American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest

by Hannah Nordhaus

  Nor did Abraham stay there long. Born in 1839, he departed in 1854 at the age of fifteen—Julia would have been ten, still a girl. He left in a great wave of migration that swept Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century. The emigrants were young men, mostly, running from the general woes of being a German at that moment in the country’s history—famine, conscription, political disillusionment—and the more specific insults that came with being a Jewish German at almost any time: laws and taxes and tolls and proscriptions, reminders at every turn that Jews didn’t and couldn’t belong.

  There was no good reason to stay in Germany, so Abraham left. He would have traveled the Weser River down through the cities of Hameln and Bremen and north on to Bremerhaven, where the Weser emptied into the North Sea and the ships sailed to America. The young emigrants from Lügde went by steamboat if they could afford it. If they couldn’t, they drifted downstream for two weeks on floating trees strapped together and sold as wood for shipbuilding at the North Sea ports. From Bremerhaven, Abraham sailed to New York. There’s no record of his arrival or of how long he stayed there—according to Aunt Lizzie’s family history, he found a position at a merchant house in Norfolk, Virginia, where he stayed for two years, learning bookkeeping and the ancient art of buying low and selling higher. Then he joined his older brother Zadoc in Santa Fe.

  They went to work for a cousin, Solomon Spiegelberg, who had come to Santa Fe in 1846 as a sutler, a civilian merchant selling supplies to the US Army, traveling with a column of a thousand poorly trained Missouri volunteers when they invaded Mexico and claimed Santa Fe for the United States. Spiegelberg stayed on afterward, bringing his brothers, five of them, as well as his cousins Abraham and Zadoc. The Staab brothers worked for the Spiegelbergs for two years, learning Spanish and traveling the length and breadth of the territory. In 1859, they opened their own dry goods store and began hauling supplies and capital from east to west over the Santa Fe Trail—brides, too, eventually.

  This was Abraham’s story—and thus Julia’s. By the time he married, he was a rags-to-riches success, a man of business and the world, and his public doings provide one of the few windows through which we can peer into Julia’s life. The company he founded with his brother Zadoc, Z. Staab & Bro., was a prominent one in Santa Fe. Wherever I searched in newspapers of the territorial era, I found the house of Staab: multiple ads in each issue advertising new shipments from the “States,” lists of wares in full columns and colossal typefaces.

  The Staabs sold “stuff,” anything a Southwest-bound settler could want or imagine. “Hats Boots & Shoes, Hardware, Groceries &c. &c., all of which will be found as well as sorted, carefully selected and compiled, at the lowest rates.” Fur, wool, corn, coffee, sugar, butter, lard, “Common whiskey,” “splendid whiskey,” beer (Schlitz, exclusively), pianos, razors, saddles. They sold castor oil, calico, “fine custom made clothing,” the latest ladies’ fashions—though the wagon train across the prairie took so long that the fashions might have changed several times before the clothes arrived—linen cambric, mohair, and garden seeds “at Eastern prices.” They sold it all, from first one, then two, then four large storefronts on the Santa Fe Plaza.

  Within a few years, Z. Staab & Bro. was the largest wholesale company in the Southwest. The brothers booked hundreds of thousands of dollars—1860s dollars—of revenue each year. Their safes overflowed with silver; what wouldn’t fit in the safes they kept in empty ax crates in their office. They made loans, dispensed promissory notes, even issued their own currency.

  When the Confederate army invaded Santa Fe in 1862, the Staabs and their Spiegelberg cousins sided with the Union. I could find no evidence that Abraham served in the Union army during the Civil War, though people sometimes called him “Colonel.” His campaign was commercial, keeping the Union forts stocked with grain and uniforms. A Confederate soldier who took part in the occupation of Santa Fe wrote of “smooth-faced Jews, that are our bitter enemies and will not open their stores or sell on confederate paper,” and suggested that “they ought to be run off from town themselves.” Perhaps the Jewish merchants sided with the North because of an antipathy to slavery—or perhaps they simply knew how to pick a winner.

  The Confederates didn’t hold Santa Fe long. In late March 1862, they fought the Union troops to a bloody draw at Glorieta Pass, twenty miles southeast of Santa Fe. Technically, the Confederates won the battle. But while they were fighting, a battalion of Colorado soldiers happened upon the Confederates’ lightly guarded supply train. The Union soldiers looted and torched sixty Confederate wagons, blew up ammunition, spiked a cannon, and slaughtered or drove off five hundred horses and mules. Soon after, the Confederates, lacking ammunition, shelter, blankets, and food—and without smooth-faced Jews willing to supply them with more—straggled back to Texas.

  After the Civil War’s last shot was fired, Abraham decided to become a US citizen. I found this information in the New Mexico state archives, which are hidden in an industrial cul-de-sac off Santa Fe’s busiest thoroughfare. I had driven down from Colorado, following a long stretch of highway that paralleled the route of Julia’s own voyage to New Mexico. It was an uncannily hot day. The birds and the flowers were confused, the crocuses lured out of the ground and returned to stalk, the tulips soon to follow. It was painful to go inside and install myself in the archives—a stale, windowless place, as many public archives are. But I hoped that those lightless shelves might shed some light on Abraham, who left Lügde an inconsequential teenager and returned triumphant to claim his bride.

  I sat down in the collections room, put on the required pair of rubber gloves, and riffled through a box of folders dedicated to the Jewish “S” pioneers in New Mexico: Seligmans, Spiegelbergs, Staabs. The box was packed with material, but I could find only one disappointingly slim folder on the Staabs. It contained some ledgers detailing corn sales to the army, and an envelope addressed from Abraham to a son. The envelope had the words “Valuable Papers” scrawled in the lower left corner, and when I went to look inside it, the outer flap crumbled in my gloved hands. Carefully, I coaxed the two sides of the envelope open and pulled out a list of names and dates and numbers: “Militia Warrants,” it said. The list meant nothing to me. I would learn only later how these warrants had come to obsess Abraham, a dream of easy wealth that nearly destroyed him.

  What charmed me at the time, however, was Abraham’s citizenship declaration, dated July 10, 1865—four months before his marriage to Julia, who waited in Lügde for her new life. Abraham hadn’t, if his meager folder in the archives was an indication, kept much by way of documents to memorialize himself. But he had kept this one piece of paper all his life. It was proof of how far he had come from Lügde, proof that he belonged, and he had tended the paper carefully. A hundred and fifty years later, the parchment was still only slightly off-white. His age, when he signed the declaration, was twenty-six: his “stature” was small—five foot two, the declaration stated—his forehead “low,” eyes gray, nose “straight,” mouth “small,” chin and face “round,” hair brown, complexion “fair.” His signature was deliberate, an almost childish script, with a big looping “S.” With that forceful, fastidious flourish, he secured his status as an American citizen, and promptly went back to Germany to look for a bride.

  Was the marriage a family arrangement? A love match? A bald transaction? I imagine that he and Julia had known each other casually before he left Germany, when she was a child and he a teenager. I picture their families greeting each other in the cobbled street after services at Lügde’s rented shul, the children awkward in their Saturday finery. Or perhaps their fathers did business together, or the children met in the meadows alongside the Emmer on a windless day, tossing stones that shattered the still reflections of the riverside’s willows. Or maybe Abraham didn’t remember Julia at all, since she was five years younger and one of many sisters. Perhaps he had simply hired a marriage broker to assist him in his bridal interviews—his Brautschauen—and Julia h
ad been the right age and possessed the right dowry. Or maybe she had played the piano for him and had learned a word or two of English, and this endeared her to him.

  For the Schusters, Abraham was no doubt an easy sell: poor boy goes to New Mexico, makes a success of himself, promises a glorious American future. In whatever way Abraham arranged the marriage, he worked quickly, as I imagine he always did. The Civil War ended in April 1865; he became a citizen in July; he married Julia five months later. She folded away her high-necked dark wedding dress; packed her steamer trunks with stockings, jewelry, and bridal gifts; said good-bye to her parents, her sisters and brothers; said good-bye to everything and everyone she knew; and departed: Lügde to Bremen, Bremen to Liverpool, Liverpool to New York.

  They sailed on the RMS Scotia, a double-masted, double-smokestacked, red-hulled paddle steamer of the Cunard Line. It was a new ship, only four years old, the fastest on the Atlantic at the time—the journey took nine or ten days. This is the very ship (a fictional version of it, anyway) that Captain Nemo’s submarine strikes in Jules Verne’s 1870 book, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, leaving a triangular perforation in the hull—but the ship, being so well built, survives the blow. It was considered the Cunard Line’s finest steamer. There was no steerage on the real RMS Scotia, only first class. Theodore Roosevelt and his family traveled on the Scotia to Europe for their first grand tour there, three years after Julia’s passage.

  The cabins were located on the main deck, nine feet in height. Two bright and spacious plate glass and mahogany-paneled “saloons” provided dining space for three hundred passengers. Guests on Cunard’s luxury ships could expect everything one might order at a fine hotel: halibut, oranges, petit filets de boeuf à la parisienne, French beans, littleneck clams, ox tongue, boar’s head, galantine of game, mince pie, roast potatoes, neapolitan ice cream, champagne jelly. There was a bakery, a butcher, an icehouse. An onboard medical office was available to treat sick passengers. Above decks, a promenade extended from stem to stern. But Julia’s was a January passage, and she was new to the rough winter sea. She may not have needed the doctor’s attention, but she probably didn’t spend much time out of doors.

  Of course, she must have gone above decks as the ship approached New York, to catch her first view of the American coastline: farms, forts, forests, telegraph pylons, homes, the lighthouses of Long Island, and finally New York Harbor and the spires of the city. Julia disembarked on January 12, 1866, and paused in the city to arrange her trousseau, buying clothes and furniture for her new home in New Mexico. Word of her arrival reached Santa Fe soon after. On January 20, this item appeared in the Santa Fe Weekly Gazette, with their name misspelled but unmistakable:

  Married:—Our townsman, Mr. Abraham Stabb, who went to Europe last year, took unto himself a better half. . . . He went to the Father Land for the purpose of visiting his friends and relatives, but he did more than he expected, he lost his heart and found a help meet for life.

  He has our best wishes for a full measure of happiness in his new estate.

  Lynne

  IN AUGUST 2012, I spent a night with my husband and children at La Posada. We didn’t stay in Julia’s room; I wasn’t yet ready for a night with the dead. We slept instead in a casita set well away from the house, a thick-walled adobe duplex with a stone patio. We saw no ghosts that night; we heard the groan of a water heater and the snores of our congested daughter—that was it. In the morning, we wandered through the reception area and past the entrance to the old house on the way to breakfast. The grand entry vestibule was dark against the brilliant morning sun, and the children ran quickly past it to the restaurant’s patio and the gardens beyond. My husband, Brent, and I ate breakfast while the kids played hide-and-seek among the coreopsis and sunrose, climbing a gnarled apricot tree that, a nearby sign informed us, Julia had planted a hundred and thirty years before.

  After breakfast, the hotel’s marketing director joined me for a cup of coffee and offered to put me in touch with a writer named Lynne, who had developed an interest in Julia’s story while visiting the hotel on a junket for travel journalists. Lynne had done quite a bit of genealogical research on my family, the marketing director explained, and I was thrilled to hear that there was somebody else tracing Julia’s path.

  When I returned home, I emailed Lynne. She sent me an article she had written about Santa Fe and the hotel, with a sidebar that mentioned Julia’s arrival on the “ship ‘Scotia’” in 1866. I hadn’t known until then which ship Julia had taken. How, I asked her, did she find this out?

  Thus began my introduction to online genealogy—ships’ logs and passport applications and death records and third and fourth and seventh cousins, online family trees of unstable configuration and dubious accuracy, as gnarled as the apricot trunk on which my children had clambered. Lynne was a talented guide to this labyrinthine world. She located census records that placed Julia in New Mexico in 1870, 1880, and 1885 with a rotating cast of children and family: cousins, clerks, servants, a bachelor uncle. She traced the Staab family tree from Germany to the United States and located Zadoc’s descendants in New York; she even tracked Dutch relatives from the other side of my family back to their arrival in New York in the 1660s.

  And Lynne also found the Scotia’s log, which included a handwritten list of passengers—Julia among them. “There she was,” Lynne wrote in her email, “married name and all.” The ship’s documents were all scanned and posted online; she told me I could see them myself. Which I did, and sure enough, there Julia was, her name scrawled in thick cursive. “Julia Staab,” age twenty-one, hailing from Prussia, the German kingdom into which Lügde had been absorbed in 1807. Listed right above her was a companion—not Abraham, as I’d expected, but rather an “Adolph Staab.” A name I had never heard. A brother? A cousin? “I find it interesting,” Lynne wrote, “that her husband left this duty to someone else.”

  I needed to know who this Adolph was. I went back to my growing sheaf of records on the Staabs—the papers my aunt Betsy had given me and the documents I’d located later in the archives and on the Internet. I dug around in the pile until I found yet another family tree that covered Julia’s and Abraham’s descendants in the United States. This one was created by my great-aunt Lizzie, and at its top sat Julia and a man named Adolph—Julia’s husband, patriarch and progenitor of the rest of the family. Abraham’s official name was Adolph. Though many nineteenth-century German Jews still addressed each other with Hebrew names in their households, they gave their babies proper German names for use in the world—Karl, Heinrich, Maximilian, and also Adolph, before Hitler rendered the name permanently unfashionable. Thus, Adolph was Abraham’s German name. Abraham was his Jewish one.

  Still, it was fitting that Julia’s husband had been given a name that was loaded, in hindsight, with such malignant associations. Julia’s ghost story had started as whispers in the halls of La Posada and the houses of Santa Fe, then migrated to the newspapers and from there to the ghost books and ghost tours and the Internet. And as Julia’s tale grew and morphed, Abraham’s ill repute did, too.

  Abraham had, in the years after his death, been remembered as a leader and a builder. But now people thought him a far less upstanding man. He was a tyrant and a grasper, who treated Julia as a possession—“arm candy,” said one website devoted to the ghosts of Santa Fe. He imprisoned and murdered her, explained another, “so he could resume his powerful position and social standing in the community.” This was not the Abraham I had learned of as a child. This was an entirely different creature—the kind of predatory male that all modern women fear.

  Lynne certainly believed Abraham to have been such a man. She and I hadn’t ever met face-to-face, but our emails grew more and more personal. I learned that she was divorced, not at all amicably, and that she had some bitterness toward her ex-husband. I learned that she lived in Arizona, suffered from neck pain, and had three blond granddaughters. I found her picture online as well—she looked trim and adven
turous; in her sixties, probably, with sporty blond hair.

  As we shared our histories and information, I came to understand that Lynne’s engagement with my family’s history was a passionate and visceral one. Through these dry genealogy websites—the census records and ships’ logs and family trees—she constructed a far fleshier life for the dead than I dared to imagine. I parsed dates and tidbits, turning them over and over like stones, hoping for a small glint of insight. But Lynne looked at the same stones and built castles—gothic constructions with plots and passions, demons and dungeons, moats and parapets and matrons in distress.

  Lynne believed, she told me, “on a psychic level,” that Abraham was responsible for Julia’s decline. This speculation had “no foundation in any document,” she readily admitted. But this is what she concluded: Abraham had chained Julia in her room at the end of her life. He may also have chained her in the basement, because a hotel employee told Lynne that Julia had left “clawed marks in the walls.”

  This was after Julia had become utterly undone—though Abraham was, Lynne believed, responsible for that earlier unraveling as well. Lynne thought that the “pivotal assault” on Julia’s sanity was the death of her child—that same dark baby whom Misha had found so disturbing. Abraham, Lynne told me, had arranged the child’s death.

  Lynne had arrived at this belief after staying at La Posada the year before—in a casita on the grounds, as I had on my recent trip. In the dark hours of the night, she had had an encounter, and she left the hotel “feeling convinced,” she wrote in an email, that something terrible had happened to the baby. Not just its death—something worse.

  Three men came to Julia, Lynne explained. They told Julia that she would have to kill the baby. If she didn’t, they would. These men were Abraham’s surrogates, sent to Julia’s room to do his dirty work. He couldn’t abide the sight of the baby. He didn’t want it to live, Lynne wrote, because, “Abraham did not believe this last child was his!”