American Ghost: The True Story of a Family's Haunted Past

Summary (from the publisher): The award-winning journalist and author of The Beekeeper's Lament attempts to uncover the truth about her great-great-grandmother, Julia--whose ghost is said to haunt an elegant hotel in Santa Fe--in this spellbinding exploration of myth, family history, and the American West.

The dark-eyed woman in the long black gown was first seen in the 1970s, standing near a fireplace. She was sad and translucent, present and absent at once. Strange things began to happen in the Santa Fe hotel where she was seen. Gas fireplaces turned off and on without anyone touching a switch. Vases of flowers appeared in new locations. Glasses flew off shelves. And in one second-floor suite with a canopy bed and arched windows looking out to the mountains, guests reported alarming events: blankets ripped off while they slept, the room temperature plummeting, disembodied breathing, dancing balls of light.

La Posada--"place of rest"--had been a grand Santa Fe home before it was converted to a hotel. The room with the canopy bed had belonged to Julia Schuster Staab, the wife of the home's original owner. She died in 1896, nearly a century before the hauntings were first reported. In American Ghost, Hannah Nordhaus traces the life, death, and unsettled afterlife of her great-great-grandmother Julia, from her childhood in Germany to her years in the American West with her Jewish merchant husband.

American Ghost is a story of pioneer women and immigrants, ghost hunters and psychics, frontier fortitude and mental illness, imagination and lore. As she traces the strands of Julia's life, Nordhaus uncovers a larger tale of how a true-life story becomes a ghost story--and how difficult it can sometimes be to separate history and myth.

 

Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this book from HarperCollins.

 

Part memoir, part family history, part ghost story, this work of non-fiction follows the author's investigation into her great-great-grandmother, Julia Staab, who is said to haunt a hotel in Santa Fe. Apparently the ghost is quite infamous, as TV shows, spiritualists, and novelists have flocked to the story. Julia and her husband Arthur became the subject of many books and articles after the appearance of her ghost in the 1970s. The family had always seen Arthur and his wife as pioneers and a first family of Santa Fe. The published stories made them sound less upstanding and depicted Arthur as "an altogether less appealing character. Now, he kept mistresses and engaged in shadowy business transactions. He frequented gambling halls and bordellos. He was ruthless" (5). Intrigued by the public's attempts to explain away Julia's haunting, Nordhaus sets out to find out the truth behind Julia's life.

 

Julia is the author's "paternal grandfather's maternal grandmother" (3). She was born in 1844 in Germany and died in 1896. She was brought to America by her husband, a rising businessman in Santa Fe, who travelled back to Germany to find a Jewish bride. She had seven children who lived to adulthood, and one who died as a baby. Frustratingly, it's hard to know much about Julia's private life. "She was a nineteenth-century woman, after all - sequestered in the home, invisible then as now. I knew of no love letters, no missives to the old country, no diaries written in her hand, no admiring biographies" (10). About as close to Julia as we can get is the diary her daughter Bertha kept from 1891 to 1893. Yet despite alluding to her mother's illnesses and a grave "accident" that befell her mother, even Bertha is veiled about her family secrets. Much has been lost to time. In all likelihood, were it not for her supposed ghost, no one would remember Julia at all.

 

It seems likely that Julia suffered from depression or some sort of nervous condition. We know that she underwent some sort of gynecological surgery - however whether that was for physical or mental treatment, we can't be sure. She had a slow decline over five years before dying in her home - the mansion her husband built her that would eventually become the hotel said to be haunted by her. Yet no one knows exactly how she died. Several of her descendant would also suffer from depression and commit suicide - perhaps Julia took her own life? Perhaps it was an accident? A legitimate illness that led to her premature death?

 

Julia's story is told in generally chronological order, but interspersed with asides about Nordhaus' search into her family history and encounters with various mediums and psychics. I was a little skeptical about the author's search for the actual spirit of Julia at first, but I was assured to find that the author is skeptical herself - "The just-the-facts journalist in me thought of the whole ghost-hunting endeavor as a joke - a punch line to my more meaningful historical search " (75).

 

I think the title and summary of this book is a bit misleading in that the book is about Julia - but it's really about Nordhaus' whole family tree. The author spends a significant amount of time on other branches of Julia's tree, including the history and fate of Julia's much younger sister who died at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. This search sparks a long discussion of what it meant for the family to be Jewish. The author also spends a good bit of time discussing the fates of Julia's offspring and family feuds that erupted long after Julia's death.

 

Although I loved reading about Julia's history, and about her specific haunting, I was not as enthused about the author's delving into the history of ghost hunters and psychics. In particular, the author spends significant time giving a history of the Victorian Spiritualist movement and performers such as Annie Abbott, who performed for audiences with claims that they could sense the other world. Since Julia's ghost didn't appear until the 1970s, this was less relevant to her particular story. The only reason the author includes the many pages about Annie Abbott is because Bertha's diary reveal that Bertha saw Annie Abbott perform. However, attendance at such events was typical of the time and not indicative of the family's strong adherence to Spiritualism or impact on Julia after her death. In short, this lengthy detour in the story didn't seem to contribute much to the understanding of Julia's particular story.

 

Whether or not Julia's ghost do in fact haunt the hotel where she lived in life, her ghost story prompted the author to explore the woman and the life behind the myth. Although there's much that we'll never know about Julia's life, the author's search has exposed what can be known, and laid to rest some of the rumors surrounding her famous ancestor.

 

Stars: 4