American Ghost Page 7

  The favor she asked was that Billy refrain from scalping the Trinidad physicians, and though he wasn’t too keen on it, he agreed and stood by his word. “Not only that, Sister,” he told her, “but at any time my pals and I can serve you, you will find us ready.”

  The gang rode off, and a few weeks after that, Schneider, Sister Blandina’s “poor desperado,” approached “the shores of eternity,” she wrote. “He has become more thoughtful, even his tiger eyes are softening.” She fetched his mother, who helped care for him, and in early December 1876, he echoed her prayers, “which included an act of contrition”—repentance at long last—and said good-bye.

  Abraham often saw luck go his way; he couldn’t have known how smart a decision he made when he insisted that Sister Blandina travel with the family to Trinidad.

  The group—the two Sisters, Abraham, Julia, her two children, the two Chicago-bound travelers, and Dr. Symington—left Santa Fe on the first or second of June in a caravan of well-armed freight wagons. They stayed a night at the Exchange Hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where Sister Blandina received an unsavory proposition “to leave the convent and go out to enjoy some of the pleasures of the world. Do you wonder at my indignation?”

  They traveled on through Tiptonville, a “map-forgotten place” with a dozen mud-thatched adobe houses, and then through Agua Dulce (Sweetwater), arriving safely in Trinidad on the sixth of June. “The greater part of the day was given to making things comfortable for Mrs. Staab and children to travel to New York City,” Sister Blandina wrote. The next morning, Julia and the children boarded the train.

  Abraham and Dr. Symington planned to return to Santa Fe, and Sisters Blandina and Augustine, their duties to the archbishop dispatched, were also free to go home. Seeking a speedier return, Abraham and Dr. Symington asked if the nuns were willing to travel back to Santa Fe with them in a hack—a smaller, faster four-wheeled coach. They hoped to break the record for travel from Trinidad to Santa Fe. There were risks, Dr. Symington explained, because “the Kid” was attacking “coaches or anything of profit that comes in his way.”

  Sister Blandina again told the men that she had no fear. On June 10, they set off, arriving that evening at the stage station at Sweetwater. “It did not take us long,” Sister Blandina wrote, “to see that extraordinary preparations were being made.” The stage driver and his passengers were loading and cleaning their revolvers, and everyone expected Billy and his gang to attack that night. Blandina, unfazed, took a long walk in the fields outside the station. The next morning, they left early. About an hour or so after lunch, the coach’s black driver yelled back to Abraham, his voice “trembling with suppressed fear,” as Sister Blandina described it. “Mas-sah,” Sister Blandina wrote. “There am som-un skimming over the plains, coming dis way.”

  Abraham and Dr. Symington took out their revolvers. The rider came closer. “By this time both gentlemen were feverishly excited,” Blandina wrote. How I love the image of Abraham, all five-foot-two Jew of him, with his suit vest and watch fob and German accent, hanging from the coach, steely eyed, revolver at the ready. “I looked at the men,” wrote Blandina, “and could not but admire the resolute expression which meant ‘To conquer or die!’” But Sister Blandina advised that Abraham and the doctor should instead “remain passive,” and put their guns out of sight. “They looked at me as if to say that a woman is incapable of realizing extreme danger. The darkey in his fright spoke again: ‘He am very near.’”

  Sister Blandina again advised them to put their guns away. Abraham listened to her this time—to a woman!—and the men put their guns down. A “light patter of hoofs” drew near the carriage opening. Sister Blandina looked out, and shifted her bonnet so that the rider could see her, as she suspected he had the night before when she took her walk. “Our eyes met; he raised his large-brimmed hat with a wave and a bow, looked his recognition, fairly flew a distance of about three rods, and then stopped to give us some of his wonderful antics on broncho maneuvers.” This was Billy, of course.

  Now free of desperadoes, the foursome rushed on to Santa Fe. They arrived on June 12, at a breakneck pace. “The record is broken,” Sister Blandina wrote. “We made the fastest trip ever known from Trinidad to Santa Fe”: the doctor, the nuns, and the Jew.

  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.

  Steve

  IN 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.”

&n
bsp; 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.

  eight

  BRICKS AND MORTAR

  Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy.

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

  Sister 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.