What Ghost Stories and Haunted Houses Tell Us About American History

The U.S. may be a relatively young country, but it has its fair share of ghost stories and haunted houses. And according to Colin Dickey, author ofGhostland: An American History in Haunted Places, most of those myths tells us something about our society’s fears and anxieties.

Dickey toured America’s most famously creepy buildings to research his book, and found that people often use “the language of ghosts and the language of hauntings to get at other aspects of culture in American society,” he tells TIME. “When there’s something curious that doesn’t belong, that nobody has an explanation for, the language of ghosts becomes a way of giving that place a sense of history.”

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