American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (9 page)

Julia’s return to Santa Fe was less hurried. She moved on to New York and from there to Germany, where she stayed for many months.

I know few specifics about her trip there, only that her children reported that for various periods in the late 1870s and 1880s, Julia retreated to Germany for months or years at a time. She had been in New Mexico for more than a decade now, but still it wasn’t home. While in Germany, her children attended proper German schools, where they received a proper German education. Abraham visited for a few
months in the summer. Whether this pattern was unusual for wealthy immigrants at the time, I don’t know.

I know only that Julia was unhappy in New Mexico, and that Abraham was worried and sought to help her. He enlisted sisters and Sisters to come to her aid, and when they couldn’t help, he sent her to Germany to heal—and even this was not enough.

I
N A
1994
TELEVISION
show, Abraham comes across as rather more dignified than I imagine he did waving his revolver in the carriage with Sister Blandina. The show,
Unsolved Mysteries
, opens with an infrared shot of a green-painted hallway. “No crime has been committed. No one has been hurt. No one has disappeared,” says the show’s host. “Believe it or not, this team of investigators is looking for . . . a ghost.”

In a pink-painted room, a ghost hunter with a densely gelled rockabilly haircut tinkers with some equipment—half a million dollars’ worth, the host says: huge computers, unwieldy boxes. This is a “classic haunt,” the ghost hunter says. “If they find a ghost,” the show’s host adds, “she is probably named Julia Staab.”

Abraham appears, top-hatted, taller, darker, and fuller-bearded than the one I have come to know from family photos. Julia—elongated and paler, with a nest of dark curls piled on her head—steps out of a carriage in front of the mansion. A uniformed maid welcomes them into their new home, blessing them with a heavy Yiddish “Mazel tov!” Abraham beams at Julia. A local historian tells of elaborate soirees held in the house.

“One would think she was a very happy woman,” the show’s host says, but “Julia’s joy turned to sorrow overnight” at the loss of her baby. There is a scene of Abraham comforting Julia over an empty crib, both of them weeping. But she cannot be consoled. A broken, white-haired woman wobbles up the stairs and takes to her bed.

The show cuts to the present day and the story of Julia’s ghost.
There are more reenactments: a security guard, once a “hardened skeptic,” knocks on Julia’s door and hears a woman’s accented voice on the other side. “I’m in here,” a German Jewish voice says, though no one is in the room. Another security guard sees Julia’s face in the bathroom mirror. “I felt a cold chill come through me,” he says, “and something told me it’s time to leave.” A hotel guest feels something staring at him as he lies in bed. He looks up and sees a white apparition—Julia, in her nightgown. The guest receives a psychological evaluation and a physical exam from the ghost hunter, to make sure he doesn’t have a brain tumor. The hunter looks at the blueprints of the building; takes samples of the water, air, carpet, and wall paint; and tests for toxins that might have caused the illusion—phosphine gas can produce poltergeist-like flashes when mixed with air, he says. He brings in ghost-hunting equipment and seals off the upstairs of the mansion for seventy-two hours.

“We were able to analyze the environment in every possible way,” the ghost hunter says, “and we did not encounter anything which was unusual or extraordinary.” But he finds his witnesses credible. “Based on all the results of the investigation conducted here, we haven’t found any facts to disprove the fact that La Posada is haunted,” he says. “There certainly is that possibility that there is unusual paranormal phenomena taking place here.”

This is how it is in ghost hunting: ghosts are present until proved absent. Absence of evidence, as they so often say in the world of the paranormal, is not evidence of absence. We so badly want the dead to stay with us.

And therein lies an industry. There are now a number of television “reality” shows that follow ghost hunters on their professional rounds. My favorite,
Ghost Hunters
, features two former
Roto-Rooter plumbers from Rhode Island. Their typical mission involves visiting a haunted property, speaking to the owners, and setting up the contemporary gadgetry of spiritual exploration—audio recorders, electromagnetic field (EMF) meters, Geiger counters, geophones, digital thermometers, and video, thermographic, and night-vision cameras—using machines to capture the ends of the visual and auditory spectrum where the dead tend to dwell.

The first episode I watched told the story of a Los Angeles waitress who had been found sliced in half in 1947. The team of five or six men in jeans and hooded sweatshirts, along with one woman, set up camp in a sprawling midcentury home where they suspected the waitress was killed. Some of the members sat outside at their laptops, monitoring the electronic activity; others wandered the rooms. Between night-vision flash cuts of blood, faces, orbs, and eddying smoke, the team members commented on the action. “We have a very interesting anomaly,” they would say, or, “What the flip is that?” The monitors noticed a figure that looked almost like a human sliced in half. After many replays on SpecterCam Three, the ghost hunters determined that the blurry half ghost was instead a member of their team. There remained, however, some inexplicable voice recordings. Probably, they concluded, a haunting. So much equipment, so little closure.

Next, I interviewed a local ghost hunter in a sandwich shop near my home in Boulder, Colorado. Steve looked to be about forty years old. He had green eyes and a judicious brown goatee with a nickel-size patch of gray. His group worked almost exclusively on residential cases. They would start by sending two team members to interview the homeowner who suspected a ghost and to examine the floor plan, to “see what we’re dealing with.” This
also gave them a chance to judge their clients—“we do get people with mental issues,” Steve said.

Much of their work, he told me, involved hours and hours of sitting in the dark, waiting for something to happen, and then hours and hours of reviewing tapes to see if something had happened that was undetectable to the naked human ear or eye, such as an EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) or a strange video image. There were plenty of nights when nothing at all occurred. Sometimes they would find a rat in the basement or an improperly grounded electrical box. But there were also nights when they did uncover something they couldn’t explain: a baffling moan, a drop in temperature, a spike on the EMF monitors. Seldom anything scary. “Actual demonic activity is rare,” Steve told me.

This statement was reassuring to me, because, to be honest, I was not in the mood for demonic activity. I was, frankly, a little scared. The just-the-facts journalist in me thought of the whole ghost-hunting endeavor as sort of a joke—a punch line to my more meaningful historical search. But there was also a side of me that, faced with the prospect of spending the night in Julia’s room, truly wanted Steve’s counsel.

In truth, the world of ghost hunters and psychics was an unexplored frontier as strange and scary to me as New Mexico must once have been to Julia. I was terrified of the dark room and the long hours stretching in front of me alone in the night. I didn’t know if I wanted to see Julia or not. My imagination regarding what I might find in Julia’s room was vague yet vivid—I had seen the horror movies. I knew the undead could do ghastly things in the dark of the night.

Still, I doubted Julia would harm me—I was her blood, after all. And I had spent the past months combing through archives and family trees and the rambling corridors of the Internet, trying
to understand who she was and where she came from. She would certainly have to understand that I came in peace.

According to Steve, though, I probably didn’t need to worry. It was, he said, highly unlikely that Julia’s ghost would appear on demand and provide answers to all the questions obscured by time and death. Or even that she would appear at all. When I told Steve about my plan to visit Julia’s room, he advised me gently that I shouldn’t get my hopes up. Steve had seen only one materialized ghost (head, arms, shoulders, no body) in his many years of looking. It was unusual to see a spirit on one’s first ghost-hunting expedition.

On the other hand, my odds might be better. As a relative, Steve said, there was a chance that I could serve as a “trigger object”; I might induce Julia to appear in one form or another—light, sound, head, body. If she did turn up, Steve advised me to remain calm: there was generally only one big event per night, he said, and I might miss it if I lost my composure. I should be as steely as Abraham was with his revolver in the carriage with Sister Blandina, facing down a legend.

Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy.

William Henry Brown, Courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 9970, circa 1900.

S
ister Blandina had traveled to Trinidad with Julia and Abraham—and risked the ambushes of outlaws—because she was asked, or rather, obliged to do so by “the most Rev. Archbishop Lamy.” This was Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the highest-ranking Catholic official in the Southwest—beloved, laureled, and feted throughout New Mexico. Why had he insisted that Blandina travel to Trinidad with the Staabs?

There was a connection between my Jewish family and this famous Catholic archbishop—a rather strong one, it appeared. How strong, exactly, was a question that had nagged at me for many years.

Lamy is famous in New Mexico, even today, because of the ambitious cathedral he built at Santa Fe’s heart, a few hundred feet from the home that Abraham would build for Julia. But Lamy is known more widely in the world of literature because of the Willa Cather novel based on his life,
Death Comes for the Archbishop
. In the book, a Lamy-like priest named Jean Marie LaTour arrives in New Mexico in 1851—the same year the real Lamy arrived, and only five years before Abraham did. To get to New Mexico, LaTour endures a shipwreck off the Texas coast and an almost fatal wagon rollover near San Antonio—just as the real Lamy did. LaTour then survives a near yearlong odyssey through the southern desert between Santa Fe and Durango, a horrific, fractured land of deep canyons, “the very floor of the world cracked open”—to request a letter from a bishop confirming his assignment. The real Lamy did this as well.

Lamy was French, born in 1814 in a clay-plastered house in the south-central plains of Auvergne, the son of well-to-do burghers. He was tall and lean, and very handsome, with a strong, square jaw and dark waves of hair swept back from a broad, contemplative forehead. He was gentle—nicknamed “the Lamb” as a schoolchild—and inclined to fits of bad health “not always entirely physical in origin,” according to his biographer Paul Horgan. There was, said Horgan, a “nervous fragility” to Lamy, though in her novel Cather describes a quiet power in the man. “A priest in a thousand, one knew at a glance,” she wrote of the hero whom she based on Lamy: “brave, sensitive, courteous.”

His manners, even when he was alone in the desert, were distinguished. He had a kind of courtesy toward himself, toward his
beasts, toward the juniper tree before which he knelt, and the God whom he was addressing.

It would take such a man to tame the vast, inaccessible parish Lamy had inherited. It was in utter disarray when he arrived—fractious, venal, muddled, and disregarded. Many of the churches were in ruins, built of dust and returning to dust. There were only nine active priests in a diocese that covered two hundred thousand square miles, and those priests took their vows lightly. They drank to outrageous excess. They gambled, danced, wore dirty vestments, and threw fandangos. They ran general stores, lived in open concubinage, and reared entire families of illegitimate children. They charged—and pocketed—exorbitant fees for baptisms, marriages, and burials, even for simply preaching once a year to a far-flung congregation. The result was that thousands of men and women who considered themselves Catholic lived unbaptized, unconfessed, unconfirmed, unmarried (though living in sin), and unforgiven.

Catholicism in New Mexico had a different flavor than it did in France. There was a theatrical element in New Mexico—the gaudily decorated altars, waxen priest dolls, and weeping, ring-kissing congregants. The statuary was vivid: bloody, “agonized Christs,” as Cather put it, “and dolorous Virgins.” The priests there had been left to their own devices for two and a half centuries. It was a daunting task to bring European piety to such an impervious parish. But Lamy was an ambitious priest—“Providence seems to have fitted me for a barbarous and extensive mission,” he wrote—and he rode horse- and muleback the length and breadth of his diocese, building churches, suppressing heretics, restoring the celibate priesthood. He imported French priests as his deputies, as well as nuns to tend to the sick and the poor.

In time, Lamy came to believe that New Mexico also needed a more permanent symbol of the Roman church’s renewed authority:
a proper cathedral. There were humble adobe chapels throughout the territory; they were endearing, thick-walled constructions. But Lamy lamented their “poor fabric of mud”—straw and dust, so primitive and impermanent. They reminded him of poverty, of barnyards. The churches of Lamy’s youth had been substantial, sober constructions of dark volcanic stone, rounded and shadowed, with thick columns and heavy arches. He envisioned the same for the church he planned to build—a house of God in the Romanesque style. This new cathedral would be defiantly
not
adobe.

Lamy scouted materials. He located a cache of ocherous limestone in the Arroyo Sais that ran through town. He came upon a light volcanic tufa, found in the vaults of the Cerro Mojino just outside Santa Fe. These materials, laboriously quarried and hauled and cut and laid stone by stone, would form the cathedral’s walls. A French architect and stonemason, Antoine Mouly, would direct the work.

The cathedral’s granite cornerstone was laid in 1869, three years after Julia’s arrival. The stone had been carved out to enclose a time capsule that contained the names of the president (Ulysses S. Grant) and the territory’s governor, along with newspapers, documents, and coins of gold, silver, and copper. But the capsule disappeared a week later—stolen for the coins.

Such was Lamy’s luck throughout the construction. The foundations were laid incorrectly, and they had to be torn up and started again. Funds ran abortively short, and Lamy’s grand architectural ambitions had to be scaled back. Mosaics and carved figures were jettisoned. The nave grew smaller, the tower shorter. The structure, built on an old grave site, kept settling until Mouly was forced to add a new and costly set of subordinate arches to its sides. Then Mouly went stone-blind from the dust. Construction ceased entirely between 1873 and 1878, even as Lamy was elevated, in 1875, to archbishop. He raffled off his horses and his carriage in hopes of bringing in more funds. He begged
the wealthy families in the parish
—
the
familias
Sena, Contreras, and Perea—for more money.

And finally, when their generosity was expended, he looked elsewhere—to the Protestants, and then to the Jews.

As the archbishop struggled to complete his life’s work, Abraham contemplated his own building project.

By the late 1870s, Julia and the children had returned from Germany. The children were at easier ages now, their characters defined. Bertha, my great-grandmother, was flirtatious; her older sister Delia was forceful, Arthur willful, Julius sweet; Teddy, the youngest, was impish and playful. Julia began to circulate in society more, attending parties and other gatherings.

She had probably learned English by then, though the family still spoke German at home. Perhaps she learned Spanish as well, though she would have less need of it soon. The railroad was approaching, and more Anglo men and women were arriving each day. Some floated through, but others stayed. Santa Fe was now on the verge of joining the larger world. Brick by brick, railroad tie by railroad tie, Indian battle by Indian battle, it was being transformed from a foreign territory into an American outpost.

In 1880, after many delays and much drama, the railroad finally arrived. Two years earlier, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway had announced that the main transcontinental line would bypass Santa Fe—notwithstanding the “Santa Fe” in the company’s name—and pass through Albuquerque instead. The local business community was devastated, and a group led by Abraham and Archbishop Lamy campaigned to pass a bond issue to aid in the building of a spur from the main line to the city. On February 16, 1880, the first train puffed into Santa Fe. The Ninth Cavalry Band, part of a Buffalo Soldier regiment,
led a flag-waving parade of soldiers, carriages, and students from the Plaza to the depot, where the territory’s governor, its chief justice, and Abraham drove in the silver spikes. President Rutherford B. Hayes paid the city a visit later that year, the first presidential visit to the territory. Abraham served on the welcoming committee, and his brother Zadoc, visiting from New York, rode in the president’s coach from the train station.

The city was growing more civilized. In 1881, the first streetlight winked on, and a “new gasometer and conduit” was erected to light the Plaza and the nearby streets. The first telephone line arrived in New Mexico around the same time. There were now “fresh oysters daily” at Miller’s, according to ads in the
New Mexican
—mollusks, hauled far from the ocean. Abraham built a plank sidewalk in front of his stores so customers didn’t have to slog through dust and mud; other establishments did the same.

Now that Santa Fe was an American city, it was time for Abraham to build a mansion befitting his American dreams. He would build it for himself, certainly—but also for Julia. It would be a proper European house; one that might, finally, make her feel at home. He had vowed, under the chuppah in Germany nearly twenty years before, that he would provide for her. Perhaps he couldn’t make her happy—perhaps there weren’t enough nuns or sisters available for that. But he could build her a home. In 1881 Abraham purchased six acres directly east of Lamy’s growing cathedral on Palace Avenue—a fittingly royal street name for this merchant prince’s palace. Then Abraham imported, first by steamer and wagon train and later by railroad, masses of pressed brick, marble, and mahogany. His associates at the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe lent him masons from Kansas City.

The house rose. Abraham’s construction went far more smoothly than the archbishop’s. The
New Mexican
made regular reports on the home’s progress. “Mr. A. Staab is doing a good deal of building. Good
for him!” it reported. “The mansard roof of the new residence of Mr. A. Staab is nearly completed,” came an update a few months later. In early 1882, a reporter took a tour. “S. B. Wheeler, the architect, showed the reporter through the splendid new residence of Mr. A. Staab. It is truly an elegant structure, doing credit to Santa Fe. . . . It is rapidly approaching completion.” The house featured brass chandeliers, inlaid wood flooring, fluted door and window frames, and steam heat. The lower floors were conceived as receiving areas—two parlors, one for family, one for guests; a library; and a conservatory.

A mahogany staircase led to the second floor, which housed the bedrooms. Separate bedrooms for husband and wife were a luxury that Abraham and Julia could now afford. Abraham’s lay to the left of the grand staircase. Julia’s—the one I would visit a hundred and thirty years later—lay to the right, with its arched windows overlooking Palace Avenue. She would have her own bathroom, with a claw-foot porcelain tub. The children would sleep in the back rooms. In the third-floor ballroom, the Staabs would host elegant affairs—fetes and formal dances, no fandangos there. For contemplation of the vistas, Abraham topped the home with an elaborately decorated widow’s walk.

It was a structure that taunted the land around it. Mastery! Triumph! Not for Abraham the becoming modesty of the native architecture. Not for him the blending of house and land. “The Hopi villages that were set upon rock mesas, were made to look like the rock on which they sat, were imperceptible at a distance,” Willa Cather wrote fifty years later in
Death Comes for the Archbishop
. “None of the pueblos would at that time admit glass windows into their dwellings. The reflection of the sun on the glazing was to them ugly and unnatural—even dangerous. . . . It was as if the great country were asleep, and they wished to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse.” But Abraham wasn’t the sort to fear sleeping spirits.

Furniture came from Europe and the East Coast. A piano traveled from Kansas City. A mezuzah was affixed to the doorframe. Workmen installed gilt floor-length mirrors. The newspaper saw fit to mention a “green sword,” perhaps a newly acquired family heirloom, that “now graces the residence of A. Staab.” On the grounds around the structure, gardens and a large orchard were planted. My grandfather, who was a child when the family sold the house, remembered that the apricot trees reached over a tall wrought-iron fence, and that the local children would shinny up to pick them.