October Not Fiction Book Discussions

Autumn has arrived, and with it, thoughts of Halloween and haunted houses. In Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, Colin Dickey asks, "how do we deal with stories about the dead and their ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed haunted?"

Dickey visited supposedly haunted places across America, including both private and public spaces. He delves into the factual history of these spaces, and he also explores the common tropes found in their ghost stories, using both popular culture and literary classics as examples, noting that "Ultimately, this book is about the relationship between place and story: how the two depend on each other and how they bring each other alive." He is not concerned with whether ghosts exist or not, but rather with human beings' persistent need to tell these stories and how the stories evolve as time passes. He cites Sigmund Freud's concept of the "uncanny," in which a place that is unsettling in any way becomes a container for the unsettled feelings we might have about events that have occurred there. Charleston, of course, has many old and, to some, uncanny places. Dickey visits the churchyard of the Unitarian Church and Magnolia Cemetery, helping us understand how ghost stories grew up around the transition from burial in centrally located churchyards to suburban garden cemeteries. Dickey also explores the real identity of Edgar Allen Poe's Annabel Lee and the protagonist of his story The Gold Bug, set on Sullivan's Island.

What do you think? Whether or not you believe in ghosts, is there a place you have visited that felt uncanny to you? Can you explain its effect on you? Is there a place from your hometown that was rumored to be haunted? What are the historical facts and what are the ghost story tropes related to this place? Has the story shifted over time? As the American landscape changes with time, what spaces do you think will come to seem haunted? What ghost stories will we tell in the future? Why? Does Dickey's explanation of the relationship between place and story as the source of our ghost tales ring true to you? Why do you think we continue to tell these tales even as our ability to use technology to determine the facts of a situation evolve? We tell these stories at least in part as entertainment . . . why do we enjoy being scared?!

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, October 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, October 19, at 11:00 a.m. at Earth Fare Café in the South Windermere Shopping Center (the West Ashley Branch Library is closed until further notice due to damage from Tropical Storm Irma); and here on the blog.