Why is the Hudson Valley haunted?” Judith Richardson asks in Possessions , a study of “the history and uses of haunting” upstate. Richardson reviews the area’s bloody rebellions and wandering ghost sailors, drawing on county archives, travelogues, letters, and the usual literary sources. She finds that the valley’s ghostly legacy derives, in part, from a fraught history of land ownership, the influence of Dutch and German folklore, and a naturally ominous landscape—as well as from entrepreneurs in the tourism industry. Richardson herself seems a little susceptible to the atmosphere that spooked Ichabod Crane. The “mountains loom and brood,” she writes, and she seeks to explain “how hauntings intersect with cultural history, public memory, economics, and land issues.”
The teen-age ghosts in Stewart O’Nan’s new novel, The Night Country
In Sara Gran’s Come Closer (Lauren Porcaro)
The author traces changing versions of several ghostly tales that mutated over time to reflect local conditions and controversies as well as national political issues like abolitionism. Richardson shows that, thanks to the Hudson Valley’s long history of settlement, the ‘legendizing impetus’ created by Washington Irving, and the area’s established position as a tourist destination, it inspired at least three sometimes overlapping traditions of hauntings: the ‘aboriginal’ Dutch and Indian hauntings, the Revolutionary War hauntings, and industrial hauntings, which are traced in Maxwell Anderson’s High Tor (1937) and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s World’s End (1987).
Possessions is a rare and brilliant book that seamlessly combines history and literature—revealing how richly they can support one another. It is a great pleasure to read: both fluent and profound.
Straddling history, literature, and folklore, [Richardson] excavates the layers, contradictions, and misty gaps in an archive of spectral traces where more is (hauntingly) lost than revealed. Possessions is an unsentimental and moving book about loss. It is also implicitly a reflection upon the loss of ‘the local’ itself under the pressures of economic development, even while it works against that story line, to reveal how past and present continue to meet (somewhere between memory and knowledge) in ‘place.’ With a kind of hard-edged pathos then, Possessions opens a door not only onto a regional New York archive but also onto what it might mean to be somewhere, to situate and to find oneself in one’s own haunted place.
Common-place - Laura Rigal
This is a lively, well-written, and engaging interdisciplinary study. Richardson pursues two main goals: probing in considerable detail a body of early national folklore and its modern revivals and testing some more general notions about the uses to which such lore is put in the periods when it is recovered, reshaped, and reinvigorated. It is smart without being condescending, locally inflected without exhibiting the least bit of piety—and, I think, quite suggestive for scholars looking at other domains far beyond the Hudson Valley. She gives us a way of understanding how the ‘local’ has figured in the cultural construction of Americanness.
This book offers a cohesive interdisciplinary project that enhances our appreciation of regionalism, folklore, local history, and the transforming uses of cultural memory in response to demographic as well as industrial change… The texture of this book varies nicely because between the author’s in-depth studies of Irving and Anderson there is a considerable amount of social history and analysis of less familiar writers and publications… Her research in primary and secondary sources could not be more thorough, and the writing is always clear, even memorable on occasion.
Michael Kammenn Historical Review
This creatively argued and intelligent book examines the phenomenon of hauntings in a particular place over more than a century. The author’s premise is that hauntings are a response to social and cultural developments, especially rapid change that destabilizes communities and creates social and economic divisions… Well-researched and gracefully written, Possessions is a sophisticated investigation of the history and uses of hauntings in the modern world.
New York History - David Schuyler
[An] informative, cleanly written, and admirably documented book.
Early American Literature - John McWilliams
[An] informative, cleanly written, and admirably documented book.--John McWilliams "Early American Literature"Possessions is an unsentimental and moving book about loss. It is also implicitly a reflection upon the loss of 'the local' itself under the pressures of economic development, even while it works against that story line, to reveal how past and present continue to meet (somewhere between memory and knowledge) in 'place.' With a kind of hard-edged pathos then, Possessions opens a door not only onto a regional New York archive but also onto what it might mean to be somewhere, to situate and to find oneself in one's own haunted place.--Laura Rigal "Common-place" (4/1/2004 12:00:00 AM)High Tor (1937) and T. Coraghessan Boyle's World's End (1987).--J. J. Benardete "Choice" (3/1/2004 12:00:00 AM)Possessions is a sophisticated investigation of the history and uses of hauntings in the modern world.--David Schuyler "New York History"Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers and The New World of James Fenimore Cooper Possessions is a rare and brilliant book that seamlessly combines history and literature--revealing how richly they can support one another. It is a great pleasure to read: both fluent and profound.--Alan Taylor, author of American Colonies and William Cooper's Town
This book offers a cohesive interdisciplinary project that enhances our appreciation of regionalism, folklore, local history, and the transforming uses of cultural memory in response to demographic as well as industrial change… The texture of this book varies nicely because between the author’s in-depth studies of Irving and Anderson there is a considerable amount of social history and analysis of less familiar writers and publications… Her research in primary and secondary sources could not be more thorough, and the writing is always clear, even memorable on occasion.
American Historical Review - Michael Kammen
This creatively argued and intelligent book examines the phenomenon of hauntings in a particular place over more than a century. The author's premise is that hauntings are a response to social and cultural developments, especially rapid change that destabilizes communities and creates social and economic divisions...Well-researched and gracefully written, Possessions , is a sophisticated investigation of the history and uses of hauntings in the modern world.
New York History - David Schulyer
