“A haunting story about the long reach of the past.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’S Fresh Air “In this intriguing book, [Nordhaus] shares her journey to discover who her immigrant ancestor really was—and what strange alchemy made the idea of her linger long after she was gone.” —People La Posada—“place of rest”—was once a grand Santa Fe mansion. It belonged to Abraham and Julia Staab, who emigrated from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. After they died, the house became a hotel. And in the 1970s, the hotel acquired a resident ghost—a sad, dark-eyed woman in a long gown. Strange things began to happen there: vases moved, glasses flew, blankets were ripped from beds. Julia Staab died in 1896—but her ghost, they say, lives on. In American Ghost, Julia’s great-great-granddaughter, Hannah Nordhaus, traces her ancestor’s transfiguration from nineteenth-century Jewish bride to modern phantom. Family diaries, photographs, and newspaper clippings take her on a riveting journey through three hundred years of German history and the American immigrant experience. With the help of historians, genealogists, family members, and ghost hunters, she weaves a masterful, moving story of fin-de-siècle Europe and pioneer life, villains and visionaries, medicine and spiritualism, imagination and truth, exploring how lives become legends, and what those legends tell us about who we are.

"A compelling, deeply rewarding novel from a unique southern storyteller, American Ghost is Janis Owens' richly woven story about how unresolved family history and the racial tensions of the past threaten a love affair between two young Floridians"--

Contains 51 supposedly true, classic American ghost stories from newspapers, journals, and magazines.

Native American folklore and mythology is rich with mystery and wisdom, and spiritually sacred stories echo through the centuries in the lives of indigenous North Americans. Many of these stories deal with crossing over between the world of the living to that of the dead-and back. Others feature animals or objects with supernatural powers, or ancestors that help guide or rescue souls lost in their own struggles for survival against the elements: A fearless Brule Sioux warrior encounters four ghosts determined to scare the wits out of him, but he turns the tables on them-and then encounters something even scarier than ghosts, the spirits of a Cherokee woman and her husband taunt the soul of their murderer for decades, Heavy Collar encounters a strange, frightening force that follows him home from a hunting trip and causes havoc in his Blackfoot camp, a young Assiniboine bride-to-be rides a great white stallion to avoid being killed in a Sioux raid; the supernatural spirit horse is seen riding the plains for centuries after, two Cheyenne children are chased across impossible stretches of territory by the rolling head of their murdered mother, Good Son tries to save his Navajo brother, the mischievious Bad Son, from the evil Spider Woman, but fails to fool her, the Phantom Horses of Palo Duro Canyon come to life for a young boy traveling with his Kiowa grandfather, a man and wife help a dead Sioux girl return to life, and she devotes the rest of her days to healing the sick... From cultures stretching back thousands of years to the earliest habitations on the continent, come mysterious, eerie tales that continue to resonate today. Book jacket.

An intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history, Ghostland takes readers on a road trip through some of the country's most infamously haunted places--and deep into the dark side of our history.