Winchester mystery house books11/9/2022 ![]() ![]() WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE BOOKS SERIALHe is not a spiritual sleuth but a literary one, preferring to hit libraries and newspaper archives for the origins of the stories we tell about the scuzzy Los Angeles hotel where a serial killer once stayed, or that house in St. In fact, Dickey writes with contempt about such expeditions. “This book is not about the truth or falsity of any claim of ghosts,” Dickey writes, dispensing with any expectation that the reader has signed up for a tedious ride-along with the teams of paranormal investigators armed with electromagnetic detectors that populate cable shows like “Ghost Hunters” or “Fear.” ![]() Tales of the inhuman, in other words, are all too human. And entire cities that have made a profit stream of ghosts - New Orleans, for example - have not made peace with their racial inequalities of the past and present. ![]() Spirits twitching inside Nevada brothels are unquiet reminders of the furtive trade of bodies for rent and how it damages the women. When we talk about the moans from the gothic insane asylum on the hill, for example, it’s really about our discomfort with the segregation of the mentally ill. Dickey rings this idea like a spoon on a wineglass. This spiritualization of corporeal feelings is the idea at the heart of “Ghostland,” a book that repeats this thesis over and over again, but does so in such creative and even ingenious ways that the reader pays no mind to that lingering echo in the basement.įrom ruined factories in Detroit to abandoned slave markets outside Richmond, Va., Dickey takes an erudite tour of haunted America and tells us repeatedly that the meaning of ghost stories lies not in what they claim about the occult but in what they inadvertently say about the anxieties and prejudices of the teller and the larger society. The trees in the backyard were hung with rotted citrus, the interior was jigsawed with strange partitions and a curious legend was scrawled on a bedroom wall : a murderer lived here.Įven though the house - which Dickey and his wife fondly recall as “The Happy Murder Castle” - felt haunted, he didn’t perceive a supernatural pall as much as he did the former owner’s pique at having lost the house to the bank, “bitter and spiteful spirits, mingling with a sense of melancholy and regret.” Colin Dickey was looking for a bargain during the real-estate fire sale following the 2008 mortgage disaster when he came across a foreclosed house in Echo Park that creeped him out. ![]()
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