Albuquerque Ghosts: Traditions, Legend, Lore

by Inara Cedrins

Many people have passed through the Albuquerque, New Mexico area. Some have stayed to live in the historic city, others come from ancient pueblos, mesas, and settlements outside its borders—and, for some, passions have caused them to remain, even after death. Read about the first witches and medicine men who held supernatural powers. Learn about cultural perspectives of death and the rituals that accompany those beliefs. Visit the Mine Shaft Tavern where glasses fly off the bar, and the Santa Barbara Cemetery where a shadowy apparition holds a tattered rope attached to a noose about its neck, and feel the gaze of the lady in white at the Luna Mansion who strolls through the rooms and gazes out at visitors on the lawn. Read about LaLlorona, La Virgen de Guadalupe, the Peyote Ceremony, the Day of the Dead, and other haunting stories. Albuquerque is steeped in historic ritual; and ghostly inhabitants still flourish there.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Inara Cedrins is an artist, writer and translator who received her B.A. in Writing from Columbia College in Chicago and her M.A. in Arts Administration at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Her anthology of contemporary Latvian poetry written while Latvia was under Soviet occupation was published by the University of Iowa Press, and her new Baltic anthology, three books of poetry from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, has been published by the University of New Orleans Press, with her prints as cover art. She went to the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing in 1998 to study traditional Chinese ink painting on silk, remaining five years to teach at universities including Tsinghua University and Peking University, as well as to the People's Liberation Army and students at the Central Academy of Fine Art, designing the courses and using poetry as a vehicle. Two collections of her poetry were published bilingually by the Foreign Literature Press in Beijing. In 2003 she went to Nepal to study the technique of thangka painting. After the king’s coup d’etat, she relocated to Riga, where she started a literary agency called The Baltic Edge and taught Creative Writing at the University of Latvia. A collection of her poetry titled Fugitive Connections was published by the Virtual Artists Collective in 2006. She lived in the Albuquerque/Santa Fe area, and wrote a book titled Albuquerque Ghosts for Schiffer Press, published in 2009, before returning to Chicago for an artist’s residency at the Merchandise Mart in 2010.