Transcriber:
Fifteen years ago,
I was doing my graduate research
on the lynching of Mexicans
and Latin Americans
in gold rush California.
And I was having a very hard time
finding the evidence
I needed to make my claim.
I don't know how much
you know about lynching,
but they are, by definition,
public executions that happen
off the official record.
These deaths aren't technically
sanctioned by the state,
and often, towns and communities
would deny they even happened,
which made it harder
to prove that they did.
Still, even when the official record
refused an act of violence,
local lore often served
as an alternative archive,
a different way of recording history.
A ghost story about someone being killed
and coming back to haunt the town
was an important arrow,
a sign to look more deeply
into the history of a place.
Very often, if local legend featured
a story about a ghost
who had been hung, murdered or lynched,
and came back to haunt the town,
digging through the archive,
newspapers, letters, diaries,
would reveal that the event,
or something like it,
had actually happened.
So the ghost story was one way
that communities were holding
the violent history of a place,
passing down the story
from generation to generation.
Now, I don't know if an actual ghost
was haunting any of these places,
but their history certainly was.
And this is pretty much my stance on it.
It doesn't matter
whether or not a ghost is real.
The ghost story is,
and the fact that we maybe, kind of,
sort of believe a ghost might be real
is significant, and we should
pay attention to it.
I'm not the only one
who thinks this, by the way.
There is a whole field
of interdisciplinary research
called “spectrality studies,”
which is proof that academics
will think of anything.
Still, this idea
was transformative for me,
and not just in my research.
For most of my life,
I was terrified of ghosts.
I didn’t even want to hear a ghost story,
because I didn't want to entertain
the possibility that a ghost might exist.
And why not?
In popular culture,
ghosts are portrayed as mean,
vengeful, destructive forces.
They’re terrifying at worst
and unsettling at best.
Unexpected presences who show up
and demand your emotional attention,
at any cost.
We are taught to be afraid
of dying and death,
and the dead.
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,
ghost stories ask us to gather around,
lean in and thrill at the possibility
that some very scary,
very chilling thing actually happened,
while at the same time being sure,
so sure, that it didn't, right?
Right?
I have found that almost everyone
has a ghost story.
Even people who say they don't believe
in ghosts usually have a "Well ..." story
about something they're sure
has a rational explanation,
even if they're not quite sure what it is.
And this not knowing
has left them unsettled,
with a feeling they can't quite explain.
And this is what I love
about ghost stories --
how so often, they get right to feeling.
Underneath the fun and chill of it
are complex relationships
with life, with death,
and with each other.
And whenever anyone
tells me a ghost story,
I ask them two questions.
First:
"What do you think this ghost wanted?"
And second, because most people
are ambivalent
about whether or not
the ghost actually exists,
I ask, "What is it that you want
from the ghost?"
The first question
is pretty easy to answer.
I have found that most ghosts
fall into one of three categories,
and what they all want
is pretty much the same --
to be acknowledged.
The first type of ghost
is the kind I started studying.
These are the furious returned --
ghosts who have met a terrible end,
and they want us, the living,
to remember it.
These are your victims
of a great injustice.
Murders, most often,
but also things like factory fires
and mysterious deaths in jail.
I'll give you an example.
Once, in a story circle
for our show "100 Hauntings,"
a man told us a story
about going as a teenager
to break into an abandoned mental hospital
on the northwest side of the city.
Now, we’d never heard
of this mental hospital,
and honestly
it sounded like any "teenagers
breaking into a mental hospital" story
you've ever heard --
a wheelchair mysteriously following them,
doors slamming shut,
creepy laughter.
But remember,
these kinds of stories
can be important arrows,
so we followed up.
And sure enough, multiple city records
show that there was a poor farm
and almshouse
on the northwest side of the city,
which later became one of the largest
carceral mental hospitals
in the United States.
It was the kind of place where people,
mostly poor people and immigrants,
were locked up for decades,
often against their will.
It was also the kind of place
where, when they died,
they were usually buried in the back,
in an unmarked grave.
The Chicago Tribune reports
that as many as 38,000 unmarked
graves are in the back.
Now,
this is a really significant piece
of Chicago history,
but I'd argue it's not well-known.
Most people who live here
don't know anything about it.
But the ghost story asks us to remember.
The second kind of ghost story
is probably the most common.
We'll call them the leave-me-alone ghost.
This is the kind of ghost
who just wants us the living to get out.
Usually, people experience
this as bad energy
or a creepy, unwelcome feeling
in some parts of the house,
and people usually imagine
that this is a former resident
who's not happy
that new people have moved in.
What's interesting to me
about this kind of ghost story
is that you find it most often
in appropriated spaces --
think gentrifying neighborhoods
or the old "built on a sacred
burial ground" trope.
And here's where I want to remind you
that it doesn't matter
whether or not the ghost is real.
The ghost story is.
So maybe there really is a ghost
who’s trying to push us out,
or maybe there’s some part
of our unconscious
that's grappling with whether or not
we have a right to be here,
whether or not we really belong.
Sure, we live here now, but should we?
What happened to the people
who came before?
The third kind of ghost is my favorite.
I'll call them "are still with us."
These are your beloved grandparents,
the child still playing with a ball
up and down a hallway,
the elevator operator
still showing up to work.
Sometimes, these ghosts
are strangers to us.
They're not people we used to know,
but they're not bothering us
or meaning us any harm --
they're just kind of there.
I'll give you an example.
Many people believe that the building
where my theater is located
is haunted.
I've not experienced this myself,
but I can't tell you how many people
have described seeing exactly half a man
sitting in our lobby.
He doesn't interact with us
or disturb us in any way.
He's just there.
Sometimes, though,
these ghosts are more active.
I've heard many stories from people
who thought that their child
had an imaginary friend
until suddenly, their child
knew how to play chess,
or was singing songs
in a totally different language.
And here's where these stories
get really emotional.
Often, people are convinced
that this is some family member
returned, sent to watch over them.
One woman told me a story
about her husband coming to visit
on a day when she was so sad,
she didn't know what else to do but cry.
Another woman told me she was sure
that a faucet turning on and off
in her bathroom
was her sister, because it was so like
the pranks her sister used to play
when she was alive.
I love these kinds of stories,
because they show us
how much we want to connect,
not just with the living,
but with the dead.
Asking people for their ghost stories
can be bone-chilling fun,
but it also gets
at really intimate questions.
How do we feel about death?
What are we afraid of?
Who did we love so much that we want them,
desperately, to return?
How do we want to be remembered?
What do we wish we could change?
What and who is haunting us?
Despite what horror movies
and campfire tales would have us believe,
most ghost stories reveal a deep longing:
a longing for adventure, for meaning,
for connection, for a beyond.
A longing not to be forgotten,
and a longing not to forget.
We're living in a time
that feels exceptionally hard.
We're divided from
one another by politics,
and the reality of a global pandemic
means that many of us
have been away from the people
and places we love the most.
So many of us are mourning
untimely deaths,
and grief is all around us.
Unfortunately, I don't think we're always
very good at grappling with loss
or talking about death,
or talking about the way that our history
is still living in the present.
Ghost stories can be scary,
but so is being vulnerable,
so is any unknown.
So the next time
you're trying to figure out
a way to connect
and you’re not sure what to do,
let me offer this.
Try asking someone for a ghost story.
It's sure to start a conversation.
Yeah, maybe they'll laugh at you,
maybe they'll turn it back on you.
Maybe they'll tell you a story
that makes the hair on the back
of your neck stand on end.
Maybe they'll tell you a story
that makes you cry.
And maybe, if you're really lucky,
they'll tell you a story
that makes you wonder
what else you don't know,
about a place, about a history,
about a people,
about each other
and about yourself.
Don't forget to ask,
"What did the ghost want?
And more important,
"What do you want from the ghost?"