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How vague and various descriptions made a medieval mistake into a lasting horror.

In the second act of Prometheus Unbound, the 1820 lyrical drama by Percy Shelley, two sisters embark on a quest to the underworld. They want to pay a visit to Demogorgon, “the supreme Tyrant” who rules over phantoms, men, and beasts, and persuade him to help out an unlucky fellow named Prometheus. When the sisters finally find Demogorgon, in a shadowy cave, all they can see is a “mighty darkness” that throws off “rays of gloom.” Surprisingly, he turns out to be a rather chatty and cooperative creature, and agrees to help his visitors. At the end of the play, he even gives a speech in praise of love (so much for supreme tyranny).

Shelley didn’t invent the fearful figure of Demogorgon. He was riffing on a character who had already stalked through 500 years of literature—from Giovanni Boccaccio to John Milton to Edmund Spenser—and would eventually rear his ugly head in Dungeons & Dragons, the role-playing game, and the recent Netflix show Stranger Things. Many writers considered Demogorgon to be the father of Greek and Roman gods; the word “Demogorgon” resembles two ancient Greek words—dêmos (meaning the people) and Gorgon (referring to Medusa and her two monstrous sisters, whose gaze could turn the viewer into stone).

Yet Demogorgon was never a deity who loomed over Greek or Roman mythology. In fact, “Demogorgon” wasn’t even a real word. His popularity actually dates back to the 1300s, when he began appearing in Latin literature in and around Florence. In the words of the late historian and mythographer Jean Seznac, “Demogorgon is a grammatical error become a god.”

Demogorgon seems to have begun his life as an unnamed god in ancient Latin poems. “In Lucan’s Latin epic poem the Pharsalia, the witch Erichto forces some infernal deities to do her bidding by threatening to invoke the terrible god whom even they fear,” writes James K. Coleman, an assistant professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh, in an email. “Then in Statius’s Thebaid, the prophet Tiresias refers to the terrible ‘Lord of the Triple World,’ whose name he refuses to speak.”

Because these poets don’t actually name the god they’re talking about, later writers were able to impose their own interpretation. According to C.S. Lewis, a medieval scribe read the Greek word demiurge, which was Plato’s name for the creator of the universe, and wrote the nonexistent word Demogorgon. “This is perhaps the only time a scribal blunder underwent an apotheosis,” Lewis wrote in his book about medieval and Renaissance literature. According to Coleman, this all happened sometime in the Middle Ages.

Demogorgon properly joined the pantheon in the 14th century, after the Italian writer Boccaccio declared him the father of the Greek gods. Boccaccio was not especially good at ancient Greek, Coleman says—he lived near Florence and wrote mostly in Italian vernacular, like his hero Dante—but he loved to show off by referencing Greek texts. He presumably came across the erroneous name Demogorgon and took it as gospel. Boccaccio’s version of the deity, in his hefty Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, is a “shadowy figure, enveloped in clouds and gloom that mask any more specific features,” Coleman writes. “His words, too, are hard to discern.”

Once Boccaccio promoted the apocryphal Demogorgon to the position of top deity, he seems to have gone the Italian Renaissance equivalent of viral. The scholar Marsilio Ficino and several local poets—Ugolino Verino, Matteo Maria Boiardo, and Ludovico Ariosto—all wrote about him. In 1565, a Demogorgon figure even marched through the streets of Florence during a Medici marriage procession. (That’s not to say that everyone was down with Demogorgon, however: The poet Giglio Giraldi noticed the scribal error way back in the 1500s.)

Boccaccio and the writers who read him are probably to blame for English-language appearances of Demogorgon, Coleman says. After cropping up in such works as The Faerie Queen and Prometheus Unbound, he wriggled his way into popular culture. Eldrich Wizardry, a 1976 guidebook for Dungeons & Dragons, describes Demogorgon as a two-headed demon lord who slithers around on tentacles.

In Stranger Things, the newish Netflix show about the misadventures of some Indiana kids, a tadpole-like Demogorgon shows up in a suburban garbage can. After devouring a house cat, he grows into a humanoid monster with tooth-covered “petals” for a head. (Unlike Shelley’s Demogorgon, this one is not much of a talker. He prefers to hiss and spit before he eats you.)

Coleman believes that Demogorgon owes his enduring popularity to the vague and ominous descriptions in the earliest texts about him. “The fact that the ancient texts supply no detailed physical description of this dreaded underworld god allowed later authors and artists to let their imaginations run free in visualizing the deity they called Demogorgon,” he writes.

Ironically, Coleman adds, Demogorgon’s nonexistence is exactly what makes him useful to scholars today. When historical texts discuss classical gods like Apollo and Hades, it’s difficult to figure out their source material: They could have been inspired by any number of Greek or Latin writings. But when Demogorgon appears, it’s possible to trace him all the way to the source.

You can join the conversation about this and other Spirits Week stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

Who you gonna call?

In 2016, Edgardo Ochoa came to Panama to bust some ghosts. The government had just received a report that a monstrous abandoned fishing net—known as a ghost net—was entangled in a coral reef in Coiba National Park, a prison-island-turned-marine-preserve popular with nesting sea turtles. When Ochoa arrived, he saw that the ghost was over 150 feet long, its nylon lattice stuck to jutting mounds of coral like a too-tight hairnet, snagging animals as it was dragged to and fro in the waves. The water was shallow, so from his boat, Ochoa was immediately able to spot the bodies of trapped fish and snails—some alive, some dead.

It took Ochoa and a team of at least seven other divers two days to remove the net, by cutting it into smaller sections that could be hauled up to the surface with minimal damage to the reef. Every six hours, as the tide changed, the net collected more passing critters and debris. At one point, Ochoa found the body of a female sea turtle the size of a laptop. “I’m pretty sure she died because she couldn’t reach the surface and breathe,” he says.

Ghost nets haunt oceans across the world at every possible depth. They linger at the surface, dangling from buoys and enmeshed in coral reefs, and they collapse to the seafloor, knotted in wrecks and snagged in the ribs of decomposing whales. As with anything abandoned or lost, no one knows how just many there are. But there is a seemingly infinite supply of these wraiths, which trap anything that swims by like flypaper, dooming them to starvation, suffocation, or predation. "They just sit there and fish, and kill and kill and kill and kill,” sea urchin diver Mike Neill told NBC News.

In his work as a marine safety officer for Conservation International, Ochoa encounters a lot of ghost nets, which fall under the larger umbrella of “abandoned, lost, and discarded fishing gear” (ALDFG). According to a 2016 report from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, ALDFG comprises close to 10 percent of the world’s total marine debris. Ghost nets are thought to make up at least 46 percent of the total mass of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that eternally swirling vortex of litter somewhere between California and Hawai’i, according to a 2018 study in Nature.

Ghost nets aren’t quite like any other kind of plastic pollution in the oceans. They’re larger, more spread out, and much harder to remove than smaller, more discrete items, such as trash bags and water bottles. And unlike those plastics, ghost nets are rarely discarded on purpose. “Most of the time gear costs a lot of money, so they’re not abandoned intentionally,” says Laurent Lebreton, an oceanographer studying ghost nets for nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup, and author the Nature study. They might have been damaged and snagged by a nearby vessel, or lost in a storm, which can make it dangerous to attempt to retrieve them at the time. They also might be intentionally abandoned by illegal fishing operations, if they happen to spot the authorities in the distance.

And ghost nets, by their very nature, are a threat to just about every kind of marine life. They pose a particular threat to air-breathers and larger animals such as whales and dolphins, who can be hopelessly tangled and, like Ochoa’s sea turtle, die of drowning. But the nets are indiscriminate, just as easily sweeping up less-charismatic species and the cornerstones of fisheries. Some ghost nets designed to catch certain kinds of fish will just go on doing it, a phenomenon is called ghost fishing, Ochoa says. This attracts scavengers, who get caught themselves. The nets also clog up waterways, making it harder for vessels of any kind to pass through.

Humans have fished using free-floating nets for centuries, but in the past they were made of biodegradable materials, such as bamboo, that break down quickly at sea, Lebreton says. But ghost nets today are almost exclusively made of plastic and nylon, and can take up to 600 years to degrade (into microplastics). They cross entire oceans, often with unintentional stowaways, from crabs to microbes that might endanger ecosystems in ways no scientist currently understands, Lebreton adds.

It’s clear that ghost nets need to be removed from the ocean, but there’s no obvious way to do it. After encountering countless ghost nets at Conservation International, Ochoa has developed a ghost-net-removal course in collaboration with the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI), an international organization that teaches and certifies scuba divers. “There are more than six million professional divers worldwide,” Ochoa says. “No one has time or resources for a massive cleanup, so I was thinking, can we do a little bit at a time?”

Though it is like a coastal cleanup in which people walk the beaches picking up litter, Ochoa’s ghost net–busting program is much more time-consuming, and even potentially dangerous. Ochoa recommends divers clean up nets in a group of at least six people. If divers hear of ghost nets, or come across any, they should tag the site with marker buoys. Once they return to the site, it’s a matter of descending, cutting out sections of the nets, and attaching them to lift bags (without getting snagged oneself). “It’s basically a supermarket bag with some straps. You attach it to the intended lift weight and then you inflate the bag underwater,” Ochoa says. “Ideally you’d have four divers in the water and two on the boat to receive the lift bags.”

Beyond lift bags, coastal ghost-net removal only requires equipment one could find in a dive shop and a hardware store. Actually doing it, on the other hand, is not simple. It requires diving skill, a great deal of precision, and an understanding of how the nets entangle the landscape. “If it’s on a rocky reef, no problem,” Ochoa says. “But if it’s on a coral reef, you have to be careful to not damage the coral.” And then there’s the issue of removing trapped animals that are still alive. “You have to be very careful with the animals,” he says. “Fish, seashells, and starfish are easy to remove. But anything bigger like a shark or manta or sea lion can be dangerous to the diver.”

Since Ochoa’s course debuted in 2018, approximately 25 divers in 20 different countries, including the United States, Dubai, Qatar, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, and Mexico, have completed it. But Ochoa’s course only reaches so deep—to 60 feet below the surface, with lift bags rated to lift no more than 50 pounds at a time. This only covers a tiny percentage of ghost nets, the ones that snag close to shore in places that see regular divers. As nets get larger, deeper, and farther offshore, the difficulty of removing them multiplies.

“A FAD, or a fish aggregating device, does exactly what it sounds like it does,” Lebreton says. In his work studying the garbage patch, Lebreton says, he found FADs to be the largest kind of ghost net. FADs often consist of floating buoys with attached synthetic nets, which can be up to a mile long, and hanging hundreds of feet into the water column. Some kinds of fish are attracted to any floating objects and the idea is that over time, FADs develop their own entire ecosystems, attracting species attractive to fishers. Some ghost net FADs are meant to drift, while others are moored and come loose. They can be large and may get Frankensteined together into an entangled behemoth that is impossible to disarticulate.

There are no regulations regarding how many FADs are put into the water each year, or how they should be collected, according to the Marine Debris Tracker, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Marine Debris Program and the Southeast Atlantic Marine Debris Initiative. It doesn’t help that they’re deployed most frequently in the jurisdiction-free chaos of the high seas. The only thing holding FAD-users accountable are GPS trackers that some carry, which fishers rely on to revisit their FADs. “The trackers are quite high-tech, and will let them know when there’s a school of fish around the net,” Lebreton says. “But sometimes these nets may just travel too far and it’s not worth it for the fishermen to come pick it up.”

In 2018, a 40-ton FAD washed ashore at Kamilo Point on the big island of Hawai'i. It was massive, much bigger than the middling two-tonners that had been washing up on Oahu. “Kamilo beach is so inaccessible that there was no way to bring a train or truck to remove the net,” Lebreton says. “I think the local government decided to burn it, releasing a whole bunch of melted plastic on the volcanic rock.”

FADs can only really be collected on boats with enormous cranes. Even more challenging is even finding them—their GPS trackers mean nothing if governments and nonprofits can’t access the data. At The Ocean Cleanup, Lebreton is working to develop artificial, U-shaped coastlines that could help concentrate floating waste, from water bottles, to small ghost nets, to titanic FADs, in one place using natural oceanic currents. “We’re trying to reproduce what a coastline does, but in a system that drifts,” he says. “And once the system has concentrated plastic, we can go with a vessel and pick up the whole lot.” Lebreton hopes the system, which is still being tested, will remove 50 percent of the mass of the garbage patch in the next five years.

As they work to clean up the ocean’s ghosts, Ochoa, Lebreton, and other advocates hope to see stronger conservation laws enacted and enforced. Lebreton wants more stringent regulations on the type and number of FADs that can be used, particularly on the high seas. And Ochoa wants laws incentivizing fishers to report their missing gear, a process that today often results in fines, and means that nets that might be able to be retrieved shortly after they are lost will continue to drift for years. “The image of ghost nets is spectacular, a huge net hanging in the ocean,” he says. “But I don’t want people to think that they are normal.”

As seas and storms erode coastlines, cemeteries are giving up their dead.

A skull drops into the sea in Nova Scotia. A femur juts out of a stream bank in Texas. A coffin breaks through the soil in New York. A fisherman nets a tombstone off the coast of Virginia.

So much for eternal rest. Cemeteries around the world, especially coastal plots, are losing the fight against the elements as seas, storms, and floods ravage once-stable soils, leaving human remains strewn in their wake.

“We have a long-standing battle with the sea,” says Hector Murphy, longtime caretaker of a church cemetery, some 200 years old, hovering on a cliff in Ingonish, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. For decades rising waters near this fishing village, on the famed Cabot Trail, have been chewing on the land—high craggy faces and soft sandy shores alike—and spitting out its bones. Walking the beach below the church’s high perch, Murphy himself has found skulls and other skeletal remains scattered in the sand.

“These people were buried well back from the shoreline, but the water has moved in at least 100 feet,” he says. Little is known about the interred there—cemetery records were lost in a fire years ago. With no funding to shore up the site, “it’s upsetting, but there’s nothing we can do.”

Some 350 miles down the Atlantic coast, a cemetery at Rochefort Point, at the famous 18th-century Fortress of Louisbourg, has gotten more attention: Scientists there are excavating and moving remains before the sea washes them away. To help make sure they accomplish this mission, Amy Scott, a bioarcheologist at the University of New Brunswick, has turned the effort into a multi-year field project for her students.

So far, teams have relocated 104 bodies—they’ve had to sift through mixed bones, as unmarked plots were sometimes inadvertently reused—but there may be 1,000 still interred. “There’s a lot of information already about this historic place,” Scott says. Now, its bones are helping “tell the stories of the everyday people who lived here.”

Scott says that while she can’t ID particular people from remains, bones offer some general information. For instance, “here’s a woman who died in her 30s. She has certain markers that tell us what she ate, that she did heavy labor, and that she grew up in southern France.”

Remote seaside towns aren’t alone in their grave troubles. In a cemetery near Buffalo, New York, last spring, a mother who went to visit the grave of her son discovered him missing. Shifting soils and a collapsing hill had forced officials to relocate more than 100 coffins, including her son’s, to more stable plots. "Do you know how sad that is to come on Easter and have your son's grave look like this?" she said to Spectrum News.

Yet coasts are particularly vulnerable, with storm surges joining rising waters for a one-two punch. “It’s a bit macabre,” says William Neal, emeritus professor of geology at Grand Valley State University. “But when these storm events occur and groundwater levels rise, coffins can burst forth from the ground. Not the resurrection expected!”

Consider Louisiana’s grave upheavals during Hurricane Katrina, when flooding sent nearly a thousand coffins and vaults floating along the Gulf Coast, some for miles, scattering skeletal remains hither and yon. Identifying the displaced was a logistical—and emotional—nightmare. One resident told the New York Times that he discovered his grandmother’s remains disinterred, still in her pink gown. Another whose family was affected told reporters it was vital that these lost souls go back underground. “The problem,” he said, “is trying to figure out how to put them back together."

“Cemeteries by the sea are classic examples of how humans erroneously accept that nature [is] static,” says Neal. Even without rising waters, “normal coastal erosion would cause shoreline retreat. But sea level has been rising [for some 8,000 years] since the Ice Age ended and the glacial ice caps melted.” It was rapid initially and then slowed, he says, “but accelerated again in the late 19th or early 20th century. While some people on low-lying coasts may not have alternatives for burials, “others do have a responsibility not to ignore Nature.”

Coastal communities represent more than a third of the global population. According to the UN, over 600 million people (10 percent of the world’s population) live in coastal areas that are less than 100 feet above sea level, while 2.4 billion (a little less than 40 percent) live within 60 miles of a coast. While coastline recession is widely variable from place to place, it can be 25 or even 50 feet per year. In the U.S., at least 40 percent of coastlines are suffering significant erosion. In some spots the land, and whatever is on it—or buried in it—is melting away like ice.

Over in Great Britain, St. Mary’s Church graveyard, in Whitby—the inspiration for a scene in Bram Stoker’s Dracula—began giving up its bones in 2013, after heavy rains contributed to a landslide. Bones that tumbled from the cliff were collected and reinterred, but cracks at the top continued to form. Engineers worked to stabilize the cliff—with netting, soil nails, and drainage—but natural forces will continue to threaten the famous site.

In a coastal village cemetery in Thiawlene, Senegal, not far from Dakar, graves are packed in tight, their tombstones jumbled and crumbling. Families there have stacked cinder blocks atop plots in a futile attempt to keep remains in place. Kids on the beach play with the human bones they find, as entire tombs are swept away by the unstoppable sea. Meanwhile, the Senegalese government estimates that 50 percent of its coastline is at high risk of destruction from the rising sea and increasing storm surges.

Back in the U.S., scientists have found a (relatively) bright side to all this dark news. Dated grave markers can help them measure the ocean’s expanding reach. Along the Eastern Shore of Maryland, tombstones discovered in salt marshes offer time-stamped evidence of rapid shoreline retreat. Joe Fehrer of The Nature Conservancy is studying a small family cemetery in the Robinson Neck Preserve on Taylor’s Island, Maryland, where markers indicate burials took place from 1818 to 1851.

“This area was once on relatively high wooded ground”—probably at least 1.5 feet above the water, he says. Now, water sloshes over his boots as he hikes in. To reach the spot and avoid sinking into the marsh, he recently had to reroute twice. “So much of this region is being inundated,” he says. “We’re losing a lot of cultural history as these cemeteries—entire communities—go under water.”

Changes in the landscape can signal where losses will occur next, he says, such as sites “where high marsh grass is thriving where it wasn’t before.” Another sign: the appearance of “ghost forests,” which appear when rising groundwater, often salty, kills a stand of trees. As the grove topples, any graves beneath it are exposed.

“Especially in low-lying areas,” Fehrer says, “it’s not uncommon now to see a burial with a heavy concrete lid so the casket doesn’t pop out of the ground in a storm or flood.”

A longer-term fix is to move remains—as people have done throughout history. At Louisbourg, for example, Amy Scott says a number of cemeteries were relocated during the outpost’s active years, in the 1700s. For modern cemeteries still in use, families whose loved ones are unearthed say they expect reburial in more permanent plots.

Engineers do have ways to bolster hillsides and slow erosion. On Hart Island in New York, the bodies of more than a million New Yorkers—people who were poor (and often HIV-positive) in life, or whose corpses were unclaimed at death—are interred in a still-active public cemetery (the largest in the country). Officials there have promised to reconstruct the eroding shoreline to stabilize graves that have been losing bones to the Long Island Sound. (Bones recovered from the shores are now being reburied—by Rikers Island inmates.)

But hardscapes such as seawalls, which deflect wave energy instead of dispersing it the way natural shorelines do, are often prohibitively costly. They’re also usually temporary solutions as nature continues to work against them.

Nobody knows how many village and family plots, how many unmarked mass graves—of soldiers and slaves, of prisoners of war and the poor—remain along the edges of North America and around the world. But especially in places where there’s no one left to claim them, the dead face continued disturbance.

Where moving isn’t feasible, says Fehrer, “the best we can do is document these places, these people, with the realization that at some point it will all be history.”

Neal, too, advises a practical approach to these vulnerable sacred grounds: “Move [them], or let [them] fall in,” he says. “But don’t waste resources trying to hold back the sea.”

Because the sea keeps on coming. Rising waters lap at the fence of an 18th-century Maori graveyard in the Coromandel Peninsula that’s still in use today. At high tide, the sea threatens the remains of many elderly people and children who were victims of disease epidemics, plus members of local families more recently interred. Decades ago there was talk of building a seawall, but nothing came of it. More recently, families have started debating whether to move the dead before it’s too late.

“I hear them calling,” a local woman told a reporter for Teaomaori in 2017. “I hear them saying, do something.”

New York is the nose, Alaska the tail, and Cuba is a giant sausage.

This story ends with an eccentric entrepreneur distributing 2,500 maps of the United States in the shape of a pig to a gala of Civil War veterans. It begins with sewing machines. Grover and Baker sewing machines, to be precise.

In 1849, William Baker, a Boston tailor with little formal education, had a problem. The newly invented sewing machine didn't work as well as he needed. So in 1851, alongside fellow tailor William Grover, Baker obtained the patent for an innovation that changed the industry forever: machines with a pair of needles that could create chains of interlocking stitches. Their invention took off, and Baker and Grover teamed up with other sewing machine manufacturers to form a trust. They made a killing.

“At the age of 40, the trust was about to run out, so he decides to sell out and retire,” says Gloria Polizzotti Greis, Executive Director of the Needham History Center and Museum. It was 1868, and Baker, astronomically wealthy and barely middle-aged, moved to an 800-acre summer estate in Needham, Massachusetts. There, he built an amusement park that included a 225-room luxury hotel, a pleasure lake, saloons, restaurants, two bear pits, an underground crystal grotto, and a diorama of Darwin’s theory of evolution that contrasted stuffed monkeys with an artfully placed mirror revealing the human onlooker’s own face. Most prized of Baker’s many attractions, however, was a state-of-the-art hog butchery facility he dubbed “the sanitary piggery.”

Baker’s interest in social causes was as sprawling as his acreage. He invested in the post-Civil War reconciliation of the North and South, women’s education, and a collection of elaborate statues of groan-worthy puns (he called one sculpture of a giant bottle, made of empty liquor containers, “A Monument to The Departed Spirits”).

But first among Baker’s interests was public health. Specifically, the burgeoning field of food science. That, combined with his love of pork, gave rise to a bold hypothesis: If farmers raised pigs in hygienic conditions, they could eliminate food-borne disease.

Today, says Greis, that idea may sound like a no-brainer. But in 1875, the germ theory of disease was hardly common knowledge. While Americans relied on pork as a staple meat, pigs were city animals, raised on scraps from urban kitchens and street refuse. “If you think about what pigs are likely to find in a city street, in a day when horses still pull the carts, it was pretty horrific,” says Greis.

Baker’s ideas reflected an age of feverish cultural change. The Civil War and its deprivations were over, and rapid industrialization led to growing cities that were laden with opportunities for the exchange of goods, ideas, and pathogens. According to Benjamin R. Cohen, a professor of engineering studies at Lafayette College who has written a history of the pure food movement, food production after the Civil War rapidly shifted from local cottage industries to industrial conglomerates. Tainted products were common.

In response to this trust deficit, a coalition of scientists, religious reformers, and progressive female activists founded the pure food movement. They approached their work with evangelical zeal. “It was a crusade,” says Cohen. “Between 1877 and 1906, they proposed 190 separate pure food bills in Congress.”

But when Baker unveiled his sanitary piggery in 1875, the pure food movement was just beginning. “He was ahead of his time,” says Susan Schulten, chair of the Department of History at the University of Denver and a historian of American cartography. Baker hatched a plan to secede his estate from the town of Needham and create his own independent “hygienic village,” “Hygeria,” a scheme that the Massachusetts state legislature shot down.

His porcine endeavors, meant to model sanitary livestock practices and accompanied by a hygienic cooking school, were more successful. “The sanitary piggery was going to revolutionize how people made pork,” Schulten says. Baker’s hogs were kept in such pristine conditions, he liked to joke, they slept in their own miniature beds with blankets and pillows.

One starry night in 1875, Baker threw an opulent gala. The fete, a commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, had two aims: to bring former Union and Confederate soldiers together for a night of good-natured excess, and to celebrate the sanitary piggery. At the end of the evening, each of Baker’s guests left with a “good cheer souvenir,” a map of the United States in the shape of a pig. The country’s snout was Maine, its bum California, the tip of its tail touched Alaska, and its Florida-shaped hoof stomped on the plump sausage of Cuba. Baker called it the “Porcineograph.”

Around the edges of this fanciful chart, bright with the new technology of color lithography printing, was a symbol of each state, complemented by a signature pork dish. The dishes are equal parts familiar (gumbo for Louisiana and pork and beans for Massachusetts) and fanciful (antelope and roast pork for Colorado, and bear steak, grapes, and ham sandwiches for California). The map also included notes on famous legal cases involving pigs in U.S. history, meant to convey, says Greis, that "pigs are responsible for the foundation of American democracy."

Even these imaginative leaps reveal the aspirational zeal of Baker’s vision for the United States. At a time when the Union had barely been saved, when the purchase of Alaska was widely regarded as a waste of money, and the West consisted of an assemblage of territories and newly incorporated states, Baker’s map depicted one country from coast to coast. “It has everything to do with a desire to bring the country back together,” says Schulten. Pork was the glue.

Baker’s Porcineograph also bears hints of the more sinister side of both American expansionism and industrialization. Many Western territories were still contested, with white settlers violently seizing land from indigenous Americans. At the same time, the United States was beginning to turn its attention to empire beyond its shores, a trend perhaps unintentionally evoked by the image of the U.S.'s pig feet stepping on Hawai’i and Cuba. Indeed, the very notion of “pure food” was, like much science of the time, mired in racist ideas of ethnic purity, which frequently spiraled into xenophobia. For some food activists of the time, says Cohen, “what’s right and proper is that which is more white and more pure, which is a racist perception.”

Still, says Greis, Baker’s innovations contributed to a movement toward food safety that benefitted immigrants and poor city dwellers. Baker himself died in 1888 of a heart attack, perhaps spurred by the heartbreak of learning that the Massachusetts government had denied him permission to build his sanitary village. Baker's wife, who had never been a fan of her husband’s hobbies, sold off the estate soon after his death, and the piggery was disbanded.

Yet Baker’s legacy lived on, in the training of those who had attended his sanitary cooking school and in the plentiful donations he had given to educational institutions. A century and a half later, the map depicting American "Gehography" is a reminder of a cultural moment where Americans such as Baker dreamed of a reunited country powered by industrialization and replete with clean pork for all.

“It’s a little bit of his moral outlook, a little bit of his political outlook, a little bit of his belief in the way to improve public health,” says Greis of what Baker meant to convey with the Porcineograph. “And a little bit his belief in the overwhelming superiority of pigs.”

The Nain Rouge has been stirring up trouble—and maybe generating some goodwill—for more than 300 years.

This week we’re looking at the ways that ghostly and ghastly tales evolve—shifting shape, but never quite dying out. Previously: How the Demogorgon went from scribal error to “Stranger Things,” and the Flying Dutchman’s imperial path to the big screen.

For the last decade, on the first Sunday in spring, a demon has stalked the streets of Detroit. Sometimes he arrives on a forklift. Once he rode in on a mechanical dragon; another time he was astride a float modeled on a cockroach, like a mischievous Poseidon on a scuttling chariot.

However he makes his entrance, this creature, known as the Nain Rouge, loves to rile up the locals. At the annual Marche du Nain Rouge, a parade that’s also part concert and part interactive theater, complete with elaborate homemade costumes and floats, someone dresses up as the Nain and taunts thousands of Detroiters at a time—whoever shows up to stroll, cheer, or jeer. (Organizers wouldn’t say who gets the dreaded or coveted demon gig.) All in all, it’s a festivity that Francis Grunow, the co-founder and parade director, calls “kind of a mashup of Halloween, Burning Man, and Mardi Gras.”

Each year, between 5,000 and 7,000 people turn out to celebrate Detroit’s favorite demon, or to cast him away. Depending on whom you ask, the ill-tempered imp is either defender of the city, who appears to warn people that danger is coming, or the very engine of said danger, delighting in any disasters that befall the place.

Legend has it that the Nain has been visiting Detroit since at least the 1700s. His tale features in the 1884 volume Legends of le Détroit, collected by the local author and historian Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin, who was descended from some of the city’s first French arrivals.

To hear Hamlin tell it, the trouble began at a party in Québec one March evening in 1701. At the castle of St. Louis, she writes, the French explorer Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac—who would soon depart to claim Detroit for the French and their fur traders—and other officials gathered around a table, “resplendent with costly silver and sparkling glass,” their heads swimming with wine from the building’s “noted cellars.”

Into that shimmering scene burst a “swarthy,” fortune-telling crone with a scrawny black cat on her shoulder. She called herself Mère Minique, La Sorcière, and she came bearing a warning. Things would work out well for Cadillac, she promised, but if—and only if—he appeased the Nain Rouge, or “Red Dwarf.”

Hamlin describes the creature as the ornery “demon of the Strait” (détroit is the French word for “strait,” a narrow waterway linking two other bodies of water). The Nain was a creature “most malignant,” the prophetess said, but “capable of being appeased by flattery.” If Cadillac played his cards right, the woman foretold, he would “found a great city which one day will have more inhabitants than New France now possesses.” Cross the demon or let your ambition run amok, she cautioned Cadillac, and “your name will be scarcely known in the city you founded.”

Cadillac set out on his mission the next day. By July, he and his company arrived at the present-day Detroit River, historic home of the Anishinaabe people and other indigenous groups, including the Huron and Miami, and began setting up Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit on its western bank.

As the Detroit Historical Society recounts it, the next few years were fairly kind to Cadillac: He and his wife welcomed a daughter, and several Native American tribes, game to trade with the French newcomers, established communities in the area around the fort. But there were tussles, too—and Cadillac started to get a little big for his britches, the Historical Society reports, demanding that settlers treat him “as a landlord,” and requiring them to pay rent and give up some of their crops. Traders had to hand over a bounty too.

Cadillac’s ambition was ratcheting up—even former supporters would go on to protest his growing greed—and one evening in 1707 he and his wife overheard an unsettling snippet of conversation. Someone claimed to have spotted the Nain Rouge. Cadillac’s wife bristled, and grabbed her husband’s hand: “‘Beware of the Nain Rouge’ was what that prophetess told you,” Hamlin recounts her saying. “When he should come, misfortune was nigh.”

Cadillac shrugged it off, and the pair kept walking—until the demon scrambled into their path. He was “very red in the face, with a bright, glistening eye,” and razor-sharp teeth. Maybe he seemed almost metallic: Hamlin writes that the demon’s visage “emitted a cold gleam like the reflection from a polished surface, bewildering and dazzling all who came within its focus.”

Cadillac was not pleased to make the demon’s acquaintance. He apparently thwacked the Nain with his cane, demanding, “Get out of my way, you red imp!” The creature obeyed, Hamlin writes, disappearing from sight as “a fiendish, mocking laugh pierced the still night air.”

Sure enough, Cadillac’s life soon took a nosedive. He was by nature quarrelsome and prone to lying, and habitually inflated his own victories and downplayed his fumbles, recounts the historian Yves F. Zoltvany in a brief biography. (Zoltvany casts Cadillac as a “scoundrel,” who had “never been anything but a cunning adventurer in search of personal enrichment.”) The fortune-teller had warned him to not let his ambition take the wheel, but Cadillac ignored the advice, and soon after his run-in with the Nain, Cadillac's superiors had had enough: He was removed from his post in Detroit and shipped off to Louisiana, which he considered a “wretched place.”

The Nain couldn’t save Cadillac from himself, but legend has it that the creature showed up over the years on the eve of catastrophe in the city. In 1805, when fire ripped through Detroit, Hamlin says, “many an old habitant thought they caught a glimpse of his malicious face.”

Hamlin writes that the tales in her volume had been in her family for generations, and that she’d bolstered them with her own research. It’s also possible that the lore was somewhat syncretic, borrowing strands from the various cultures that co-existed—somewhat uneasily—in Detroit at the time. In the 18th- and 19th-century Midwest, French and indigenous cultures intermingled. In some trading towns, bicultural marriages and households were common, says Tiya Miles, a historian at Harvard University whose research includes Native-American and African-American history in 18th-century Detroit.

“While French Catholics would have been suspicious of beliefs that seemed anti-Christian, they may have picked up bits and pieces about indigenous culture heroes that stuck with them and influenced how they recalled and interpreted folktales from their homeland,” Miles says. “And it is even possible that the French imagining or retooling of Nain Rouge in and around the walled settlement of Detroit, where the French viewed some Native people as allies but others as enemies, was partly a projection of French settlers’ racialized anxieties about a lurking indigenous threat.”

To this day, there’s disagreement about whether the Nain is a friend or a foe. At the Marche du Nain Rouge, the demon scales the steps of the city’s massive Masonic Temple to reveal the ways he plans to meddle in Detroit’s business in the coming year. (Once, he threatened to become the city’s emergency manager. Another time, he announced plans to launch NainCo—what Grunow describes as a dystopic, “insidious corporate interest behind everything.”)

Each year the Nain snarls and heckles. But ultimately, at the end of the parade, he leaves. Just before the festivities morph into a full-on party, Grunow and his collaborators engineer a bit of catharsis among attendees—maybe holding up a cheerful banner, or celebrating a genuine marriage proposal. In each case, it’s something that irks the Nain. He does not “want to deal with all the positivity” coming from the crowd, Grunow says. “He’s just disgusted by it.” The Nain retreats, chased away by an onslaught of earnestness.

But some locals think everyone should just try to get along. In a 2016 deep dive about the Nain Rogue in Detroit Metro Times, a local alt weekly paper, reporter Lee DeVito spoke to John E. L. Tenney, a Nain enthusiast who believes that the demon gets an unjustly bad rap. Tenney and his fellow Nain-lovers have flanked the parade with signs reading “Stop Nain Shame,” “Nain Is Nice,” and “Don’t Dread the Red.” Tenney contends that the Nain is less a rapscallion than a guardian angel.

Plus, he adds, it’s a matter of neighborliness. “The Nain has been a resident of Detroit for longer than any of us,” Tenney writes on his website, “and the spirit of the Nain will continue long after we’re gone.”

The Marche du Nain Rouge comes but once a year, but elsewhere in the city, the Nain hangs around all the time. He was the inspiration for the Detroit Dwarf brew at Detroit Beer Company. And this autumn, the new Nain Rouge Brewery is slated to open a taproom adjacent to the new restaurant Smith & Co. in an old industrial space in the city’s Midtown neighborhood.

Grunow says there’s room to think about the demon either way. “For me, the crux of it is that there’s an enigmatic quality no matter which way you slice it,” he says. “I think it’s totally reasonable to have a variety of perspectives on it.”

So grab a beer and raise a toast—resentfully or lovingly—to Detroit’s patron saint of shenanigans.

As seas and storms erode coastlines, cemeteries are giving up their dead.

A skull drops into the sea in Nova Scotia. A femur juts out of a stream bank in Texas. A coffin breaks through the soil in New York. A fisherman nets a tombstone off the coast of Virginia.

“Especially in low-lying areas,” Fehrer says, “it’s not uncommon now to see a burial with a heavy concrete lid so the casket doesn’t pop out of the ground in a storm or flood.”

Where moving isn’t feasible, says Fehrer, “the best we can do is document these places, these people, with the realization that at some point it will all be history.”

Neal, too, advises a practical approach to these vulnerable sacred grounds: “Move [them], or let [them] fall in,” he says. “But don’t waste resources trying to hold back the sea.”

“I hear them calling,” a local woman told a reporter for Teaomaori in 2017. “I hear them saying, do something.”

It helps to have cold storage and room to hold a wake.

Jasper McCarthy, the fifth-generation owner of the pub that carries his family’s name, pulled his first pint at the age of 10 and buried his first body three years later. For nearly two centuries, the McCarthy family has been serving Irish spirits in Fethard, a quaint village in County Tipperary fortified by a 13th-century stone wall. A hearse is now parked in the old livery stable out back, but otherwise little has changed at McCarthy’s Pub, Restaurant, and Undertakers since it was founded in 1840 by Michael McCarthy, Jasper’s great-great-grandfather.

The worn wooden walls, textured by tobacco smoke and time, are adorned with faded photographs, decades-old newspaper clippings, and horse-racing memorabilia. Funeral ledgers, dust-covered and peeling with age, are stacked haphazardly on antique grocery shelves. A cast-iron stove fights the chill of the Irish winter and partitions called snugs, set with stained glass, frame the front section of the bar. Traditionally, these nooks were for women, who were not permitted, by policy and propriety, to drink in the main bar. The frosted glass on the front door reads “McCarthy’s Hotel and Pub,” though the former has long since closed.

McCarthy’s is not the only pub in Ireland that serves beer alongside burials, but it is one of the last. This seemingly unusual commercial pairing used to be quite common, but has steadily declined since funeral homes were introduced in the late 1960s. “It wasn’t uncommon for a publican to combine undertaking with their normal day-to-day business 50 or 60 years ago, but the number has declined over the years,” says Tom Coburn, a longtime casket supplier. “Throughout the Republic of Ireland there are maybe 100 publicans that also still do the undertaking.”

“In my home town of Newry, there were three public houses/undertakers within 50 yards,” writes Iain Harkness of East Lothian in a column in the Irish Daily Mail. “As children, we would play among the beer barrels and coffins out the back.”

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the dual role flourished in rural Ireland, where publicans often ran multiple businesses from the same premises to compensate for low foot traffic. “Back then the local publican was a general factotum. He just did everything, including the undertaking,” says Coburn. Country pubs doubled as groceries, butchers, hardware stores, carpenters, and of course, undertakers. “You could buy anything in a pub, from a needle to an anchor,” recalled Tommy O’Neill, a carriage driver from Dublin, in Dublin Pub Life and Lore: An Oral History. For example, Michael McCarthy was listed in a 1889 business directory as a baker, grocer, spirits dealer, draper, and post car and hearse driver.

Since the early 18th century, pubs have been deeply woven into the fabric of Irish political, social, and economic life. “At the time there were no community halls or neighborhood meeting places. So therefore, all social, recreational, political, and economic activities were concentrated in the pub,” says Eamonn Casey, a pub historian and author of The Dublin Pub Saunter. With so much of a community’s life centered in the pub, it was natural that they would also play a prominent role in death.

“The publican was the man who christened them, married them, and buried them, the local people,” said John O’Dwyer, a Dublin publican, in Dublin Pub Life and Lore.

In many ways, the combination of publican and undertaker was natural within the context of a traditional Irish wake. Up until the middle of the 20th century, wakes were raucous, multi-day affairs where alcohol flowed freely and traditional taboos were temporarily suspended. “It was very convenient for the family,” explains Coburn. “At a traditional Irish wake there would be a lot of drinking done to give the deceased a good send off and a bit of a party.”

Traditionally, locals looked to the publican to provide alcohol for the wake—and money for the funeral. “If there was a death in the family they always depended on one person [to] go to the publican for a loan of money for the funeral,” noted Mikey Boy, from the Liberties district in Dublin, in Dublin Pub Life and Lore, “And always after the burial there was a good session [at the pub].”

Pubs always had a place in commemorating the dead, but the actual foray into undertaking can be traced back to the Great Famine in the late 1840s and early 1850s, in which an estimated one million people—one-eighth of the total population—died from disease and starvation. Mortuaries and medical practitioners struggled to keep pace with the endless flow of corpses. The bodies needed to be stored somewhere, lest they spread infection or be consumed by wild animals.

And this is where the centrality of the pub to community life returns. The Coroners Act of 1846 mandated that dead bodies be brought to the nearest public house. Publicans were required to store the corpses until an inquest was held, and those that refused were heavily fined. (Remarkably, the requirement was on the books until 1962, though it had stopped being enforced long before.) It was also a practical matter. In the days before refrigeration, beer cellars provided a cold storage space to delay decomposition. Eventually, even after the famine had passed, some pubs gained a reputation for their services and remained in the business. For example, the Templeogue Inn, which was located next to a dangerous road bend in Dublin, was nicknamed “The Morgue” because so many traffic accident victims were dropped on its doorstep.

During this time, some aspiring publicans even opened mortuaries first, since the establishments were allowed to serve alcohol. “Many pubs received licenses because they had facilities where a body could be held overnight,” says Casey. The Dropping Well Pub, located on the banks of the Dodder River in South Dublin, opened as a morgue in 1847. Shortly after, the proprietor, John, caught an infection from all the dead bodies on the premises. He died of complications in 1850.

Sensing an opportunity, some of the publicans tasked with storing dead bodies took the next logical step and developed side businesses as undertakers, which included making funeral arrangements with the cemetery, priest, and family. They installed autopsy tables and separate rooms in which to hold wakes. “Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, families were often not in the position to host a wake,” explains Coburn. “The homes in Ireland would have been really small and sparse and not have the facilities to have a good wake.” The pub was like a home away from home. This was certainly the case at McCarthy’s. “Before we had a funeral home, bodies were waked in a side room off the pub,” says Jasper McCarthy.

As society changed, so, too, did the pub’s function within it. Increased mobility brought other stores within reach, so not everything had to be procured at the pub. Modern funeral homes and hospital mortuaries made the storage and viewing of corpses in pubs unnecessary. Irish pubs have always played a part in funerary rituals—and probably always will—but their role has expanded and contracted over time, constantly evolving to meet the needs of their communities. While the future of the publican-undertaker trade is uncertain, at least a few Irish bartenders can still properly prepare a stiff one.

Two weeks before opening night, vicious winds ripped the roof off of their homemade haunt.

This year, Troy Yu and Aaron Bolton spent more than a thousand hours building Gothic Hills Cemetery, an elaborate haunted house in California’s San Fernando Valley. But a few weeks ago, vicious winds ripped through the neighborhood, tearing the roof off of a majority of the walkthrough and damaging other central set pieces. Opening night was just two weeks away.

Yu wasn’t sure that all the hard work could be salvaged. He wrote to his followers online, “We've suffered nearly complete destruction of our haunt in the 60mph winds we had last night.” The final room of the haunt, considered the most impressive part of the attraction, was hit the hardest. With ceiling framing and walls now lying on the ground, Troy went on, “We’re assessing the damage and will update when we know where to go from here. It seems no matter how much we try to increase our wind-worthiness each year, the winds have got news for us.”

After much debate, Yu and Bolton made a decision. Even though their creation was in tatters, they were going to try to reconstruct it. They put out a call asking for volunteers to help with repairs, and covered the cost of unexpected damage themselves. Their efforts went into overtime. They did have one comforting thought: This was not the first time they’d constructed a haunted house on a seemingly impossible deadline. And this time, they had a community to help them.

Home haunts date back to 1802, when Marie Tussaud’s gruesome display of wax figures first began to terrify audiences, according to Chris Heller in a story for Smithsonian.com. A few elements have become instantly recognizable: fog machines, cotton cobwebs, fun-sized candy bars. Presently, the home haunt community ranges from modest yard displays to ambitious walkthroughs. Groups like CalHauntS and SoCal Valley Haunters, which host skill-building meetups for haunted house makers, aim to take things to another level.

Between the dusty, sun-bleached mountains of the San Fernando Valley are numerous cookie-cutter suburban homes. Many are barely decorated, save for the occasional American flag or party store skeleton. They seem to blend into each other, one family home after the next, until visitors come upon Gothic Hill Cemetery’s corner property.

On a warm day in October, Troy Yu is waiting behind a billowing gray Grim Reaper cloak that covers his front door. He’s wearing a Gothic Hills t-shirt designed by Bolton, flamingo shorts, and socked feet. The interior of his home looks like any other: a large, comfy sectional, dogs demanding belly rubs, a few fall decorations. But one thing stands out—there’s almost no natural light coming from the patio door. Yu’s family gives up space and comfort for the sake of the haunt.

Outside, jack-o-lanterns and headstones are secured to the ground with construction-grade rebar, to help keep set pieces in place against the harsh winds. Yu is followed by Bolton, wearing the shirt he designed and a pair of paint-stained shorts, and their security team—Yu’s two cuddly brown dogs, Pixel and Jax. Together they explain the story behind the haunt’s inhabitants: the Fitzroy family, which has hundreds of pages of backstory that guests may never see. The Gothic Hills team keeps the story as an always-evolving reference, to help inform and inspire their decisions within the homegrown attraction.

Yu and Bolton have designed the haunt to look like a historic family mausoleum, complete with handmade decor and multimedia components. It takes up the entirety of the backyard, butting up against the house. Visitors will pass the large, imposing mausoleum facade and follow a tour guide into the halls that begin the haunt.

Yu, who owns the house, is executive director of Gothic Hills Cemetery, which is both a home haunt and nonprofit foundation. When he was young, his parents loved Halloween and passed their passion on to their children. Troy’s father, an electrician, was the haunter, making a small haunt in their garage every year with masks and a few scarecrows. One year, the garage successfully scared the pants off of Yu’s childhood bully, who went home crying. He didn’t cause any trouble after that night.

Yu became a high school volunteer in the Haunted Forest, a Halloween attraction in his Michigan hometown that raised money for various after-school clubs. Each club could design their own small haunt zone that was overseen by the director, to ensure themes remained family-friendly. After graduation, Yu taught himself carpentry, set design, and engineering, and he took over the haunt for a few years after he graduated. He fondly remembers helping kids build sets and make their creepy creations a reality.

Bolton, the creative director and designer, also learned to love Halloween as a child. His parents tasked him with decorating the family home, which he sprayed with Silly String to imitate spiderwebs. Years later, he began to dream of becoming a theme park designer, and met Troy when he needed help building a convention booth years ago. (When they’re not building haunts, Yu works as a photographer and Bolton works as a freelance designer; they’ve spent over $20,000 of their own money on the haunt since they began working together.)

Yu first dreamed up the storyline for the haunt on a flight home from London. He and his husband had visited Highgate Cemetery, a gorgeous Gothic cemetery where 170,000 people have been buried since 1839. Gothic Hills Cemetery opened in 2016 and saw 660 people in just six hours, across two evenings. (Yu and Bolton would rather round up to 666.) They’ve fought to keep the tradition going: Yu was forced to move one year, and had to sell or discard most of his haunt; last year, the Camp Fire threatened Troy’s neighborhood. He recalls seeing his walls glowing with the orange haze of the nearby wildfire.

Over time, the team has gotten to know like-minded home haunters across Southern California. At monthly meetups like CalHauntS, which has over 400 member and about 30 regular participants, they share work, find inspiration, and talk technique. Another source of support is Rick West, the creative director and co-founder of Midsummer Scream, an annual summertime horror convention that thousands attend in Long Beach, California. West was so impressed with Gothic Hills Cemetery that he asked Yu and Bolton if they would exhibit at the convention. They were nervous: They were still rebuilding what they had lost during Yu’s move, and had never done something of this scale before. But they pulled it off in only two days. Inside the convention hall stood the Fitzroy mausoleum, the facade of the home haunt turned into a convention attraction. It was flanked by cemetery imagery and an illuminated full moon, and it drew over 1,300 people over two days.

Creating a home haunt is not a simple task, and Yu’s best advice is to partner up with like-minded people. A majority of the Gothic Hills haunt relies on woodworking and “haunter’s gold,” which is what Yu calls foam. It’s the raw material for many of their props and intricate features, such as concrete bricks, urns, and tombstones. He and Bolton use canvas, paint, and texturing liquid to create realistic textures. Many of their pieces are made by hand, including a stunning urn that was gifted to Gothic Hills Cemetery by local artist, Kara Walker.

Yu and Bolton rely on the help of about 10 volunteers during construction and on show nights. Many are locals with an interest in set design and production, and they pick up techniques they could then use to conjure their own creepiness. The haunt itself is a free attraction, funded in part by donations from visitors, a local nursery that loans plants out to create a spooky forest vibe, and other Halloween lovers who are looking to rehome their decor. They also work with EcoSet, a women-owned business that recycles theater, movie, and television sets. Gothic Hills Cemetery even has a few pieces from the set of the HBO series Veep.

For the time being, the goal is to keep the haunt out of the unforgiving clutches of the wind, and hope Pixel and Jax tolerate the growing crowds. (Visitors can find opening hours, along with updates on the wind, on their social media pages.) The duo has big dreams for the future, like more conventions, a larger haunt with more scares, and eventually a professional haunt, one that’s indoors and large enough for massive crowds. Yu says he’ll be “launching a dead body side business” next year, making hyper-realistic corpse props for haunt and film sets. He’s already an expert in how haunted houses can rise again.

To stave off boredom, some people donned sheets and menaced the public.

In 1882, in the southeast Australian state of Victoria, repeated attacks on the general public were carried out by a figure known only as the “Wizard Bombardier.”

This individual was known for wearing an ostentatious outfit of white robes and a sugarloaf hat. The Wizard’s strategy involved disorienting people with loud screams before hurling stones and other sorts of missiles at them. Then the ghoulish individual made a quick dash and was gone.

Attacks like these, in which pranksters disguised as ghosts would wreak havoc, came to be known as “ghost hoaxing.” There were many cases and perpetrators in Australia from the late 19th century to the First World War—to the point that rewards were offered for the apprehension of ghost hoaxers.

In this era, Australia was the perfect location for villains and rogues who wished to imitate apparitions for their own ends. David Waldron, author of the article “Playing the Ghost: Ghost Hoaxing and Supernaturalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Victoria,” says that the lack of professionalized police meant that Australia had a particular “lawlessness.” That, along with an abundance of leisure time and a lack of affordable entertainment options, created an environment ideal for ghost hoaxers, who often used their own theatrics to entertain themselves.

Technology helped make the ghost pranksters look spooky. As Waldron writes, the recent invention of phosphorescent paint meant that individuals could glow in the dark as they menaced others, which made their outfits all the more believable and gave them an otherworldly appearance. Ghost hoaxers sometimes fashioned elaborate disguises: In 1895, for instance, one prankster created a costume to resemble a knight and emblazoned the phrase “prepare to meet thy doom” on his armor. To ratchet up the threat factor, this “knight” also threatened people with decapitation.

Australia during this period was very concerned about the threat of “larrikins”—rowdy youths out to cause mischief. Some of these larrikins regarded ghost costumes as suitable devices with which to commit crimes and violence. A sort of urban warfare was fought, with ghost hoaxers on one side and, on the other, vigilantes and armed guards determined to shoot the pranksters with buckshot, as a way to end their mischief.

Waldron writes that despite the ghost pranks being associated with the working class, once the ghosts were apprehended, “many if not most of those arrested” were in fact “school teachers and clerks and the like and a small number of middle-class women.”

One unexpected ghost hoaxer was Herbert Patrick McLennan, who in 1904 equipped himself with a glowing outfit that included a top hat, frock coat, and boots. Most menacingly, McLennan carried a cat o’nine tails whip and used it to assault women he encountered. When a bounty of £5 was placed on McLennan, he proceeded to declare war on the authorities, threatening to shoot anyone who came after him in a letter addressed to local leaders, in which he referred to himself as “the ghost.” When McLennan was arrested, however, he turned out to be a powerful, influential clerk and public speaker. McLennan was sent to jail, but he was soon back out again.

Some ghost hoaxers made their own custom disguises—such as wearing a coffin strapped to their backs, so as to give the appearance of having risen from the dead, as in one case in 1895. A female ghost hoaxer even incorporated music by playing a guitar while she skulked around near a hotel, according to reports in 1880 and 1889.

One theme common to ghost hoaxers was the use of pre-existing superstitions and locations that were regarded as haunted or associated with death, such as cemeteries, in order to double down on fear. Some hoaxers even painted a skull and crossbones in a particular location, to create a sense of fear before they arrived to wreak havoc.

To the wider community, ghost hoaxers presented a threat not just through fear but also via crime and violence, such as indecent exposure, sexual assault, or even just egg theft. Not all citizens were prepared to stay helpless in the face of this threat. In 1896, an ex-soldier named Charles Horman seemed to be a one-man army against the spectral impersonators. He opened fire with a shotgun on one youth who was pretending to be a ghost, while using a cane to attack another hoaxer who was assaulting a woman.

Parents whose children had been physically attacked by ghost hoaxers also took the law into their own hands. One woman unleashed her pit bull on a hoaxer who had assaulted her daughter. In 1913 a mob of vigilantes chased and beat a man wearing a glowing ghost outfit who had terrified an old man.

Eventually, the phenomenon of ghost hoaxers ended, hastened by the arrival of World War I, which took the lives of over 60,000 Australian soldiers. As Waldron says, the war showed that there were “far bigger issues at stake, and the symbolism of death [became] less amusing.” With human mortality no longer a premise for pranks, ghost hoaxers lost their spirit for good.

This story originally appeared on August 2, 2017.

When a moral panic swept over Europe's seaside casino playground.

In early 1883, a grisly broadsheet shocked Paris. Below the headline “Tragic Suicide of M. Andrieux at Monaco” was an illustration of a crowd of casino-goers, horrified and transfixed by the sight of a man, toppled back from a roulette table, his head seeping blood, a revolver at his side. According to the accompanying story, a prominent French politician had shot himself after gambling away his savings in the Mediterrranean casino-resort of Monte Carlo in Monaco. But in a surprise twist, the paper reported, French President Jules Grévy sent a telegram stating that the man was actually alive and well in Paris. Finally, text at the bottom of the page revealed the whole thing—image, story, telegram—to be an advertisement for The Mysteries of Monaco, an upcoming serialized roman d’actualité (news-inspired novel).

Within weeks, the story took another turn—a real one. As documented in a report by M. Vidal, director of the Monte Carlo Casino, afternoon gambling was suddenly interrupted by the desperate cries of a Parisian woman. She had lost her fortune, and management refused to front her the 2,000 francs she demanded as a condition for leaving the property. With that, she pulled from her dress “a six-shooter revolver loaded with one bullet” and brought it to her head. Guards wrestled the gun from her hands and she was escorted “without resistance” into the director’s office, where her demand was met. “This woman has lost almost 100,000 francs in the Casino since 1881,” concluded the report. “She admitted that she had no intention to kill herself but knew that there would be no better way to get what she wanted.”

Whether threatened or carried out, real, exaggerated, or imagined, suicide stories like these darkened the reputation of Monte Carlo for the first half-century of its existence. It’s fitting in a way. Excess, risk, desperation—they’re all part of Monte Carlo’s origin story.

In 1855, with her tiny Mediterranean monarchy facing financial ruin, Princess Caroline of Monaco hatched a rescue plan: build a seaside casino resort for all of Europe. At the time, the continent was in the grip of Christian moralism, with most nations outlawing gambling in public. This left Monaco as the only game in Europe, and after 10 years of casino mismanagement, it found a savior and champion in Francois Blanc.

Years earlier, Blanc had gamed the French stock market—earning him both a criminal conviction and popular awe, which he parlayed into a booming casino/spa in Bad Homburg, Germany. Monaco’s newly christened quarter of Monte Carlo, and its eponymous casino, would become his next empire. He brought professionalism to the gaming rooms and made a big show of Monte Carlo’s “honest odds.” And with the addition of a fine hotel, spa, grand opera house, lush tropical gardens, and seaside pigeon shoot, he gave the resort an air of aristocratic luxury. In 1870 alone, Monte Carlo boasted 150,000 visitors. “It was worldly and charming,” writes Mary Blume, author of Cote d’Azur: Inventing the French Riviera, “but its heart, if it had one, was clearly in the wrong place: the cathedral of Monaco was completed in 1886, well after the casino and the opera.”

Their pockets lighter, the hordes often spilled over into neighboring Nice, France, where the locals were less than thrilled. Some opposed gambling altogether, while others simply lamented that they couldn’t profit from it themselves. In turn, there emerged from Nice a growing wave of anti–Monte Carlo news and propaganda. By 1875 it included vivid claims of an epidemic of gambling-induced suicides.

In 1876, the Anglican Bishop of Gibraltar—denied in his request to build an Anglican church in Monaco by Prince Albert, a Roman Catholic—delivered a blistering polemic that referred to Monte Carlo as “a scandal not only to our religion, but also to the civilization of this nineteenth century.” Gambling, he seethed, causes “such a selfish heartlessness of character that, as was seen the other day, players will immediately continue their game after one of their party has committed suicide before their very eyes.”

Disgust and opprobrium with Monte Carlo’s reputation—fair or otherwise—swept across Europe and beyond. Over the following decades, these suicide tales made for regular news worldwide—as incessant as they were gruesome—some confirmed by death records, with far more utterly unverifiable. An “Italian nobleman” hung himself from a palm tree. A “Hungarian gentlemen” stabbed himself to death. Despondent gamblers guzzled carbolic acid and prussic acid, jumped from seaside cliffs, hotel windows, the rack-railway viaduct, a ledge high above the Sainte-Dévote Chapel. A Parisian woman strangled her two children before doing herself in. In his “dying agony” after shooting himself, a German overturned a candle in his hotel room and “was cremated before the fire brigade arrived.” Two young lovers asphyxiated themselves with charcoal fumes. Their purported suicide note read, “We have enjoyed the present; we have ruined our future at Monte Carlo; we prefer death to shame and misery.”

Routinely (and perhaps tellingly), the papers reported the victims’ gambling losses with precision—always huge—and offered a running tally of suicides to date. “The Monte Carlo black list, or rather death-toll, for the month of June,” reported the Scotsman in 1888, “is considerably lower than average … 23.”

Another standard story template was the tale of the “cover-up,” of casino management going to lengths to conceal the epidemic. Cold-hearted croupiers whisked fresh corpses through a hidden “sliding panel.” Guards plucked them from the gardens with a long rake. Bodies were mailed out of Monaco, sunk at sea, wedged into pianos. Blanc and casino management bought media silence, insisted Niçoise reports, and Monégasque authorities fudged official records. According to one recurring tabloid rumor, casino staff lined the victims’ pockets with cash before police arrived, so gambling losses could not be blamed. (Supposedly scam artists took advantage, splattering their faces with red paint, playing dead and waiting for the payoff, then dashing away richer.)

Internal correspondence from the casino archives suggests that some of these tales contained at least a kernel of truth. In one missive, for example, management complained that a suicide victim’s body had been left outside all night because the lazy guards went home before the casino’s midnight closure, leaving “no surveillance at the time when it would be most necessary.”

Skeptics raised doubts about the quantity of these suicide stories, and in response, tell-all books, tabloids, and soft-news outlets such as Cassell’s Saturday Journal doubled down. Their correspondents gossiped of a secret “suicides cemetery” on the steep mountainside above Monte Carlo, at the base of the promontory called Tête de Chien. Some claimed to have visited, illustrations were made, and an unnerving gravedigger quoted by a British wire service: “All these forty graves I have dug myself. They are all mine, and so are the people in them.” Depending on the story, the graves of suicides were marked with numbers, an “S,” or not at all. Over the years, their reputed location moved, from high-altitude isolation to a subsection of the official Monaco Cemetery, then to scattered spots all over the cemetery to avoid suspicion. U.S. State Department records of two actual suicides of Americans in the 1930s point to the likeliest truth behind some of these rumors: Their bodies were temporarily interred in numbered graves before being shipped home.

These stories, as one might expect, added to the fascination with Monte Carlo, and became a draw for tourists. Casino-goers asked to see (or sit in) the infamous “suicide chair” at the roulette table, rumored to have claimed 17 souls. Outside, constant gunshots made it seem like a suicide mania had gripped the entire principality (though it was probably just the pigeon shoot). Painter and gambler Edvard Munch sought out a recent suicide spot: “I had to look at the earth behind the bush as though I would still see blood.” And for those who couldn’t make the trip, an 1883 wire report, printed in the Ediburgh Evening News, promised that a Monte Carlo suicide waxworks, based on actual photos, was soon to open in Paris. (It never did.)

For all the hype, according to historian Mark Braude, author of Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle, there is no evidence that suicide rates were ever much higher in Monte Carlo than elsewhere. Some tales were true, others were surely invented, and still more at least embellished. They may have just drawn more attention because of where they took place. “It’s always about more than the suicide,” Braude says. “It’s about movement … people throwing off the shackles of home … going to this place and running wild.” In the young republic of France, in particular, the unease with Monte Carlo and its suicides was acutely political and moral. “Here are these ultimate rejections of everything having to do with community and the nation. And what has caused it?... The evils of speculative capitalism—people who want something for nothing and want to get rich without working.”

Today, suicide no longer haunts Monte Carlo. It is a tax haven for the world’s super-wealthy, its small harbor clotted with giant yachts. Monaco Cemetery is still there, and now involves a concrete hike—up staircases and winding streets, through narrow canyons of apartment towers, along the well-fenced ledges above Sainte-Dévote Chapel, past luxury car dealerships, police checkpoints, and public defibrillators (Monaco has the world’s oldest median age). As it did a century ago, the cemetery still commands a sweeping Mediterranean panorama. Josephine Baker is buried there, as is Sir Roger Moore. But there are no graves marked with a number or an “S.” The “suicides section,” if it ever existed, is nowhere to be found.

The digital descendants of 'yōkai' can be spotted in many Japanese games.

This week we’re looking at the ways that ghostly and ghastly tales evolve—shifting shape, but never quite dying out. Previously: the afterlife of Detroit's little red demon, and how Demogorgon went from scribal error to “Stranger Things.”

In 1666, a year that some might consider spooky, a 16-volume collection of scary stories came out in Japan, called the Otogibōko. One story concerns a monk named Sōgen, who lived in the temple of Mibu-dera in southern Kyoto. Sōgen was a lackluster monk, frequently stealing money and precious oil intended to be an offering to the gods. Sōgen died unpunished, but the gods knew of his crimes, so they gave him the cruel, celestially righteous punishment of spending eternity as a floating head in a fireball.

Sōgen-bi is one of the ghoulish creatures in Japanese folklore known as yōkai, or demons. Yōkai take many other bizarre forms, such as Waniguchi, shrine bells with reptilian bodies, and Kasa-obake, umbrellas with one eye and one leg. The creatures gained mainstream notoriety during Japan’s Edo period (1603–1868), when art and literature became available to and produced for the masses, says Rebekah Harmon, a fellow at the Tokyo National Museum and author of Yokaigrove.com. The scholar and artist Toriyama Sekien cemented the vast canon of yōkai in The Illustrated Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, which depicts the disgruntled head of Sōgen-bi wobbling in the air above a meandering stream.

Sōgen-bi, which translates to “Sōgen-fire,” is one of many fireball yōkai. They’re so common that they form their own distinct category: hi-no-tama, which translates to “orbs of fire.” Under the umbrella of hi-no-tama, there are even more subcategories, including onibi, which refers to strange blue lights that appear at sites of battle; kitsunebi, which refers to any fire created by magical foxes; and hitodama, which encompass the “benign manifestation of human souls,” Harmon says. Sōgen-bi falls in the last camp.

Though Hitodama is written using the kanji for “human souls,” they are not ghosts. “Hitodama are actually more of a generic supernatural phenomena that’s associated with graveyards and haunted places and spooky situations in Japanese folklore,” Hiroko Yoda, who translated Sekien’s yōkai encyclopedia with Matt Alt, writes in an email. “Although they're found in the same sorts of places, the big difference between them and ghosts are that hitodama generally don’t have their own stories or personalities.”

The Illustrated Night Parade of One Hundred Demons catalogs a plethora of ghostly fires, including Sōgen-bi, Chōchin-bi (lantern fire), Shiranui (unknown fire), and Kosenjō-no-hi (old battleground fire), Yoda says. Harmon believes that Sōgen-bi is a much more recent legend than other examples of hi-no-tama, a cautionary supernatural tale that was imported with Buddhism. “Punishment in the afterlife for one’s sins was not an indigenous belief in Japan,” she says, adding that people only came back as restless spirits if they died of betrayal or violence, or if their relatives did not perform the appropriate burial rites.

Unlike more corporeal yōkai, which seem to have no origin in the real world, hitodama likely originated as a way to explain will-o-the-wisps and other mysterious, naturally-occuring lights. “There's one called Aosagi-no-hi (Heron-fire) that is a glowing great blue heron,” Yoda says, adding that England has a similar heron spirit that likely originated in a spooklight.

Today, the digital descendants of yōkai can be spotted in many games, particularly in the world of Pokémon. “I don’t believe it’s ever been directly addressed by the creators, but fans have always made a lot of connections between the Pokémon and yōkai,” says Michael Goldstein, who wrote The Yōkai Character Collection. Fans frequently connect the Pokémon Gastly, which resembles a face floating in a ball of purple fire, to Sōgen-bi and other hitodama. “Gastly’s Japanese name is Ghos, which is obviously taken from ‘ghost,’” Yoda says. He thinks that Pokémon probably references hitodama in general, rather than Sōgen-bi in particular.

Other examples abound. Bloggers recognize the Shiftry, a Pokémon that resembles a maned animal with leaves for hands, as a modern-day version of tengu yōkai, a heavenly dog that wields magical fans made of leaves. The most explicit example of this connection may be Froslass, an Ice/Ghost-type Pokémon that seems to be an incarnation of the yōkai Yuki-Onna, a beautiful woman who appears in the snow and preys on lost travelers. In the game, a Pokédex entry for Frosslass reads: “Legends in snowy regions say that a woman who was lost on an icy mountain was reborn as FROSLASS.” And the official Yu-Gi-Oh! trading card game includes a monster card called the “Hinotama Soul,” which speaks for itself.

According to Harmon, other Yōkai live on in Nintendo’s video games. Consider the tale of the mountain hag Yama-uba. “In old stories, her body turns into gold and fine silks after she is killed,” she says. “Allegedly, this was the inspiration that led to defeated enemies turning into coins.” For those playing Mario Party anywhere near Kyoto, be grateful that Sōgen-bi no longer has hands—otherwise he might come for your coins.

Ingredients often included molasses, caraway seeds, ginger, and grief.

If you visit the Merchant’s House Museum, in New York City, on a Saturday in October, chances are good that you’ll leave with a funeral biscuit. Every autumn, the museum—the 19th-century homestead of the wealthy Tredwell family—mounts an exhibition of mourning garments and rituals. A black wreath hangs on the front door, and the curtains are drawn so the home is dark except for the flare of candlelight. The mirrors are veiled with black crepe, and lilies are arranged as they would have been to cloak the smell of a corpse laid out for a viewing in the parlor. On a table in the downstairs kitchen—province of the servants—there are stacks of slightly savory, ginger-colored cookies shrouded in white wrappers and sealed with black wax. Ann Haddad, the museum’s historian, bakes a fresh batch of these funeral biscuits each weekend, so that visitors can taste what it was like to mourn like a Victorian.

Funeral biscuits predate the Tredwells: They go back at least to the late 18th century, when The Gentleman’s Magazine, a London monthly, ran a short blurb about an advertisement for the cookies glimpsed in a shop window in the North Yorkshire town of Knaresborough. The writer—who signed off with “Syne”—couldn’t quite pinpoint “the origin of this ceremony,” but wrote that it seemed to call for “a kind of sugared biscuit, which are wrapt up, generally two of them together, in a sheet of white paper, sealed with black wax, and thus presented to each person attending the funeral.”

The little parcels were sometimes inscribed with poems, Bible verses, or other memento mori. One wrapper, printed in Yorkshire in 1828, to commemorate the passing of one 52-year-old Mrs. Oliver, lamented, "How feeble is our mortal frame! What dying worms we be." Occasionally, the dough was pressed into molds that left impressions of skulls, hearts, or other shapes. In 18th- and 19th-century England, it was customary for biscuits like these to accompany a formal, printed funeral invitation, “wrapped in a black-edged paper printed with suitably reflective verses and sealed with black wax” and tied with a black ribbon, writes University of Bristol folklorist and historian Helen Frisby in Traditions of Death and Burial. The more ornate wax seals might depict an hourglass, skull, or cherub flying toward Heaven. The cookies were also sometimes handed to mourners directly, or mailed to those who couldn’t make it.

The cookies often needed to be baked in fairly big quantities in a short period of time, so some bakeries made it clear to their customers that they could handle it if a sad, frazzled family needed help. Edmund Hollingshead, a “confectioner and biscuit baker, &c,” placed an ad in The Derby Mercury, in Derbyshire, England, in August 1837, guaranteeing that he could provide “Bride Cakes and Funeral Biscuits made on the shortest notice.”

The macabre confections are a mashup of various traditions—and possibly anxieties about death and the afterlife. Haddad, the museum historian, wonders if they have roots in “sin eating,” a murky tradition said to have been practiced in Wales and elsewhere in the United Kingdom. It involved recruiting living people—usually the poor or desperate, or, as the Buffalo Commercial crassly put it in 1900, "a long, lean, ugly, lamentable rascal"—to eat and drink over the bodies of the deceased, symbolically consuming their earthly sins so that they could ascend to Heaven. Jane Aaron, an emeritus professor of English at the University of South Wales, traces sin-eating's knotty path in a 2013 book about the Gothic tradition in Wales. In it, Aaron cites English antiquarian John Aubrey, who described the practice in the late 1680s as “an old Custome at Funeralls” in Wales and England, in which lower-class neighbors would stand over the body, working their way through bread and beer. In exchange for a sixpence, Aubrey wrote, the person “tooke upon him (ipso facto) all the Sinnes of the Defunct, and freed him from Walking after they were dead.” In the Victorian period, biscuits "were an essential element" of British funerals, historian Peter Brears explained in a segment from The Great British Bake Off. According to the show, the biscuits held on in parts of Britain until the 1940s, when they fell out of favor amid wartime rationing.

Whether the cookies evolved from the sin-eating tradition or not, at some point, they made the leap across the pond. In many places in early America, the cookies were so common that they were barely even remarked upon, writes Jacqueline S. Thursby in Funeral Festivals in America: Rituals for the Living. “Mentioning them in a history,” she writes, “would be like mentioning that the sky is often blue.”

Recipes varied, but often called for some mixture of molasses or treacle, ginger, and caraway seeds. Other varieties were more like shortbread, and still others similar to ladyfingers, reported an unnamed Englishwoman in the New-York Daily Tribune in 1893. She was bewildered and a little bummed out when her new American friends kept offering her bites of oblong sponge cookies without realizing that her “associations with them are of the gloomiest sort.”

Thursby reports that funeral biscuits were common among British and German Americans from Virginia to Pennsylvania, and some traditions included the practice—also seen in England and elsewhere in Europe—of consuming them with (or even dunking them into) wine or beer. In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Thursby writes, mourners going from the church to the graveyard would first stop by a young woman holding a tray of biscuits, and then again at a young man inviting them to sip spirits. They wound up with a mouthful of each.

The cookies are also the product of the Victorian obsession with household management as both art and science. In the pages of domestic handbooks and etiquette manuals marketed to women, mourning wasn't just a part of life, but a practice that could be—and ought to be—refined and perfected. The recipe Haddad serves at the Merchant’s House Museum is a modern riff on the gingersnap recipe in Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book, a mid-19th-century volume that included everything from crumpets and jellies to little pea-sized bits of cod, “an excellent relish for a convalescent.” Beecher's recipe called for sugar, molasses, ginger, butter (melted in a bit of warm water), and pearl ash, or potassium carbonate, a leavening agent. Somewhat unhelpfully for a modern cook, it omitted baking time and temperature.

"Nowadays we use baking soda for the pearl ash," Haddad says. And there’s no need to eat the biscuits by candlelight—unless you like your dessert with a sprinkle of spookiness.

Kentucky's bourbon industry is covering its neighbors in black fungus.

On a gray autumn morning, Kayleigh Count stands outside her home eyeing the mist curling through the trees and lazing around open spaces. For many in Kentucky, the cool dampness signals relief, the end to an unusually hot fall. Not for Count. “It’s a bad time for the stuff,” she says, pointing to the eaves and gutters of her home. They look as if they’ve been shaded in with pencil.

The “stuff” is a fungus: Baudoinia Compniacensis. It grows all over her neighborhood—on stop signs, porch furniture, siding, fences, basketball hoops, cars. It’s even been found growing on the dome of the Kentucky state capitol building. From a distance it looks sooty. Up close, a little like thin, black felt. Anything left untouched for years ends up a convincing burnt-to-a-crisp black.

Several communities in Kentucky spent years wondering why the dark film always returns, no matter how deep they clean. Count suspected it was ash from chimney smoke. Others blamed nearby factories. “I had no idea what it was,” says Bruce Merrick, owner of Dant Clayton Corp., a manufacturer of stadium seating and bleachers in Louisville, Kentucky. His business has been in an industrial section of the city for decades, so the gunk on his buildings and bleachers didn’t seem unusual. Only later did he learn that Kentucky’s beloved spirit is quietly fueling the fungus.

Kentucky makes 95 percent of the world’s bourbon. In Frankfort, where Count lives, as well as Louisville, large warehouses hold stacks of bourbon left to expand and contract in charred oak barrels, a process that takes at least a couple of years and results in bourbon’s caramel color and smoky sweetness. During this phase, an estimated two to five percent of the alcohol evaporates. For one distiller alone, that can add up to as much as 200 to 1,000 tons of ethanol emissions every year.

In the bourbon world, the lost ethanol is referred to as “the angel’s share.” The name suggests that ethanol vapors reach the heavens. But research shows that vapors actually filter out, traveling as far as a mile, and fall back down to earth. When that ethanol combines with a hint of moisture (say, morning dew or humidity) Baudoinia Compniacensis thrives, earning Baudoinia its nickname: whiskey fungus.

“Ethanol is like a flying sugar as far as [Baudoinia] is concerned,” says Dr. Richard Summerbell, a Canadian mycologist who’s researched Baudoinia extensively. Many fungi use ethanol as a nutrient. But in Baudoinia, which is otherwise a slow-growing, humble mold, the drifting vapors trigger a superpower. “The ethanol turns on a heat-shock protein in the machinery of the Baudoinia cells,” Summerbell explains, making it tough and aggressive. The fungus can survive severe winters, covering buildings surrounding Canadian whiskey distilleries, as well as the tropical sun of St. Croix, home to rum distilleries.

A French scientist named Antonin Baudoin first studied this “plague of soot” in 1872, after noticing it on distilleries in Cognac, France. It was misidentified until 2007, when Canadian mycologist Dr. James Scott re-classified the new fungi through DNA analysis and named it Baudonia, honoring the scientist who first took notice of the mold. In 2011, a lengthy article in Wired magazine detailed the discovery, unmasking the mystery soot as whiskey fungus.

Many people who live near Kentucky’s distilleries say the problem has worsened as bourbon’s popularity has soared. According to the Kentucky Distillers Association, 68 distilleries dot Kentucky, a 250 percent increase in one decade. While many of those are small-batch distilleries, large operations such as Jim Beam and Buffalo Trace have also grown. Last year, Kentucky distillers filled 1.7 million bourbon barrels. Not all those barrels age in Kentucky, but hundreds of thousands do.

Count has had her home professionally power-washed twice in the last five years. Now she does it herself to save money. A bucket of bleach and water at her feet, sponge in gloved hand, the 57-year-old straps a mask over her nose and mouth. (Baudoinia has no known adverse health effects, but public health officials recommend people not inhale spores that come free during washing.) Count stands nearly nose to light-gray siding, cleaning a textbook-sized square repeatedly before moving to the next similarly sized section.

“It’s a tough spore,” she says. “It sticks.” Completely scrubbing her 1200-square-foot home takes three days. “When you come home and the house is dirty and black,” Count says, pausing, “it’s depressing.”

Merrick and Count were among several Kentucky residents involved in class-action lawsuits filed in 2012 against five major companies that operate distilleries in Kentucky, including Brown-Forman, Heaven Hill, and Diageo. All these companies hold locally issued permits that certify compliance with the federal Clean Air Act. Since distillers claim that preventing ethanol emissions would harm their product, administrators of the law don’t regulate the angel’s share. The lawsuits sought to prove that the angel’s share, though, was a giant nuisance, causing property damage and forcing neighbors to spend money on messes not of their making.

William F. McMurry, the attorney who brought the suits, has worked on similar legal action in the Virgin Islands and Scotland. The case in Scotland is “alive and well,” he says, and the judge in St. Croix recently issued an order to test all affected homes for Baudoinia. In Kentucky, the cases stair-stepped up the legal ladder through motions to dismiss and appeals. One case wound up in the Kentucky Supreme Court.

But Kentucky’s $8.6 billion bourbon industry is no scrappy opponent. McMurry says the justices were sluggish to rule, so after five years of litigation (and five years of paying scientists to swab homes and experts to analyze how ethanol carries on winds) he decided to call it quits. “The economic benefit of moving forward was heavily outweighed by the cost,” he says. (The distillers involved in the lawsuits were contacted by email and telephone for this story but did not provide any comment.)

Merrick was disappointed. He had hoped going to court might push distillers to look at ways to remedy the issue, such as the ethanol-capturing equipment used by brandy distilleries in California. “At a minimum we could’ve had a dialogue on how to address it,” he says. “I can deal with this problem as a business owner. I think the biggest travesty is for the people who live here.”

Neighborhoods surrounding Merrick’s business, including parts of Shively, a suburb of Louisville familiar with Baudoinia, have median incomes in the $25,000 to $40,000 range. Power washing a home can cost anywhere from $200 to $500. If the fungus grows too unsightly, Shively’s code enforcement department can impose a $100 fine. Many in the community worry about property values. If they want to sell, who wants a home routinely cloaked in fungus?

Joyce Edwards, a 73-year-old retired factory worker and widow, has lived in her home on the edge of Shively for 50 years. Last year she spent $20,000 on new gray aluminum siding and crisp white awnings. Still, this summer, she climbed an eight-foot ladder with a sponge, brush, and cleaner to erase the crusty mold that had returned. “I can’t get up on the ladder with a power washer. It’s so powerful it will knock me off,” she says.

Despite the nuisance, many who live with whiskey fungus still talk fondly of bourbon, the spotlight it shines on Kentucky, and the thousands of jobs it provides. Edwards’s husband used to work in a distillery. Kayleigh Count’s father, uncle, and aunts did too. Count speaks warmly of using old bourbon barrels as kindling in the fireplace as a kid. “It smelled so good,” she recalls.

Driving through Frankfort that autumn morning, she stops at Buffalo Trace, a historic distillery down the street from her home. She points out a water tower sprouting a black beard and an ashy-colored warehouse. But she’s quick to compliment the “wonderful tour” they offer and their “gorgeous” Christmas light display. “I want them to be my neighbor,” she says. “Just a good neighbor.”

Depending on the ghosts, it might fetch a premium.

One Laveta Place, in the charming hamlet of Nyack, New York, lies on the Hudson River, about an hour north of New York City. It’s a beautiful old Victorian, built in 1890, its sprawling 4,600 square feet complete with five bedrooms and five bathrooms. The house has previously been owned by Adam Brooks, the director and writer of the 2008 rom-com Definitely, Maybe, as well as singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson. It’s currently owned by Jewish (formerly Hasidic) reggae artist Matisyahu, who recently put the house on the market for $1.9 million.

The real estate listing boasts of river views, an in-ground saltwater spa pool, and a beautiful wrap-around porch. It does not mention that the house is haunted and was the subject of one of the funniest and most famous real estate legal cases of the past 50 years. It’s taught in law schools as the “Ghostbusters Ruling.”

One Laveta Place is just one of dozens of purportedly haunted houses currently for sale. Selling a haunted house is a complex negotiation, a mash-up of local laws, local culture, and local lore. It isn’t even necessarily a bad thing for real estate sales; the Nyack house has in the past sold for significantly more money than comparable houses in the area, due to its infamy. Maybe Matisyahu loves ghosts. Or at least arcane legal history.

Real estate law is, with a few exceptions, dependent on state rather than federal statutes. (Those exceptions include disclosures for stuff like asbestos and lead paint.) States have wildly different requirements for what’s called disclosure, or what a buyer has a right to know about a house before the purchase is complete. “About half the states are disclosure states, and half are called caveat emptor,” says Randall Bell.

Bell is a real estate appraiser; he assigns dollar values to damages to a property. That means that Bell is often called in for pretty normal stuff, like figuring out how much a property that has been damaged by a natural disaster is really worth. But he’s also perhaps the nation’s foremost appraiser of, as E.J. Dickson at Rolling Stone put it, “the world’s most gruesome murder sites.” Bell, who is based in Los Angeles, has worked on the site of the Tate-LaBianca murders, as well as the house where JonBenét Ramsey was killed, and where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered, among many others. So he has a little experience in moving real estate with a dark history.

Bell has also dealt with haunted houses, which of course are not really the same thing as houses where a real, actual murder has taken place. But what’s interesting is that in the eyes of the law, these two factors fall under the same umbrella. It’s a little bit cold and calculating, but in real estate law, an on-site, prior murder and a supposed ghost are both issues that do not affect the physical state of the house, but can impact both that home’s value and the experience of living there.

A disclosure state, Bell explains, requires sellers to provide a fair amount of information on the state of the roof, the foundation, the appliances, whether there has been water or smoke damage, that kind of thing. The precise level of information varies—New York and California are particularly strict, he says—but in general, there’s a big form the seller has to fill out truthfully.

Caveat emptor, Latin for “buyer beware,” is the opposite. In states employing this guideline—Alabama, Arkansas, North Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming, for example—there’s generally a rule stating that a seller or seller’s representative must be truthful if asked direct questions, but that the seller is under no obligation to volunteer information.

“The number of things you could potentially disclose is in the hundreds,” says Bell. Many states use a pretty standard checklist form without any weirdness, but not all. Several states, including Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri, require the seller to disclose if the house was ever used to cook methamphetamine (which can leave behind hazardous waste). In Mississippi, the seller is required to state if there are hardwood floors underneath the carpet or linoleum, and also what kind of internet access the house has, which is pretty generous.

Among disclosure states, there’s also a term called “stigmatized property.” That refers to things that have, or may have, happened in the house or on the property that are not material damages. Most commonly that means crime: murder, suicide, or burglary. The most important legal precedent in this area comes from a 1983 case in California called Reed v. King. Dorris Reed purchased a house from Robert King, unaware that a woman and her four children had been murdered there in grisly fashion 10 years prior. The big issue here is that King was not only aware of the crime, but had actually asked neighbors not to reveal anything about it to potential buyers. The disclosure element—in which a seller is obligated to reveal facts about a property without specifically being asked—is vital here, because no physical home inspection can turn up a murder, and the buyer may not think to ask. That case created this idea of stigmatized properties: something, likely invisible, and probably intangible, about a property that can affect what it’s like to live in or sell that property in the future.

This brings us to the 1991 court case involving Matisyahu’s house in Nyack. The Nyack case is technically called Stambovsky v. Ackley. Helen Ackley, the owner of the house at the time, was trying to sell the property to one Jeffrey Stambovsky. Stambovsky agreed and made a down payment—only to discover that the house was believed to be haunted. Ackley had, in fact, repeatedly boasted that the house was haunted, including in a Reader’s Digest story called “Our Haunted House on the Hudson.” Ackley claimed to have seen several ghosts, including a Revolutionary War soldier and one that apparently approved her choice of paint color. There were also reports of phantom footsteps, gifts that would later vanish, and a child woken up each morning by a ghost shaking her bed. The interactions were, however, described as peaceful.

Stambovsky sued Ackley for not disclosing that the house was haunted. After an initial dismissal—New York was a caveat emptor state at the time—the verdict was overturned on appeal, with the court finding that Ackley had deliberately concealed information that could affect the value of the house. The majority opinion of the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division, written by Justice Israel Rubin, is extremely funny and full of puns and wordplay:

In the interest of avoiding such untenable consequences, the notion that a haunting is a condition which can and should be ascertained upon reasonable inspection of the premises is a hobgoblin which should be exorcised from the body of legal precedent and laid quietly to rest.

Partly as a result of that ruling, today’s real estate sellers are often required to note if a house is generally believed to be haunted. There is no specific question in any of the state disclosure forms I read, but rather a more general question asking if there are any other factors potentially affecting the home’s value or the well-being of the home’s owner. “If asked, I'd say, ‘Yeah, if it's got a reputation of being haunted, you should disclose,’” says Bell.

There are some exceptions. Arizona explicitly does not require the disclosure of murder in the house, even if the seller is asked. The seller cannot lie, but can simply say, “I am not legally required to answer that question.” This is kind of a giveaway, you can imagine. In California, you must disclose any death in the house within the past three years, but you are legally forbidden to disclose whether a person with HIV or AIDS lived or died in the house, even if asked.

It seems likely that living in a house where someone was killed is not much of a draw for the vast majority of potential homebuyers. But a haunted house disclosure is not necessarily a dealbreaker. “For some people, that’s what they want,” says Bell. Sure, sometimes a haunting can be a turn-off, but it all depends on the market and, well, the ghosts. In the case of the Nyack home, the house’s famous paranormal and legal status has probably boosted its price. In the past, it’s sold for significantly more than comparable houses in the area; in 2019 it's listed for substantially more, per square foot, than other houses in Nyack, though it’s also a very nice house that’s literally on the Hudson River.

In New Orleans, a city absolutely saturated with ghosts, some real estate brokers add an additional little sign to their “For Sale” placards. In other cities, this kind of sign might read “Newly Renovated” or “Price Drop,” but in New Orleans and a few other places, some say “Haunted” or “Not Haunted.” In a city with such a rich history of the supernatural, these haunted houses can sometimes demand a premium. Magnolia Mansion, among the most famous haunted houses in the city, was listed for nearly $5 million in 2016.

So maybe Matisyahu isn’t crazy to ask for a little more for his gently haunted house. After all, there are plenty of million-dollar houses with saltwater spa pools. But how many of them come with poltergeists who can critique your interior design choices?

As America's immigrant population grows, so does La Llorona's cultural stature.

During the making of the 2019 horror movie The Curse of La Llorona, some of the cast and crew were convinced that the spirit of La Llorona—Spanish for The Weeping Woman—lurked about. They were spooked by inexplicable cold chills and exploding jewelry on set, unexplained flickering lights and screaming dreams.

“We did have some creepy supernatural occurrences,” the director, Michael Chaves, told the Los Angeles Times. “Half the crew actually does believe the house that we shot in was haunted, and there might have been something to that.” Actress Patricia Velasquez added, “I think she was there just making sure we were doing right by her.”

In the film, the titular character is the ghost of a mother from 17th-century Mexico who drowned her sons and now haunts the living with her inconsolable crying. Dressed in white, she spends her days looking for other children to steal.

Off the screen, La Llorona is a well-known and pervasive legend who serves as a cautionary tale for multiple generations in Latinx households, often invoked to scare kids and stop them from misbehaving. Known throughout Central and South America but most often associated with Mexico, her story varies according to who tells it.

In some versions, she’s an indigenous woman who's so enraged by her husband’s infidelity that she vengefully murders their children in a nearby river, then drowns herself in grief and remorse. In other versions, she blames her offspring for her lover’s desertion and throws them to their death in the river.

Regardless of which version is told, each tale results in her being doomed to wander the earth, always near water, wailing for her little ones (and thus earning her sad name). What earns her a scary reputation, is that La Llorona doesn't just kidnap youngsters. She also brings woe and death to those who hear her cries or get in her way.

“The versions of the story we see today—including movies (The Curse of La Llorona, Mama, and La Leyenda de La Llorona) and television shows (the series Grimm)—all emphasize the spooky or frightening aspects of the story,” says Domino Renee Perez, author of the book There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture and associate chair of the English department at the University of Texas at Austin. “That this wandering woman who weeps will get you if you don’t watch out.”

Other, more complex versions of the grieving woman exist. She’s sometimes associated with Doña Marina, or La Malinche—the Nahua woman from the Mexican Gulf Coast who served as an interpreter, adviser, and mistress to Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, bore his child, and was then deserted by him (to compound her misery, she’s sometimes portrayed as a traitor for siding with the Spanish).

Other times, the mourning lady is thought of as an Aztec goddess whose weeping was an omen that predicted the Spanish arrival and ensuing slaughter of indigenous groups—an aggrieved deity who continues to weep to this day.

In Xochimilco, a section of Mexico City that's called the Venice of Mexico, during an open-air theatrical spectacle that bears her name, La Llorona is portrayed as a woman warrior who kills herself and her baby to avoid leaving her land and people, swearing vengeance against the Spaniards. The performance—which has taken place each year on the water since 1993, to coincide with the Day of the Dead—was created to promote the history, ancient cultural traditions, and natural beauty of Xochimilco’s water canals, which date back to pre-Hispanic times.

Ultimately, what ties all these different stories together is the thread of overwhelming grief. “It’s a story about loss,” says Perez, “and the many ways that the woman at the center of the story chooses to respond to that loss. It’s also about how a community responds to her actions.”

Though her actions can be interpreted in a variety of ways, La Llorona has recently become more visible outside the Latinx population—not just in the arts and media but in mundane items such as cocktails and towels. Her myth may date back centuries, but her growing popularity today is a sign of the times, says Perez: “I think that as the Mexican-American and Mexican-immigrant populations continue to grow [in the U.S.], more and more of our stories, cultural practices, and customs are finding their way into the mainstream.”

For the Latinx community, The Weeping Woman is such a familiar and subjective subject, says Perez, that she’s malleable enough to be more than just a tool to discipline naughty kids. In fact, she can be—and is fast becoming—a potent and enduring cultural symbol.

“The story also has a timelessness to it,” says Perez, “dating back to pre-conquest portents foretelling, for some, the fall of the Aztec Empire and extending into the present, where thousands of women are being separated from their children at the border. La Llorona remains relevant, and as long as she does, her story will continue to be told.”

'Shimi,' or “grave-sweeping festival,” takes place every April on the southernmost islands of Japan.

This past April, families across Okinawa gathered as they do each spring at island cemeteries for a lively graveside party. Family members sat under canopies and on blue tarps, laid out neatly in small courtyards in front of family tombs. Children dashed around the crypts, while the adults laughed and ate elaborate meals prepared for the occasion. Even in famously festive Okinawa, the cheerful sight was striking in a space usually thought of as solemn.

But it was a party with a purpose. Known as Shimi, or Seimeisai—“grave-sweeping festival”—it is an annual event each April held across the islands in the farthest southern reaches of Japan. Locals gather at family tombs to give offerings to the spirits of their ancestors, and to celebrate with song, food, and drink. It is an Okinawan tradition that reflects the islands’ eclectic heritage: a mixture of Japanese, indigenous Ryukyuan, and Chinese cultures that form a unique custom in the region.

The practice of Shimi in Okinawa dates back centuries, to when the islands were still the independent Kingdom of the Ryukyus, according to Okinawa’s Ryūkyū Shimpō newspaper. The event bears a striking similarity to the Chinese Qingming Festival, appropriate given Okinawa’s historic trade ties with China.

Originally, Shimi was limited to the islands’ royal family. The first Shimi ceremony of the year, kujinu-shimi, still takes place annually on the island of Izena, home to one of three Ryukyuan Royal Mausoleums, according to the Okinawan Times. But the practice gradually spread through Okinawa, says Professor Masato Ishida, a philosopher at the University of Hawai’i’s Center for Okinawan Studies, in an email. “Japan's modernization after 1868 removed the distinction between the elite class and commoners," Ishida explains.

Observed on the Sunday closest to the 15th day of the third lunar month, April, Shimi mixes the solemn and the celebratory. Like the practice of Obon, which the rest of Japan observes in August, Shimi begins with family members gathering to sweep and wash the ancestral tomb, and provide offerings to the dead. Island fruit and alcohol, especially the distilled island spirit known as awamori, are popular choices, as are favorite dishes of the deceased. Grocery stores across Okinawa, Ishida writes, make a concession to modern life: they sell colorful pre-made hor d'oeuvres in the week leading up to Shimi. Families burn black incense and ceremonial paper money, known as uchikabi, to provide for ancestors’ well-being in the afterlife.

“The dead in Japan thirst,” writes Mark Rowe, a professor at McMaster University and expert in Japanese funerary practices. The spirits of the deceased demand rice, water, sweets, and incense, but most of all, Rowe says, they seek conversation, attention, and remembrance. In a phone interview, Rowe explains the political and cultural origins of Japan’s modern attention to the dead. As part of Japanese modernization efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he says, the nation relied on "the idea of the family as the basic unit of the state," with the Emperor as a symbolic “father” to these patrilineal, multigenerational households.

On the religious front, Rowe cites traditional concepts of duty, family identity, and Confucian ideas of obligation to one’s parents that drive the veneration of ancestors. "Ancestors are always present," Rowe says, noting that in many households in Japan, it is common for rooms to be adorned with photographs of one's deceased relatives. Grave-sweeping rituals in Japan, he goes on, are more than a social expectation. The ritual serves as a “precursor” to ceremonial offerings of food and incense. "Spaces of the dead reflect the spaces of the living," he says, and graves can serve as an extension of the home.

With respects duly paid back on Okinawa, families break out coolers of their own food and drink for a graveside celebration, with plenty of laughter and traditional island music played on the sanshin, Okinawa’s version of the three-stringed shamisen.

For one Okinawan resident, who asked to be identified by her last name, Asato, Shimi is a familiar ritual and an opportunity to reconnect with family, both living and deceased. "We gather with our extended relatives, including cousins, for a picnic at the family grave," Ms. Asato says. In her experience, the family burns black incense next to the offerings of food. "We say to our ancestors, ‘douzo tabete kudasai’: please eat," she explains. When the incense smoke rises, it is believed to be the ancestors partaking in the offering. "After the incense smoke is gone,” she says, “we say to our ancestors, ‘We will also eat,’ and begin our own meal at the grave."

Tombs that are unique to Okinawa are purpose-built for this occasion. As described in the Japan Times, islanders traditionally preferred kamekobaka, or “turtleback” tombs, but many now celebrate at Haka tombs, shaped like small homes. Both styles contain the bones and ashes of the deceased, and feature courtyards at the mouth of the burial vault, specifically designed for hosting Shimi celebrations. Professor Isihida describes the courtyards as “a space of communication across many generations, including ancestors."

Turtleback tombs originated in China, but evolved to be larger and include a courtyard when they came to Okinawa in the 16th century. The turtle-like shape has also come to represent different meanings in China and Okinawa: Turtles were a sacred symbol of ancient China, but in Okinawa, writes academic James C. Robinson, the turtleback design is thought to represent a mother’s womb.

Within the tombs rest families’ ancestral remains. In Okinawa, the body of the deceased was traditionally left in the tomb to desiccate before family members cleaned and stored the bones. In modern times, and in keeping with the default practice of cremation in the rest of Japan, Profesor Ryoko Shiotsuki of Nihonbashi Gakkan University notes that more and more Okinawans are filling family crypts with urns.

Tombs in Okinawa are far from one-size-fits-all, depending on who occupies its space. Massive communal graves can accommodate the remains of thousands of residents from a particular town or family, while large, jointly-owned tombs can be shared among close friends and their families. Smaller tombs, known as monchu, may fit the extended family on the paternal line, and are typically inherited by the eldest son. The most modest in size are only for immediate family.

In Okinawa, the Shimi festival represents the strong connection between islanders and their ancestors. While venerating the spirits of the deceased is common in Japan’s Buddhist and Shinto traditions, Okinawa’s religious history also skews towards the spiritual and animistic. Shimi "honors" ancestors in one traditional Shinto sense, Professor Ishida says, but in Okinawa "it is more about feeling and appreciating the lively presence of ancestors than worshipping them from a distance." The islands embrace a mix of religious traditions, Ms. Asato points out. “The ancestor is the closest guardian deity,” she says.

Read some of our readers' favorite spooky tales from very close to home.

Happy Spirits Week!

We've covered all sorts of spirits in this most spooky of weeks, but it would be downright irresponsible of us not to include a few of your ghost stories. While Atlas Obscura is firmly in the skeptic camp when it comes to the actual existence of ghosts, we're big fans of ghost stories themselves—especially when they revolve around a local myth or legendary place.

We recently asked the readers in our Community Forums to tell us about their favorite extremely local ghost stories, and we got an impressive collection of tales about everything from haunted roads to benevolent theater ghosts to unquiet spirits on the golf course.

Read some of our favorite submissions below. And if you have a terrific ghost story of your own to share, head over to the forums and keep the conversation going.

Happy Halloween!

Orpheum Theatre

Memphis, Tennessee

“Memphis has a lot of ghosts, but my favorite has always been 12-year-old Mary, one of the Orpheum’s ghosts. No one knows for sure how she died—might have been in an accident on Beale Street, might have been in the 1923 fire that burnt the Orpheum down—but in 1928, when the theater was rebuilt, she was there, sometimes dancing in the aisles, sometimes playing (possibly also fixing) the new Mighty Wurlitzer organ, sometimes in her favorite seat on the mezzanine. I’ve never seen her myself, but there are quite a number of sightings recorded.” — korenni

Otter Mound Preserve

Marco Island, Florida

“I live on the edge of the western Everglades and this area was prime Calusa Indian territory. I was on a history tour at night on Marco Island. We stopped at Otter Mound. If you’re not familiar, mounds are made of shells and other organic matter that the Calusa stacked up. While there, our guide said to stay on the path, do not venture off of it or the spirits will get angry. I was wearing jeans and closed-toe shoes… an important detail. While on the main trail, I felt tons of biting on my calves and feet. I thought, 'this is not good, all these bugs are biting through my jeans and shoes.' Really annoying. When we all gathered back at the entrance, our guide said when the Calusas get upset they attack from the knee down. I knew nothing of this previously, nor had I ever been to Otter Mound. I was officially scared out of my mind. It was not painful, just annoying, like bitty bites. Anyone in the area should check it out but stay on the trail at night. There is no charge to go there on your own. There is also an old house where a previous owner still visits the area in the spirit from. You can actually feel his cold spots outside.” — toniamonkey

Berkeley Castle

Berkeley, Gloucestershire

“I live near Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, which is meant to be very haunted. A few years before moving nearby, we went for a visit and guided tour of the castle. When we entered what used to be the chapel, I got very dizzy, queasy, and had to leave the room and sit down. As soon as I walked out, the feeling went away. Five years later, we became locals and went back to the castle with friends and went on the tour again. We walked into the chapel, and it happened again, but not as intensely. Just as I was edging out of the room, the tour guide said that she had worked there for 17 years and that room was the one that affected visitors the most. People saw ghosts, heard things, passed out, felt sick etc… At least I was in good company.” — mcmecq

Grand National Golf Course

Opelika, Alabama

“In Auburn, Alabama, there is [said to be] a single grave in the middle of the expansive Grand National golf course, part of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail. The headstone bears the name of ‘Mary Dowdell,’ although I don’t remember the dates. The headstone was discovered when the pine trees were being cleared away to build the golf course. Finding an old grave in the middle of nowhere is not unusual around here, according to the local genealogical society. An old marked grave like this, in a Deep South state, was often surrounded by the graves of people enslaved by the family (and the Dowdells were a prominent family). Those graves might be marked only by a stone, but they always faced east. For that reason, a wide area around Mary’s grave was left undisturbed. Nevertheless, really weird things have happened at the golf course. The people who work there always say, ‘Mary’s unhappy.’ And they really believe this. The few things I have seen written about this supposed ghost are completely wrong, but a lot of people think she is absolutely real.” — jkochak

College Hall

Montpelier, Vermont

“College Hall, the flagship building of Vermont College of Fine Arts, has long been home to a ghost named Anna. She was shot in a scandalous love triangle by another woman who was in love with Anna’s fiance in the late 1800s. Anna knocks clocks and pictures off walls when we work into the night, and bars entrance to doors she doesn’t want opened. She’s said to be based in the now-empty glass-encased bell tower that tops the 1868 iconic brick building. Because her existence is so widely accepted by our staff and students, and because we have such affection for her, we named our campus cafe Cafe Anna. — anndavilacardinal

Ruins of the Institute of Natural Therapeutics

Olalla, Washington

“Northwest of Gig Harbor, Washington, in the hamlet of Olalla, are the ruins of the Institute of Natural Therapeutics, made famous in Gregg Olsen’s book, Starvation Heights. Said to be haunted and still a deeply creepy place. A friend (who used to run haunts and still reviews them) went on a private tour a couple of years ago on Halloween and had to leave… it gave even a professional haunter the creeps.” — SMRichmond

Paramount Arts Center

Ashland, Kentucky

“My town’s old Paramount Theater (now known as the Paramount Arts Center) has a permanent resident that’s well known throughout the area as Paramount Joe. The story is that a few decades back work was being done on the stage via scaffolding. Joe stayed behind a little to finish up his work as the other workers left one night. The next morning they returned to find he’d fallen from the scaffolding and died on the stage.

Ever since he’s been a prominent presence in the building. He’s well known for turning on the light at the bottom of the basement stairs for female employees (the only location of a switch thus saving them a trip down into the dark) and seems to favor the small cafe/concession area. It’s common practice for visiting performers to leave him autographed pictures which are then hung in the cafe. They were all removed once during redecoration, and replaced with pictures from around town. When the theater opened the next day the new pictures had all been knocked off the walls. I suppose he didn’t want his autographs removed.

I personally haven’t seen Joe but I’ve felt his presence many times in the lobby and cafe, both by myself and with others. While I’m sorry that he’s stuck there I’m glad that he’s appreciated.” — Tookwagner

Laura Kelly Statue

Kosciusko, Mississippi

“There is very little sculpture to be enjoyed in the small city of Kosciusko, Mississippi, but in the City Cemetery there stands, in a small gated enclosure, a life-size statue of Mrs. Kelly, hand resting upon the handle of a… shovel? Axe? No one knows for sure, but of course, local legend says it is an axe, with which she murdered her entire family. There’s a circle of graves inside the fence.

Another story about the same statue, claims that Mr. Kelly was away from home on business, his wife died from a disease (not sure which one). They had not been married long, and his heart was so broken, he sent a photo of his beloved off to Paris to have the sculpture in her memory. These things took time in the late 19th century, so by the time the work of art returned to Kosciusko, Mr. Kelly had remarried. The first wife’s likeness was erected in the city cemetery, which Mr. Kelly could see from the turret of his home.

On the anniversary of her death, and his second marriage, it’s said that if you go to the cemetery, you can see the statue cry.” — nytechilde

Bradley Woods

Lincolnshire, England

“There’s a small patch of ancient woodland near the village of Bradley in Lincolnshire, England, known as Bradley Woods. For generations, people have witnessed the ghost of a pretty young woman dressed in a black cloak and hood that hides her hair but reveals a mournful, pale, tear-soaked face. Recently, motorists driving past the woods have seen her standing by the side of the road. She has never harmed anyone, but is said to be a pitiful and unnerving sight.

It is thought that she once lived in a cottage in the woods with her husband, a woodsman, and their baby son. During the Wars of the Roses, an English civil war of the 15th century, the woodsman left his family to join the army of the local lord. After many months with no news of her husband, the woman would walk to the edge of the woods with her baby to await the sight of him coming home. One day, enemy soldiers marched through the area on their way to attack Lincoln. The woman was set upon by three horsemen who raped her before snatching the baby and riding away. Heartbroken and humiliated, the young lady wandered the woods in vain searching for her child and husband. After her own death, nearby villagers continued to see her spectral image wandering the woods carrying on her never-ending search. The ghost is known locally as the ‘Black Lady of Bradley Woods.’” — jarad75

Haunted Apartments

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

“I’m living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. When I moved here in June, for a summer internship, I was housed in a large apartment complex. Despite numerous complaints to our landlord about the problems with the flat, they never offered us a different flat. That was until we complained about a ghost. We had a new place within 12 hours. Amazing.

Also, the 8th lunar month is ‘Ghost Month.’ You mustn’t leave your clothing hanging out overnight to dry. The ghosts will borrow them and then when you wear them you’ll fall ill.” — Xin_Chao_Con_Meo

Hollywood Downtowner Inn

Los Angeles, California

“We’re L.A. natives, and had Friday/Saturday night tickets for shows at The Greek. Instead of driving up and back both nights, we got a room at The Hollywood Downtowner. On Friday I stowed Saturday’s tickets in my duffel. Come Saturday night, the tickets were nowhere to be found, and we went through every inch of our suitcases. We never found Saturday’s tickets and got them replaced, but were really confused about how they could have gone missing.A couple weeks later we were partying in the backyard. Both my grandparents (RIP) were there, and then Bren(dan) came through. He told my mom that he’d taken our tickets so someone would know he was there; he’d been murdered in a drug deal in the room we stayed in, and wanted to let someone know he was there.

My mom’s a sensitive, and to a much lesser degree my sister and brother and I are, but that night, in the backyard, it was total WHOA—spirit party.” — YeahRok

Hotel San Carlos

Phoenix, Arizona

“Hotel San Carlos in Phoenix is built over the first schoolhouse in Phoenix. There was a well that two kids drowned in turn of the century. I did a school project about the ghosts there and all the staff would talk about hearing kids laughing and running around in the basement when no one else was around. There’s also a room where the ghost of a woman who jumped from the roof in the 20s haunts guests at night. She appears, and then suddenly disappears. I’m a big ol skeptic when it comes to ghosts, but for some reason the hotel is a spot where several people have committed suicide by jumping off. There’s a Subway across the street, and the manager there said he saw the most recent one (this was 2009, so that was around 2003 I think). He was looking at the street and suddenly a woman splattered on the pavement. That was the story that creeped me out the most.” — dgluth

Cuba Road

Barrington, Illinois

“So, this isn’t my ghost story or even a particular ghost story. Cuba Road is a twisty, winding street that occupies some space in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, and considerably more space in the local imagination.

Stories of Cuba Road abound. Because it is a very windy road, and goes up and down some pretty steep hills, it’s a dangerous drive. There’s a small cemetery that dates from the 1820s, including some Civil War-era graves. Most frequently, people see floating balls of light above some of the graves, feel ‘cold spots’ there and see presences. In the woods behind the cemetery, there’s a house that will appear, and disappear, as you come towards it. It supposedly burned down a long time ago, although no one really knows the truth. [...]

It’s a road best avoided on Halloween, but well worth a ride if you’re bored with your friends on some long, dark summer night.” — yelena

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

After many a misadventure, his warplane is on display today.

Beverage companies can go to great lengths to keep their goods flowing, especially when they run afoul of international geopolitics. In the Soviet Union, Pepsi accepted payment for cola concentrate in warships that it could sell for scrap, leading to reams of jokes about the escalation of the Cola Wars. In the case of spirits-maker Bacardi, the company patriarch went much harder in his vendetta with the communist regime in Cuba. In 1962, he dreamed up a mission to bomb a Cuban oil refinery with a surplus warplane, a machine that aviation historians Dan Hagedorn and Leif Hellstrom call “very nearly the first corporate bomber in aviation history.”

Today, the Bacardi portfolio is large and easily recognizable—Grey Goose vodka, Patrón tequila, Bombay Sapphire gin, and more, in addition to its line of rums. But the company had humble roots. By the time Don Facundo Bacardí Massó started making rum in Cuba with a friend’s borrowed still in the 1860s, he had gone through a series of Job-like trials. A cholera epidemic had killed two of his children, and his general stores in and around Santiago had gone bankrupt. Making rum was a last-ditch shot at success, especially since at the time, according to booze historian Mark Spivak, the liquor “was almost universally regarded as a low-grade product, the favorite spirit of outlaws, social misfits, and lower classes.”

But as a 1963 article in The New York Times rhapsodized, Don Facundo “conjectured back in 1862 that there was a future in getting rum out of the peasant cantinas and off the waterfront into polite society.” He had the foresight to use a distinctive logo—the bat that still graces bottles and signaled even to illiterate drinkers that they were imbibing his creation. By the time he passed the business on to the next generation, the family was committed to what Spivak calls “unrelenting efforts to free Cuba from outside forces,” such as Spain and the United States. But the company’s greatest foe would come from within, when the revolution led by Fidel Castro banished Bacardi from its home.

It should have been impossible to separate Bacardi from Cuba. Henri Shueg, Don Facundo’s son-in-law, had inextricably tied the brand’s identity to the island, even as he opened distilleries abroad. Plus, Cuba had become a drinker’s paradise during Prohibition. Many a professional bartender, writes Spivak, moved to Cuba and found work in a sunny haven.

Also central to the brand’s identity, it seems, was the ardent political beliefs of the company’s lineage of presidents. Emilio Bacardi, Don Facundo’s son, went to jail several times for supporting and financing the country’s independence from Spain. Shueg, his successor, was less of a Cuban patriot, but next in line, his son-in-law, José “Pepín” Bosch, actually sent money to Fidel Castro as the revolutionary took on the corrupt Batista government. But at the same time, Bacardi quietly began to move essential parts of the business abroad, such as the yeast strain necessary for making its vaunted liquor.

Less than a year after Castro took over the Cuban government in 1960, his administration ordered large businesses nationalized. In 1962, as journalist Tom Gjelten writes in Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba, an exiled Bosch decided “to finance and organize a military action of his own in Cuba.”

It’s perhaps not as extreme a reaction as it might seem. After all, the United States had lent its support to Cuban exiles planning an attack on Cuba, resulting in 1961’s disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion. But even without the explicit support of the United States, Bosch wanted to strike a fiery blow against his nemesis Castro. In their book Foreign Invaders: The Douglas Invader in Foreign Military and U.S. Clandestine Service, Hagedorn and Hellstrom note that one of the consuming goals of wealthy, exiled Cubans was to fight back, or “at the very least keep Castro in a high state of anxiety.”

In an interview with Gjelten, Pepín Bosch’s son Carlos related how the United States government kept shutting down his requests to start an air transport service (unrelated to Cuba and the liquor business) in 1962. Carlos was stunned to learn why, when his father offhandedly mentioned “the plane I’m keeping in Costa Rica.”

The plane in question was a Douglas B-26 Invader. With a wingspan of 70 feet, they were designed during World War II by Southern California–based Douglas Aircraft Company. Afterward, they were used by militaries worldwide. This particular bomber, a former U.S. Air Force plane from 1945, had spent its career in units based around the United States. Sold off as surplus in 1958, and it passed from owner to owner before a Miami-based insurance company purchased it in 1962, “quite likely acting on the instructions” of a lawyer connected with Bacardi, who had also contracted two Cuban pilots. The mission? To bomb a major oil refinery on the island, write Hagedorn and Hellstrom. Such a plan “would have arguably put Castro in very difficult circumstances, if successful,” destabilizing the country enough to perhaps even trigger a counterrevolution.

So on June 8, 1962, Gonzalo Herrera and Gustavo Ponzoa, both Bay of Pigs veterans, set off for Costa Rica with a fudged registration and a plan to carry out the bombing in July, after stocking up on bombs from Guatemala. The plan started to go south right away. The pilots landed at a beach at La Llorona in Costa Rica, but had to leave in a hurry when the tide came in while they waited in vain for their bomb supplier to show up. More misadventures followed, with both the Nicaraguan and Costa Rican governments circling, suspicious of the motives of the Cuban aviators and their unregistered American bomber.

Ponzoa even had the bad luck to run into his uncle, a Costa Rican official, who was rightfully leery of what his nephew was up to. It may have been that uncle who notified the U.S. government, leading to a visit from State Department agents, who told Herrera and Ponzoa to cease and desist. The pilots left the plane and made their way back to the United States, while Bosch turned to other Castro-defying plans, such as funding the exile group Representación Cubana del Exilio. The plane itself had a spirited second life, perhaps being used for smuggling in Costa Rica, and then flying officially as part of the Honduras Air Force. (Gjelten, in Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba, tells a slightly different story, naming a single pilot, Gaston Bernal, and stating that the CIA had been notified, rather than the State Department.)

“The Bacardi bomber” flew well into the 1970s, but it increasingly showed its age. The United States intelligence community wrote it off as a threat after a terrifying emergency landing in 1971, but it was rebuilt and shown off at events in Honduras until 1979. Painted broom handles were thrust into its nose to give the illusion that it was bristling with guns.

The Bacardi bomber did eventually return home to the United States, after it was purchased by pilot and plane engine–builder David Zeuschel. It eventually ended up in what is now called the USAF Airman Heritage Museum on Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, where it is still on display. Curator Fernando Cortez had never heard of the plane’s Bacardi connection, but he did confirm that the U.S. government had halted the aircraft’s mission to Cuba. “Once the CIA got word of the mission, they didn't want World War III to start,” he says.

“In USAF colors, in honorable retirement," Hagedorn and Hellstrom write, “44-35918 [the plane’s serial number] has come home at last.” But these days, the venerable plane is decorated with more than fake guns. A blonde pin-up, decked out in tropical fabric and flowers, sprawls across the aircraft’s nose, as an homage to one of the most famed B-26s of the Korean War. And next to her is painted the aircraft’s spot-on nickname: Versatile Lady.

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Doodletown was shuttered by the state in 1965. That hasn't stopped Doodletowners from burying their dead there.

The Junes had called Bear Mountain State Park to let them know there was going to be another funeral in Doodletown. Arthur June had died on March 31, at age 72. He was born here, in Doodletown, and now his family was returning him to the land he loved.

No one has lived in this abandoned hamlet in upstate New York since 1965, but the Junes, and other former residents and descendants, retain life rights to the old cemeteries concealed in the woods of Bear Mountain, high above the Hudson River.

After some rain, the funeral procession made its way up the winding mountain pass to Doodletown. Park employees unlocked the gate on Lemmon Road—a nearly invisible dead end to passersby that seals off the ruins of the town from unwanted motor traffic. Aside from some foundations and cellar holes, the Second June Cemetery—named after two of Arthur’s ancestors, Ithiel and Charity—is one of the only things the state didn’t demolish as soon as the last June left Doodletown.

The park is supposed to maintain the road, specifically for funerals, but it’s an uneven, half-paved trail that fades into dirt, rock, and foliage, lined with barberry bushes and old rock walls built by the June’s ancestors, which date as far back as Doodletown’s founding, in 1762. Disused electric wires, which were only strung through the hamlet in 1946, look like man-made vines now, sagging down into the brush—another part of this once vibrant village that’s being swallowed by nature.

Arthur’s procession went as far down the winding, narrow path as it could, until the early April mud became impassable. The cemetery, beyond the trees, was still about 50 yards away. The park employees made a path out of plywood for the family to walk safely to the gravesite, carrying Arthur’s urn the rest of the way.

When Junes die now, they’re typically cremated, to ensure there’s enough space for future descendants who might want to join their family on the mountain. (The only thing former Doodletown residents and descendants are legally allowed to do up here now—aside from hike, which anyone can do—is bury their dead.)

Cradling Arthur’s urn, his wife, Vera, joined by their six grandchildren and a host of extended family and friends, walked past the Doodletown Brook where Arthur and his siblings––Eileen, Sharon, Caroline, William, and Gilbert—once swam as children, and the plots of land where they used to help their mother hang drying clothes between the trees.

The cemetery is a single craggy acre, seated at the edge of Doodletown Lake—a spleen-shaped body of water that looks clean enough to drink. There are signs nailed to trees here that say “CEMETERY CLOSED - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.” A dead pine twists up through the middle of the cemetery, separating the newest June graves from the weather-beaten graves of their ancestors.

Arthur’s sons—Curtis, Richard, and Scott—proceeded to dig their father’s grave. The Junes have always dug their own graves. It’s been that way since the first June—Charity—was buried in the First June Cemetery, sometime in the late 1700s, when the town was a center of mining and logging.

Arthur and his wife, Vera, were the last couple to be married in Doodletown, in the little white church that’s a five-minute walk west from the Second June Cemetery. That was just three years before New York State kicked everyone out of Doodletown by way of eminent domain. Almost immediately after the town was emptied, the state sent bulldozers to level the 70 homes, the church, and the beloved school.

Arthur worked for the park up until his death—a job he unhappily held for 53 years. Bitter as he was to have lost his home, the park offered steady work. Other Doodletowners have made a similar peace. If you look at a roster of park employees today, you’ll see the family names of many former residents.

In 1964 the state gave residents of Doodletown, and other mountain hamlets nearby, two options: Take a buyout or be condemned. A ski resort was coming, whether they were ready or not. (The ski resort never materialized. The area was absorbed into Bear Mountain State Park instead.)

Doodletown was the last of the hamlets to be taken. It was also the largest. The other villages, such as Sebago, have tiny graveyards hidden in the forest as well, but none as active as Doodletown’s.

Clarence June Sr., Arthur’s father, was one of the first to sell. It’s something that his daughter, Eileen Bramsen, is still slow to admit. She fears that her father’s decision provided the impetus for others to sell, rather than put up more of a fight. Then again, there weren’t any good options. “It was going to happen no matter what we did,” she says. Her parents—her mother was named Irene—had eight children and bills to pay.

Those who grew up here remember it as an intensely quiet, idyllic place; the dense woods and high elevation seemed to block all sound from the outside world. As a child, Eileen and her friends and siblings would jump into “the 10 foot”—a swimming hole that young Junes still swim in today (although it’s illegal to do so, even for Doodletown descendants). Eileen remembers exploring caves, climbing trees, and playing hide-and-seek until it was dark. On summer nights, fireflies illuminated the night. On fall mornings, a thick, serpent-like band of fog hovered above the Hudson River.

Eileen recalls learning how to make holiday wreaths with her mom, for extra money. She’d go out and collect vines and twist them into circles. They’d spend the month leading up to Christmas making wreaths. One time, she helped her mother build one 25 feet in diameter, for the Bear Mountain Inn to hang from its façade.

Today Doodletown is defined locally by its many myths. People in the towns at the foot of the mountain speak of feral children up here. And Dunder the Troll, who lives in the woods. And pirate treasure hidden in the mica mines below the surface of the mountain.

Then there’s the myth of the town’s namesake. If you grew up in this area, you might’ve heard that Doodletown was named after British troops who marched through singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on their way to conquer Fort Clinton. The reality is that the British did come through, but at that point Doodletown was already named, as letters dated before the Revolutionary War attest. (The real provenance of Doodletown’s name comes from the Dutch word Doddel, which means “Dead Valley” or “Dead Wood.”)

Toward the end of Doodletown’s existence, there was a wave of strange tourism. People would drive into town asking where all the activity was. There’d been articles in the papers about the hamlet being bought out, so curious motorists drove down Lemmon Road to see what was going on. It probably hadn’t been that busy since those thousand British troops marched through.

There was no mass exodus from Doodletown. Everyone moved out individually, one at a time. Some dug in their heels more than others, but eventually everyone left. Many settled in the towns at the foot of the mountain: Highland Falls, Fort Montgomery, Stony Point, Tomkins Cove.

Eileen’s brother, Clarence Jr., had his home turned into a park building, but he was allowed to stay on for a little while as a maintenance man. During his last days here, he watched state workers start to flatten everything, even tearing up the roads. Soon after, vandals found their way into the empty village. They destroyed the Herbert-Weyant Cemetery, and set the beloved school—the heart of Doodletown—on fire.

One October, years later, park rangers came upon a Halloween party in the cemetery. Headstones had been decorated, and lanterns hung from trees. Campers, too, have been discovered by the Junes, building fires among the family graves.

Clarence June Jr. was the last person to live in Doodletown—a matter of pride for him. He and his family left for good on January 16, 1965. Before everything was torn down, he and his father spent time shooting 8-mm film of every building. Clarence Sr. was there the day the bulldozer tore down the school.

Thirty years later, when Eileen helped plan the first official Doodletown reunion, she used her father’s footage. Approximately 200 people showed up. Eileen made sure to plan that reunion, and all future ones, on Columbus Day, in hopes that it would be too cold for the rattlesnakes and copperheads. (There’s always been a snake problem in Doodletown.)

Eileen bought a machine to transfer her dad’s 8-mm films to VHS. She and her husband made a virtual tour out of the old footage. Eileen narrated. The footage played on a loop. Nearly everyone who attended the school in Doodletown cried at the sight of its demolition.

Now a siren tower sits in where the school was, rising above the tallest trees, ready to bray warnings if there's an emergency at the nearby nuclear power plant, the Indian Point Energy Center.

Most of the current June grandchildren have only known Doodletown as a ruin, but they’ve spent their young lives exploring the forest, the caves, and the brooks just the same. It’s illegal, but if a ranger were to find them, there’s a good chance he or she has a personal connection to Doodletown, making the chances of getting in trouble unlikely. Still, the Junes have become tourists in their ancestral home.

Before Arthur passed away, his granddaughter, Leah, said she wanted to be the new last person married in Doodletown. She got engaged not long before he died. Arthur was able to help her get the proper permits for the wedding. One year after Arthur’s funeral, Leah was married in the field by the lake, opposite the cemetery. Arthur was practically in attendance.

The Junes still maintain their own gravesite. They bring their own lawn mower to tend the grass, their own chainsaws to cut fallen trees. Vera’s sons have restored a park bench and placed it beside Arthur’s grave, so that their mother can sit with her father. His headstone reads: “Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there, I did not die.”

Sometimes when Vera is in Doodletown to visit Arthur, she meets curious hikers who find their way to the isolated cemetery. They stop at the edge, afraid to walk past the signs, wondering how and why there’s a cemetery on this secluded mountain. And who’s there mourning among the ruins. Vera and her family will often invite them in—so that they can tell someone else the story of Doodletown.

They are haunted, but not by ghosts.

Rising 200 feet out of the hills of rural West Virginia, a clock tower looms over a vast and empty collection of buildings that once housed thousands of people diagnosed with mental illness. After being shuttered for more than 20 years, since 2007 the Weston State Hospital has been open for business again under its original name—the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum—and caters to tourists interested in some combination of history and the paranormal. Some buildings are off-limits and most of the site is without electricity, but a considerable portion of it awaits the curious and the brave. As I pulled in to the vast, park-like grounds, the imposing, cut-stone main building leered in the late afternoon sun. The architecture is Gothic-inspired, and the windows dark—like it was made to evoke a sense of dread and mystery. But this is precisely not what the builders wanted to inspire.

I’m an academic historian of American culture as Southern Connecticut State University, and my trip to the Trans-Allegheny began years earlier, when I saw it featured late one night on a ghost-hunter television show. What was it that made this place so scary? Was it always that way? (According to the Travel Channel, the hospital is one of the 10 most haunted spots in the country.) I spent the next five years tracking the dark narrative of mental hospitals through fiction, memoir, film, media, and art. I watched hundreds of movies, read scores of novels, and pored over heaps of periodicals. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that Americans have always been deeply invested in what goes on within the walls of these institutions, and I began to understand why. The term “asylum” itself, which has negative connotations today, was originally used to evoke confidence, safety, and security. How and why this changed is part of this longer story of stigma, fear, and horror. A “ghost tour” through the Trans-Allegheny is the logical end of the story. Or perhaps, more precisely, the opening of another chapter.

The Trans-Allegheny was once among the most expensive buildings in the United States. Ground broke on this massive collection of sandstone buildings in 1858, with the forced work of incarcerated African-American laborers, and continued on and off through the 1950s. Situated on over 300 acres, it was designed to evoke optimism and the spirit of reform that gave birth to similar mental hospitals around the country, beginning in the 1830s.

These public works were sold as monuments to healing, mansion-like and airy, with cutting-edge medical treatments and scientific architecture. Inside, a person committed there was said to encounter occupational therapy, medication, hydrotherapy, even hypnotherapy. Superintendents boasted that the older methods—chaining up the “mad” in basements—had been abolished. Straitjackets and strong rooms, it was said, would be used only sparingly. Clean air, baths, simple food, and healthful activities were the considered the cures for disorders of the mind, and the reported “cure” rates were—at least at first—terrific.

These “asylums”—the word in common use at the time—were meant to feel like a refuge, but were also products of a very different understanding of mental illness. As such, they also employed high doses of opium, bleeding, harsh purgatives, and devices such as the “Utica Crib” and the “phrenological hat.” Still, the institutions were not operated as though they had something to hide. Tourists were encouraged to visit, and postcards and even patient newspapers were printed for public consumption. In 1842, Charles Dickens called on a number of mental facilities during his American tour. He was famously unimpressed by Blackwell’s Island Asylum in New York, but found the Connecticut Retreat for the Insane in Hartford “admirably conducted” and the Boston Lunatic Asylum to be a place embodying “enlightened principles of conciliation and kindness.”

But even in those years, exposés, novels, and short stories began to cast America’s asylums as mysterious, even sinister. In 1833, one Robert Fuller called the McLean Asylum for the Insane in Massachusetts a “tyrannical Institution” and a “dungeon.” Isaac Hunt’s 1851 description of the Maine Insane Hospital told of a “most iniquitous, villainous system of inhumanity, that would more than match the bloodiest, darkest days of the Inquisition or the tragedies of the Bastille …” Pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft locked her protagonist up in an asylum for her controversial 1798 novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman. Edgar Allan Poe set a dark comedy, “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether,” at the fictional Maison de Santé hospital, where the protagonist encounters a mad doctor who lords over a topsy-turvy world ruled by the patients.

Without a firm understanding of the causes of mental illness, or more advanced pharmaceutical or therapeutic options, these places were never going to achieve their goal of humane treatment of mental illness—a goal we still grapple with today. By the end of the 19th century, the hospitals were clearly overwhelmed. Stays grew longer, treatments were revealed as ineffective, and conditions worsened markedly. And thanks to a widely copied 1890 New York state law that made the state wholly responsible for the care of people with serious mental illness, patients kept flooding in. Overworked doctors tried dangerous new drugs and treatments, or simply neglected their charges. Things were even worse in the segregated, “colored” hospitals for African Americans, which typically had much lower budgets and fewer treatment options. In an effort to reverse the bad publicity, superintendents started renaming their institutions “hospitals.” It made little difference.

The demise of these big state hospitals began in the late 1960s, spurred by the widespread availability of thorazine (called the “chemical lobotomy”), a new Medicaid provision that funneled federal mental health funds to nursing homes, and a new emphasis on outpatient care. Deinstitutionalization of mental illness emptied many struggling hospitals, but also put many former patients, damaged by their institutional quarantine, on the streets and in prison.

This larger historical arc is mirrored, beat for beat, in the history of the Trans-Allegheny. Inspired, like many of the large state hospitals, by physician-reformer Thomas Story Kirkbride, it was designed for “moral treatment.” Kirkbride’s animating idea was that space, air, and rest would cure most cases of mental illness, hence the wings were set back in a staggered pattern to facilitate maximum light and air into each ward, and the grounds were planned with pleasant walkways, lawns, and fish ponds. Renamed the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane by the new state government of West Virginia in 1863, it welcomed its first batch of 20 patients in fall 1864. By 1881, the massive clock tower and the fourth wing of the main structure were completed, at significant cost to the state. It was touted as the largest hand-cut stone building in America.

The hospital was designed for 250 patients, but by the end of the century there were nearly 500 in residence. Intake diagnoses included “hereditary,” “epilepsy,” “menstrual,” and “masturbation.” By that time the cure rate was reported as 26 percent, much lower than earlier levels. Another name change, to Weston State Hospital in 1915, reflected a lack of confidence in the operation of the hospital, and within a couple of decades, the patient population was more than 2,000. New treatments, such as electroconvulsive therapy and lobotomies, were introduced. The crowding increased and conditions further declined.

By the time the hospital closed, at the tail end of nationwide deinstitutionalization, in 1994, it had lived through the lifecycle of just about every American mental hospital: early optimism, local boosterism, poor results, declining conditions, overcrowding, and finally desperation and closure. As with other hospitals, Weston shut its doors after years of diminishing support and patient numbers.

The grand old abandoned asylums carry the weight of a heavy past. Many are Kirkbride structures: massive faces, extended bat-like wings, tall ceilings, and extensive facilities. Cupolas and towers top many of them, which look castle-like. Nature has reclaimed many of the forgotten ones, which makes them alluring and hazardous. Hydrotherapy tubs, ventilation pipes, broken toilets, empty bed frames, and rotting dance floors: The mental hospital has become core to the idea of “ruin porn.” And for good reason. These features that these sites are known for, frankly, have long been associated with hauntings in popular culture.

Some states have declared their abandoned hospitals strictly off-limits, citing health hazards, including asbestos. Some hospitals have been repurposed. Fairfield State in Newtown, Connecticut, for example, has recycled and updated some of the buildings for municipal functions, and added a large youth sports complex to the site. Others, such as Blackwell’s Island (on what is now called Roosevelt Island) combined demolition with extensive refurbishment to create luxurious private living and commercial spaces. And then there are the hospitals that have entered the paranormal tourist trade.

In 2007, a contractor purchased the derelict Weston building from the state at auction for $1.5 million. The new owners revived its original, more frightening, less socially acceptable name, and began a program of limited restoration and courting of audiences interested in history or that like a good scare. The employees at Trans-Allegheny report that the site, as an attraction, has been a great boon to a local economy, which calls to mind the civic optimism that came along with its construction in the 19th century.

I arrived at Trans-Allegheny in the afternoon, and my experience began with a historical tour led by a docent dressed as a nurse. She explained the history of the buildings in great detail and related the stories of some of the patients with sensitivity and a modern understanding of mental illness. We meandered through a section of the central building, including a small museum, medical facilities, and the parklike courtyard in the back. A few spaces, such as one well-appointed hallway section, have been renovated to their midcentury splendor, with period furniture, fresh paint, and carpeting. In other places peeling paint and grimy floors spoke to the fact that most of the building has been untouched since 1994, and in many cases much earlier.

But I had signed up for more than the history experience. I was to return that night for the “Ghost Hunt,” in which about 30 visitors were allowed to see much more of the hospital between 9 pm and 5 am. I arrived that evening with a thermos of Starbucks, some snacks, a notepad, a headlamp, and a Ghost Meter EMF sensor (purchased online for $39.95). I wanted to understand the place that the old asylums have taken in the modern American imagination.

The large group was broken up into teams of 10 or so, and each was led through tours of different floors within the massive central building and its attached wings. The guides related history and legend and then let us wander freely for an hour or so in each new area. Walking through such a dark space is disconcerting and disorienting by itself. With my headlamp on a subdued setting, I could make out objects and doors but little else until I got close up. There were many times that I found myself alone. The hallways were staggered, and opened onto bedrooms, offices, bathrooms. One section had a row of cells. Wheelchairs seemed to have been strategically placed. My EMF device remained quiet.

In one area, a guide told me about Big Jim, who, it is said, murdered another patient with a bedpost. Here was the process for contacting him. Sit in the dark room and unscrew the head of your flashlight until bulb and battery lead are just disconnected. Then ask Big Jim a question and wait to see if his spirit would make the connection to make the light flicker on. There was some flickering, which means that it was at least a very good story to tell your friends later. I returned there later, after the tour, and sat in the dark room across the hall, my headlamp off, curious if something would happen—some noise or creak or visual artifact of the kind that tends to inspire ghost stories.

There was nothing, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying.

As the night went on, I continued patrolling the dark halls, sometimes away from the group, and I heard the sounds and thought I saw things in the shadows (though nothing that couldn’t be explained a dozen ways by animals, architecture, and the psychology of the unknown). I entered rooms and sat as still as I could. I checked that ghost meter. If there was a sensation that stuck with me, it might be the smell of old cigarette smoke—a direct sensory connection with the departed residents, it seemed. I’m a scholar, a skeptic, someone who knows how, over the years, a drumbeat of movies, rumors, horror stories, and more have made the classic American state mental hospital into an object of terror—maybe the most haunted class of buildings in the country. I know all that. But it’s impossible not to be affected by this.

These abandoned hospitals still have a lot to teach us. And sometimes that’s what’s most scary about them. None of us visitors slept that night, but rather spent the whole time exploring. I left in the light of the morning, tired but glad that I had had the experience. I neither saw nor heard any evidence of the supernatural, but I recalled all the stories and films from my years of research and started to see them in a new way. We, as a society, created these horrors, in allowing the overcrowding and decline of places of healing, in the stigmatization of people with mental illness, in the mistreatment of even the staff. Something about spending the night in the facility let me trace this path of hope and despair for myself.