for the day (or anytime)

Oct 31, 2024 08:17

Haunted hotels? There's one in this post.

I'm fond of reading (well-written) books where the author finds out interesting and complicated things about their own family history. I offer for your consideration American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest by Hannah Nordhaus. It's very good, and available in hardback, paperback, Kindle, and Audible. Amazon description:

"La Posada-“place of rest”-was 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 ghost-a 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 1896-but her ghost, they say, lives on.

In American Ghost, Julia’s great-great-granddaughter, Hannah Nordhaus, traces her ancestor’s 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-siècle 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."

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