There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. “Does Virginia have ghosts that it is not yet ready to face?”Īn intriguing but somewhat uneven exploration of things unseen.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. “What does it mean to whitewash the spirits of a city?” Dickey asks. Places like Shockoe Bottom in Richmond, where hundreds of black men, women, and children were tortured and buried, should surely offer up their share of ghosts, but most of the spirits have been white. The investigation feels especially poignant when he connects the nature of ghost stories to issues like race. While the histories of the locations are well-expressed, Dickey’s personal experiences can feel flat. Most revealing is the author’s examination of the logical factors that contribute to hauntings-e.g., hotels feel eerie because they are uncannily not home, and homes often feel haunted because they have been abandoned. Interwoven throughout the narrative are the voices of writers and thinkers including Nabokov, Freud, Poe, Dickens, and Stephen King. This allows us to see how ghost stories often say “more about the tellers than they do about the supernatural.” Throughout history, ghost stories have been used to make money, offer a moral, mark a location, and explain the unexplainable, among many other functions. In each location, the author reveals not only the ghost stories of the site, but also, most importantly, the site’s true history. While not a new concept, Dickey’s theme has been more extensively explored where fairy tales and general folklore are concerned. On his quest, the author examines every manner of haunted place, from houses like the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, which inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Gothic romance of the same name, to haunted cities like New Orleans as well as asylums, cemeteries, battlefields, and haunted hotels. Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith, 2012 etc.) exploration into the ghost stories of America and what they reveal about society. So begins Dickey’s (Creative Writing/National Univ. “If you want to understand a place, ignore the boasting monuments and landmarks, and go straight to the haunted houses.”
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