American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (2 page)

Nearly twenty years later, I was visiting the summer house my great-grandfather had built in the mountains northeast of Santa Fe. One afternoon when I was looking for something to read I found, in a leaded-glass bookshelf, a photocopied booklet—a family history. My great-aunt Lizzie had written it in 1980, shortly before her death, and had made copies for her children and nieces and nephews.

I pulled the book from the shelf, whisked off the dust, and sat to read it on the screened-in porch that faced Hermit’s Peak, a lonely wooded crest on the eastern flank of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, its granite face lurching sharply from the plains. Those same stony cliffs had greeted Julia and Abraham Staab on their journey from Germany to New Mexico. Lizzie was Julia’s granddaughter, but Julia had died long before Lizzie was born, and Lizzie discussed
her only fleetingly in the manuscript. “Grandmother was an invalid most of her life due to difficulties encountered during her many pregnancies,” she wrote. She briefly mentioned that Julia was reputed to haunt the hotel, and that Julia’s bedframe could still be found in her old room.

About Julia’s husband and the seven children, Lizzie had much more to say. There, Xeroxed and spiral-bound, was a tale of a family ecosystem deeply out of balance—forbidden love, inheritance and disinheritance, anger and madness. There were drug addictions, lawsuits, brother against brother, madhouses, penury, and suicides. There were fatal wounds to the “bosom.” These were Julia’s children; their story branched from hers. And it was clear to me, from Lizzie’s book, that the family was haunted well before Julia became a ghost. I wondered what had gone so wrong.

When I was a younger woman, I imagined Julia to be young as well, struggling as a new bride, frustrated and angry, beset by men. Now that I was older, Julia seemed to be aging alongside me. So many women’s stories trail off, in the books and the movies, with the happy ending of finding a mate. But I was married now, and I understood that the wedding is only the beginning. I had children of my own, and I knew the terror of having so much to lose. I knew, too, the daily sturm und drang of raising children. And as I entered middle age, I had come to understand the dread of decline. I would wake up in the night sometimes, gasping, and lie there, terrified of all the loss that lay ahead—the people who would leave me behind, and how as we age we leave ourselves behind, too, and wake up as somebody we don’t always recognize.

Motherhood rarely allows for solitude, yet it begets its own kind of isolation: from one’s past, from one’s youth, from the women we once thought we were and would become. I had, in the years since I’d last written about Julia, gone from heroine to auxiliary, from Fräulein
to Frau. I wondered if this was how Julia had felt. She lived in a time before granite-countered subdivisions colonized the empty land, when husbands were masters and women and children were property. But no matter the era, certain inevitabilities remain—we move unremittingly through life from youth to death. I understood this now. Perhaps Julia did, too.

Julia was first an ancestor for me, sepia-toned and indifferent; then a roaming spirit, titillating and abstract; then a symbol of women oppressed. But reading Lizzie’s book on the porch swing, facing out to the same mountains that Julia saw as she first approached her married home, I realized that she was also a woman—a specific, particular woman, who courted and married and emigrated and raised children in a rough and unfamiliar world, and then began to grow old far from home and family. Her life was real, and it had traversed the same hurdles and milestones from girlhood to marriage to motherhood to middle age that I was now passing in my own journey. And as I read about Julia’s troubled family, I realized that I wanted to know so much more: How had Julia come to New Mexico? How had she found life there? Had she loved Abraham? Had he loved her? Was he the tyrant that the ghost stories made him out to be? Was she ill? Depressed? Insane? Did she kill herself? Was she murdered?

I wondered about the world that she and Abraham had left behind in Germany—why they had left it, and whether their lives were better in this unforgiving land, a place that nonetheless seemed willing to forgive the fact that they were Jews. I wondered what had happened to those who stayed behind. They were Jews in Germany, after all—another story that haunts; whole families erased. In her book, Lizzie described a congenital fragility in Julia’s offspring, a tendency to nervousness. I wanted to know how the family had suffered, and why, and whether my ancestors’ afflictions might be prone to seeping down through genes and generations.

I didn’t think I believed in Julia’s ghost, but she was nonetheless starting to haunt me.

This, then, became my plan. I would set out on a ghost hunt—a metaphorical one, and a literal one, too. I would come to know the world in which Julia lived and died. I would disentangle the life from the legend, the flesh-and-blood woman from the ghost, the history from the surmise, the facts from the fictions. I would learn about the world Julia inherited and the world she created, and about the children she raised and marked and left behind. I would try to rescue her from the prison of other people’s reductions. I would make her real.

Julia would be a difficult quarry—I knew that. Although she was, in her ghost story, a “presence,” her life story was riddled with absence. She was a nineteenth-century woman, after all—sequestered in the home, invisible then as now. And I knew of no love letters, no missives to the old country, no diaries written in her hand, no admiring biographies. She had died more than a century before; anyone who had known her was long gone. I could get only so close. To reconstruct her world, I’d have to see her through the eyes and lives of others, in the concentric circles that radiated from the small plot-point of earth she had once trod. I would try to trace those circles—relatives and acquaintances who had once known her and whose own marks on history may also have been light—ever farther from Julia’s unobtrusive center.

Her husband, Abraham, was closest. Through Abraham’s story, I could surely gain a glimpse into Julia’s. Their children, too, had left imprints and memories that had trickled down to us. Like an archaeologist, I could burrow into the layers of evidence my relatives had left behind. I could rummage through Julia’s world, and hold those long-buried shards up to the light. And perhaps by reassembling the confused
fragments, I could make Julia whole. I could, perhaps, retrieve her from the dark place in which she dwelled.

In this age of information—ones and zeros tracking lives into infinity—there are ways to seek the dead that are more accessible now than they were thirty-five years ago, when Aunt Lizzie wrote about Julia, or twenty years ago, when I did. There are the tools of history: newspaper archives, government records databases, immigration rolls, memoirs, and journals. There are the tools of genealogy: websites, chat rooms, DNA services, online reminiscences, distant relatives blowing around the Internet like dandelion spores and probing shared pasts. For me, there were also living relatives—a few—who remembered Julia’s children.

There are, too, more subjective methods available for seeking the dead. I am a journalist and a historian. By temperament and training, I believe in a world that can be measured and tested. But perhaps there was some truth to be mined from the gothic tales floating around Santa Fe: the lost baby, the unhappy marriage, the laudanum, the radiator, the suicide, the ghost in the hotel, stories Western and dark. To unearth Julia, I would explore my Victorian ghost in the company of modern ghost hunters: mediums and psychics, tarot card readers and dowsers and intuitives. Perhaps they could help me find the truth I was seeking.

And finally there was the house. There was her room. She had lived and died in that room, and her ghost was said to dwell there. I would have to visit, of course.

It wouldn’t be my first time in her room. I spent a few minutes there once many years ago, soon after I wrote the article about Julia’s ghost. My cousins and I had been at a nearby restaurant celebrating my grandfather’s eighty-fifth birthday, and we ended the evening in the plush Victorian bar on the first floor of Julia’s old home. Someone convinced the manager to let us in to see her room. It had high ceilings, dark woodwork, heavy rust-colored drapes, and complicated furniture.
We turned out the lights and stationed ourselves in the armchairs and in the rocker and on the four-poster bed, feeling tipsy and silly and daring at the same time. We called for her as we thought one should when beckoning a ghost. “Julia!
Jooooolia!
” We sat still for a minute or two, felt nothing, and went back to the bar.

Now, though, I would visit with more earnest intentions. I wanted to see Julia’s room again. I wanted to spend the night, and wait patiently and quietly for her. I wanted to find her.

But I didn’t go right away. I didn’t for a while—not until I had hunted across the American Southwest and Germany, rifled archives and history books and the Internet, grilled relatives and mediums and ghost hunters, and learned a lesson about living itself that I hadn’t known I was seeking. Nearly one hundred and fifty years after Julia Staab followed her husband into an unfamiliar world, I found myself, finally, back in her room. It had the same four arched windows that looked out to the eastern mountains, which blackened into sky as dusk bled into night. I perched on the end of her bed, and wondered what the night would hold for me.

T
HEY SAY THAT
J
ULIA
lives in the afterworld: in the documented one—history, the remembered past—and also the unaccounted one. I had set out to look for her in both of those places, and while I was comfortable with facts and dates and documents, I had no experience in the world of spirits. I was distrustful and embarrassed.

I decided to start my search with a phone psychic, with whom I could commune from the relative safety of my home office. Searching online for psychics in Colorado, I found myself confronted with a choice: I could select my seer from a website called bestpsychicdirectory.com, or alternatively, from a list provided by the American Association of Psychics. The association sounded more authoritative, so I browsed through the headshots of angel readers, animal communicators, medical intuitives, psychic detectives, shamans, clairvoyants, and Rosemary the Celtic Lady ™, who seemed to be all of the above, until I found someone who caught my eye.

Her name was Misha, and I picked her because she did phone consultations and was affordable—and because she was also very pretty. In her headshot she looked slightly edgy, with china-doll skin, dark, straight hair, and a heart-shaped face. The “About” page on her website explained that her passion was “to bring ALL into LIGHT and to help reveal and heal all that is still in the darkness.” The site was built against a starry background with a dormant, witchy-looking tree in the foreground and these reassuring words: “I am real. Accurate. And accredited.” That is what I wanted. I made an appointment, shelled out fifty dollars via PayPal, and waited by my speakerphone.

Misha called me right on time. She had a sensible voice—a touch girlish. She told me that she channeled her psychic abilities through tarot and soul cards, holding them in her hands and letting them drop one by one onto a table in front of her, where they would convey messages to her from the beyond. She avoided “full-contact medium work,” however—speaking directly to the dead. When she was a child, the dead often contacted her, and this had caused her problems, especially in high school, when it was hard enough for her to speak to living people, let alone the dead. But she assured me that her cards were every bit as accurate. She would watch the cards fall, and tell me what they meant.

This wasn’t my first visit with a psychic. I had been once before, when I was in my twenties, late at night after leaving a party in downtown Manhattan. We wandered by a storefront shop and decided, on a whim, to go inside. The psychic looked the Gypsy part: dark hair, dangly earrings, a flowing skirt, scarves. She asked me what I wanted to know. I asked her—of course—if I would find a mate. That was my main concern then. She told me that it would happen, but not soon. She was right about that.

But back then I was speaking—rather tipsily and on a lark—to the future. Now it was the past that concerned me—Julia’s past, my family’s, this hidden world of memory and myth.

I didn’t know quite how to begin. I had trained in graduate school as a historian, and in the years that followed, as a journalist. I was accustomed to matter-of-fact phone interviews: here’s my question, quick and concise; tell me the answer; we won’t waste each other’s time. But my queries now involved dead people floating around in a hidden world that I could neither see nor hear nor understand, and in which, until quite recently, I had had very little interest. How does one interview the dead?

Since I had paid my fifty dollars, I plunged ahead. I offered Misha a vague description of Julia and a haunted hotel. As I spoke, Misha let a card drop. “Well,” she said, “the first card that has fallen out is an upside-down temperance card, and the main message with that is that she left this earth in a not peaceful manner.”

I heard another card slap down. Misha explained that it was the hermit card. “She’s hiding out. She’s definitely there and it doesn’t look like she’s going away anytime soon.” She dropped another card, then another. Julia was angry, Misha said. “Her dark side is very much present.” The cards kept falling, faster than I could formulate questions. Julia still haunted the hotel because she was missing a piece of herself, Misha explained, and she was going to wait around until it came back to her. “It’s like she’s quote-unquote stuck in the mud, so to speak”—Misha said “so to speak” a lot, and also “whatnot.” Julia had felt trapped in her life. She had wanted to escape.

“What other questions do you have?” Misha asked.

I had so many—who she was, how she lived and died, what it felt like to walk in her shoes—but I didn’t quite know how to formulate them. Better to be specific: I asked Misha about Julia’s marriage. “Did she love her husband?”

A card dropped. “She definitely loved her husband,” Misha said. “But there were other people in her life that she loved as well. She believed that she didn’t do anything wrong by loving that person and wanted to have her cake and eat it, too.”

A lover?

Yes, a lover. But it didn’t last, Misha said. And the cards told her that Julia felt betrayed because of this. There was someone, a trusted close companion “who she thought was safe and whatnot,” a male, definitely a male, somebody very close, who “didn’t approve of her way of being,” and who hurt her in some way.

This was Abraham, I assumed—Abraham, who built a trophy home for his trophy wife, and expected her to be demure and self-sacrificing. Had Abraham driven her into the arms of a lover? Had his disapproval destroyed her in some way?

The cards were silent on this question.

Our half hour was running out. “Is there anything else you want to know?” Misha asked.

I consulted my list of questions. I had only a few left. But they were important ones, concerning the sad events at the end of Julia’s life.

“Was she insane?” I asked.

Misha paused. The thing about speaking to ghosts, she explained, is that you get only the perspective of the ghost. The dead don’t surrender their subjectivity. So if a ghost doesn’t think herself insane, she won’t tell you otherwise. “For her it’s no, of course not.”

I asked her to ask Julia what had happened to her baby—the one she was said to have lost late in life, the one that turned her hair suddenly white.

Misha let a card drop, and gasped. “Oh. Oh my gosh, wow, there are very dark messages coming through,” she said, falling silent for a moment. “These are very dark images and cards and messages—that this child was not of the light, so to speak.”

Misha said she had rarely received such dark words in all her years of reading cards. “I would say that in ten years this is the second time I’ve had that, where it’s basically pure evil that’s come across.”

I sat at my steel-and-maple desk, alone with Misha’s voice, looking at my world of objects: the burgundy couch against the wall, the books sorted and stacked on the shelves, the afternoon light flooding through the west window. On her end of the line,
Misha saw other things—a sad woman and a baby who was evil, or who made the sad woman feel evil, or who had had evil cast upon her.

Through my speakerphone, we contemplated this long-dead woman and her baby. Misha continued. It was like the baby had “psychically killed a piece of Julia,” Misha said.

She hesitated a moment before she spoke again. “This baby,” she told me, “was seriously of the darkest stuff that there is.”