Haunted Identities: How Women’s Roles Become Ghost Stories, Part One | Grave Talks CLASSIC

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2:24Deep remaining than their respective stories. The histories of these factors, which collectively contribute to a larger narrative about the shifting social roles of women in the United States, are vastly different in terms of their backgrounds, social classes, and other circumstances. However, there's one thing that binds them together. The ability to continue to arouse both fascination and fear after they have long passed away. Today, we hear the haunted history of invisible women on the Grave Talks. I was giving a burrows of the dead tour. I am a tour guide with Andrea's company, Burrows of the Dead. We're a ghost tour company in New York City, which is focusing on Macabre history and obviously haunted places. I had an editor who was familiar with my years of publishing fiction, who had taken one of my tours. She said, you know, you really should do a ghost story book, a nonfiction book about ghosts. We were just sort of generally talking about New York

3:27City, because that was our expertise. I knew that I was not about to write a nonfiction book about ghosts without my boss and MVP, Andrea. I knew that while I love writing and I love nonfiction, the type of dynamic that I bring to a ghost tour is coming directly from the curated experiences that Andrea has put together with company. It really felt like I would be taking a certain amount of intellectual property and angle by which I discuss, you know, and we discuss respect for the dead and that intersection of history and hauntings. So I very immediately, literally without even thinking about it, I said, great idea. Let me bring Andrea in on this idea. And so we collectively brainstormed what would be a good angle for us. And because publishing is a long and winding road, it didn't actually end up being the editor who had approached me about

4:30this, who ended up acquiring the book. It was my editor at Kensington, Elizabeth May, who was already working in my fiction, which is, you know, a fiction of ghost stories set in New York City. So it was, you know, just kind of a nice little parallel thing. And then, you know, the group of us kind of decided, well, let's think about this, this tour that Andrea has been hosting that's been really successful. So Andrea, do you want to talk about your feminist ghost tour and how that fed into our concept? I do, I do. So I had apparently invented New York City's first feminist ghost tour and that was fun. So we have been chatting about how to approach these ghost stories and how to organize them. Initially, the focus was on New York City Ghosts. And then we decided to expand it because it just felt too insular. And we thought, well, what about female centered ghost narratives drawing on the success of this ghostly women of Greenwich Village tour that I've been running? And so we like that. We settled on that. And Liz May, our editor had a really brilliant stroke of genius where she

5:35decided to organize the stories by tropes because it would have been really unwieldy otherwise. It's like, let's take 50% of the human population until their ghost stories. It didn't make any sense. And we didn't want to do it geographically because we didn't want to feel like a guidebook. We also knew that it was not going to be comprehensive. It was going to be our, you know, favorite stories or stories that spoke to us or moved us in some way to share them. And Liz decided to organize it by archetypes or tropes. And it made a lot of sense because, you know, archetypes are so gendered and female archetypes are so strong and powerful and very well known. It's such a shorthand, right? You know, the the maid and mother-crone kind of thing. I think when you talk about feminine archetypes, something will leap to mind immediately to any person. And once we had that well in hand, it was really just a matter of kind of sifting through the material and deciding who's going to write what, which for Leanna and I fell into a really kind of natural pattern. I think we each knew which kind of stories we wanted to write. And there wasn't a ton of overlap.

6:38There were some overlap. So we co-authored some chapters. But for the most part, we each held like these very separate niche passions that we wanted to explore. So it worked out pretty well. How interesting to kind of go in from that angle. Let me ask you, Andrea, since you're talking right now, how did your interest in the paranormal as a whole come about? A lot of us have an event or sometimes it's just a setting or something like that in childhood. When you look back as far as you can, where does that spark begin? And then I'll ask the same thing to Leanna. I think I'm of two minds. Like initially I felt I was born this way. Like I think some people are just born spooky and we're just naturally interested in that kind of thing. And for sure, that is absolutely I think true. But the real spark, and this is so me, because I'm such a nerd, but the real spark was not a real life experience, but actually a book. And I am part of the region of people out there who were obsessed with that usborn book, Ghosts. It is legendary. I don't know

7:42if it's as much in the States. I grew up in Canada and I know in the UK and Canada, it was like, it was huge. It was like our Lego, our Star Wars. It was like our childhood obsession. And that usborn book on Ghosts, my mother brought it back from London. She was a flight attendant and she would pick up these books in London and bring them back. And she was like, here, I got one for detectives for my older sister. And then for the little one, I know you like Ghosts. Here's this. And I was like, good God, this is incredible. And that was it. And the rest is just like, it's all I wanted to do. Just think about Ghosts forever. Did you have any experiences at home as a child or anything growing up? No, I was desperate to. I work around my basement with a flash, like desperately seeking ghosts and desperately seeking sectors. No, nothing. I'm like completely tone deaf when it comes to being attuned to that frequency. So I have, I'm one of those people who like desperately wants to see a ghost, cannot see a ghost. And so has compensated by spending

8:45her entire life writing theoretically about ghosts. Sure. I hear you. I get it. I was a child that was doing the same thing. I would go and play in cemeteries for the fun of it, hoping something would happen. But it was more so me describing people who were visiting their dead loved ones. And I had a proton pack on and they were like, what is this child doing? Oh my god, that is so cute. Kids are at the playground. I'm by myself in a cemetery. Yeah. Leon, how about for you? How did your interest come about in this area? It's a similar mix of everything that you're talking about here, both of you and but also add in significant actual paranormal experiences that I could not explain in any other way. So I didn't really necessarily have to go looking. They sort of came to me and I guess I was sort of tuned into that frequency. But it's really hard to tell when you're a kid because everything seems very big and strange and wondrous and possible. And I was I also had a fiercely overactive

9:50imagination. And so I had a particular experience when I was little and this does not this does not factor into the book because it just did not feel I didn't it just didn't feel right to share it there. But I have shared it on some of our interviews. When my great grandmother who I'm named for was passing away, I had been scheduled to go up and visit her with the rest of my family. But I I think I was about five or six and I had a really dangerously high fever. And so my mom did not take me up north in Ohio to see her instead. My dad went up and I my mom was debating about whether or not to take me into the hospital because of how high the fever was. But at a certain point in the evening, my fever broke and I went into a bit of a trance like sort of rapsotic state. And I began talking

10:51about God and the angels using words I had never been taught. And we found out that that's around the time that she passed away. And so my fever broke and I went into the sort of I guess one could sort of say a spirit trance. And that was sort of that. And you know, and then my name say because always kind of I've always thought that she's kind of been looking out for me ever since. And so in some ways that that story didn't come to me until I was actually a lot older. And there was sort of this family moment of wait a minute. Something very strange happened when you were little. Yeah. And I was like, Oh, okay, that explains a lot of things. And then and then I was reinforced of course by by books. I similarly had like a a tattered paperback cover about about ghost stories that I that literally went with me everywhere. And I was at school and at a an age younger than than kids should be reading Edgar Allan Poe. I had a teacher that handed me a collection of Poe and was like, you're weird. You're like, you're like this. And lovingly said that.

11:55Sure. So I feel like there is a bit of that like Andrea said, born spooky to that too. And so I just try not to I try not to assume that ghosts are around every corner because I think the the it's so easy to get caught up in things. And I don't I'm not interested in fabricating encounters. I'm not interested in having inauthentic experiences. And so I don't do ghost investigating to tell you the truth because if they if they want to say hello, they will find me and I will have an experience. And I've had many, many, many through the years. And we really try in the book to not tell you which one of us is the is the scully in which one of us is the molder in the ex files of this relationship. I think it's very clear from what I've just said, who's who in this? But we try not to tell you the reader what to believe in our in our work because we really want to bring that openness and that trying not to lead the witness as it were in our work because that's you know,

12:58again, the human imagination is so powerful. And we want you the reader to decide for yourself. And the paranormal is so open and that we really don't want to tell anyone what to think or what to believe. The stories in this come from all over. I mean, how did you begin to research the book and decide what was going to make the cut, what was going to go into it? And I'm assuming obviously the ghost tour and guide backgrounds helped. I think so. I think they helped. I think they definitely helped us take a more conversational tone the things, but they also for me anyway made me want to get my research very clear because as a ghost tour guide, it's a pet peeve of mine when people just spread misinformation. So, you know, all those footnotes and citations were motivated by like a decade of frustration with people not citing their sources. How did we choose the stories? We definitely started, as you said, the guide thing helped us to begin with our favorite New York stories.

13:59That was really easy. And then in terms of the other stories, well, for me personally, my motivations were like very random. I would just be like sort of walking on the street, carrying a bunch of library books and being like, oh man, I love reading and libraries. And my favorite feeling in life is just like walking across the park with an armful of library books. I live across a park between a park and a library or across the park from a library. So like I'll get a bunch of books from the library and I'll hold them in my arms and I'll walk through the park on my way home and it makes me feel like I'm in college walking through the quad again. And I'm like, I loved that time of life. That was my favorite time of life. And I was like, God, I should write something about college ghosts because the campus ghosts are such a thing. So then boom, that dark academia chapter was born or like a little snippet of a song, like a Carter family song would make me start to think about something. And then I was like, God, I should write about like Appalachia. So then that came to be and I was reading Ruth Ann Music's Telltale Lilac

15:00Bush. And I was like, oh, I want to write about West Virginia. And there's that really famous story about the Greenfire Ghost. And I was like, let's talk about like wives of West Virginia. It's like these little random inspirations, I would just sort of pluck them from the sky. And then if they were enough to flesh out a chapter, they would become a chapter. If not, they might become like a sort of folded into an introduction. And then like ultimately, it was like, do they fit with the scope of the book? Do they fit within one of the tropes that we've outlined? Where do they belong? You know, it was kind of stuff like that. And I had a long time kind of interest in the Lizzie Borden story. I read the Fom River Acts murders, the short story by Angela Carter, like every August, like I find it really fascinating story. Probably this is one for the therapist, but like makes me think of my own stepmother. I was like, ah, this is an interesting kind of outlet for a lot of unresolved feelings. And it was really cathartic writing that because I started to feel a lot of sympathy for poor Abby Borden. I was like, ah, I can see her side of the tune now. So, you know, it was like, ah,

16:05you know, Ghost Wars are very cathartic, I think. So yeah, very, very random bits of inspiration. So if the book feels chaotic, it could be like my own personal randomness coming to it. That was my process. Yeah, I see. I think that's why that's one of the reasons why I love working with Andrea is that our styles are so complimentary because I'm also very much a chaotic my process and my writing, my entire writing journey is often very chaotic and very, but very intuitive. I know I have a method to the whole approach, but no one else would look at it and see that that's a method. So it really was very intuitive for both of us. We knew exactly going in that we had to have a couple of sort of tent pole stories, the stuff that was going to be on the back cover that people would have to know. And so sort of are to kind of like biggest

17:07media chapters. You know, I knew from Andrea's experience and her interest that she would do the Lizzie board and one. So I was going to do this era Winchester one. And so, you know, as soon as this book was approved, I booked a flight to San Jose because I couldn't write about that house without being there. And even though I had a long time fascination with it, I was not about to write it without walking through it and and and talking to the house historian there and really getting her perspective as someone who has to do the same thing that we have to do, which is walk a fine line between expectations of a haunted place and the truth of the haunted place. And that's one of the things we're trying to to uncover. So it really was, you know, both of us sitting with a whole lot of books and sifting through and seeing what popped out. Because we were not given, thankfully, we were not given a directive of you have to have this amount of ghost stories from this particular area because we just wouldn't have wanted to constrain it because sometimes there's really

18:09interesting snippets of stories, but is there enough meat to it? So that was sifting and making the decision. Sometimes I had to come to can we hang enough on this for a full chapter or like in many of Andrea's chapters, which I love, she'll sort of have a bit of a collection of things that will kind of come to mean a certain metaphor or kind of come to be a collective if there's not enough for each one to have its own standalone chapter. I ended up being really drawn to, you know, who are people who are truly people that we can we can dive in a little bit, even if they're enigma's like in the case of the beautiful stranger, which is the Kate Morgan case out in the hotel tell Coronado also in California. And she was this stranger who was living sort of a double life that didn't really get uncovered until after her passing. And so this, you know, if there was an

19:09intrigue about who their real lives were, then that was really helpful because we're not necessarily only talking about ghosts. I mean, yes, this is a book of ghost stories, but the most important thing is this is a book about women who lived actual women. And so what about their lives? Can we discuss that either primed them for an eternity of haunting or how did they transcend or buck the conventions of what was expected of them in life in their afterlife? And so definitely anytime we could create either a a turn on the stereotype or or it was just a great example of the stereotype kind of had previously unexamined and then we sort of unpack it. That was always like a juiciest thing. And so we, you know, we had a very active spreadsheet where we would just put down notes of interest. And then we went back and called and say, okay, what do we really have here? And which ones are we really, really passionate about? We had to feel passionately about them. Otherwise,

20:11otherwise, we couldn't go forward. Sure. Let's talk about, you know, your choice to kind of make this a candidate of stories. And what you guys would call walking the fine line with that, what do you mean by that? Right. So Leanna just talked about the Winchester mystery house walking this fine line. And this is a sort of and very early in the interview, she just talked about her respectful approach to ghosts. Walking this fine line between entertainment, honestly, in our ghost tours monetization and the ambivalence we have about participating in that industry. And also, you know, that that very respectful, as Leanna said, these are people who lived in most cases. Most cases where there's a kernel of truth or there's a real person in play, this is a real person's life, a person with living descendants. And, you know, we want to be very, very respectful of that. So we walk a fine line where, you know, people expect to go story to be juicy and entertaining,

21:12but we also have to sort of pull back a bit and say, how would you feel if this was your grandmother we were talking about right now? So we kind of were very, very cautious in that sense to always be very respectful and and try and deliver on audience expectations without selling out in a way that makes us feel icky. And make us feel like we're doing wrong by the ghosts. For example, the triangle shirt waist factory is a big one where we're standing in front of a the side of a mass grave of 140 something women. Is it 146, Leanna? It's 146 that died, 123 of them were women. There you go. Thank you. So, I'm going to lose my tour guide license for that one. But, yeah, so, you know, this is this is very it's very important to us to frame it that way. And then in terms of our choice to keep the stories in the book canonical, you know, we didn't go out and interview people and say, okay, tell me the story of the ghost in your house. There are ghost story books out there that have done that. I have on my shelf right now book by Blue Balliette called

22:13Nantucket Ghosts. And this woman lives in a ticket and interviewed her neighbors and wrote down their stories. This is an oral history. And Leanna and I did not travel the entire country and do this exhaustively with hundreds of people and gather thousands of data sets. That was not our methodology. Our methodology was to draw on canonical stories such as Lizzie Borden or Sarah Winchester because what we were looking for were patterns in how these stories are represented, what they tell us about ourselves. And Leanna said unpack these stories. That's what we wanted to do. I wanted to do very close readings of these canonical stories unpacking what they sort of represent and mean and what they metaphorically convey and draw, you know, connections between them. I wanted to interpret, analyze, understand and offer my own take on these stories. And what do they what do they seem to reveal to me when I look at them closely? So, you know, that's why we chose to draw on stories that already exist and not go out, you know, like the story core looking. Sure.

23:18Yeah, doing something that the already is some knowledge of, but to take a little bit deeper and help inform people on all of that. Let's talk about some of the actual stories in the book, Bridget Bishop, one of them. She was the first person executed in the Salem Witch Trials. And as we know, a lot of the Salem Witch Trials were just a lot of very angry and crazy mobs that were going, you're a witch. And they really weren't. Let's talk about Bridget Bishop a little bit. What did you find out there? It's really hard to write about the Salem Witch Trials and not insanely angry because it's just such an injustice. And there are all kinds of different theories about why the mob mentality got to be what it was. At the end of the day, when people get swept up into sort of a hysteria, in a time frame where the devil was a very real force to these people,

24:28in a town of absolute religious fervor, with people in power who were interested in keeping control of their wealth and their things, it's very quickly a story of greed because if you were accused as a witch, and it was very hard to extricate yourself once you were accused, just why so many people died, your assets, your lands would go to the state, the city, the people who were prosecuting you. And so it very quickly became utilizing these young girls who found themselves in the middle of something. Young girls in Puritanaque Society who said that they're who were told that they didn't really have any other place in the world other than to be mothers and to be beautiful children were suddenly sort of given a microphone by the most powerful men in the area. And so that got out of hand really quickly. And so Bridget Bishop was an easy target

25:35in that she had been known to sort of fight with her husband publicly. She had been known to be a bit of a prickly person. She had the audacity to wear what was known as a red paragon bodice, which is the chapter title. A red paragon bodice makes us think of course of Nathaniel Hawthorne's the Scarlet Letter, Baxter and Nathaniel Hawthorne. His ancestors were the Haythorns who were part of the Witchtrial, one of the judges, one of the most notorious and violent judges of the Witchtrials. And so he put the W in his name to distance himself from that truly bloody legacy. So the family guilt that you see in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter is coming a lot from Bridget Bishop's death. And all of the follow one of the rest of the true horror of the Witchtrials where you know, it wasn't just women who were persecuted, it was men too that were executed. But they were people who were somehow either on the margins of society or had recently just become widowed or had some way in which they could not leverage their own power or they were poor.

26:40And so it really was like the sort of oppression of the marginalized in a very, very difficult way, even though Bridget Bishop herself actually did own land. She because of the laws of the time, she couldn't quite inherit the land that she had technically inherited. And so the Witchtrials provided kind of a nice excuse to take it. So that's it's really, really hard to write about, and not get mad as I found with both of my Salem chapters. But I have a wonderful resource in one of my dearest friends, Sebastian Crane. He's a tour guide in Salem. And he manages to discuss Salem's very complicated history with a gentle approach, very aware of Salem's cognitive dissonance as a town that now profits off of Witchtrials and actual practicing Witchtrials, even though the Salem, which is we're no such thing. They were not in fact practicing. They just were people who,

27:41the town's people turned on. And Witchcraft was just a comedian excuse. But none of them would have considered themselves actual practicing Witchtrials. And that's very different now from Salem, which is now known as Witchtrials, where the police officers have, you know, Witchtrials riding on brooms on their patches and on their police cars and their statues of Witchtrials everywhere. And there's Witchtrials shops everywhere. So it's quite a turn for Salem. And, you know, her Bridget Bishop for me was the way into this because she was a very bold personality. So I wanted to talk about who these people were in life. And there's a lot of extents, you know, court, her court transcripts can still be found. So her protestation, I wanted to end the chapter with her saying, I am innocent to a witch. I know not what a witch is. I wanted to end it with her saying, no, I, what are you talking about? That's sort of the rhetorical question when anything of, anything of such magnitude can come into our popular consciousness. Because, you know, it's

28:45we as a society are not done with conspiracy theories. So that's, I was trying not to, to make so many modern parallels that it would take away from Bridget's, Bridget's actual history. I was really trying to make sure that I was talking about the, you know, the 17th century, first and foremost, but the parallels are there. And, and I do think like anything, it can all be a cautionary tale. Very much so. And it's interesting how history is like that. Once we pass a certain threshold, it seems no matter how horrific the crimes were or the murder was in or the event was there. It becomes so distant that there's a disconnect between the reality of what some of those events were and, and current day thinking. If we were to see this thing going on today, oh my gosh, that would be huge. Uproar, there would be, you know, very crazy outcry for it. But at a certain point, it almost becomes lore,

29:50but it's not. It's reality. And then there are example of that that I remember seeing a few years back was going to a county fair and the big blow up slide that the kids are going down. It's not just a slide anymore. It's the Titanic. It's the deck of the Titanic. And it's a big blow up Titanic and kids are going down it. And I was horrified. And this was that, yeah, it was horrifying. This was the Titanic Facebook group was up in arms over it. Oh my goodness. I was, I was horrified. And it was shortly after 9-11 when I first saw this at a county fair. And my comment and I was like, oh, that's horrible. How could you say that? I'm like, it's a similar type tragedy because I said, what in the hundred years are they going to have kids like jumping out of the bounce house of the twin towers? Because it's, I mean, it's that disconnect from reality and the tragedy of those events that that the public, you know, we, I guess, naturally goes to while the rest of us look in horror. Yeah. That wraps up the first part of

30:54our conversation with Leanne and Andrea in part two, airing tomorrow. We're going to dive deeper into the book and their investigations and exactly what they have experienced. We should try to press subscribe so you don't miss that here on the Grave Talks. If you'd like a commercial free version of the program, just be sure to go on Apple podcasts and subscribe there. You can even try it for three days free. You'll get access to our archive of episodes along with our advanced episodes and everything completely ad free plus you're supporting the program. You can also do the same thing through Patreon. Patreon.com slash the Grave Talks. Until next time for all of us at the Grave Talks. I'm Tony Bruceke. Thanks for listening.

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