If you read my earlier post on
Colonial Williamsburg you understand that I was a little disappointed about my
lack of child-like wonderment and that I am really into soap. In this post I am
going to talk about the ghost tour I went on. If you read some of my posts from
last year you will get an idea of how I have been thinking about ghosts and
public history.
News on that front: I am thinking
about people’s interactions with the past through spiritual encounters. This
includes things like ghost stories, the awe people may feel in the presence of
historical objects, buildings or landscapes. This idealized concept of being
able to connect spiritually with the past harkens back to turn-of-the-20th
century Spiritualism. Though some people debate me, The Spiritualist movement
gained its wide spread popularity AFTER the Civil War. It can be said however
that it gained steam beforehand if you look to The Fox Sisters and stirrings
across the Burned Over District (Upstate New York). I would argue these are
unique cases –it was not until after the Civil War that séances became parlor
tricks.
(And I mean literally parlor- as
in the room in the house where you entertain guests and tricks- as in fun
things to scare your friends. So it’s 1899 you invited some friends over, you
have finished up dinner and drinks, and now it is time to contact the dead. It
sounds similar to a modern slumber party, even more so considering someone will
probably cry and end up being taken home early. You can’t please everyone.)
So we have the popularity of
Spiritualism and séances on the rise, due in part to the massive loss of life
in Civil War. Right. Large amounts of people experience unresolved death (Billy
never came home, I hope he had a proper Christian burial in Virginia, and his
spirit is at rest yadayada) and have a desire for closure.
I recently read Gary Laderman’s Sacred Remains.[1]
He makes the argument that the conceptual understanding of funerals changed
after the Civil War from being about a community or united experience of
mourning where the body was rarely seen or necessary to a more
personal/spiritual experience which involved a personal viewing of the body.
Laderman compares the funeral procession that took place across the Northern
United States after Washington’s death to the funeral train and numerous (what
we today would call..) wakes after Lincoln’s death. People wanted/needed to see
Lincoln’s body, but when Washington died they did not. The body becomes an
important part of the spiritual experience. The importance he sees in gazing on
the body, I argue, is transferable to the objects, lands, and building
associated with the dead. This would be the case in situations where the body
is unable to be seen, like how we can’t see Washington or Lincoln’s body today.
The inclusion of spiritual encounters pushes material objects to the side in
favor of a personal experience with the past. What am I saying? People like the
idea of encountering ghosts at historical sites because they desire to have a
spiritual/personal relationship with the character from the past. (sound
familiar…?)
So back to C.W!
It was 6:45pm and my friend and I
were entirely too early for the 7:30 ghost tour. We passed the time by watching
the William and Mary students jog down Duke of Gloucester Street. We debated
whether the W&M students ran funny and did not understand that by running
down, a not only public, but tourist laced street we would all watch and judge
them as they ran like little T-Rexes, or they were putting on a very effective
show.
The tour took us in two different
houses, one of which we entered twice. Fashioned like a theater, seats were set-up
on one side of the room leaving an open space on the other. After the entire
tour group took our respective seat a women in colonial clothes would come in
and perform the ghost story. Sounds
weird? Performing a ghost story –your right it was. Those of us who were once
children recognize a ghost story as something someone tells you (Do you see
that bent up part of the cemetery gate? That is where so-and-so tried to
escape” Ep!), not someone in period garb describing their encounter with a
ghosts, or their being a ghosts, or…well the last one was alright more on that
later.
So, its weird. The first woman
comes out frantic and theater-scared. She tells us about a guy in town who killed
a black boy because he had demon in him, and then she saw the demon, “now”
(that would be a C.W. now) she is crazy. I am very easy to scare—the
parenthetical description of the ghost story I JUST wrote freaked me out a
little. This ghost story did not give me any sort of willies. Why not? It was
not a 21st (or 20th) century ghost story. Interesting
choice C.W. It was an 18th century ghost story lifted from court
records. Which is pretty interesting. This story illustrates an 18thc
understanding of women’s susceptibility to the feared spiritual world, the danger
black people were in, (on top of being enslaved, the white people might think
you are full of the devil and kill you), and the existence of paranormal
activity in court records which tells us that the people in C.W. were uncomfortable
with the mysteries of their own world (not to say we, today, are not). Neat,
okay. Next.
On the second stop the C.W. actor
was a ghost. Blerg. Great story though. Socially strange women gets put in “The
Hospital” (see my last post on C.W.) then haunts her old house because she was
locked out and very unhappy about it. Again, crazy ladies of the colonial era.
That aside this woman, real life woman, use to invite people over to her house,
have them hop in her carriage, and have her slaves push the carriage back and
forth, jump on it, ect to simulate a ride through London. Oh, and she thought
she was the Queen, used to steal her friends clothes, and then put multiple
hats on and parade around town. What fun!
Last stop, featured a Scottish maid
telling us a story about cannibalism in Scotland. It ended saying that she
might be a cannibal whose family teaches their kin to eat people –so there
might still be people eaters in C.W. (So when you go to bed at night in your
C.W. hotel remember the bus boy might try and eat you…. “What’s for dinner?”…
“Susan”) It was a really good work of storytelling and attempted to tie in the
recent discoveries of cannibalism at Jamestown.[2]
What we learned: There were three
types of women in Colonial Williamsburg: The scared, the crazy, and the hungry
(who would, of course, argue for a fourth category “delicious”)
These ghost stories were, in some
way or another, linked back to 18thc sources and tell us how 18thc people interacted
with or understood as paranormal. These stories intended to be 18thc
scary. They tell us more about the ever persistence desire of C.W. to be
historically authentic. (Oh I see what you did there, you noticed the
popularity of ghost stories on historical landscapes and decided to do it to,
but Surprise it is C.W.! So it has to be done as if it were the 18thc).
So what does this have to do with
Spiritualism at the turn-of-the 20th century? And what does this
have to do with how people interact with the past through ghosts? Well you see
the C.W. ghost stories were 18thc century because the concept of ghosts as we
know them did not exist back then. It emerged around the TOT20C, coinciding
with the emergence of spiritualism.[3]
This complicates colonial ghost stories because the colonials did not believe
in that sort of conceptualization of the dead in the living world. The
existence of such tales is a desire to interact with the past on a spiritual
level and a post Civil War construction. People want there to be colonial
ghosts because they want to experience George Washington or Thomas Jefferson in
person. People want them to stay; they want to reach out to their dearly
departed historical figures, learn from them and become better for it.
Or not…who knows I’m working on
it, I have a lot more to read.
[1] Gary Ladermen, Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Towards
Death, 1799-1883. (Cambridge: Yale University Press, 1999)
[2] See this for the news on
the Jamestown Cannibalism - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130501-jamestown-cannibalism-archeology-science/
[3] TOT20C –Turn of the Twentieth
Century
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