This is a very interesting thread.  Like others I have to say I'm of two
minds about it. My initial reaction was that reporting ghost stories was
perpetuating superstition and detracting from "real" history... However,
on reflecting longer it seems to me that attitude discounts the lives,
experiences, and belief systems of many other people.  Who am I, indeed
who are we, to say that these stories are not part of a fully valid
history of a place or person and to exclude them out-of-hand?

While I do not share their faith, a number of family members, esp. on my
father's side, were spiritualists.  To them accounts of sightings were not
simply "stories" but potentially true accounts of encounters with
ancestral spirits.  Their belief in life-after-death did not preclude
their whole-hearted practice of more accepted religions, and they
variously attended Methodist, Anglican (CofE) and Catholic churches.
Some family members had spiritualist faith without personal experience,
others experienced things they found painful and unwanted. One 100
year-old great-aunt I met at a reunion told me of the "sight" she had,
that her mother had had, and that her daughter now experienced, and of the
pain of inexplicably experiencing catastrophic events before they had
occurred.

My paternal grandfather was very active in the Psychic Society in England
and, along with others in that society, actively campaigned against
fraudulent practitioners.  I would guess he'd have been the first to
doubt some of the "ghost stories" and perhaps even be offended by
some of them.  However, he firmly believed that honest seances
could be conducted by true mediums and, along with one of his sons, was
instrumental in getting an old anti-witchcraft law, invoked in preventing
seances, repealed.

Perhaps he was a "nut," (I think as a child I thought so) but if so, he
was in good company.  William James, one of the "founders" of the field of
psychology whose writing on perception and cognition remains astonishingly
valid even today, was also a spiritualist.  James' housekeeper was a
medium, and seances were held in his home. The full text of his work on
psychology (my grandfather had a copy) has a fascinating discussion of
extra-sensory perception and of contact with the after-life; this is
omitted in reprints of "The Briefer Course..."  Would an historical
account of James' thought or a museum dedicated to his life be justified
in suppressing this information?  Would we -should we- suppress this part
of his life because it might make him appear crazy and taint his life's
work?  Or do we embrace it, accepting the possibility that perhaps these
beliefs were integral to that work?

I think too of a night bus ride I took last year from Toledo down to
Knoxville (with an excruciating 3 am change in Cincinnati).  One of the
few "white" riders on that nearly-full bus, I was on the fringe of a
several-hour-long conversation between four women of color.  For some time
the discussion focused on houses they had lived in or experienced that
were "haunted" in various ways, how this had impacted their lives and the
lives of others they knew.  These were not stories told to scare each
other and neither was it it a game of one-up-woman-ship: these were full
of caring, pain and the lessons learned.

The youngest woman, a high schooler who had recently read Toni Morrison's
"Beloved," recounted the story for the others, simultaneously intertwining
facets of the novel and the womens' real-life accounts.  Among the things
that struck me was how I, a white academic reading "Beloved," had
interpreted the events somewhat differently.  (Let me say I do think
"Beloved" is one of the most powerful books I have ever read.)  To me it
was a story of a woman, and a people, inexorably obsessed by a past that
cannot be ignored: it refuses to be.  Allegorically realized as a ghost,
the past takes on a life of its own following us into the present.  Yet
hearing these four women's stories, and the "reading" of the text by the
young woman, I realized that I had missed something huge, something I had
never really considered.  For the reader/re-teller on my bus, and for many
readers, the ghostly spirit of Beloved is not fictional, allegorical, or a
figment of a mind and body stressed by unthinkable events.  Rather, for
some at least, Beloved and spirits like her is part of a full reality
(exactly what part, I probably can't say because I'm ignorant).


How tempting it is to package the experiences and stories of others
according to one's own training and beliefs.  How much harder to allow
others' lives and stories to be fully realized especially when they
conflict with our own, or demand that we go beyond what we can really
understand from our own experience.

I guess this is pretty much a "duh!?!" (to use my niece's expression) to
many of you involved in historical museums and presentations.  But perhaps
this very challenge, how to hear and express others' lives, is what also
holds out the greatest reward?



Annette A. Wilson
_________________________                            _____________________
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3+ Master of Architecture    and            :         in Feminist Practice
Doctoral Program in Architecture            :              2125  Lane Hall
        Environment and Behavior            :                 734/763-3589
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