About This Project
Ghost stories often avoid discussing race. Which is interesting because sometimes when you share that lived history, things can actually get more creepy.
This project examines how American paranormal narratives perpetuate settler colonialism—a system that demands BIPOC people be removed, exploited, and then written out of the story. These "haunted" sites are often locations of real racial trauma, repackaged as sanitized tourist attractions. The ghost stories that sell tickets aren't the ones that implicate America.
Ghostwritten
Popular ghost stories vs. the histories they're built on
Myrtles Plantation, Louisiana
"Chloe," an enslaved woman in a green turban, poisoned her master's family and now haunts the grounds.
The plantation sits on Tunica burial grounds. Visitors report seeing a Native American woman's spirit. Nearly 200,000 Indigenous people were enslaved in America—often undocumented. Who was "Chloe" really?
A comfortable slave revenge story sells rooms. The truth about desecrated burial grounds doesn't.
Cahawba, Alabama
A glowing orb in the garden maze—the ghost of Confederate Colonel C.C. Pegues.
Pegues died 800 miles away in Virginia. Meanwhile, 5,000 Indigenous people were massacred on this land. As many as 1,800 Union soldiers survived Cahawba prison, then died when their ship exploded on the way home. The first Black congressman from this area vanished from the historical record entirely. How are there not more ghosts of color here?
A Confederate officer gets the ghost story. Indigenous genocide and Black political power don't.
Ridgeway, Wisconsin
A shape-shifting phantom terrorized a mining town for 60 years. The New York Times reported it as the only known case of murder by a ghost.
Wisconsin's first territorial governor ran illegal slave labor in those same mines. Enslaved people poured 2,000 pounds of lead a day. A Black veteran's mine was recorded under a racial slur on a federal map until 1961. Folklorists collected hundreds of ghost stories from Ridgeway. None of them mention the enslaved laborers.
The government put a racial slur on the map. Folklorists collected hundreds of ghost stories from the same land. The enslaved laborers made it into neither.
