since those early years, the book festival has just exploded, and very quickly became a national premiere destination for the biggest books of the year. >> join booktvphone the texas book festival live from austin, saturday and sunday, november 4th and 5th on c-span. [inaudible discussion] >> hi, everybody. colin is sit neglect haunted cheer. >> i want to tell a story about the big chair. >> thank you all for coming on this lovely saturday, or as i like to call is the day after

friday the 13th. i hope yours was spooky or nice. so bear with me while i go through some front matter for a couple of minutes. number one, please silence your cell phones, obviously. unless you're lucky enough to have a haunted one and have no control over it. in which case it's fine. after the event this is our last event today. if you fold up your chair and leave them against a pillar or bookshelf so we can make space for signing. finally, chance to ask questions. we really, really, really ask you to use the microphone we have right here because c-span is here recording, and our videographer is also recording. so we want to not have empty space on the audio track. finally, one more thing. we're not of at the wharf in southwest. if you're there, it's a whole

new development. it looks amides, really cool so do go down there and think us out. if you live in southwest and you can prove it in any way, show your i.d. and you'll get a six-mong trial membership, which is really, really convenient because the present giving time is coming up so you can save some money. so, check out web site for more information. we have events there starting next week. i'm very excited to introduce colin dickey, here for the paperback release of his book "ghostland." not obviously his first foray into straining and unusual things. he has written two books and has short essays in the new republic, and he contributes to l.a. review of books. how many here were here on

thursday for kaitlin? well, coppin is a member of the order of the good death, which is a collective of sort of creative types and people who deal with death professionally, and they're trying to change the way we think about death and deal with it. if you don't know who they are, look them because they do some really, really good work. picked up "ghostland" when it came out in hard cover. what didn't expect it to be quite -- hit me quite as hard on an emotional level because it was us a much about the living as about the dead. and colin is really, really good at sort of adding layers of social and historical commentary to think about how -- why we make ghost stories, how we make those ghost myths and what that says' our mindset, our history and who we are.

and i'm not going to say much more about it. i'm just going to say pick up a copy, it's a beautiful book you can 0 use as a halloween decoration right now. so join me in welcoming colin dickey. [applause] >> thank you for coming out, and thank you for politics and prose for hosting me. this is your fourth or fifth event today. you really packed it in today. i didn't actually -- you mentioned friday the 13th. didn't actually prepare anything so i can't give you the full story but y'all should look into the history of friday 13th for many years, the number 13 was superstitious and friday was superstition but the two were finally combined in a 1906 viral marketing campaign which i'm doing from memory to double check the year but this guy who was -- had a sort of pump and

dump stock market scheme that wrote a book to tie into it and in order to drive up buck sale his created the melt around friday the 13th. that's why friday the 13th 13th became a thing. so that's the fun thing. that not what we're here to talk about tonight. i'll talk maybe just sort of generally for ten minutes and then read from the book and then we can chit-chat and take turns sitting in the haunted cheer. so, the-i did want to -- thicks isn't the book but i want to talk about why we're here now in october, because i think this is just one of those cool thing that we don't tend to think too much about. i of course want to talk about ghosts and haunted stuff all year around, but for most of american culture, october is the month and this is a michigan that that not always been the case, and just thinking today

about how relevant this is that in the first half of the 19th century the holiday that is associated with telling ghost stories and haunted stuff is of course christmas eve. it is not halloween. and in fact of course if you think about the most famous, like, christmas story we have, of course, "a christmas carol," the most famous ghost story is" a compliments story. " that for many years, christmas each was when we gathered at a culture and gary around the fireplace and told ghost stories and i recall read a couple paragraphs from the humorous jerome k jerome who put together a collection of ghost stories in the 1880s and talked about christmas eve. i just love this. so, why on christmas eve of all nights in the year i could never

myself understand. it is invariably one of the most dismal mights to out in, cold, muddy and wet and at christmastime, everybody has quite enough to put up with the way of a houseful of living relations without want to ghost of any dead ones among about the place. must be something ghostly in the air at christmas, something about the close muggy atmosphere that drawles up the ghost like to dampness of the summer rained that bring out frogs and snails. whenever five or six english supreming peopling miami around a fine on christmas eve they tell each other ghost stories. night like telling authentic anecdotes about specters. a genial festive season and we love to muse pornographies and dead wide and murder and blood. so, how we get to halloween in october is through -- tell me you know -- through irish and scottish immigrants, that start

neglect second half of the 19th century the bring all hallow's eve, an amalgamation of a catholic holiday and the celtic holliday, so comes to us through the irish and scottish. and so you see advertisements in 18 60s and in philadelphia for advertisements for halloween where you can hear a cultural event where you can hear dreamy tales of old ireland, the idea is halloween when your hear folk tales and tales of ferryies and goblins from celtic areas like scotland and ireland, and one of the things that's fascinating is that sort of scottish immigrant association by the end of the 19th stir, trying to divest halloween from it sort of superstitious woulds make it like st. patrick's day,

halloween would be a scottish cultural holiday and we celebrate scottish culture. and what i find fascinating the way that sort of backfires, what we don't lose the superstition aspect of halloween, we lose the cultural specificity, the rest of americans start to say, we don't want this holiday. it's a commemoration of ireland and scotland. we want it for offers becomes a universal spooky holiday. every halloween i think again about our current discourse about immigrant culture and assimilation and without -- obviously wont without minimum nice thing discrimination that muslim americans or mexican immigrants are facing right now, sort of the history of halloween suggests strongly that 100 years from now americans are going to be celebrating the day of the

dead and talk about the commercialization of it. i think of halloween as a time that it representative of the way in which we have successfully integrated an immigrant culture into the fabric of america and how that is pretty cool. that's they here and now. this book can be enjoyed year around, a great stocking stuffer, fourth of july. this began for me -- i grew up in san jose, california. anybody here know the winchester mystery house? which is -- a couple of people. yeah. so, i grew up down the street from the winchester mystery house with described as most haunted house in america, and the story that you get on the tour is that sarah winchester --

there's a movie coming out with helen mirren in february about her. sarah winchester was the daughter-in-law of the guy would under forked win chest irrifle company and became fabulously rich. but her husband and child both died. her child died in infan say, her her died a few years later on tb. she moved from connecticut out to san jose, california, bought this eight room farm house, and over the next 37 years turned it into this sprawling 61 room victorian labyrinth and if you have taken the tour, it takes two hours to walk through the house. you walk over a mile without stepping outside and you only grow 110 rooms. it's a really bizarre and amazing house, and the story you get on the tour is that she became convinced that her family was cursed by anyone whod a ever

been killed bay win chest irrival and that she was billing the house as a labyrinth to keep the spirits at bay and as i did the research i found that a lot of that last little bit i told you think reason for the house, actually not -- doesn't track well in the actual historical record. the record suggest something quite different. and this idea of a woman living alone, being haunt by the spirits of people who had been killed by the winchester rifle, the gun that won the west, was in fact more of an invention and a projection, i started to think about the way in which that story, while maybe not historically accurate, reflects a lot of sort of fundamental myths and stories about america that have been brought together in this figure of this one woman. the idea of a woman who live as i lone, never remarry us, and

the sort of discomfort that our male oriented culture has about women living alone, has about women who are not sort of pegged to a husband, father, children, whatever. that -- her very presence as a spinster creates unease and people look for explanations for that. this story of this gun that was instrumental in the sort of displacement genocide of native american cultures and the way sarah winchester has come to be the kinds of collective mourner for that. she sort of u.s. exists for some people to bear the burden of that historical stale that white people take for grant. she becomes the figure and the house become this way for all these folk tales to express a lot of anxieties that different kinds of americans have about our culture and that is what

really sort of drove the book, this idea that what i wanted to do is wanted to look at these ghost stories, less with the question of do i personally believe that ghost does or do not exist, and is kind of a -- there's no way to win that conversation. you either -- nothing you can tell a believer that will disabuse of them of notion that boasts degree and nothing you can tell a skin skeptic that would prove it. what are the stories we tell about ghosts and and the buildings we see as haunted and what those tell us about ourselves. so that's how the book came and what you'll be walking out with this in your hand for the low price another $17 plus tax. that's the main thing, and i try to go around the country, tried

to visit different place us immigrant i wanted to haunt it hotels and haunted prisons and haunted insane asylums, a haunted brothel, not as a customer. but i tried to sort of see as men different places and gather up as many stories and sort of throughout the country. i did not make it to d.c. unfortunately. so i have for you tonight no stories of haunted d.c., which i. kind of bummed about but i have a close second in richmond, virginia. what i'll read i is from the chapter on richmond, virginia, won't be able to read the whole thing but i'll kind of move around a little bit and hopefully if i have done my due diligence, it will still make sense and be sort of interesting. so this is about richmond, virginia. hopefully about ten minutes. we'll see. let's have some water first.

theres ghosts everywhere in the historic neighborhood of richmond, virginia. the upsale restaurant julies is thought to by haun by the ghost of a gun smith apprenticety name damage donoon. hi was shot on the stairs and the stair ace was converted into storage closet but employees hear the thump of a body falling down the stairs. bob's cantina was home to bikini contests, jell-o wrestling and the spirit of other knife-wielding fish seller. next door rosy's pub is haunt by

several goats, one, woman in dress would vanishes when confronted and another, a man often seen the kitchen and one whose part is unknown. over on east carey street the building is supposedly built on the site of brothel from the early 1800s. on upper floor, women in gauzy dresses wander, staff are known to hear their names called only to turn and find no one there. it's hard to find a building that doesn't have a ghost story attachment it to. local historian and paranormal investigator pamela kinney speculates because virginia was home to earliest settlements in north america which makes sense so long as we agree by settlements we mean settlements of europeans, which to say the kind odd ghosts you look for and kinds of ghosts you see depend on your frame of reference. when i began to tally the super natural record of the area at the heart of richmond, a simple

fact emerged. the ghosts are overwhelmingly white. this is curious because if you walk just a little way away from the haunted bars and shops down the be freeway, you'll find the devil's half acre, black men, women and children were brought here, imprisoned and tower e tortured while the waited to be sold to planters and speculators. dozens of slave traded had office here's where slave auctions were widely triesed and many came from all over the south to make their fortunes of. tens of thousands mens where some women's lives changed hand in the years leading to the civil war. today wall street is gone, replaced by at the freeway, but the rest of the area remains mostly unchanged. while it's difficult to estimate how many people lost their lives in the slaves of the city, hundreds of softs human remains have been found in this nearby

slave burial ground. we typically think of ghost stories in terms of the remnants of a terrible tragic, past we welcome not escape, justice unavenged like hamlet's father. why then in a place that should be haunted by the aggression of such a terrible injustice think scene of countless deaths should there be nothing but white ghosts? for once you start looking forgoerses that aren't white they're easy to find. maybe not in the city itself but not a house in the country that ain't packed to its rafter with some dead negro's grief of graffiti. the 19 in 30s in workers began collecting stories of former slaves, everything from recollection's their day-to-day lives under slave troy questions about clothing, medicine and first hand accounts of slave auctions and mistreatment. the story's are compiled in 17 tate from indiana to florida and accelerated with urgency once it

became clear the first hand accounts were differ appearing. for more than two-thirds of the respondents were anywhere 80s when they were entered between 1936 and 1938. by the 0th century america's understanding of the hotted officer slavery was tinged with nostalgia via folk flower vehicling contented slaves and benevolent owners that -- folk tales which game the later for song of the south. the slave narrative's collected by the wpa sagamore newt -- sought a more neutral approach. they had a largely untold version of the landscape. interviewer were begin a list of questions to ask and number 13 asked specifically got ghosted. could the respondent remember thesens and stories of childhood? had she learned any stories about raw head and bloody bens or other haunts? had he personally seen any guests? answers to the questions vary.

some sir view subjects didn't believe. some new rumors were whites intimidating them. some spoke of ghosts a terrifying thing, at comforting things, as exhausting things. jane arrington of north carolina told one worker the story of john may, slave who had been beat tone death by two might when named bill stone and oliver may. after his death she report john may came back and worried both of the them. he kept them awake, hollering and growning all through the night, hundreding them relentlessly and got to bad that other slaves became afraid of the white men because of the ghost of john worried them so bad. another respondent, george, spoke before a haunted benton hill in missouri, telling the interviewer, one night we was driving through there and heard something that sound like woman just screamingful old man was with me and he wanted to stop and see what it was. but i said, no, you don't. drive on. you don't know what that might be.

in these stories ghost terrified but embed in the tear of cautionary tales. a woman recalled how as a child she and her peers would see a covered wagon that would appear in tallahassee where she lived, analysis some secluded spot. the kidded have been tempted to proof the wagon they were today by assaults inside was dry head and bloody bones, a ghost who didn't like children. only as a adult did he learn the wagon was owned bay slave holder who stole children. a man named thomas lewis of indiana once described a place where there's other hyphens that was haunted. he said, if someone gets near he can hear the cries of spirits of black people who were beat ton death. it's kept secret so people won't find out. he reround edstory 0, to two men out houstoning and the dog began

chasing something, run through the fence as one of the men started to follow his friend said, what are you going to do, the other replied i want city what that dog chased. his friend told, you better stay out of atlanta. that place it haunted by support blacks who are beat ton death. when the nights were still and in the spoon was fool you could hear the tinge ting of the lever and you knew there wasn't anybody, just haunts. again and again, these ghost stories revolve around a tenuous and threatened connection to the past. ghosts will emerge at that time times through the breakdown of family. one woman no tennessee saw the guest of a woman appear before if while she was giving birth, she called out, who are you? the ghost replied, don't forget the old folks and then vanish elm the young woman realized it was guest of her own mother.

a man identified only as uncle louis spoke of go ghost thursday terms of melancholy. he said ghosts are social ablable. when folks are scared it behind haunt's feelings. if slave openers and traderred naught a reel way to obliterate memory and history for those they enslaved then the mel lan com koley gose maize be in search search of their own paste. it would to state hard and fast distinction between ghost stories told by whites and those by the black community there are stories of black ghosts that serve the same function as white ghosts, marking a location, explaining the unexplainable, comet rating an event. what is clear it that history is not just women by the victors it's written by i literate. the prohis gigs against enslaved americans learning to read or write that the way too keep them under droll nut in long run men

the stories, lives and opinions of million offered americans were lost to time. ghost stories theoretically should be an ante dote to this, based on oral tradition, handed down for the years, it onact as alternative history. a record record of the oppressed and ill literal and marginalized. this isn't out this indication because goat siting are are so vague they can easily be a attached to the dominant narrative and to only that narrative. once one of the main economic engines of thing south, the city now feels hallooed out. devoid of life and commerce. from the university is doesn't trachemuch in the way of the night life those not for lack of trying. there irrestaurants, vape shops, nightclubs. not say there haven't been attempts to revitalize their

area, the mayor of richmond pushed plan to build a new stadium for the minor league baseball team, the swirled, on land adjacent at the devil's half acre, the plant succeed manyifully drying ire from preservationists and those that were concerned it wise obliterate the city's past. after the project was announced a team fundsly richmond slave trail commission set out to uncover the devil's half acre through a careful study of old maps they located the area where the complex once stood. some partially obscured beneath the freeway. in december 2008 work unearthed the remnants of the japan. they need fine why whipping ring but i found unexpected behind office lives. table wear, englishing china, earthen ware, remnants of a

porcelain doll. how does a city balance commerce with remembrance? the ghost stories told are not only harmless, they add a patina to to city's bars and restaurants, an air of mystery and glamor, invite you spend an evening waiver time out of reach to add a small bit of wonder to an average night out. what that it don't do is speak a past whose legacy can still traumatize. don't ask pattrons to consider a complicated history and ask the city's white citizen tuesday tourists to face difficult facts. those who would rather not revisit those days the city's ghost lore makes is easy, turning our attention to murdered gun myths and prostitute its. that's not to say there aren't other ghostes present. the a member of the commission recalled i start weeping and couldn't stop when the bit odd porcelain and dahl were -- and

doll were founder. there was a heaviness i felt over and over again. i'll stop there. [applause] >> if you want to ask questions or tell ghost stories or sit in the chair, see if we can levitate books across the room. >> you mentioned halloween at the beginning of -- and how grew in this country. how does it stack up -- do you have in your research why hasn't it not taken off here the same way since everyone looks -- i mean, when they start selling halloween stuff in august, you think they would look for another holiday like that. >> yeah you. think they, would christmas used to also double as that holiday, and once halloween became

ubiquitous, christmas ceased to be a ghost-telling holiday and became about santa and presents. don't know i have a hard and fast answer for you because it's hard to say for sure but i sometimes wonder, us a much as we need one holiday about ghosts and gob behind, that we has -- goblin lynns that we as could curl, the main stream nonweirdos. no a need for 0 dunk of different holidays. halloween sopped up the feeling into one area. i guess that's the short answer. even shorter answer would be issue don't know how. it's a weird thing but it's odd the way that some somethings sort of catch on and then become juggernauts. >> does it seem like maybe -- i'm just winging it here -- maybe it's too dangerous, too close, and maybe -- >> could be. i mean, you know, if -- has

anybody here seen "meet in the in st. louis" that my mother maded you are us watch? you know my grandmother. if you remember there's -- it's from the 1940s but set in 1904 and there's a great scene at halloween where the little girl has to go murder somebody, and like murdering somebody means showing up at the door of your neighbor, knocking on the door and when they open you say, i hate you, mrs. johnson, and throw flour in their face and your like i murdered miss johnson so the actual cultural rituals do change through time and we didn't always just like have candy. think we had candy as early as the 1890s. so evolves through the years. >> what is your favorite ghost story that did not make it into the book? >> one of the story is really like that i really wish i could have gotten in book is actually

a haunted drive-in honolulu, hawai'i. which has been subsequently torn down. but the story of the haunted drive-in in hawai'i -- i want to just by able to go to hawai'i on my publisher's dime, right? but the story is that there was a bathroom in this drive-in, where you would go in and there would be a woman who was washing heir hands at the sink. right? with long, long black hair. and then at some point she would turn around to face you and she had like no face. just like pure skin. that was the hawaiian drive-in bathroom ghost and if you know anything about japanese culture and, you know actually a very common ghost in japan next no face ghost. something that is like a long are standing part of japanese tradition and that makes sense for hawai'i because so much of

hawai'i's culture comes from japan and asia. so it would make sense that of all the place inside the united states that would have a singularly japanese ghost it would be in this place that straddled -- in the middle of the pacific ocean that straddled the u.s. and is. so i love that story bus it's a clear reflection of the way that ghosts -- stories tend to be cultural the pick. in japan this is a normal ghost and in the out you don't find it anywhere except in hawai'i. i don't -- just kind of ran out of time and space and money so that wasn't didn't get in the book but i kind of wish it was. >> you mentioned you traveled across at the country looking for got e ghost related areas. there is an area that surprised you with how large of a ghost culture there was in terms of understanding the local history? >> yeah. i think one of my default assumptions dish think assumption that a lot of us make -- is that the older a

city, me more ghosts it's going to have. the boston is going to have a lot of ghostes. that new orleans is going to have a lot of ghost, and that's true, they do. but then maybe phoenix won't have as many ghosts, las vegas, l.a., just by virtue of the affect they've been settled more recently. but this turns out not to be true. in one thing -- i actually lived in l.a. so i knew a bun overgoes hunter inside l.a., knew the locations. but i love how rich a place like l.a. is with ghosts, even though it's a quarter as old as richmond or new orleans or something like that. do think that really does speak to the way -- again, in l.a., you're not going to find wild west ghosts and brothing ghosts. you'll find hollywood starlets, marilyn monroe so the ghost stories in a city become an

integral part of how that city tells its own history, so that -- in vegas all the ghosts are in kinds -- casinos, which is vegas creates a very different category of ghosts than l.a.'s ghosts or new york's ghosts. that's what i found on that score. >> i know you just talk about japan, but is there such unique concept. never really read -- actually thought about culture in terms of ghost stories. have you ever put any thought into ghost stories outside of american culture, like, anything from, like, europe, africa? >> yes. the think you should do is gate lot of people to call my editor and tell her that they need to fund a worldwide travel and, like, probably three our four

books. no in some ways, i'm joking but at some pound i had to cut it off or else this would be an endless project the more united states was one way of being able to say, this is how i'm going to narrow this down, and also so much halves is is cultural, about the folk lower you grow up with that the ghosts of the united states felt very natural to me, whereas with japanese ghost hoise something bit because i studied it but it would be a different approach because clearly i would be an outsider. so i would love to. it's just ran out of -- again, like ran out of space. >> colin, you spoke about the idea of culture and the differences. do you find commonalities that emerge everywhere or they really kind of submerged injure the regional differences? >> yeah. i definitely found commonalities

one theme of the book that wasn't evident was architecture and why some buildings feel haunted and others don't. and why do victorian houses feel haunt whereas brutalist, a architecture is not. there's commonnal grit the way certain buildings work on us. i mentioned the winchester mystery house. feel like a labyrinth, disorienting, you have been in thousands of houses and know when you buick the house you know where the kitchen is, we build houses in the same way. so when you walk into a house and the kitchen is in some weird place, right? or the bathroom is sort of oddly spaced. you'll figure it out but there's a moment where you're like, that's weird.

and again, in addition to my experiences in san jose, one thing that foster this book is when my wildfire and i were looking at house in l.a. and kept looking at weirdly built small houses that had been just sort of oddly constructed so you'd walk into the him and the window into the backyard except there was another room behind and it you're like why is there a window from one room to the next? so i got to think about the way in which unsettling architect tooth breeds ghosts. that's a commonality that i found throughout the country and like whenever you're in a house that feels a little bit odd, the odds of their being ghost stories attached it to it are pretty high. >> a followup you. debt with a lot of communities in your book which i read in hardback so i don't have to buy. >> thank you. >> injury welcome. it was good. the idea is have you followed up anywhere -- has any particular site gotten back to you said

from that book we have increased? amazes me how much money there is. >> yeah. >> in guests. every washington has it. and yours were very well-done. had anybody gotten back to you? >> no. if they did i would ask for a cut. that's probably why. it's a multilevel marketing scheme. i get it. >> hello. i recently took a ghost tour of george down and there was a big house there that made them mention the winchester house. you said that -- the research you did didn't bear out the story behind the winchester house that is told. what did you find in terms of what was the real story? >> you know, i try and kind of keep that also close to the vest so people buy the book, but i like you guying you're a fun audience, you're hanging out. so the -- one of the fascinating

thinged in winchester story is when you talk to historians, they know a lot about rich people because rich people write letters, keep die's, they have stuff. stuff is passed down, nicely made. they have large houses, houses pre-preserved so rich people leave behind a legacy and in a lot of case is historians struggle with boar people because poor people are move around a lot, they're maybe not literal. one weird thing about sarah win chest iris she would so fabulously rich and writ we know much less about her than we -- like historians would expect for an upper classwoman like that. we have some letters and we have some document -- a lot of letters between her and her lawyer, we have some letters between her and her sister-in-law which are really -- theres just couple and you get so much in the letters. only if we had more.

and i had my theories why we don't have more, but what we do know that she was not in any way crazy or roaming around the house mourning, wearing black, weeping and wailing, we know that none of here employee, which she had many, none of them sawing to during sought to tell the world she was crazy or had seances. so we have no evidence of that. when you think about the people who worked with her, if she was really doing all these seances, pretty eye feeling that would get out. what we do know is she was not a professionally trained architect because women were not allowed to go to architecture school until the 1890s. the earliest women were

admitted. so we know she was a self-taught architect, who for me, like -- i see her as like many folk artist us, be they working in needpoint or woodworking who just take it upon themselves to develop a craft i just see her craft as, a tech -- architecture, some people make elaborate quilts and never been to art school, she had the means to just play around with making a house. and so the way she describes building the house is she'll say, i had this hallway and then i -- i added this room 0 on the side and blocked the skylights and now the servants are tripping so i have to redo that. gentlemen just sort of would like try something out and have unintended scone wednesday. that's the best i can give.

understand it's extremely unsexy compared to haunted widow, chasing ghosts but the flip side is i think it's -- that's a really cool art practice that doesn't get recognized. itch she is just sort of pathological and crazy and doing weird stuff, the house is a manifestation of psychosis, where if she is a self-taught artist, the house every manifestation of her work and i think that's a cooler story. >> it's pretty interesting someone would just perpetually keep trial and errorring on a house. >> exactly. >> thank you for your talk tonight. i was wondering what you think ofuture for ghost stories looks like, you have this old timey vibe. with technology and more ways to verify things and facts and history and everything, and what do you think the future looks like good, signaled. >> at the end of the book, talking about a friend of mine whose father was a really

influential early product manager of computers. sort of on the forefront of the minicomputer revolution. so he was a sort of technological kind of innovator. and his house, which -- he sort of built in the sort of early to mid-2000s, was an early example of what we are now referring to as the internet of things. so he had the light switches automated. they were all set up to follow his rhythms and stuff like that. he had this sort of elaborate computer system controlling temperature and the water ask all this stuff. so after he died, in i think 2010, his two daughters sort of inherit the house, and as -- as you can imagine the computer systems from 2007 are already

obsolete. so the two women had difficulties figuring out how to shut things off and how to turn things on. and the house continued to live in the rhythms of its departed owner. so, tom west had taught himself to go to bid at 10:00. because it was not good for his health if he stayed up late so at 10:00 all the lights go out, and the computer that controls the lights is buried in a wall behind dry wall, with no easy access, and it's written in the computer code that is totally bugged oat and doesn't work. so now if you liver in the house grew to bed at 10:00. there's -- this is the problem that they have. just could not overcome the house's sort of inertia for the deceased occupant. that's a way in which i see the future of ghosts, is running

through the technological systems increasingly going to run our lives, that ghosts or a furnishings of memory out of control. that's how the internet work, how social media works. the happened to me -- i don't think facebook does this anymore but i got a notification from facebook asking me to reconnect with a friend who had died eight months earlier. but facebook didn't understand that. she just hadn't -- facebook was like, why is this person not enter acting with our site? let get this person interacting. she died. so, there's always these ways in which this idea of like memory out of control is going to drive the future and i think we're just going to continue to have ghosts that way. >> iwhy some many ghost stories

having to do with mental hospitals, is its, a tell tour or stigma about mental illness. >> a little bit of both itch was interested in the architecture, so -- and i was just driving here, i've been driving across country. ... >> sort of looked like a victorian home. and because you paid to have your family member treated there, and you wanted to feel as though they were getting a good treatment. and as those asylums decayed over the years, they got overcrowded, treatment methods

changed. so much of that became about, you know, what used to be welcoming and fun became a representative of aspects of how we treat mental health issues in ways that people don't want to function. so i guess that's maybe a kind of shorthand version of what i talked a lot about in this book. but it is really, yeah, it is about the architecture, about the way those buildings were built and how our intentions get coded into architecture in a way that lasts much longer than the intentions themselves. that we change our attitudes and our cultural attitudes much faster than our buildings actually fall down. and so that's a legacy. same thing with victorian homes, same thing with old fortress-like prisons like eastern state penitentiary. we change ideas, and yet these buildings are left standing and that, i think, is a lot of how they become, like, haunted. so -- >> okay, you just answered part of my question, because you focused on architecture. >> yeah.

>> so it means you did not do cemeteries -- >> oh, i did do cemeteries, yeah, yeah. i did look at cemeteries. i spent some time in stull, kansas, which is a cemetery haunted by, it's a mouth to hell, is so they say, where the devil comes up twice a year, and the devil appears to take the form of many drunk college kids -- [laughter] and empty beer cans. so the people of stull, kansas, are busy exorcising themselves of hooligans more is so than actual paranormal events. >> did you do the gragos? >> i don't know that i'm familiar with that, what's that? >> okay. in the beach community. okay, i'll tell you afterwards. >> okay, all right. awesome. >> it's a rich story. i'm surprised you didn't -- >> i mean, i love it already. i love the gray ghost, that's a wonderfully evocative name. >> saved a family during hurric-

>> oh, wow. >> how are you defining ghosts, you know, in terms of separating them from unsettled spirits from other dimensions? >> loosely, i was defining ghosts. because, again, i was not interested in proving their existence or disproving their existence, and when i was interviewing ghost hunters in l.a., i would ask them, you know, what they thought, and i got really varied explanations. you know, all these guys all believed in ghosts, they all had their meters and stuff, but what they claimed to be experiencing was wildly different. and the one that really struck me was this one guy who told me that they are worm holes, that they are, you know, like so he's using sort of cutting edge, like, astrophysics to explain what's happening when you see a ghost is a temporary worm hole through time back to 1930 or

whenever is momentarily opening where you're getting a glimpse of whatever. and it's not that i believe or disbelieve that, but what it made me sort of think about in terms of the book is that i didn't want to foreclose that possibility. i didn't want to verify it. i just wanted to say what i'm referring to as ghosts are just whatever anybody wants to call a ghost, you know, and however anybody wants to define it. again, i was more interested in the stories that got told about it and the places that got associated than i was in a kind of onlogical kind of understanding of the physical materiality or lack thereof. so that's how i just kind of tried to -- because, again, i, we'd be here all night, you know? if we're going to prove or disprove ghosts once and for all, it's not going to happen. so this was a way of having that conversation without having to get into a loop of unanswer about. >> thank you. >> i'm actually just going to close out. i'm going to be the last

person -- >> yeah. >> so that we're not here all night. >> politics and prose burned down 30 years ago. [laughter] >> well, it is, actually, haunted. so if you -- >> oh, cool. >> yeah. so if you do do something on d.c., come back. >> okay, sure. >> but you said, so the most sort of haunted feeling you ever got, i think, was in the mustang ranch or something like that where it was actually -- >> yeah. >> -- sort of tied to psychological, you know, experience. >> yeah. >> and so my question is actually probably unanswerable, it's sort of a question of making of ghost stories and what ghosts do you think we're going to make, like, in this time? like everything is topsy-turvy and we're all kind of -- >> yeah. just some back story for those of you who have, will be reading the book -- [laughter] tomorrow. so i, i was sent by maxim magazine to profile the owner of

the mustang ranch which i feel is important. i was not there as a client. [laughter] but it was, so i was doing this completely other writing job when, you know, the women who worked there were like, oh, by the way, this place is totally haunted, right? but one of the things that they told me in a number of different ways and i saw sort of firsthand is that the job of working in a brothel, sex work, is emotionally and psychologically really taxing which sort of makes sense, you know? that, you know, i asked, you know, how much of your job is sort of emotion allay boar as opposed to physical labor, and -- i said, is it 90%? they said, it's 100%. these women are working as basically -- in addition to everything else they do, as untrained therapists. and is, thus, the psychological exhaustion is actually quite high, that it's a very difficult job for many people. and they don't have a lot of turnover because they think

they've gotten very good at sort of picking good, you know, good people who will fit the job well, but they did describe at length how it's a very difficult job, and it's not one for everybody. so that's where i was like, oh, well, that would make sense that people would see ghosts as an education presentation of just, like -- an expression of emotional and psychological exhaustion, right? it's like when you're vulnerable, when you are sort of strung out and sort of had a really tough time, then you see something and you're sort of more likely kind of almost like a 19th century sort of hysteria way you'd be more likely to see things that got labeled ghosts. that was my hypothesis, but that was also where, the only place in all the places i went where somebody actually showed me videos of things like -- and i was like, well, that's odd. so i'm looking at this video, and i'm clearly not emotionally taxed from being involved in sex work. so, you know, so that's just the background to that question. and so, yeah.

so i guess to answer your question partly is that i don't, i don't know that i believe that hypothesis, you know, at the end -- thatting i don't necessarily, it didn't bear out that people who were sort of at their most sort of extreme emotional were more likely to believe in or see ghosts than people who were more recharged. but as i was saying before, i mean, i think that one of the main drivers for ghost stories is really this idea of memory out of control, you know? and when i think of this year, i think of how fast everything has happened and how quickly we have all been processing information and how, how many things which take just time to work through are just being filed away because we don't have time. i was watching cnn today, and the woman who had been in vegas, had been at the concert in

vegas, had survived, flown back home to her house in santa rosa -- which is now gone. you know? which has burned to the grown, you know? and the cnn anchor was, like, have you processed this? she was like, no. she's like, thankfully, right now there's just things to do. now i'm just trying to do things, and i'm not looking forward to that time when i'm, when i actually have to process everything that's happened. and i think, i think that that, that's where the ghosts are going to -- the ghosts are going to come there hurricane harvey and hurricane irma and hurricane maria and the northern california fire, they're going to come from all these things that need, that are, like, traumatic incidents that we as a culture haven't dealt with because there's no time, because it's on to the next thing. that's also the future of american ghosts, i think. >> thank you so much, and give

colin a hand again, and thank you very much. [applause] >> yeah. thanks -- i know it's a saturday night, you could be out care yolking -- karaoking. this was super fun. >> fold up your chairs, if you can, and lean them against something, and we're just going to start the line to colin's left. and books are by the register. [inaudible conversations] >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. booktv, television for serious readers. >> and this weekend on booktv's "after words" program, former "face the nation" host bob schieffer examines the impact of changing technology on journalism. we attend regnery publishing's 70th anniversary party in

washington d.c. and nbc news correspondent katie turer reflects on her coverage of the trump campaign and the 2016 presidential election. also airing this weekend, microsoft's ceo weighs in on the reinvention of microsoft. history professor ty ya miles examines the role that slavery played in the early history of detroit. success academy charter school founder eva moskowitz discusses her work in education, and the former vice president of public policy at freddie mac talks about the problems that led to the collapse of the mortgage company in 2008. that's all this weekend on booktv on c-span2. 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books, television for serious readers. >> the brain is incredibly sophisticated timing device, and i'll give you two examples of that. so in language, for example, if i say two sentences like they

gave her cat food or they gave her cat food. so there's two different meanings there, and based on pause. and another example is in music. and music, of course, doesn't make sense. i think music would be less enjoyable in an internallist universe, right? [laughter] because it's already out there. it's sort of the change. and so i give an example and i think now might be a good time if we can play the audio clip. and this audio clip will be of a song, and the challenge to you is to see if you can recognize the song, if it reminds you of anything. i'll explain what it is later. i'll give you guys a clue and a clue that whenever i give this to my undergrads, they look at me with a blank face, but the name of the group is the beatles -- [laughter] and so see if this song reyou of anything. so can we play that, please? --

reminds you of anything. so can we may that please? ♪ ♪ >> so does that remind you guys of any one or two songs? does anything pop into your heads? >> [inaudible] >> very good, anything else? >> my girl. >> what? >> any oh beatles' -- other beatles songs? somebody said yesterday of so the people who sort of picked up on yellow submarine were paying attention to the notes, but the timing was of yesterday. so it was a hybrid song in which you sort of crossed both of the songs in the spatial and temporal. this is a nice example in the fist place of how important time -- first place of how important time is to everything we do. and, again, this is the idea that time is really flowing. but at the same time, how

sophisticated the brain's ability is to tell time on the scale of tens of hundreds of milliseconds to a few seconds. and if you slow music down or speed music up too much or if you slow speech down or slow speech up -- or speed speech up too much, it ceases to be speech or music. is so there's this very critical range or the golly locks -- goldilocks zone of timing. [inaudible conversations] [applause] >> good evening, everyone. my name ruth robbins, and it's a pleasure to welcome you all here tonight for our program. before we get started, i wanted to go over a couple of very quick