Hauntings & Historiography

In this special spooky episode, Ellie and Carrie discuss the cultural logic of hauntings in both American history and their own lives. They grapple with childhood notions of their late father's ghost, something Carrie feared and Ellie denied. Understanding hauntings as living loss, they bring in the work of historian Tiya Miles, whose book Tales from the Haunted South offers ghost stories as potentially radical works of historiography that often deal with narratives left out of the official record. But such narratives are also taken less seriously because they are ghost stories. For Miles, the Native American ghost and the enslaved ghost play twin roles interrogating trauma in the American gothic. Ellie offers a brief history and social explanation of the Salem witch trials, undergirded by patriarchal prescriptions and the anxieties of Puritan predestination. Meanwhile, how have misogynistic conceptions of women as vessels prone to hysteria colored female possession narratives from Dido to Bertha Mason to Regan MacNeil (a.k.a. the Exorcist girl, who's chained to a bed while the Devil makes her say "Fuck me! Fuck me!")? During the Victorian era, women spiritualists used such stereotypes to their advantage, finding their own voices while speaking for the undead. Other topics include the role of inherited trauma in the most powerful horror stories (see the Graham family in Ari Aster's Hereditary), queerness and ghosts (see Dani in The Haunting of Bly Manner), and the relationship between 19th-century spiritualism and technology, especially when it came to the new medium of photography. In addition to Miles, books referenced are Judith Richardson’s Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley, Renée L. Bergland’s The National Uncanny, Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad, and, of course, Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others. Articles are “Most witches are women, because witch hunts were all about persecuting the powerless” by Bridget Marshall for The Conversation (2019), “Why Did So Many Victorians Try to Speak with the Dead” by Casey Cep for the New Yorker (2021), and “What Ghost Stories Taught Me About My Queer Self” by Nell Stevens for the New Yorker (2022).