793: The Problem with Ghosts

Ira Glass

Chaunte is not somebody who believed in ghosts. When her mom died this past May, she remembered seeing her lying there and feeling the finality of it. Like, she's gone. It felt real. But three days later, this thing started happening.

Ira Glass

It was her mom.

Ira Glass

She lived in Las Vegas. You want to get a spot that's in the shade. That's key. And not saying, I love you? Typical.

Ira Glass

To be clear, Chaunte didn't actually see her mom. She just felt her presence, like a person sitting beside her, she says. She didn't think too hard about whether it was real or not. Mostly, she just liked it, her mom dropping in like that. She and her mom always really enjoyed each other, made each other laugh, liked hanging out. And her mom died relatively young, 61 years old, from a degenerative disease. She was struggling to speak. She was in a lot of pain. It was nice to think of her past all that.

And then it happened a second time a few weeks later. Chaunte was back home in New York City, over 2,500 miles from Vegas where her mom lived and died. How a ghost would get from one part of the country to another is a question that I certainly would have if I believed in ghosts. Does it just jump on a commercial jet? In any case, Chaunte was on her couch.

Ira Glass

Chaunte did deliver the message to her dad, who told Chaunte, yeah, her mom's right. He doesn't listen so well sometimes. The third and last time her mom showed up, again, Chaunte was sitting on the couch.

Ira Glass

But it's actually how her mom was often in life, off busy doing her own thing. And can I say, this is not what Chaunte wants to hear from her dead mother. And she does know what she wants. She wants her mother to say something about her, what she meant to her mom.

Ira Glass

Today on our program, "The Problem with Ghosts." We expect such specific things from them, and they so rarely deliver. We really do want them to be something they are not, which, frankly, is so unfair. They're dead, and still they're supposed to put up with other people's expectations? Don't we at least get relief from that in the great beyond?

Today on our program, we have stories of all kinds of ghosts, ghosts who've been ignored and misunderstood, famous ghosts, and ghosts who have ghosted those who love them. Yes, they ghosted. Why do you think they call them ghosts? From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, The Ghost Industrial Complex. What people want from ghosts in Savannah, Georgia couldn't be clearer. They want a good scare. Ghost tours are a thriving part of the tourism business there.

Ira Glass

Every night in Savannah, the historic district is packed with ghost tours, guides taking people around with ridiculous ghost-detecting equipment, tours in open-top hearses. There's a lot of drinking on these tours. The journalist and podcaster that a bunch of us here at the radio show know, Chenjerai Kumanyika, recently heard from a friend of his, George, who's an eighth generation Savannahan, that something weird is happening on these ghost tours.

George told Chenjerai that the guides actually talk about the brutal reality of slavery. Chenjerai thought, really? On these tours? They're going for that? Chenjerai was the co-host of the podcast, Uncivil, which documented the typical ways that white Southerners present the history of the South and what they usually leave out, like the violence of slavery. So he wanted to see for himself what was happening and went down to Savannah.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

I went on a bunch of these ghost tours. My friend, George, told me to be sure that I went on one called The Spirits and Scoundrels Tour. I pulled up on it at about 10:00 PM on a Saturday night. It was being led by an older white dude dressed like a pirate with baggy pants and a black scarf around his head, silver rings and daggers hanging from his waist. He jingled when he walked.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

As we walked, every once in a while, he would stop our group in front of one of these large mansions and tell us about a murder and some kind of ghost sighting. All of this was totally predictable on a ghost tour and also part of why I'm not into ghost tours. But then the pirate pointed down to these bricks and said they were sunken down in the sidewalk because there were bodies of people buried beneath us.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

Suddenly, we weren't just talking about ghosts anymore. The pirate had snatched us into this kind of weird Black history archaeology moment. Honestly, it caught me off guard. Keep in mind, people are walking past us with beers in their hands. It's not quite New Orleans, but it's definitely a downtown drinking vibe. The pirate knelt down and held his fingers above the indentations in the bricks.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

When white people acknowledge slavery, I'm not going to tell them, don't do that. But at this moment, I'm not sure I'm buying this connection. This was a tour guide dressed like a pirate, leading mostly white folks who were here to find ghosts. The only other Black guy on the tour was this dude who was maybe in his 30s, and I couldn't help but notice him. Clearly, we were not the target demographic for this tour. When we saw each other, he gave me the nod. I walked over to him.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

He looked directly at me and scrunched up his face. If you looked up, "seriously, bruh?" in the dictionary, this guy's face would be there. I couldn't help but laugh. We both did. His name was Greg.

Soon enough, we had another weird slavery moment on the tour. We stopped in front of a big mansion called the Mercer-Williams House. According to the story, the former owner of the property, Hugh Mercer, told eight of his enslaved people to stand in the front of the house, and then--

Chenjerai Kumanyika

As the pirate imitated the sound of the gun, he also acted out the whole thing, pointing his fingers at imaginary Black heads in front of us.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

After that horrifying detail, he's on to the next thing, like that was just another fun little story. I fell back from the group to walk next to Greg.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

I wondered the same thing. I wanted to hear more about the Black folks in these stories, not just their deaths. And in every tour I went on, this happened over and over. Guys would breeze through these violent stories of enslaved people getting killed for pure shock value or laughs. Like when the pirate took us to what he said was a slave burial ground, he said the bodies were pretty much just thrown in the dirt, and then he capped that off with a joke.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

Other graphic moments of terror or trauma got other punch lines. One tour guide told us about four runaway slaves who were beheaded and joked that their ghosts haunt the square. And if you listen close, you can hear them singing, "I Ain't Got No Body."

I think I was expecting these tours to acknowledge slavery in a way that would check a woke box or something, a few somber sentences acknowledging that slavery was bad before they got back to ghosts. But this was more than that. They were really going in. A lot of this stuff was cartoonish and stereotypical. But intentionally or unintentionally, they were doing something I've called for many times, getting groups of white people to confront the violence and cold-bloodedness of slavery.

And why were Southern, mostly white people paying to go on these tours in their time off? It's almost like if you turn critical race theory into a book of ghost stories, all the white folks who hate it would love it. I talked to someone who had an explanation for why this is happening. Tiya Miles is a historian at Harvard, and she stumbled onto a tour like this kind of on a whim.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

This tour is presented to Tiya as a historical tour, not a ghost tour. Tiya loves going on history tours.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

Molly is the person at the center of what's probably the most popular ghost story down in Savannah. Her story is the spooky climax of nearly all the tours. The tour guides all stop in front of a big orange mansion with palm trees and Spanish moss. And the way they tell it, this Black woman, Molly, who lived and died in the house, was owned by a wealthy and influential businessman named Francis Sorrel and his wife, Matilda.

Molly is caught up in a love triangle. Francis is having an affair with her. That's the word they use. Only Matilda, his wife, has no idea. Then one night, Matilda walks in on Francis and Molly and catches them in the act. Matilda is so distraught to learn that her husband is cheating that she walks out on the balcony and jumps to her death. Some even believe she was pushed.

A few weeks later, Molly is found dead, hanging from the rafters in the slave quarters. Francis is a suspect in both deaths. Tours all over the city exploit this tragedy by claiming Molly still haunts the house where she was murdered. And remember, because these are ghost stories, they get told with a whole bunch of embellishments, and there are slightly different versions on different tours.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

In some tours, Molly and Matilda come off as if they were lesbian lovers. Here's a letter Molly supposedly wrote.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

And one guide went as far as to add a detail about Matilda holding a hot bowl of soup when she walked in on Molly and Francis.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

There was only one tour guide who talked about it differently, not coincidentally, the only non-white tour guide we had, a Latina guide named Sarah.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

That's how Tiya saw it, too.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

After that first daytime tour where Tiya learned about Molly, she came back for a nighttime tour, which takes you to the room where Molly died.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

Tiya stands frozen at the threshold of the door, while the other tourists brushed by her.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

At this point, the tour guide takes out a phone and plays this audio clip that he says was featured on the TV show, Ghost Hunters. They filmed an episode in the Sorrel-Weed House. What Tiya heard was a woman's voice screaming, help, oh, God, help, and the muffled sounds of her crying.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

She knew it wouldn't be easy.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

So she started with the more accessible records and tracked down Francis and Matilda and found evidence suggesting she did kill herself, though not in that house. But to confirm that they owned someone named Molly or anyone in that age range, Tiya started out by going to state and local historical collections.

She combed through purchase records of people the Sorrels enslaved, dug through national archives and census records of enslaved folks in Georgia, scoured local newspapers from that time, found letters from neighbors. She even discovered a memoir by one of the Sorrels' sons. And at the end of a year of exhaustive research?

Chenjerai Kumanyika

If Tiya had told me that Molly's story was exaggerated in certain ways, I don't think I would have been surprised. But no Molly?

Chenjerai Kumanyika

Tiya was so appalled that she decided to find out if this was happening anywhere else. Turns out plantations and old mansions all around the South give tours like this, and she went on as many as she could. She discovered a whole industry built around fabricated stories, historical sites ginned up with fake tales of murder and torture. And she wrote a book exposing this part of the tourism industry called Tales from the Haunted South.

Hearing this, I thought back to my tour with the pirate and that story he told about the shooting of eight enslaved people by Hugh Mercer. There's no evidence that happened. And those fingerprints of the enslaved in the bricks we walked on? Bricks like that do exist in Savannah but probably not in that location. But it's not just that so much of this stuff is made up.

The closer Tiya looked at these ghost tours, the more she saw a disturbing pattern in the kinds of stories the tour guides told. They were stories where enslaved folks betrayed their masters or poisoned their masters or seduced their masters. The gore and sensationalism of stuff like this actually hides the realities of slavery by turning the victimizers, their masters, into victims. If you look at them as little moral fables, the message of these stories is that everything would be fine if everyone just stayed in their place.

Tiya's book debunking Molly came out in 2015. But when we took the Sorrel-Weed House night tour, Molly's story was still presented as fact, and it was the focus of the tour. I wanted to know how they could justify it. Why are they still telling this lie? The manager of the Sorrel House agreed to talk. His name is Calvin Parker, and I was surprised to learn that he's Black.

He's worked at the Sorrel House on and off for 10 years and gives tours himself. But they're the historical tours that happen during the daytime, and they don't mention Molly. These days, he says, Molly only gets mentioned in the nighttime tours. After we discussed some basics about the house, I got right to the point.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

At this point, I realized that this conversation was going to go very differently from what I had expected because I thought Calvin was going to defend the Molly story. Like cite evidence and show me documents. In fact, I'd spent the night before preparing counter evidence, like we were going to trial.

Calvin told me he's changed the scripts of the daytime tour so they're factual. But he insisted that, even as the manager, he has no control over what happens in the house at night. He says he was promoted to run the daytime tours four years ago and only the daytime tours.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

He says, this year, for the first time, they haven't had people from these outside companies running that business. So for now, guides have continued giving the ghost tours with no one really supervising them. Calvin says, he's de facto in charge and hoping for a big overhaul.

I have to say, I feel for Calvin. As a Black man, he's in a tough spot as someone stuck navigating a situation created by other people's lies. But I still have this very real feeling that what's going on here is wrong, and I couldn't hold this back.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

It's so weird that any of the ghost tours are making this stuff up to shock people because there's no shortage of real horror in Savanna's history, and it's hiding in plain sight. Slavery used to be the city's main business, and you can still see the infrastructure around you.

The boats came in at the dock. Negro marts where enslaved people were sold are throughout the city. Don't picture an auction block. These were just stores whose merchandise was human beings, and there were brokers and bankers that funded all of this. People came to Savannah from all over the South to buy enslaved people.

The problem with these tours is not just that tourists don't get a sense of the actual lives led by real Black people hundreds of years ago. It's also that they don't get any picture of the economic machine that built Savannah, that built this country and made so much of what we live in today. They tell us we're haunted, but they don't say what's really haunting us.

Ira Glass

Chenjerai Kumanyika. He teaches podcasting and audio reportage at NYU's journalism school. His story was produced by Elna Baker with Valerie Kipnis, Esther Blessing, and George Dawes Greene. George writes about the ghost tours in his new novel, a surprisingly funny thriller called The Kingdoms of Savannah.

Coming up, one of the most famous people on the planet tries to get in touch with his mother, who is dead. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "The Problem with Ghosts," the problem being, of course, that we expect all kinds of things from ghosts, and they usually do not deliver.

Ira Glass

We have arrived at Act Two of our program, Act Two, Wedding Crasher. So this next ghost story takes place at a wedding where an uninvited guest shows up. Elna Baker explains.

Elna Baker

The wedding took place on a cold night in February, just one month ago. It was big, celebratory. There was an hour of light food and drinks, and then everyone walked out into the courtyard for the ceremony.

Elna Baker

This is Abby. It was her younger sister's wedding, the last of the kids to get married, so it felt like the end of an era. This wedding would be the grand family finale.

Elna Baker

But Abby doesn't say hi to any of them. She can't. Abby is standing behind a fence, a little over 50 feet away, on the sidewalk. The uninvited guest, it's her. Abby was disowned by her parents seven years ago. She grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the Hasidic community there. It's a tightly knit world of Orthodox Jews in long dresses and black suits and hats, it's own little cultural ecosystem tucked inside New York City.

Abby was standing pretty far from the ceremony, but just in case, she wore a face mask, a big coat, and a hat so no one would recognize her. She thought the distance would make it feel less intense, but standing there made her feel like she was at the wedding. It totally threw her off guard.

Elna Baker

When Abby first questioned and then left the Hasidic community at 21, it seemed like things would be OK. Her parents stood by her, which was rare at the time, but also made sense. Her family was really close. She'd still come home on weekends.

But then a few years later, Abby came out as trans. It was a concept so foreign, she says it took over an hour for her father to grasp what she was telling him. But the second he understood, he stopped making eye contact with her. Looking over her shoulder, he said, this means I'm never going to be able to talk to you ever again. Abby says she asked if she could at least say goodbye to her mother. He forbade it.

Not talking to her mother was unfathomable. Before, they'd spoken almost every day. Even though Abby's one of 13 kids, her mom took a special interest in her. And when Abby broke away from Judaism, her mom loved hearing about her life in the outside world. In the weeks and years after Abby was cut off, Abby would call and call trying to reach her mother. One time, her mom picked up the phone.

Elna Baker

Abby was later told that her father consulted a rabbi about his decision to cut her off, and that this rabbi told him, your child is dead now. When she actually dies, you don't need to sit shiva.

Now, standing outside the wedding, Abby was being forced to watch all the people she'd lost parade in front of her. She studied her father's face. His hair and beard were finally turning white, but she knew that. She'd seen pictures of him online.

Elna Baker

Even though Abby knew going to the wedding would be painful, she felt compelled to go because she'd always imagined being there. For years, after they cut her off, she told herself, by the time my youngest sister gets married, we'll have worked through this. I'll be back in the family.

Throughout the ceremony, Abby kept waiting for her mom to come out with the bride. She knew about when it would happen. She'd been to many weddings. But still, the moment they actually walked out, it caught Abby by surprise. Suddenly, there she was-- her mom, with her sister.

They play this song that's been in the family for generations.

Elna Baker

So she watches through this chain link fence. It's this literal thing separating them, but even if it weren't there, there'd be no crossing from where she is to where they are.

Elna Baker

Abby brought her girlfriend to watch the wedding with her. It was a strange moment for them both, a kind of bizarro meet the family. These are the people from all the stories I tell you. This was once my life.

Elna Baker

Abby takes one last look at her family, and then she walks away with her girlfriend.

Elna Baker

They walk down into the subway together and get on the M train, each stop taking them further and further away from Abby's old life and closer to the place she now calls home.

Ira Glass

Elna Baker. Abby Stein has a memoir, Becoming Eve, about leaving the Hasidic community and transitioning.

Ira Glass

Act Three, Seance Fiction. So this last story happens at a moment in history when lots of people were believing in ghosts. This was the early 1920s. The 1918 flu pandemic had just killed some 50 million people worldwide. Just for scale, that is way more than the number of people who've died of COVID so far, and the number of people on Earth was just a fourth then of what it is now.

Add to that the millions of deaths in World War I, and, well, chances are pretty good that if you lived in America or Europe, you were mourning somebody you loved. All that loss led to this peculiar moment that seems kind of unfathomable now, where the idea that ghosts are around us just within reach wasn't some far-fetched or fringy kind of thing. It was mainstream. Sean Cole explains.

Sean Cole

Do you know about Spiritualism? It's this religion, basically, that surged during this period. Believers thought that it's possible to talk to the dead. They attended seances, lots and lots of seances, sit in darkened rooms, often pitch black, holding hands. Furniture would move. You heard voices from beyond.

Sean Cole

This is David Jaher, history writer, wrote a book that delves deep into this whole world.

Sean Cole

Ectoplasm, like that stuff in the Ghostbusters movies. Richet was actually a physiologist. And while you may not have heard of Charles Richet or any of the scientists who were spiritualists or who ran with spiritualists, there were these two guys you definitely have heard of, both incredibly famous back then, and even today, who got swept up in this movement in a way that came to really define their lives.

The first is the world-renowned magician and escape artist, Harry Houdini. At the time of our story, he was grieving the loss of his dearly departed mother. And this was no ordinary mother-son relationship. He wrote romantic letters to her, used to rest his head on her bosom when he was anxious and when he was 35 years old. This, by the way, was before the whole world was talking about the whole Oedipal complex thing.

Sean Cole

Identified with, but he had a really hard time believing in spiritualism in the same way and for very, very good reason.

Sean Cole

Yes, the guy who wrote all the Sherlock Holmes stories. He's the other famous-y mcfamous guy in our story. Conan Doyle lost his son, his brother, lots of the men in his family, either in some World War I battle or in the flu pandemic.

Sean Cole

And not just a believer, but really the de facto leader of the spiritualism movement. You might be familiar with this part. He traveled all over the place giving presentations and lectures about the virtues of spiritualism, which lent the movement a lot of credibility. Here was this guy who had invented this character who was the pinnacle of rationality and deductive reasoning. Of course, you were going to give him the time of day. And Conan Doyle acknowledged, yeah, there are a lot of fake mediums out there, but there were legitimate ones, too.

Houdini's mom had already been dead for the better part of a decade when he met Conan Doyle. He presented himself to Conan Doyle as a seeker after the truth, and Conan Doyle thought he could help him talk to his dead mother. They came to really like each other. In 1920, Houdini traveled to the UK to do some shows, and Conan Doyle sent him around to all these mediums that he trusted. But with every one of them, Houdini could see the puppet strings because, again, he had pulled the same stunts himself once upon a time.

Sean Cole

Which, of course, is a conversation you hear in a lot of spiritual houses. If you can't get in touch with the spirit, whether divine or just your cousin, it's because you don't believe well enough.

Fast forward a couple of years, 1922, Conan Doyle comes to the states to give some spiritualism lectures, brings his wife along. And they hang out with his new best bud, Houdini, and Houdini's wife. And toward the end of the Conan Doyles' time here, the four of them are at a resort in Atlantic City, just hanging out at the beach or whatever. And the Conan Doyles surprised their magician friend with a suggestion.

Sean Cole

Sort of an eerie coincidence already. And Houdini, he's agreeable, actually eager. He wrote about this saying, quote, "I was willing to believe, even wanted to believe." They go up to the Conan Doyle's hotel room. Sir Arthur closes the curtains and puts a writing tablet and pencils on the table. This was to be Lady Doyle's mode of mediation, automatic writing.

Sean Cole

Then Lady Conan Doyle starts writhing around, making all these jerky movements. She pounds on the table, which is the sign that the spirit is present. Lady Conan Doyle asks the spirit, do you believe in God? And then pounds the table three times, which means yes.

Sean Cole

Lady Conan Doyle starts writing furiously. Every time she gets to the end of the page, Sir Arthur tears it off the tablet and hands it to Houdini. Luckily, Houdini held on to the pages after all of this, so we know what's on them. I asked David to read some of what Houdini's dead mother had to say.

Sean Cole

That's Conan Doyle's version of the story. Houdini is left pale and trembling, a new believer. Houdini's feelings about it become evident about four months later. He writes an article for The New York Sun, saying he's never seen any evidence that anyone can communicate with the dead. Quote, "I don't know of any medium who has not, at some time, been detected in some fraud."

Conan Doyle sees the article and writes a letter to his friend, Houdini, saying-- I'm paraphrasing here-- dude, what the hell? I watched you tear up in front of me. Also, my wife is not a fraud. Houdini writes him back like, dude, that was not my mom.

Sean Cole

Including no reference to the fact that it was her birthday. I think she would have mentioned that. Plus, that cross that Lady Conan Doyle put at the top of the page when she started channeling, Houdini is like, ahem, we're Jewish.

Now, Conan Doyle has responses to all this stuff. First off, there's no language in the afterlife, he says. Maybe a trance medium would come through uttering the exact words of your loved ones in their native tongue, but automatic writers are more translating their thoughts and feelings. We're not taking dictation. And as far as the cross goes--

Sean Cole

The Atlantic City seance was the last straw for Houdini. From then on, he wasn't just a skeptic of spiritualism, he was an all out crusader against spiritualism. He would sneak into darkened seances in disguise, shine a flashlight on huckster mediums as they pushed furniture around that was supposed to be moving on its own. He devoted a big chunk of his touring show to just bashing spiritualists, demonstrating exactly how shysters pretended to channel your dead relatives.

He even testified before Congress in favor of a bill that would outlaw fortune-telling for hire. It didn't go anywhere, but the hearing devolved into total mayhem. Mediums and other spiritualists flooded the Capitol, jeering Houdini as he gave his testimony. Security was called in to keep them from laying into each other. He screamed at them, tell me the name my mother called me when I was born.

The way Houdini saw it, these so-called psychics, they were just fleecing money from the bereaved, people who were so grief-stricken, of course they were ready to believe anything. It wounded him because he knew how they felt.

Ira Glass

Sean Cole is one of the producers of our show. David Jaher's book about Houdini's war against people who claim to speak with the dead is called The Witch of Lime Street.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Elna Baker. People who put together today's show include Phia Bennin, Zoe Chace, Aviva DeKornfeld, Tobin Low, Alaa Mostafa, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Naida Reiman, Charlotte Sleeper, Ike Sriskandarajah, Laura Starcheski, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Dr. Jamal Toure, Clyde Washington, Brad Dilling, Jessica Osbourne, Joe Posnanski, David Eagleman, the folks at 1790 in Savannah, and all the tour guides in Savannah who helped us understand the ghost scene there.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. You can listen to our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. Last weekend, I took him to his first rave. He was so excited to finally try MDMA. And then we got there, and he was so disappointed.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.