But when I stopped worrying about ghosts
and started worrying about ghost stories,
I found myself in a new relationship
with the world around me.
In addition to being a historian,
I'm also a performance maker,
and about five years ago,
I had the great honor of working
with Free Street Theater in Chicago
to create a performance
called "100 Hauntings."
To make this performance,
we asked hundreds
and hundreds of Chicagoans
if they'd ever encountered a ghost.
We were interested in what I call
ordinary ghost stories,
so, not the kinds of ghosts
who show up in urban legends
or on a city's ghost tour,
but the kind of ghost people say
they've just found in the bathroom,
right after signing the lease
on a new apartment.
Following my research,
we were interested
in what these ghosts might tell us
about Chicago's hidden history,
but we were also interested
in the ghost story as a form.
Like no other kind of storytelling,