Colin Dickey > Quotes

“We tell stories of the dead as a way of making a sense of the living. More than just simple urban legends and campfire tales, ghost stories reveal the contours of our anxieties, the nature of our collective fears and desires, the things we can’t talk about in any other way. The past we’re most afraid to speak aloud of in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“Ghost stories are a way of talking about things we’re not otherwise allowed to discuss: a forbidden history we thought bricked up safely in the walls.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“A city obsessed by its ghosts seems to be weighted down by a conflicted view of the past. Something close to melancholy: a weight it can't quite let go of, a lingering sadness. And though we don't often think of the United States in these terms, this melancholy is as much a part of our history as our triumphs.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“When it came to the definition of genius, the ultimate measure could never really be the skull - the measure was always the writing, the music, the art itself.”
― Colin Dickey, Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius

“If you've ever wondered what you would have done in 1930s Germany well then my friend here is your fucking chance to find out.”
― Colin Dickey

“But this, too, you could say, is part of the American story, as we have always been people who move on, leaving behind wreckage and fragments in our wake.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“This is another way to make sense of that haunting sensation: to walk into a home and recognize, even if you can’t name the feeling, that someone else not only lived here but adopted patterns of life completely alien to your own, whose daily ritual and marks of wear will never match your own. Haunted houses are the repository of the dreams dreamt inside them—both our dreams and those of previous occupants. This can make even the most simple of houses feel, at times, alive.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“Goethe wrote in 1827, America, you have it better Than our old continent, You have no ruined castles And no ancient basalt. Your inner life remains untroubled By useless memory And futile strife. That was then. Now, almost two hundred years later, we’ve started to catch up to old Europe. We have plenty of ruined castles now, plenty of wasted strife to call our own.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“Look for the darkened graveyards, the derelict hotels, the emptied and decaying old hospitals. Wait past midnight, and see what appears.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“There had been no contradiction between a man of science and a man of religion. They provided different means to the same goal: understanding the works of God.”
― Colin Dickey, Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius

“There’s precious little land in the United States that hasn’t been contested, one way or another, through the years. Americans live on haunted land because we have no other choice.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“The dead are watching, whether or not we choose to listen to their stories.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“Our brains are hardwired to think in terms of place and to associate psychic value or meaning to the places we inhabit.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“Ghosts, you could say, flock to women left alone.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“More than just a place of shelter, a place of comfort, or a place of privacy, the house for Bachelard “shelters daydreaming” and “allows one to dream in peace.” The”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“Here, then, is a central paradox in the way that ghosts work: to turn the living into ghosts is to empty them out, rob them of something vital; to keep the dead alive as ghosts is to fill them up with memory and history, to keep alive a thing that would otherwise be lost.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“The “moral treatment,” as it came to be known, became the solution: rather than chained and forgotten, patients would be unshackled and allowed to move about the asylum at will. Instead of being tortured and imprisoned, patients would work and play. Through labor and sports, hobbies and other recreations, the moral treatment promised rehabilitation and freedom from insanity. The moral model was held out as a means of actually curing patients, rather than simply bundling them out of sight.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“For centuries the mad belonged to the same group of society as the blind, the poor, the sick, and the elderly; all who could not work or otherwise easily contribute to society were more or less treated equally, regardless of the specificity of their situations. Prior”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“In a single stroke, the Linnaean classification system wiped monsters off the face of the map. There might still be unknown beasts and fearsome creatures out there, but now they each would have a family, a genus, a species; no matter how strange an animal might be, it was now under the rubric of scientific study and discussion. Thus, the medieval world's monsters and wonders were, one by one, either incorporated into this taxonomy or excluded as myth. The kraken became the genus Architeuthis, the giant squid; the sea serpent became Regalecus glesne, the giant oarfish.”
― Colin Dickey, The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained

“The use of ghosts as a means of social control predated the Klan. Slave owners employed so-called patterollers, usually poor whites, who would patrol the countryside at night; such patrols would regularlyuse spook stories, among other tactics, to help keep enslaved people from escaping. "The fraudulent ghost," [Gladys-Marie] Fry writes, "was the first in a gradually developed system of night-riding creatures, the fear of which was fostered by white for the purpose of slave control." A man in a white sheet on horseback riding ominously through a forest could help substantiate rumers that the forest was haunted and that those who valued their lives best avoid it. By spreading ghost stories, Southern whites hoped to limit the unauthorized movement of black people. If cemeteries, crossroads, and forests came to be known particularly as haunted, it's because they presented the easiest means of escape and had to be patrolled.

Now it's common to think of such places as the provenance of spirits. We have stories for such places: a tragic death, forlorn lovers, a devil waiting to make a deal -- stories that reflect a rich tradition of American folklore. But all this might have come much later, and these places might have first earned their haunted reputation through much more deviant methods. In the ghost-haunting legacies of many of these public spaces lies a hidden history of patrolling and limiting access.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“Local cops preferred working the beat around the tower, because migrating ducks would often fly into it and fall, electrocuted, dead to the ground, and the cops could pick up the dead ducks and sell them to restaurants.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion once wrote, and that is just as true of ghost stories: we tell stories of the dead as a way of make sense of the living.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“The problem with ghosts is that they can never figure out if they’re transients or residents—they don’t quite stick around, and yet they never really leave.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“Conspiracy theories, after all, feed on historical amnesia. They depend on your belief that what is happening now has never happened before. They present repetition as novelty. When a moral panic dissipates, its traces are forgotten in a forceful act of collective amnesia. If you are going to make sense of the history, you have to stick with the sense of déjà vu; you have to run in circles if you’re going to get anywhere.”
― Colin Dickey, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy

“The language of ghosts is a means of coping with the unfamiliar, and if they sometimes require that we overlook the truth, that may be a price we’re willing to pay. In some ways we don’t want to know too much about the true story, since whatever happens, we can’t break the spell—because the ghost is too important.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“This is the effect of zamani memory: without first-person accounts, without personal memories, the stories become monuments that must serve larger purposes.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“Holgrave, a daguerreotypist (the technology was brand new then, suggesting a cutting-edge man of the future), opines that we shall soon live to see the day “when no man shall build his house for posterity.” He instead imagines a country in which “each generation were allowed and expected to build its own houses,” a simple change that would ameliorate most of society’s ills. “I doubt whether even our public edifices,” he concludes, meaning capitols, courthouses, and other government buildings, “ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and reform the institutions which they symbolize.” As the ill-gotten remnants of the past, the buildings that have borne witness to the sins of the fathers, the houses we inherit must be destroyed. If we want to truly be free of the past, we must first start by destroying our ancestral homes.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“With a haunted house, the question is: to what extent is the house itself alive, and to what extent is it inanimate?”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“The secret staircase, simply by virtue of not being immediately self-explanatory, renders the entire house even more uncanny. Its meaning, then, can shift with the times.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“Stare down a long hotel corridor and you’ll feel something like this: there’s something uncanny about the very nature of a hotel, its endless, involuntary repetition of home-seeming spaces, rooms that could almost be home but are always somehow slightly off. Cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum writes, “The uncanny is home defamiliarized—its rule book torn at the seam. The hotel mutates the unhomelike into industry and canned hospitality.” And behind each one of those uncanny doors, perhaps, another uncanny aspiring star, each like the next and yet somehow slightly different.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places