The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

For such a young country, the United States is an unusually haunted place. Sociologist Judith Richardson points to the Hudson River valley from Manhattan up to Albany as a uniquely haunted sphere, one steeped in literature and folklore even beyond the persistent headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow fame. Ghosts are both remnants of history and witnesses to it. In a region like New York, marked by nonstop waves of immigration and change, in which it can be argued, as Richardson does, that the signal experience is of a stranger newly arrived in a forbidding landscape, ghosts both invite our terror and reassure us that others have trod our path before. In that sense, the ghost represents a curious contradiction in terms: extant and illusory, terrifying and reassuring. Their spectrality enables them to contain several ideas at once, embodying our slippery, overlapping cultural feelings about history, place, and time.

Ghosts are tied inextricably to a specific place, oftentimes a site of transition and change. Folklore regularly locates ghosts in conveyances—at a crossroads, on a bridge, near a river, in the backseat of a car. But the most haunted realms in literature are, of course, houses, sometimes of such specific character that they bear names themselves: Usher, Hill House, Bly. Houses imprison ghosts, perhaps, as bodies contain souls; ghost is the name we give to an innervating sense of an object’s, or place’s, persistence through time. Ghost stories are how we forgive houses for daring to outlive us.

In the same way, certain places can be said to be haunted by our imaginations of them. Both Annie (whose Dutch name, Annatje, is an homage to the folktale of a murdered servant dragged screaming behind a horse in the Hudson River valley) and Wes move through a New York City that is in some sense impossible to see. Annie sees the city as she remembers it being, while Wes sees the city alternately as his father has told him about it and as he’s experienced it in movies. Memories, while true, are impermanent, and film, while permanent, is untrue. The real place lies somewhere between these layered images, these overlapping specters of the city as it never was.

History, too, struggles with ghostly narratives, as forgotten and overlooked ideas refuse to disappear completely, instead bubbling just under the surface of that which is remembered. New York’s financial involvement with slavery, for example, was something of a historical ghost until recent excavations have returned that fact to light. Academic history, even when revisionist, is typically bound by a rhetoric of power. Only select perspectives last: perspectives of the literate, the rich, the powerful. But silenced voices have a way of refusing to lie dormant as our culture marches away from their moment in time. They instead become folded into us, lingering on the periphery of our experience. Haunting us.

The haunted self, the haunted house, and the haunted city: When we talk about ghosts, then, we’re not just dealing with sheets and chains and Scooby-Doo. Ghosts are the language we have come up with for talking about ideas that influence us even in the absence of our conscious awareness. A whiff of cologne might conjure the specter of our first love, a certain quality of light in summer might be the ghost of our childhood home, and something as innocuous as a traffic pattern might be the lingering scar of a city’s entire reason for being. We can all point to things that have made us what we are, but there are many more things we can’t point to, because they are invisible. We’re surrounded by ghosts all the time. In a sense, we’re ghosts ourselves.

As I showed the home inspector to the door after he declined my offer of coffee, he reassured me once again that I had nothing to be worried about. Some ineffable quality of my house met with his experienced approval, which of course made me happy. But as I shut the door behind him, I had to reflect that in a way he was wrong. Certain smells will always transport me to July 4 celebrations in this house. Its staircase was moved by people I never met, to a place of their choosing, for reasons of their own. It stands on a street with a name changed out of revolutionary zeal over two hundred years ago.

My house is definitely haunted. And I bet yours is, too.





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