Spellbinding, scary, and wickedly insightful, Ghostland discovers the past we’re most afraid to speak of aloud in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.

With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living -how do we, the living, deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed, for whatever reason, haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made -and why those changes are made -Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved. Some have established reputations as “the most haunted mansion in America,” or “the most haunted prison” others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and “zombie homes,” Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places.

It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature.“A lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories…absorbing… intellectually intriguing.” - The New York Times Book Reviewįrom the author of The Unidentified, an intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history that takes readers on a road trip through some of the country’s most infamously haunted places -and deep into the dark side of our history.Ĭolin Dickey is on the trail of America’s ghosts. Ghostland is Parnell’s moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists - and what is haunting him. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift’s Waterland to the archetypal ‘folk horror’ film The Wicker Man. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children’s fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper from W. He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M. In Ghostland, Parnell goes in search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands.

For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death. In his late 30s, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy.

Ghostland an american history