'Ghostland' gets at the truth behind haunted houses

Every October, I freak myself out. I pick up the books at the top of all the "Terrifying Reads" lists, and my electricity bill promptly goes up from sleeping with the lights on. Ghosts, devils, undead pets — I read it all.

But this October, I picked up something different: A book that tells you what's not going bump in the night.

Colin Dickey's "Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places," walks you through some of the most storied haunts in the country, from the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, Calif., to the Civil War battlefield in Shiloh, Tenn. Instead of simply cataloging secondhand accounts of strange balls of light or weeping women on the staircase, Dickey digs into why these places have spawned ghost stories and what those stories say about us — the people who tell them.

Take the Winchester House, the sprawling mansion designed by the widowed heiress of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Legend has it that Sarah Winchester was haunted by the ghosts of all who had been killed by Winchester rifles, including thousands of Native Americans. The story goes that she was building a never-ending structure to hold all those ghosts and stave off her own death.

Not so much. As "Ghostland" explains, Winchester had an interest in architecture: She wasn't building rooms for spooks. She didn't believe that when construction on the house stopped, she would die. That tall tale started with one unsigned newspaper article written in 1895, and it grew from there.

But what was really at play, Dickey points out, were societal insecurities.

The legend of Sarah Winchester depends on a cultural uneasiness to which we don't always like to admit. An uneasiness about women living alone, withdrawn from society, for one. An uneasiness about wealth and the way the superrich live among us. And, perhaps largest of all, a uneasiness about the gun that won the West and the violence white Americans carried out in the name of civilization.

In "Ghostland," Dickey crosses the country, debunking popular ghost stories and investigating the kernels of truth buried under piles of superstition. He visits the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colo. — the hotel that gave Stephen King his inspiration for "The Shining." He also returns to his childhood Toys "R" Us store in Sunnyvale, Calif. — the one supposedly haunted by a farmhand who bled to death in a machinery accident in 1884.

Why do ghosts choose these places? Dickey asks. Or, more accurately, why do we choose these places for ghosts?

In the particularly haunted area of Richmond, Va.'s Shockoe Bottom, Dickey broaches the brutal truths behind an absence of certain ghosts. If ghosts supposedly linger at the site of their deaths, where terrible, unspeakable things have happened, why do Richmond's most popular hauntings completely ignore the slaves tortured and killed on the Devil's Half Acre, right by the freeway?

"We typically think of ghost stories in terms of the remnants of a terrible tragedy, a past we cannot escape, or a justice unavenged. Why, then, in a place that should be so haunted by the legacy of such a terrible injustice, the scene of countless deaths, should there be nothing but white ghosts?" Dickey writes.

"Ghostland" is not a ghost story — it's the story of ghosts. It asks why we create them, why we see them and why we keep talking about them. Dickey's insights into our national psyche, which is haunted from coast to coast, are a worthy read this October — and you'll still be able to sleep after.