18 Quotes by Colin Dickey

A city obsessed by its ghosts seems to be weighted down by a conflicted view of the past. Something close to melancholy: a weight it can't quite let go of, a lingering sadness. And though we don't often think of the United States in these terms, this melancholy is as much a part of our history as our triumphs.

The dead are watching, whether or not we choose to listen to their stories.

We tell stories of the dead as a way of making a sense of the living. More than just simple urban legends and campfire tales, ghost stories reveal the contours of our anxieties, the nature of our collective fears and desires, the things we can’t talk about in any other way. The past we’re most afraid to speak aloud of in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.

Surely ghosts will follow wherever there is bad record keeping

Our brains are hardwired to think in terms of place and to associate psychic value or meaning to the places we inhabit.

A ghost story’s reduction of a complex moment or the history of building into a series of cliches is reproduced in beautifully staged photos that fetishize the past without truly representing it. “Ruin porn” is the visual analog of the ghost story.

The “moral treatment,” as it came to be known, became the solution: rather than chained and forgotten, patients would be unshackled and allowed to move about the asylum at will. Instead of being tortured and imprisoned, patients would work and play. Through labor and sports, hobbies and other recreations, the moral treatment promised rehabilitation and freedom from insanity. The moral model was held out as a means of actually curing patients, rather than simply bundling them out of sight.

Ghost stories are a way of talking about things we’re not otherwise allowed to discuss: a forbidden history we thought bricked up safely in the walls.

But this, too, you could say, is part of the American story, as we have always been people who move on, leaving behind wreckage and fragments in our wake.