A haunting story about the long reach of the past.Maureen Corrigan, NPRS Fresh Air
In this intriguing book, [Nordhaus] shares her journey to discover who her immigrant ancestor really wasand what strange alchemy made the idea of her linger long after she was gone. People
La Posadaplace of restwas 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 ghosta 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 1896but her ghost, they say, lives on.
In American Ghost, Julias great-great-granddaughter, Hannah Nordhaus, traces her ancestors 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-sicle 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.
