Who doesn't love a good ghost story? The unseen hand moving a cup or the shadow climbing a staircase promises an existence beyond our mundane realities. Hannah Nordhaus's new book American Ghost is an offbeat mish-mosh of memoir, cultural history, genealogical detective story and paranormal investigation, but it opens in the classic manner of spooky tales — with a sighting.
Late one night in the 1970s, a janitor was mopping the floor in a grand Victorian mansion in Santa Fe that had been turned into a hotel called "La Posada," or "place of rest." He looked up and saw a white-haired woman standing near the fireplace. She was dressed in a black gown; she was also translucent. Soon the white-haired woman was spotted everywhere in the hotel, along with attendant eerie phenomena like cold spots, swaying chandeliers and disembodied voices. Disturbances, though, were centered in one room — the bedroom of the former mistress of the house, a woman named Julia Schuster Staab. To this day, Nordhaus says, Julia Staab is Santa Fe's most famous ghost; she also happens to be Nordhaus's great-great-grandmother.
Read Full Article »