As America's bloodiest conflict, it is no surprise that the Civil War gave rise to a golden age of ghost stories. Popular publications were filled with accounts of ghosts—ghosts that appeared in the heat of battle, in the fretful quiet of picket duty, and in the miserable confines of hospitals and prisons. Civil War ghosts continued to haunt the troubled peace that followed, revealing that even so deadly a conflict left unresolved issues in its wake. In a nation forever altered by the war, these ghost stories speak to something far more meaningful than Americans' taste for spine-tingling entertainment. They provide powerful evidence of how they tried to put the trauma, grief, and anxieties inflicted by the Civil War to rest. By telling ghost stories, Americans created narratives that honored the dead, explained the unexplainable, and gave their experiences a broader sense of identity and purpose.
In this annotated anthology of Civil War ghost stories, historians John R. Neff and Amy Laurel Fluker offer the first scholarly analysis of the significance of ghosts to the history and memory of the Civil War. Haunted by Memory includes hundreds of examples of ghostly tales that appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and books between 1861 and 1932. These tales both satisfied and fed popular demand for news, entertainment, and ghostlore, and became powerful tools of cultural memory. By bridging the study of the Civil War, folklore, and memory, this collection expands the parameters of cultural history and reveals how the supernatural became a lasting part of the commemorative landscape of the American Civil War.
About the Author :
John R. Neff was an award-winning educator, Associate Professor of History, and Director of the Center for Civil War Research at the University of Mississippi until his passing in 2020. He was the author of Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation.
Amy Laurel Fluker is an Associate Professor at Youngstown State University in Ohio, where she holds the Reeder Endowment in U.S. History. She is the author of Commonwealth of Copromise: Civil War Commemoration in Missouri, among other publications.
Review :
"Editors John R. Neff and Amy Laurel Fluker have expertly selected, introduced, and annotated one of the most novel collections of Civil War era documents to appear in generations. Quarrying the period's popular press for Civil War ghost stories written by veterans, minor literary figures, and newspaper editors, they recover vitally important yet heretofore overlooked texts of Civil War memory. Imaginative and thought-provoking—brought to fruition by one of the field's very best young historians—this superb collection is a worthy tribute to John Neff's marvelous but much too short career."—Brian Matthew Jordan, author of Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War
"Every story is in its way an epitaph—a message from the dead or future departed. In Haunted By Memory, John R. Neff and Amy Laurel Fluker assemble nineteenth- and early twentieth-century 'headstones' into a marvelous graveyard of narrative and invite us to summon spirits. The result is a rich repository of memory as past hauntings of national trauma emerge into the reader's present and compel us to listen."—Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, co-author of The Routledge Introduction to the American Ghost Story
"By turns fascinating, illuminating, and sad, Haunted by Memory makes a compelling case for taking ghosts seriously. Whether ghosts exist or not, ghost stories remain a cultural map to our unfinished business and our collective trauma. As ghost tours become a forty-billion-dollar industry, rich collections like this one resurrect the aspects of our past that won't stay buried. Haunted by Memory is an essential read for those who seek to explore all that lurks in the shadows of the Civil War Era."—Stephen Berry, author of Count the Dead: Quantification and the Birth of Death as We Know It
