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A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest
The dark-eyed woman in the long black gown was first seen in the 1970s, standing near a fireplace. She was sad and translucent, present and absent at once. Strange things began to happen in the Santa Fe hotel where she was seen. Gas fireplaces turned off and on without anyone touching a switch. Vases of flowers appeared in new locations. Glasses flew off shelves. And in one second-floor suite with a canopy bed and arched windows looking out to the mountains, guests reported alarming events: blankets ripped off while they slept, the room temperature plummeting, disembodied breathing, dancing balls of light.
La Posada - "place of rest" - had been a grand Santa Fe home before it was converted to a hotel. The room with the canopy bed had belonged to Julia Schuster Staab, the wife of the home's original owner. She died in 1896, nearly a century before the hauntings were first reported. In American Ghost, Hannah Nordhaus traces the life, death, and unsettled afterlife of her great-great-grandmother Julia, from her childhood in Germany to her years in the American West with her Jewish merchant husband.
American Ghost is a story of pioneer women and immigrants, ghost hunters and psychics, frontier fortitude and mental illness, imagination and lore. As she traces the strands of Julia's life, Nordhaus uncovers a larger tale of how a true-life story becomes a ghost story - and how difficult it can sometimes be to separate history and myth.
"Starred Review. Perceptive, witty, and engaging, Nordhaus observes that 'it's not so much the ghost that keeps the dead alive... as it is the story.'" - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Part travelogue, part memoir, part ghost story, part history... Nordhaus offers a deeply compelling personal account of her attempts to better understand her own family... The book's unique blend of genres and its excellent writing make it hard to put down." - Booklist
"A thoughtful and intriguing chronicle of familial investigation." - Kirkus
"Tenaciously researched and beautifully written, American Ghost gives flesh to a lost story, exhumes a bygone world, and animates the ways in which the past haunts all of us." - Benjamin Wallace, author of The Billionaire's Vinegar
"American Ghost is a perfect blend of compassionate empathy, hardheaded journalism, and lucid writing." - Mary Doria Russell, author of The Sparrow, Doc, and Epitaph
"Hannah Nordhaus has crafted a seamless blend of gripping mystery, moving family confessional, and chilling ghost story." - Karen Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy
"Here is a very different sort of a Western, a deeply feminine story with a strong whiff of the paranormal - Willa Cather meets Stephen King. Don't read this book late at night... unless you like feeling your neck hairs stand up on end!" - Hampton Sides
"Hannah Nordhaus approaches the legend of her great-great-grandmother's ghost with the insight of an historian and the energy of an inspired detective. A fine tale well told. I loved every word." - Anne Hillerman, author of Spider Woman's Daughter
This information about American Ghost was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
A historian by training, award-winning journalist Hannah Nordhaus has written for the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, the Village Voice, Outside magazine, and other publications. "The Silence of the Bees," the High Country News article on which her first book The Beekeeper's Lament was based, won a special citation from the Stanford University John S. and James L. Knight Fellowship's James V. Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism. She has also received Associated Press and California Newspaper Publishing Association awards for feature writing and business reporting.
Her most recent work American Ghost (2015) has seen critical acclaim from People Magazine, Newsweek, NPR, Elle Magazine, the Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, the Denver Post, Minneapolis Star-...
... Full Biography
Link to Hannah Nordhaus's Website
Name Pronunciation
Hannah Nordhaus: nord-house
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