly seemed to enjoy her time with her father; they had fun together. “Hired a three-seated rig for six persons. Managed to get seven in,” she wrote. They drove toward Pasadena, through the wheat fields and past the palms and olive trees, past roses and heliotropes that grew high above their heads. “Met several ‘Heathen Chinese,’” she wrote, “and accosted them but they vouchsafed us no answer.” She took lunch at a grand hotel in Pasadena, drank champagne, tasted persimmon for the first time, bought a silver spoon, visited the ancient San Gabriel Mission church (which was “not as curious for us because had seen others just like it in New Mexico”), dropped in at a winery, tasted sweet “Angelica” wine, and then headed back to Los Angeles. “It poured down but we did not mind, fortified as we were with gossamers, umbrellas and thick coats.” When winter rains socked in the next day, she fretted. “Been writing letters all morning,” she wrote. Abraham played whist with the men while “ladies looked on,” Bertha added. “Dull day.”

  As one would expect from such a personal document, Bertha’s diary is much more about Bertha—where she went, what she did, how she felt, what she ate and drank—than Julia, who was home in Santa Fe, lingering just slightly offstage. And of course I hoped, as I scoured those fragile pages, that Bertha would shed some light on her mother’s temperament and state of mind; that she might help me crack the code. But as I read, I found myself more and more engaged in Bertha’s world—the world Abraham and Julia had created for her, and that now, as a young woman, she sought to make her own.

  In the days that followed she shopped—buying another silver spoon—and socialized with other hotel guests. “Mrs. Schulte talked to us in her high cracked voice,” Bertha wrote. It seemed that Bertha had a tendency to mock. She spoke about books with a fellow guest named Mr. Wright. “His pet expression is ‘Well if you will’ or ‘If you do I’ll eat my hand’ which I recommended him to substitute for another expression.” Her writing reminded me, painfully sometimes, of my own snobbish declarations at a similar age—the disdain of a young woman trying to decide who belonged in her tribe and who didn’t.

  Bertha took walks when the weather cleared, and she expanded her circle of acquaintances. It seemed not to matter whether they were Jewish or not—at least Bertha didn’t mention it. Her judgments seemed to be rather more personal in nature. “Do not like Miss Smith’s face,” she wrote upon meeting a new crowd of guests.

  Her nose is turned up—very suggestive of what she may be, but I do not know. Mr. B also forming one of their party is anxious to meet me thinks I have an intellectual face—First time I think anybody ever said that of me! The man must be of poor eye-sight.

  Bertha wrote often of men—“gentlemen,” she always called them—and what they thought and said of her. She was a tad boy-crazy—more than a tad, actually—and as I read through the diary, I began to wonder whether Abraham hadn’t dragged Bertha along on his trip to separate her from the fellow for whom she pined—an army officer, perhaps.

  For Abraham, the journey had multiple goals. His health needed tending—he was, according to the Santa Fe papers, receiving “electric treatment.” Bertha never mentioned what that treatment entailed, or what exactly ailed Abraham. But in addition to traveling for his health, it seems that Abraham had also journeyed to California in hopes of convincing the army to keep its troops headquartered at Fort Marcy in Santa Fe—the troops his business supplied. The War Department had recently announced that the Southwestern command was moving to California. So while Bertha shopped and socialized and explored, Abraham met with the military brass, hoping to persuade them to change their minds. “Met Col. Willard of the United States Army,” Bertha wrote. “Said he did not think there were any prospects of having headquarters in Santa Fe.” Indeed, a letter arriving by post soon informed Bertha that the army—including all the officers who had squired and admired her—was already preparing to leave Santa Fe. Bertha “felt blue” about this. She longed to be among the officers. Instead, she was in California engaging in unsatisfying flirtations with unsatisfying men. “Mr. Wright said I had a good forehead—Rats!”

  In Los Angeles, Abraham’s health did not rebound. They had planned to ride the cable car to downtown Los Angeles, but Abraham had a “weak spell” and sent Bertha with her friends. She saw a play, Barrel of Money, at the Los Angeles Theatre. “Could have been worse, but not much.” She took walks, wrote letters, read books, toured another winery, visited another orange grove, bought another silver spoon—this one for her sister—visited an ostrich farm, collected shells at the beach, and on the evening of February 26, went to see a strange performance at the Pasadena Grand Opera House. It was a show that defied logic, presented by a performer named Annie Abbott—“an ordinary-looking woman of about 28,” Bertha wrote, who did things that weren’t ordinary at all.

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  MEN COULD NOT MOVE HER

  Annie Abbott, performing her levitation act.

  Courtesy of Susan J. Harrington.

  Annie Abbott was a diminutive, graceful woman from Georgia “noted for miraculous strength,” Bertha wro
te in her diary, “which lies not in physical force but in some hidden power. Nobody knows what.” Annie—her real name was Dixie Annie Jarratt Haygood—was a traveling performer who executed uncanny feats of strength and gravity. “She lifts a chair with six gentlemen upon it by applying the open palms of her hand to the chair,” Bertha wrote. “They insert an egg between her hand and chair and she does not break it—wonderful.” Audiences and scientists alike were baffled by Annie’s power. It was thought to be magnetic, or perhaps electrical. “Some of them say I am possessed of the Devil,” Annie wrote in a letter to a Georgia newspaper in 1893, “and others say I am another saint.” She considered herself a Spiritualist—one who communes with powers from beyond.

  It is convenient that Bertha ran across Annie Abbott, a wandering Victorian Spiritualist, and that I learned of their intersection as I considered the story of Julia, a wandering Victorian spirit. Because Julia’s story fulfills a certain tradition: a woman, not a man, who appears late at night in a black or white high-necked gown, her hair piled elaborately on top of her head, and possessing an “aura of sadness,” thanks to a life cut short, or things left undone and unexplained, or passions left unresolved. It is not a coincidence, I suspect, that this particular brand of ghost story—not the keening ghost in the white sheet, but the materialized human spirit in Victorian dress speaking lucidly from just beyond—emerged during Julia’s lifetime. It was a time when Victorian spirits roamed the world.

  Annie first performed her act in 1885 in her hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia. The next year, her husband died, leaving her with three children to support. She adopted the stage name Annie Abbott (“The Little Georgia Magnet”) and took her act on the road, traveling the South and then the Northeast, captivating ever-larger crowds with feats of magnificent female power. Her act involved resisting male force; men could not move her. In New York, she faced off with the strongman Eugen Sandow, a brawny bodybuilding pioneer. “I put forth strength enough to lift eight men clear off the floor,” he said, “yet I failed to shift this little fragile creature one inch from her position.” Here and there a newspaper article would claim to expose the trickery behind her (the crafty use of leverage, illusion, and charm). No matter, the crowds kept coming. She traveled to Canada, California—where Bertha saw her—and Europe, where she packed theaters for weeks and performed before the German kaiser, the Austro-Hungarian emperor, the Russian tsar, Queen Victoria (whom she helped to locate a missing pearl), and the sultan of the Ottoman Empire (who watched the show, “but did not smile,” because he believed her to be a witch).

  Soon, other “Annie Abbotts”—imitators—sprang up, three or four or five of them in competition. Some dressed like little girls, others like Spanish flamenco dancers, others like proper Victorian ladies. But all of them were small, and all of them hefted men many times their weight, claiming powers that lay beyond our comprehension.

  Spiritualist performers could be found everywhere in the years when Julia lived in Santa Fe: young and old, men and women, in small towns and large cities. Their “talents” varied—some read minds, some talked to spirits from beyond, some, like Annie Abbott, exhibited feats of paranormal strength. Forebears to the psychics I met in my search for Julia’s supernatural side—Misha with her tarot cards, Sarina with her lost son—they claimed to channel the powers of the dead. Julia might have consulted with such mediums in Santa Fe after she lost Henriette. It wouldn’t have been unusual.

  All of them—from Annie Abbott to the Stanley Hotel’s ghost hunters—came out of a tradition born four years after Julia’s birth. In March 1848, two teenage girls reported hearing a series of fearsome “rapping” sounds inside their bedroom in a rented house in the small town of Hydesville, New York. Maggie Fox was fourteen years old; her sister Kate was eleven. The rapping noises were so loud, wrote the girls’ mother, Margaret, in an affidavit, that it shook the bedsteads and the chairs. Sometimes the raps sounded like knocking on walls, sometimes like the moving of furniture, sometimes like a person walking. The noises resumed the next night. “We heard footsteps in the pantry, and walking downstairs; we could not rest . . . ,” Mrs. Fox wrote in an affidavit she signed a few days later. She declared that she was not, by nature, “a believer in haunted houses or supernatural appearances.” But the noises were impossible for her to ignore, and she concluded that the house “must be haunted by some unhappy restless spirit.”

  On the third night—March 31, 1848—the family went to bed exhausted from the previous sleepless nights. “I had been so broken of my rest,” wrote Mrs. Fox, “I was almost sick.” She had just “lain down,” when the noises commenced. Her daughters, sleeping in the room with her, heard them, too, and Kate, the younger one, began snapping her fingers in response. “Do as I do,” Kate said to the unseen noisemaker. She clapped her hands: “The sound instantly followed her with the same number of raps,” wrote Mrs. Fox. It stopped when she stopped. Kate repeated her clapping, varying the number, and the noisemaker followed suit each time. Mrs. Fox then gave the noisemaker a test. “I asked the noise to rap my different children’s ages, successively.” It did. It then informed the Foxes, through a sort of simplified Morse code of yes-or-no raps, that it was a spirit—a man, aged thirty-one, named Charles B. Rosma, who had been murdered in the east bedroom of the home five years earlier, cut through the throat with a butcher’s knife and buried ten feet under the buttery below the house. Thus began a communication with “Mr. Splitfoot”—the girls’ nickname for their visiting spirit—that first wowed the neighbors, then consumed the nation.

  Hydesville, which no longer exists, was a hamlet about twenty miles from Rochester, in the heart of the “burned-over district,” the region of upstate New York famously swept by wave after wave of evangelical religions in the 1830s and 1840s, from which emerged Mormonism, Christian Science, Millerism (which predicted Jesus’ return on October, 22, 1844), and the Oneida Community (the silverware-making commune that encouraged sexual congress between postmenopausal women and teenage boys). The area was so heavily evangelized, it was said, that there was “no fuel left to burn.” The Fox girls’ story was one of those embers. They are credited as founders of Spiritualism, a movement that rested on the basic premise that humans could communicate with the dead.

  As news spread of their communications with Mr. Splitfoot, the family was tortured by the ceaseless, sleepless rappings. The hair of the girls’ unnerved mother went briskly white—Julia was not the only woman whose tresses succumbed to nineteenth-century traumata; it seemed to be a Victorian tradition. Only after Mr. Splitfoot informed the girls, via what must have been a rather elaborate series of raps, that they should “proclaim this truth to the world” did he let them sleep. The girls began to speak of their sensational communion with the spirits. Aided by a group of radical Quaker suffragist abolitionists and accompanied by their older sister Leah, Maggie and Kate traveled the state and then the country, visiting the homes of the wealthy and powerful and conducting public séances that were attended by such luminaries as William Lloyd Garrison, James Fenimore Cooper, Horace Greeley, and Sojourner Truth—sessions in which they conveyed messages from the dead on such weighty afterlife subjects as railway stocks, love affairs, and the existence of God.

  It’s not as if people didn’t think about ghosts before the Fox sisters came along. In New Mexico, Spanish and Indian legends teemed with spirits: murderous mothers, vanquished Indians, and Kokopelli tricksters. Julia’s village of Lügde, too, produced its share of ghosts: malicious wood spirits, grunting swine phantoms, a tax collector turned hellhound, and Sister Irmgard, a mad nun betrayed by a false lover, whose spirit wandered restlessly along a nearby stream, “shadowy and bloody,” according to a book of local ghost tales. There are ghosts of legend and literature—Bloody Mary, the Headless Horseman, the Headless Nun, Banquo, Jesus, Hamlet’s father.

  Across the ages and across all cultures, people have claimed to hear from the dead. These tales remind us that there were people here before us
and that others will take our places. But the dead of ancient legend did not, typically, communicate back and forth with the living quite so readily as they did in the Victorian era. Until the nineteenth century, ordinary people rarely boasted of speaking to specific dead relatives; their extrasensory perceptions weren’t so finely grained. Victorians, on the other hand, held regular posthumous counsel with dear departed ones. The practice of mediumship—of the dead speaking through the living, as through psychics today—was something new.

  In the years that followed the Fox girls’ revelations, mediums emerged from every cabinet and closet. By 1853, there were more than thirty thousand in the United States alone. The Civil War, which left so many American families bereft, made communication with the dead only that much more appealing. The world was afire with talkative ghosts. Mary Todd Lincoln held séances in the White House in the hopes of talking to her dead son, reaching across the “very slight veil [that] separates us from the ‘loved and lost’” (the president was in attendance); Queen Victoria is rumored to have tried to reconnect with the spirit of her beloved Prince Albert at Windsor Castle. Leo Tolstoy and Tsar Alexander II communed with mediums; Arthur Conan Doyle, whose fictional Sherlock Holmes was such a devotee of deduction, attended regular séances and wrote a book on the subject; Harriet Beecher Stowe reported that she had written Uncle Tom’s Cabin under the guidance of spirits. Spiritualism infiltrated the fabric of everyday life. “It came upon them like a smallpox,” the British logician Augustus De Morgan wrote in 1863. “And the land was spotted with mediums before the wise and prudent had had time to lodge the first half-dozen in a madhouse.”