American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest, by Hannah Nordhaus
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American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest, by Hannah Nordhaus
Read Online Ebook American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest, by Hannah Nordhaus
“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.
American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest, by Hannah Nordhaus- Amazon Sales Rank: #466717 in Books
- Brand: Nordhaus, Hannah
- Published on: 2015-03-10
- Released on: 2015-03-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.09" w x 6.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
Review “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)“Whether you believe in ghosts or are just intrigued by their persistence in popular culture, American Ghost is itself a haunting story about the long reach of the past.” (Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air)“Expertly dissects fact from embroidery. . . . A colorful and engrossing quest.” (Elle, "7 Must-Read Books")“Nordhaus attacks her subject with the same scholarship and lively writing that made her nonfiction debut, The Beekeeper’s Lament, a beloved best-seller. . . . Fascinating.” (Dallas Morning News)“The more Nordhaus digs into the history and explores the supernatural dimensions of the story, the more complex and intriguing it becomes. American Ghost is a multi-genre work that succeeds on a number of levels.” (Denver Post)“Journalist Hannah Nordhaus braids personal memoir with historical research and resolute ghost hunting in a narrative that investigates the restless spirit of her great-great-grandmother Julia Schuster Staab.” (Boston Globe)“A gripping account of frontier life from an immigrant Jewish woman’s perspective. It is the author’s connection of the past where she explores the story, trying to separate the history and the myth.” (Working Mother)“Part travelogue, part memoir, part ghost story, part history. . . . Nordhaus offers a deeply compelling personal account of her attempts to better understand her own family. . . . The book’s unique blend of genres and its excellent writing make it hard to put down.” (Booklist (starred review))“[A] funny, moving, and suspenseful tale.” (The Week)“The author’s multifaceted work brings Julia back to life and explores the journey it took to rediscover her narrative. . . . Every aspect of the account is enlightening, well written, and entertaining. This touching and uplifting work is highly recommended and will appeal to a variety of readers.” (Library Journal (starred review))“An incredible story. . . . A haunting tale.” (National Examiner)“A fascinating and nuanced account of her ancestral ghost story and her complicated clan.” (BookPage)“A unique collision of family history, Wild West adventure, and ghost story. . . . Perceptive, witty, and engaging.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review))“Fascinating and frequently surprising. Ultimately, American Ghost is a reflection on how the unresolved questions in our own histories can be even more haunting than ghosts.” (Shelf Awareness)“Tenaciously researched and beautifully written, American Ghost gives flesh to a lost story, exhumes a bygone world, and animates the ways in which the past haunts all of us. Hannah Nordhaus has performed a lyrical feat of dead-raising.” (Benjamin Wallace, author of The Billionaire's Vinegar)“Beautifully written and self-aware, a memoir that tells a story and searches for broader lessons. . . . Ultimately, American Ghost is not just the story of a haunting, but a story that will haunt its readers.” (Minneapolis Star Tribune)“A thoughtful and intriguing chronicle of familial investigation.” (Kirkus Reviews)“American Ghost is at once an engrossing portrait of a forgotten female pioneer and a fascinating meditation on the fine line between history and lore. Hannah Nordhaus has crafted a seamless blend of gripping mystery, moving family confessional, and chilling ghost story.” (Karen Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy)“Here is a very different sort of a Western, a deeply feminine story with a strong whiff of the paranormal--Willa Cather meets Stephen King. Don’t read this book late at night . . . unless you like feeling your neck hairs stand up on end!” (Hampton Sides, author of In the Kingdom of Ice and Blood and Thunder)“Hannah Nordhaus approaches the legend of her great-great-grandmother’s ghost with the insight of an historian and the energy of an inspired detective. A fine tale well told. I loved every word.” (Anne Hillerman, author of Spider Woman's Daughter)“A spirited memoir of one of the earliest Jewish pioneer families in the West. . . . A delightful travelogue.” (JWeekly.com)“Hannah Nordhaus braids personal memoir with historical research and resolute ghost hunting in a narrative that investigates the restless spirit of her great-great-grandmother Julia Schuster Staab.” (Boston Globe)“Hannah Nordhaus writes a detective story, although it’s not fiction, and a ghost story, although it’s not a chiller. It’s biography and history and the product of investigative research, yet everything of power, even scholarly process, must come from the heart, and so does this story.” (Washington Independent Review of Books)“A spirited memoir of one of the earliest Jewish pioneer families in the American West…A delightful travelogue…reads like a novel.” (Jewish Book Council)“All of us are haunted — by vestiges of the past, and, as Hannah Nordhaus poignantly observes in American Ghost, by the ghosts of who we thought we were or thought we would become.” (Boulder Weekly)Nordhaus’s lyrical memoir … untangles truth and legend, the tale of success and the hardships of life, the woman and the ghost.” (Jewish Woman Magazine)“[A] chronicle of German-Jewish immigration to the American Southwest, a reckoning of family secrets, and an account of the author’s personal ghost hunt.” (Santa Fe New Mexican)“Nordhaus takes us on a journey back in time — by any means possible — in order to draw a better picture of who her great-great-grandmother was.” (Washington Post)
From the Back Cover
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.About the Author
Hannah Nordhaus is the author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller The Beekeeper’s Lament, which was a PEN Center USA Book Awards finalist, Colorado Book Awards finalist, and National Federation of Press Women Book Award winner. She has written for the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Outside magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, Village Voice, and many other publications.
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Most helpful customer reviews
35 of 37 people found the following review helpful. Indelible By Mark Stevens “Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what.”That’s a Salman Rushdie line (from "The Satanic Verses") but it’s a perfect description of what Hannah Norhaus sets out to do with American Ghost—chase down some unfinished business.In this case, the ghost is from her own past—a great-great-grandmother whose life and death deserved, well, fleshing-out.The woman was Julia Schuster Staab. Her life began in Germany. It ended half way around the world, as the lonely and disheartened wife of a Jewish dry goods merchant, in New Mexico.Julia Schuster Staab’s life (1844-1896) forms the heart of "American Ghost." So does Julia’s ghost—a ghost first seen by a janitor at La Posada (“place of rest,” not hardly) in the 1970s. Other odd occurrences, straight out of heebie jeebie land, soon followed.Even without the added wrinkle of the (possibly) paranormal mixed in, the story of Julia Schuster Staab would have been ample on its own for a fascinating account of Santa Fe and settling the Southwestern frontier in the second half of the 19th Century. Julia’s husband Abraham amassed the largest fortune in Santa Fe and was an active civic leader so we see Santa Fe take root out on the western fringes of the “prairie ocean.” Some of the tales here about the multi-cultural aspects of Santa Fe’s early days, particularly that a Jew played a role in helping Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy (yes, the Death Comes to the Archbishop guy) with his cathedral construction, are fascinating. The ghost question—and our collective beliefs about the spirits and apparitions—add another layer of intrigue to this brilliant book.Nordhaus, in fact, had a longtime fixation with the ghost in her family’s past. “I gravitated to her story simply because it was such a good one,” she writes. “A child who loved stories, I could now claim my own piece of the past: a mail-order German bride dragged west, married badly, driven insane and trapped forever as a ghost in her unhappy ending.”After college, in fact, Nordhaus moved to Santa Fe and read extensively about the lives of women on the frontier. She later wrote her first published article about Julia. It was “heavy on self-dramatization and feminist surmise,” she notes in one of many self-deprecating lines. At the time, she was certain that Julia was a victim “and that this victimhood lay behind her ghost.” Nordhaus concedes that Julia “was the specter of my twentysomething angst.”Twenty years later, she came across a document that reignited her interest in the story—and would perhaps give her a chance to recalibrate her opinions of Julia’s life. The document, a family history written by a great aunt, Lizzie, in 1980, “was a tale of a family ecosystem deeply out of balance—forbidden love, inheritance and disinheritance, anger and madness. There were drug addictions, lawsuits, brother against brother, madhouses, penury and suicides. There were fatal wounds to the ‘bosom.’ There were Julia’s children; their story branched from hers. And it was clear to me, from Lizzie’s book, that the family was haunted well before Julia became a ghost. I wondered what had gone so wrong.”Unfinished business.Nordhaus traces threads wherever she can find them and what unfolds is a fascinating portrait of a stranger in a strange, barren land. "American Ghost" follows the history of Julia’s life, including her roots in Germany and life in the booming outpost of Santa Fe. The threads lead her back to Europe (how “American”) and Nordhaus’ research and digging in Germany are as colorful and as haunting as anything else in this account. Interspersed with the historical detail are Nordhaus’ takes on modern-day efforts to detect or stay in touch with the spirit world—ghost hunters, psychics, and drugs (medical marijuana). Her account of a ghost tour at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park is hilarious.Nordhaus also spends a night in what was Julia’s room and, even if her scientific, fact-based approach to reporting, recounts a chilling moment but offers no conclusion. “Ghosts are not innocent until proven guilty,” writes Nordhaus. “They are always guilty: present until proven 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.”As she notes, ghost hunting and ancestor hunting are kin. “They both involve sifting through heaps of supposition, extrapolation, and unmoored clues interspersed with brief, infinitesimal wisps of evidence.”The wisps come together. As both a human being and as a lingering spirit, Julia left a powerful story that comes into sharp focus in "American Ghost." In the hands of Hannah Nordhaus, the resulting narrative is indelible.
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful. A HISTORICAL ROMP AND MOVING PERSONAL HISTORY By Lisa Jones spoiler alert! - AMERICAN GHOST is a memoir, a ghost-story, a romp through the history of frontier Santa Fe. It starts out as a titillating giggle of a book — the author’s great-great grandmother Julia lives in a hotel in Santa Fe? And is a GHOST!? — yet AMERICAN GHOST takes us deep into the frailty of the human heart, and the family ties that bind us all. Hannah’s a skeptic with a sense of humor. She does a great job with her family history, helped by a fascinating set of forbears — German Jews who migrated to New Mexico in the 1800s to make a fortune as merchants, along the way posing for formal photographs of themselves with Kiowa Indians in full regalia, having their stagecoaches threatened by Billy the Kid, and being protected from same by a nun named Sister Blandina. Oh, and then there’s the Archbishop Lamy — later immortalized in DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather. The Bishop was a close friend of Hannah’s forbears, most notably with the book’s main character, Hanna’s great great grandmother Julia, with whom he would linger in the garden, speaking French, and grafting European fruit trees.This all sounds like a blast. But Julia is frail, and the Santa Fe of the 1860s was a far cry from the artistic mecca it is today. Julia was unhappy, and became more so as the years wore on. She loses her 8th baby three weeks after she is born, and a subsequent restorative trip to Europe goes terribly wrong when she suffers a mysterious accident. Back in Santa Fe, she becomes a recluse in her room. She dies — no one knows exactly how — at age 52. But she doesn’t go away. As the family home changes hands and morphs into what it is today — La Posada — a luxury hotel — She appears as a cold breeze, as dancing lights, as the outline of a white haired woman in Victorian dress. She’s very very sad.This is the story Hannah has brought to life. It took her to a number of psychics, and ghost hunters. It took her to archives, to relatives she never knew she had, to long buried family diaries. It even takes her back to Germany, to the village from which Julia and her husband Abraham hailed, as well as to the concentration camp Julia’s sister Emilie was taken to at age 80, where she died. The book has won critical praise, and there are inklings from psychics that it has also earned the gratitude of her dead great great grandmother, and given her peace. It also left its author with a greater understanding of the humanity of her family and the vulnerability of the human heart.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful. but when exploring something nebulous like a legendary haunting By Andrew Lark A fascinating account of a family's history; of pioneers, desperadoes, and a woman completely out of her element who's forced to live in a harsh and uncomfortable environment. The questions is; does her spirit still inhabit the house that her husband built for her almost a century and a half ago. Hanna Nordhaus explores this question from every angle, traveling to the southwestern United States, Europe, and many places in between, retracing the footsteps of her great-great-great-grandmother Julia - the woman said to haunt the old family Santa Fe mansion.The story was interesting as a history, and I was especially engaged when the author told of her encounters with mediums, spiritualists, and ghost hunters - some of who seemed fairly on target and others who were clearly way off base.Sometimes the story dragged on a little in its exploration and seemed to deviate off track, but when exploring something nebulous like a legendary haunting, I guess the author was justified in wandering a little. I recommend this book for people who like reading about interesting family histories - of a resilient, driven, prosperous (and possibly tyrannical) man, and a wife who, after being taken out of her element succumbs to the stress, the strain of loss and loneliness, and pioneer life to which she was ill suited.
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