American Ghost

“A haunting story about the long reach of the past.”—Maureen Corrigan NPR’S Fresh Air“In this intriguing book [Nordhaus] shares her journey to discover who her immigrant ancestor really was—and what strange alchemy made the idea of her linger long after she was gone.” —PeopleLa Posada—“place of rest”—was once a grand Santa Fe mansion. It belonged to Abraham and Julia Staab who emigrated from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. After they died the house became a hotel. And in the 1970s the hotel acquired a resident ghost—a sad dark-eyed woman in a long gown. Strange things began to happen there: vases moved glasses flew blankets were ripped from beds. Julia Staab died in 1896—but her ghost they say lives on.In American Ghost Julia’s great-great-granddaughter Hannah Nordhaus traces her ancestor’s transfiguration from nineteenth-century Jewish bride to modern phantom. Family diaries photographs and newspaper clippings take her on a riveting journey through three hundred years of German history and the American immigrant experience. With the help of historians genealogists family members and ghost hunters she weaves a masterful moving story of fin-de-siècle Europe and pioneer life villains and visionaries medicine and spiritualism imagination and truth exploring how lives become legends and what those legends tell us about who we are.