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

by Hannah Nordhaus

  New Mexico was a young territory, still in the process of cleaving itself from Mexico, and it was poor. The Santa Fe upper crust couldn’t replicate the flamboyant wealth and grandeur of their East Coast brethren, nor could they hobnob in such rarefied Jewish circles—there weren’t enough Jews in New Mexico to form a circle. But the Staabs made their best New Mexico approximation. They occupied the heart of Santa Fe, literally—with the huge storefront right on the Plaza and the big, towering house a few blocks away—and also figuratively. The New York Jews, wealthy though they were, kept to themselves; they socialized together and vacationed in the same places. The Jews in Santa Fe mixed with Gentile society in a way their New York brethren still could not or did not. In New Mexico, they were “Anglo,” as long as they were white. The smaller distinctions that reigned in the East and in Germany—high WASP, low WASP, Irish, Italian, Jew—didn’t seem to matter.

  On Thursday afternoons, Julia and her daughters took callers. The butler, McCline—he was African American, not Irish—greeted visitors at the door and showed them into the parlor. There were many guests of all creeds: business folk and politicos, society wives and soldiers. They accepted each other as equals. As the army moved in and out of Santa Fe fighting the Indian Wars, the Staab girls found themselves in great demand among the bachelor officers stationed at Fort Marcy. They danced in the eye of the social whirl. There were teas, sewing circles, reading clubs, dances, balls, riding parties, champagne and oysters, boxes at the Albuquerque opera. The girls rode sidesaddle and carried gold-headed riding crops. The boys—Arthur, Julius, and Teddy, who also went east to prep schools—wore tennis whites and striped sweaters and looked every bit the nineteenth-century swells.

  Julia was around for all of this. She went on family visits to New York twice a year and also took regular trips to Germany to visit her family. In Santa Fe, she visited friends and took callers. In his journals, the Swiss anthropologist Adolph Bandelier, who explored New Mexico’s Indian cultures during the 1880s—combing villages and ruins for specks of bone and obsidian—wrote of receiving visits from Julia and her daughters, even from the mentally impaired oldest son Paul, and also of visiting them in their home. “Went to Staab’s,” he wrote, “and spent rather a lonesome hour there.” Most of his visits seemed less lonesome, however: Julia and Bandelier’s wife, Josephine, were friendly. Josephine visited Julia, and Julia also visited Josephine—Julia took herself out of the house and made some effort, it appears. They went on carriage rides together; attended the same parties, and spent a number of “pleasant” evenings together, Bandelier wrote. Julia had friends—which made me unaccountably happy. She may have been grieving and lost, but she wasn’t always the recluse the ghost stories made her out to be, that I once made her out to be. She was out in the world still, visiting and being visited, attending cheerful parties. (“At night, party at Koch’s until midnight,” wrote Bandelier. “Mostly Jews. Pleasant.”)

  Julia didn’t travel to New York with Abraham and the girls in 1885 when they returned to school for their third year, but she was very much in evidence in Santa Fe society—seen in December of that year at a housewarming party for a clothing merchant named Gerdes, a lively affair that began at 9:00 p.m, saw supper served at midnight, and featured dancing to the music of the Thirteenth US Infantry string band. She received callers at home on New Year’s Eve, a regular tradition; she went to California with her two oldest daughters for three weeks in January 1887.

  In February of that year, Abraham, Julia, and all three girls traveled to Colorado to celebrate the opening of the railroad line between Denver and Santa Fe. Abraham had, years earlier, transported a large group of New Mexico’s territorial legislators to Denver in hope of bringing a direct line to Santa Fe—he had paid all the expenses for the trip and had given each legislator a top hat and gold-headed cane. The legislature soon issued the necessary bonds, and in 1887 the first train motored up the line from Santa Fe to Denver. It was composed of “seven coaches, six elegant chair cars and a Pullman sleeper,” reported the Denver Rocky Mountain News, and it arrived in Denver at ten o’clock at night bearing Abraham, Julia, their daughters, and a hundred-plus other Santa Fe residents. There was a ball the next evening. “Mrs. Staab and the Misses Staab enjoyed the privileges of the dancing floor,” the newspaper reported. Anna wore pink silk with white lace trimmings; Delia “an elaborate toilet of corn-colored satin”; both wore “some very fine diamonds.” Julia was seen dancing, too, in “a handsome robe of ruby plush, white lace trimmings; diamond ornaments.” She danced into the night. Perhaps she still mourned her lost child; perhaps she still suffered from various mental or physical ailments. But she was nonetheless out accompanying her husband and chaperoning her daughters. It seems she wasn’t as damaged in the years after Henriette died as everyone believed.

  Julia traveled to New York again in the summer of 1887, and she spent the winter of 1888 there with her daughters. In February 1889, Anna—Julia’s oldest—married an Albuquerque Jewish merchant named Louis Ilfeld. Abraham added an extra room to the back of the house for the occasion, glassed on two sides to afford a view of Julia’s gardens. “Precisely at 7,” the New Mexican reported, “the bridal party was ushered into the double parlors, the bride’s mother”—Julia—“leaning upon the arm of the groom and the bride following, escorted by her father.” Anna wore a “magnificent robe of white faille Francais cut en train, with point lace and orange blossoms.” A judge married them, not a rabbi; then the party proceeded to the Palace Hotel. At the entrance to the hotel “was one feature which deserves special attention,” the newspaper gushed. “In small gas jets appeared, three feet long, the letters ‘A. and L.’”—Anna and Louis, her groom. It was very resplendent, very American. Dancing commenced at nine, and the party ate dinner at midnight. Julia was there, out of her room, looking lovely—she wore a dress of red velvet. For a time at least, she found it possible to rise to these occasions.

  John

  I ARRANGED TO MEET John, a ghost tour guide, at the obelisk that sits in the center of Santa Fe’s Plaza. The obelisk was erected in 1868, two years after Julia arrived, to honor the territory’s Civil War casualties as well as federal troops “fallen in the various battles with savage Indians in the territory of New Mexico.” The word “savage” was chiseled away from the marble in 1973 by a hippie in a hardhat, then scratched back in and chiseled out again.

  I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find John among the homeless and skater kids milling around the Plaza, but it was quite obvious when I spotted him: Indiana Jones hat, leather vest, puffy-sleeved green tunic, cargo shorts, hiking boots, white tube socks. We shook hands and set off.

  Our first stop was a Southwestern knickknack store on San Francisco Street, where, John told me, four basement spirits liked to throw clothes from the hangers. The clothing stayed put while we visited, however. Next we wandered through a saloon-themed restaurant—red velvet wallpaper, colored lamps, plank floors, a stamped tin ceiling, and a mechanical bull. The place had once been the site of a card room owned by the notorious madam Doña Tula. It was brimming, John said, with the ghosts of whores and gamblers. “The ghosts don’t want to quit,” he told me, “they’re having so much fun.” He gestured to the empty barroom with a dramatic flourish.

  We moved on. Ghosts tend to congregate in places with a history of violence, John explained as we walked down Burro Alley, the short and once notorious city block where Julia had lived as a young bride. It was paved now, and a statue of a firewood-laden bronze burro moped on one corner. There were no storefronts or whorehouses or homes full of children along the alley anymore, just the cleanly plastered sides of buildings that fronted elsewhere.

  Still, the place reeked of another time, and it occurred to me that spirits tend to be seen in places that seem as if their best days are behind them. John told me that ghosts were everywhere in this city with so many pasts piled together—Indian, Spanish, Anglo; New Spain, Old Mexico, New Mexico; the Wild West, the tourist Sou
thwest, surges of conquering cultures washing through the desert arroyos like spring floods. It is often the dispossessed and defeated who come back as ghosts, I’d read somewhere, the historical voiceless, finding voice.

  We walked toward the low-porticoed rectangle of the Palace of the Governors, where the Spanish had once ruled the Indians with iron swords. On the doorway, an inscription once welcomed visitors: VITA FUGIT SICUT UMBRA. Life flees like a shadow. It does now; it did then, and even more quickly. There were beatings on this spot, John said, and hangings. Indians were enslaved here and rose up against their captors; priests were slaughtered; the Spanish governor’s head was tossed around the courtyard like a football. “It was the bloody tower of the Southwest,” he said. Now it was full of angry and ancient spirits.

  La Llorona was another of these angry spirits, John told me. An Indian beauty who married a conquistador and gave birth to two children, she despaired when her looks faded and her man ran off. This was an old folk tale common across the Hispanic Americas. In the version John told me, La Llorona threw her two children into the Santa Fe River, hit her head on a rock in her frenzy, and died—another overwhelmed mother. Now she wandered the banks of the river, which was not much of a river anymore but rather an intermittent stream channeled and deflected—a ghost river—looking for other children to drown. From the willows by the riverside, a bony arm would rise, a pale claw waiting to pluck wayward children and drag them into the water. She could sometimes be heard wailing by the river’s banks. John gesticulated vaguely toward the concrete channel a few blocks away.

  We moved on, lingering at the porch of a pretty Victorian art gallery whose previous resident, a prominent Realtor, had moved out very quickly after he encountered a black-cloaked, waxen-faced figure who smelled of rotting flesh and froze all the houseplants. This was an evil ghost, but they are rare—“Only five percent of spirits are really evil,” John said. I wondered how he knew this, though I didn’t ask. The Indiana Jones hat did seem to lend him some authority. No one knew, John went on, why this particular ghost was in this particular place. “Could there have been a hanging post there?” John asked. Ghost stories are full of rhetorical questions; there are never solid answers when we probe among the dead.

  The cathedral’s bells tolled the afternoon Mass, and John used the opportunity to tell the dubious story of Abraham and the cathedral, how Jewish money helped complete the upper half. “They say it’s a cathedral on the bottom and a synagogue on the top,” he joked. John had a lovely smile; there was a credulous sweetness to him. He pointed out the site of the archbishop’s gardens, where my grandmother had imagined Julia and Lamy eating apricots and reciting French poetry. It is now a parking lot, all those cuttings and blooms and fancies interred in asphalt.

  Then we came to La Posada. We sat in the reception area that wrapped Julia’s old house, drinking lemon water and looking at its front door. A mezuzah adorned the doorframe, and I could see Abraham’s gilt initials above the original entry—A.S.—as prominent as Yahweh’s on the cathedral.

  John shared some details from Julia’s past, and just as Lynne had moved seamlessly between census records and dreams, John also had no difficulty transcending the line between fact and lore. He mentioned that Julia had watched from the top of the stairs while her youngest daughter entertained. That wasn’t hard to believe at all. He explained that a child had died in the house; I knew this was true. But he also noted that children sometimes see a ghost baby teetering at the top of the steps, because Julia’s son had fallen down the stairs and died. I hadn’t heard this story. And he speculated that Julia might have died of a laudanum overdose—though there was also a chance, he said, that Abraham had killed her. “The sixty-six-thousand-dollar question,” John opined, “is the nature of their marriage.” Yes, it was.

  We wandered through the front door into the narrow hallway between the bar and the library. We admired the opulent brasswork, and John, sleeves swaying with each gesture, reviewed the various spots where Julia’s ghost had been seen: in the library, the bar, the Rose Room. He pointed upstairs in the direction of Julia’s suite, and told me how the faucet in Julia’s bathtub turns on and off of its own accord (“nineteenth-century ghosts are fascinated by plumbing fixtures”), and how the housekeeping staff never—“ever”—go upstairs alone, not since the day when a door slammed shut on a maid, the linens tossed themselves around, and the maid was unable to open the door to flee.

  Julia’s ghost, John told me, is rarely quiet for more than a month—but she also won’t show up on demand. People who book the room seeking Julia rarely find her. I probably shouldn’t expect to, either, he suggested diplomatically. It’s the unsuspecting ones who have encounters. “Spirits are like colts,” said John, “they’re skittish.”

  twelve

  THE GREAT PACIFIC

  The first page of Bertha’s diary.

  Courtesy of the author.

  In her family history, the dusty photocopy that I’d found in my great-grandfather’s mountain home, Aunt Lizzie mentioned a diary that had belonged to her mother: my great-grandmother, Julia’s third daughter, Bertha. It covered the years 1891 and 1892, when Bertha traveled to California with her father and then to Europe with both her parents. In Germany, Lizzie said, Bertha had written of a “dreadful accident” that befell Julia, but Lizzie’s history didn’t say what it was.

  I decided, after reading Lizzie’s book, that I had to find the diary. I wanted to know about the accident and Julia’s trip to Europe, and more than that, I needed to see and feel the pages that had once documented Bertha’s life, and perhaps her mother’s as well. I needed to have this connection.

  The diary had to be somewhere; Lizzie’s children couldn’t have just thrown it away. So I emailed Lizzie’s daughter Nancy—Lizzie’s only living child. She told me she had seen the diary only once, after Lizzie’s death in 1980, and remembered the “fancy writing” inside. But her sister Judy had taken it. Judy had died in 2003, from a brain tumor, and Nancy didn’t know what had happened to the diary after Judy’s death.

  Nancy suggested I try Judy’s husband, Ron, who had relocated to southern New Mexico and, Nancy thought, may have brought the family copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf with him; perhaps he had the diary, too. I hadn’t known there was a family copy of Mein Kampf, nor that it was something that Jewish families typically handed down through generations, like a prayer book or a menorah. I emailed Ron, who didn’t know anything about the diary. He suggested I get in touch with his daughter Rhonda, who now lived at my great-grandfather’s summer home and had taken possession of Judy’s papers when she died.

  Rhonda and I have always been close; she is eight years older than I, and as a child I idolized her. She is a free spirit with a thick mane of dark hair much like Julia’s, though Rhonda accessorizes hers with daring turquoise jewelry, and she is full of opinions and sass. Rhonda and her brother were my only cousins to grow up in Santa Fe, and it was she who told me most of the ghost stories I had heard about Julia when I was a teenager. She was deeply connected to our family’s history in New Mexico, so it surprised me, when I contacted her, to learn that she hadn’t looked through Judy’s papers in the nine years since her mother died. Perhaps this was her way of managing her grief—packing the ghosts away for a while.

  When I called Rhonda to ask about the boxes of Judy’s pictures and letters, she said they were piled up in a storage room and promised me she would go through them when she found a moment. A few months later, she and Nancy—up visiting from Albuquerque—examined the boxes, “& LO & BEHOLD,” wrote Nancy in an email, they “picked up a little book that is the diary of Bertha!!!!!!! YEA.” It was a small leather-bound notebook, Nancy said, three inches by six inches, and it contained writing so tiny that Nancy could hardly read it. A couple of weeks later I traveled down to New Mexico to see it myself. In it, I hoped, I could find some insight into Bertha’s life, her time, her place, her family, and most of all, her mother. I longed to find Julia in those
pages.

  The dark-brown leather was a little scuffed, but the pages were still relatively undamaged, browned and crumbling at the corners but white on the inside. On paper lined in a thin, pale-blue grid, Bertha had tracked her days in a neat, penciled cursive. She had also tucked small aspen leaves into the pages to press and preserve them. The leaves were 120 years old when I first opened the diary, but they were no more brown or brittle than last year’s dried flowers, their decline into dust suspended by care and happenstance.

  I sat down to read the diary on the porch facing Hermit’s Peak—the same spot where I first read Lizzie’s remembrance of our family. I handled the book with the tips of my fingers, as if it were something exceedingly rare and precious, which it was—a direct line to Bertha and Julia, through Lizzie and Judy, Nancy and Rhonda, and now me. I couldn’t believe my luck. Finally, the dead would speak—no more parsing rumors and reading between the lines.

  On the first blank page, Bertha had written with a fountain pen. This was her only entry in pen—large, looping letters, with little blots where she lingered too long: “Bertha Staab, Santa Fé, New Mexico.” In smaller letters below she wrote, “Left Santa Fé with Papa for California on Feb 14th, 1891.” The diary continues in pencil, her voice more mundane than I had hoped and imagined it to be, detailing her activities both rousing and, more often than not, dull, beginning on the day Bertha and Abraham arrived in Los Angeles. Bertha had completed her three years of finishing school at Madame Froelich’s and was living at home in Santa Fe with Abraham and Julia, waiting, I suppose, to marry. I couldn’t ascertain at first the reason for the trip, but it was clear that this was an adventure for Bertha—her sisters had gone to California with Julia a few years earlier and it was now her turn to see the West Coast.