What Lies Beneath America’s Haunted Places, Part Two | Grave Talks CLASSIC

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Welcome to part two of our conversation with Colin Dickey,

author of the book Ghost Land in American History in Haunted Places.

When you're out there and you're looking for these locations,

are there certain locations that seem to have more lore around them than others?

Of course, one of my initial questions for the book was what makes a building

sort of more or less likely to have these kind of stories.

So, why are Haunted House was always Victorian Manchains

and never mid-century modern tract homes?

Sure.

Why does, when you picture a Haunted Usainless Island,

why do you picture a clock tower in the front of the building

with a wing spreading out to either side?

And that kind of thing drew me to a lot of the places that became chapters

and books to sort of try and answer these questions.

I think I was just casting a broad net for Haunted Downtowns.

Because I was like, what does that mean to have a Haunted Downtown?

And one of the places that I came upon was Richmond, Virginia.

I thought, okay, cool, I don't know much about Richmond.

Let's find out why it's haunted.

And I started just reading all of these stories about Haunted Richmond.

And just something in the back of my head triggered at some point.

I thought, this was the capital of the Confederacy.

This was the second most heavily trafficked slave trading market in the South.

How come all of these ghost stories are about white people?

And again, it was just sort of like, well, why these stories and not other stories?

And so in many ways, I think most of the chapters, the books,

started from a place of why this building and not this other building.

Why this place and not some other place?

Why these stories and not other kind of stories?

And trying to sort of understand that for myself.

What sort of conclusions did you come to, for example,

when you were investigating Richmond?

Why this versus that?

Yeah, I mean, I think it was really interesting

because with the South, in particular, not just in Richmond,

but what I found is you would get stories of slave owners,

but not enslaved Americans.

So you would get stories about slavery,

ghost stories about slavery, but the white people were always the protagonist.

And I think at some point, I just had to ask the question,

is this a facet of audience?

Are these stories written by white people to be consumed by other people?

Or maybe written, it's not the right word,

but told by the white people for other white people.

And so one of the things I did is I went to the archive of stories,

these oral stories that had been gathered in the 1930s of formerly enslaved Americans,

who were sort of near the end of their life,

and they were sort of gathering up these oral stories.

And sure enough, it's filled with ghost stories.

It's this archive.

There are all kinds of ghost stories,

and they don't look anything like the kinds of stories

you're going to hear on a walking tour of Haunted Richmond.

But they're very much part of the American fabric of ghost stories.

And so, you know, I found, again, I mean,

each chapter of the book is kind of set up around trying to answer that question

in a different way.

And with Richmond, I found that, at least the conclusion I came to is that

these ghost stories work to reflect the audience that they're being told for

in a way that I think we don't examine nearly enough.

With you were talking earlier about asylums and looking into that a bit,

because those are obviously that that's one of those,

it seems to be kind of an in thing for the last handful of years

when it comes to paranormal investigation.

And it's understandable.

I mean, you look at some of these old buildings

and their architecture and their just hulking structures,

sometimes massive campuses with just giant building after building,

sometimes even larger campuses than we would even consider today to be built

for many medical facilities.

But they are constantly looked at as these are haunted locations.

You have places all over the world with these sort of reputations

and people go in and they claim to have experiences left and right.

And factually, you know, they're depending on what medical records you can find.

There certainly had been very, you know, the science of the time or the medicine of the time

now looked at as almost gruesome and torturous in some ways.

But while being practiced, it was this is how you do things.

What did you find in terms of asylums in your research

and any sort of routes that you went down when exploring that in terms of some of the stories

that have been told and matching it up to what factual details you could uncover?

Right. And you know, the silums are another really interesting

kind of facet of history that played into this in the sense that

asylum architecture changes with our understanding of, you know,

psychiatry and psychology and mental health.

You know, and so as we have retooled what it means to be, you know,

quote unquote, sick and what it means to, you know,

what are the best ways to sort of make someone healthy,

we have changed our, you know, the architecture of these spaces to better accommodate that.

And so what I found was, you know, the kind of archetypal haunted asylum is, you know,

what I started discovered to be the the Kirkbright asylum, which is a very specific kind of

architecture that sort of was popular in the mid 19th century where it sort of looked like almost

a kind of comforting, safe Victorian manner, you know, thus with the clock tower and the,

you know, the kind of, you know, it would have sort of homie rooms and it was sort of,

it was a place because these were mostly private, it was a place where wealthy families would send,

you know, relatives to kind of get better and so it had to look nice so that they would feel like

they were, you know, happy there. And so these things spring up all over the country,

you know, there are dozens and dozens of them throughout the United States and elsewhere,

but you know, it's mostly looking in the United States. And then sort of attitudes about

psychiatry changed and that necessitated new kinds of buildings. And so by the 1890s or so

asylum sort of switched to a campus model, which is, you know, a smaller kind of like a college,

like, you know, smaller buildings on a kind of larger open space. And so the question was,

what do you do with these old buildings? And, you know, they were massive and they are not easy to

tear down. And so they mostly just kind of sat there. And so, you know, what I, what I kind of

argue in the book is that, you know, one of the ways in which a thing becomes seem to be haunted or

or likely candidate for being a haunted place is that it somehow kind of wears out its welcome.

You know, if if a building persists beyond, you know, its age and, you know, and it sort of takes

on a kind of sheen or an aura of the past, it will be the kind of thing that people start to tell

ghost stories about. And so, you know, you know, that's why Victorian mansions and not, you know,

brands, bank and new, you know, suburban tract homes are the kinds of places that have, you know,

ghost stories. And that's, that's what I think explains a lot of why, you know, the haunted

asylum is, is a corporate asylum because these were things that were everywhere and then all of

a sudden they were immediately an agronistic and yet nobody could really tear them down, you know,

physically, all that easily. It's like looking at a Halloween mask versus a mannequin face. You

know, one of the two is, is going to just give you a humanistic reaction to it of, well, that looks

like a person. Well, that one looks like a skeleton, which one is more scary? The one that looks

more worn down, the one that looks like it's kind of out of place, it doesn't look like it's living,

you're going to be naturally a little more frightened by it. The same with a house or a building

that is rotting away and it doesn't seem to fit into the atmosphere anymore. When you have

something like that, do you believe that a location can be haunted by the energy of, of what,

once happened there, beyond just the psychology of looking at the building and going, that looks spooky,

just because our, our genetics or whatever, tell us that spooky, that scary warning, warning,

warning, but more so when we get that feeling, like if you walked in blindfolded to a place,

you didn't get a chance to see the aesthetics of it. Do you believe there's locations that just

seem to hold energy in them, not even necessarily conscious energy, just, especially asylums,

where so many really kind of dark things went down and so much suffering took place with those

who were suffering from mental illnesses that had no idea at the time of how to be dealt with

or cured or treated. Do you think that that plays into the, the hauntings of some of these buildings

more so than just the allure of the creepiness? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think that that's

very true of silums. I think it's also very true of prisons. I mean, one of the other places I

went to, the Mountsville Penitentiary and Mountsville, West Virginia, sort of famously haunted prison,

not in use now, although it was, I think it was only decommissioned in the 90s. But again,

I mean, this massive, massive, just brick and rock of a building that you couldn't tear down

without a nuclear weapon, I think. It's just there. It's not going anywhere. It was built like a

castle. And, you know, to be in that space and to be even before you're aware of the stories,

I mean, you know, it's a space that just feels bad. And again, I mean, you know, when I looked into

it and I did a bunch of the research, I found well and pointed fact, you know, at the time in which

it was built, same with the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia, you know, the idea was literally,

you know, can you make architecture that makes people feel bad, makes people feel gloomy and melancholic

and use that as part of the penal punishment, you know, that you were not just going to prison

to be locked up for time. You were going to be locked up in a place that would make you regret

and reflect upon your terrible deeds or whatever. And so, you know, just, yeah, I mean, things like,

you know, just the walls being slightly the wrong height or the ceilings being too low or

something like that, you know, just like, like little things that maybe you're not even conscious of,

but they have an effect on you. And, and then you start to hear these stories about, you know,

terrible things that went on and, you know, deaths and murders and that kind of stuff. And,

and of course, I mean, I think you kind of have to be hollowed and not feel somehow the kind of

psychic weight of such places, you know, kind of bouncing back off the walls back into into your own

emotional state. It's just an opinion question. When you have a place like that, aside from changing

the aesthetics of it, aside from completely, you know, HGTV redo the whole place and suddenly

have a modern farmhouse in a prison. What did you believe that there's a way or there ever is a

way to to rid a location of negative energy that resides there from it being a prison location

or from being asylum or a house that had a horrible murder in it or something of that nature?

Oh, sure. I mean, I guess theoretically, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I went to the

Dan versus asylum near Salem, Massachusetts, which was the one that H.P. Lovecraft sort of

used as an inspiration for, you know, Arkham. And that building, the main building had been

converted into condos. And so it still had the kind of, you know, the front facade with the

clock tower and then everything behind it was kind of had the air of like, you know, a three-star

hotel. And, you know, and it was sort of a weird vibe. And I thought, well, you know, yeah, I mean,

I guess you can, you can, you can kind of, you know, sage out, you know, the whole legacy of the

place if you put enough work into it. I don't always know why you would want to. I mean, I guess

unless you, you know, personally felt that you were being, you know, pursued by these things. And,

you know, and sometimes the opposite is the case. I, you know, another place I looked at was this

former hospital in Brooklyn that was being remade in the condos and local residents began

spreading ghost stories about it and it turned out it was because they were sick of gentrification.

They didn't want all these rich people coming in and, you know, driving up real estate and, you know,

apartment rentals and all that stuff. And so they were trying to use ghosts as a means of kind of

pushing back against gentrification. So yeah, I mean, it's possible. It's, it's, who knows

whether, you know, what the best way to do it because it seems like it's such a personal,

it's such a personal facet about how each of us interact with spaces like that. Sure. And

belief systems and all of that. Yeah. One more question. In closing, what was there any location

that you investigated when you look back on it and you did the research for the book that you

walked away from going, you know, I think, you know, there's maybe not necessarily the original

story was completely true, but there's something going on there that I can't quite, you know,

come, explain. Yeah. I mean, I think in a lot of senses, most places I went to, I thought,

you know, well, there's something happened. There's, you know, this, this place has a reputation

for a reason. And I think that even places where I was confident that the story that I was

being told was not historically or factually accurate, that didn't change the fact that I would

still feel a pull or, you know, maybe something sort of unsettling or a little bit, you know,

uncanny about, about these spaces. And, and so then when somebody would tell me subsequently,

you know, well, I, you know, I saw something there or I heard a light or, sorry, I heard a sound

or saw light or something like that, I thought, well, you know, could be certainly weirded me out,

you know, I don't know. So yeah. So there have been locations like that, that, that, that stand out

to you, out of all, out of all the locations in your book, which one stands out to you as if you

had to name one and go, you know, someone saying, okay, if one of these is haunted, truly,

truly haunted, which one would you suspect to be the one or the most? Oh, geez, I don't know, I mean,

it's hard to say, possibly the House of Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, which again,

you know, for a long time, they told this very specific story that turned out to be entirely

fabricated, you know, when they, when they were renovating the house, you know, in the early

1900s to get ready to turn into a tourist destination, you know, so they, they concocted the story

and then it became the story and it turned out to be totally fictitious. So all that being said,

it's still a weird, crazy old house and, and to be in that house is to be like nowhere else and,

you know, I, as I said, you know, I've heard stories that, that people have seen or

felt things there and I don't feel like I'm in any position to, uh, to doubt any of that, I think.

Sure. It turns out sometimes with some of these cases that, even though big stories are

concocted and, and we can prove that they've been made up, sometimes the reality is scarier

than the fiction that ends up being concocted around them. Exactly. Yeah. I think that's fair to say.

That wraps up part two of our conversation with Colin Dickie about Ghost Land, an American

history in haunted places. Be sure to check out his book wherever books are sold. Until next time

for the Grave Talks, I'm Tony Bursky. Thanks for listening.

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