American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest Read online

  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.

  Misha

  THEY SAY THAT JULIA 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 i
s 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.”

  two

  A DRESS OF BLACK SATIN

  Julia Schuster Staab as a young bride.

  Family collection.

  Julia wore black at her wedding—German brides did then. She married on Christmas Day, and a day or two later, she left her home forever.

  In a photo of Julia from around the time she married, she wears a black satin dress with a subtle floral pattern on the arms. Lace cascades down her chest, and a large brooch holds a bow around her neck. Perhaps this is a bridal photo: she is young, barely a woman, and she sits uncomfortably and looks away from the camera. Her expression is somber, the way people were in early photographs—to be photographed was a serious occasion meant to capture one’s image for eternity. Her nose is aquiline and a bit severe. A dark coil of thick, twisted hair is piled high on her head, a frothy fringe of curls circling her forehead.

  I first saw that photo when I visited the home of my aunt Betsy, in a winding, rock-and-cactus-littered adobe subdivision thrust up against the Sandia Mountains in Albuquerque, the city in which my father and his siblings grew up. Betsy and her French husband had returned to New Mexico after twenty-five years of living in Europe. She had moved to France after she married—the reverse journey that Julia had taken. Betsy found it difficult to live as a stranger in France and equally difficult to return home after living away for so long. Like Julia, she felt she no longer belonged in either place.

  Perhaps that was why our family history had become so important to Betsy: she focused instead on where she came from. She was the archivist of her generation—deeply organized, brusque and businesslike, a tenacious seeker and keeper of photos and stories and newspaper clippings, with no-fuss short hair, a Cleopatra profile, and a thunderous voice. The road to Julia, I was quite certain, traveled through Betsy, who took me in with a big hug and set me up with a pile of files in her spare room, a south-facing rectangle with a trundle bed and a desk. “THERE YOU GO!” she boomed, and she whisked off to wipe the counters, drink her coffee, skype with her children abroad. I leafed through a blizzard of paper: maps and photographs—diminutive strangers in old-fashioned clothing—memos, photocopies, faxes.

  It was in that pile that I uncovered a family tree of Julia’s kin, the Schusters—nine sisters, two brothers—a large Jewish family. The tree consisted of four pages stapled together to accommodate all the marriages and far-flung offspring, full of odd German names—Emilie, Amalie, Regine, Sofie, Bernhard. Julia was third from the left—“Julie,” the German spelling, pronounced Yul-ya, born in 1844. Betsy had received the tree from a distant relative she had found on the Internet, a great-nephew of Julia’s from Germany. With that many siblings, Julia would have had many great-nieces and -nephews, and until this moment I hadn’t realized that I cared to know about them. Betsy gave me copies of the emails she had exchanged with these relatives whose names I had never heard before, whose stories I’d never contemplated as part of my own.

  From these exchanges, I learned that Julia’s family had come from a village named Lügde—Luuech-da—which was then a quiet, compact town of some three thousand people on the Emmer River, in the forested hills of Westphalia in northwestern Germany. The floodplain on which Lügde perches—a set of parallel meadows—offered a clearing in the forest, an interlude of light for those floating downriver toward the Weser and the North Sea. The village was named for that light: Licht, luuech-da, Lügde. It was tucked in the bottom of a valley between two mounded hillsides, and hemmed in by green patchwork fields and conifer forests—untamed, shady places, full of wild orchids and mushrooms.

  There was a roundness to the countryside around Lügde, an alluvial smoothness interrupted by stone farmhouses and solitary castles and gentle watercourses. Lügde was green in the summer. Winters were long. The rock doves, common nightingales, and eisvögel—kingfishers—would fall silent around Saint Hedwig’s Day on the sixteenth of October, and Julia and her neighbors wouldn’t hear the birds sing again until Easter. Saint Hedwig’s Day happens to honor a German saint who married young, bore seven children, buried a child, and rose after death—as Julia would.

  Julia’s family, the Schusters, had been in Lügde for many generations. In her time, the villagers had farmed and produced linen, lace, and cigars. Today it’s a still-small factory town best known for its Osterrad, a fiery oak “Easter wheel” that is stuffed with hay, set aflame, and rolled down a nearby hillside. The Easter wheel has been flaming downhill for a thousand years or so—in their own blazing moment, the Nazis embraced it as a true Teutonic ritual. The wheel burned before the Jews arrived in medieval Lügde, peddling their wares from their backs, then from wagon
s, then from stores. It burned each Easter when Julia was a child; it burned in 1865, the year she married.

  The wedding likely took place in Lügde. Julia was twenty-one years old, Abraham twenty-six. Her father, Levi, was a wealthy local merchant, and the wedding would have been a festive affair. There was no synagogue in town—none was permitted. Instead, Lügde’s Jews worshipped in a rented house with ten rows of seats left and right of a central aisle, and a ceiling decorated with a starry sky. Perhaps Julia and Abraham made their promises there, or perhaps in her father’s large half-timbered Fachwerk home in the south quarter of the village, under a pitched roof on a cold Monday evening in December. There would have been feasting and dancing well into the night, the men on one side, the women on the other. In the ketubah—the marriage contract—Abraham would have vowed to provide Julia with food, clothing, and children. In those respects, at least, he kept his promises.

  Here is how Abraham looks in photos from his youth: clean-faced and compact, with a tightly trimmed beard, a light spray of freckles, deep-set eyes, and a stubby nose. He looks alert and attractive; there’s a potency to him. This is the man who took Julia away from Lügde.

  Abraham must have known Julia before the marriage, because he had grown up in Lügde, too. His father, Moses, was a merchant there as well—though not, like Julia’s father, a particularly wealthy one. In a history of Lügde’s Jews sent to me by a historian from the area, I found the Schuster name scattered throughout the document; the family’s presence in the village dates back at least to the eighteenth century. But I could find no mention of Abraham’s father until 1868, when he served on the village’s Jewish council. It seemed the Staabs were relative newcomers to Lügde.