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

by Hannah Nordhaus

  But no one knew for sure: Julia didn’t communicate. She just appeared, a diaphanous specter, as insubstantial and fleeting as the record of her life, or a “draft of cool, stale air,” as another article described her presence: vague, colorless, incomplete; a whisper from the past.

  Jonathan

  I VISITED JONATHAN IN his adobe house in the shrubby foothills north of Santa Fe. He looked to be in his sixties. He had had a stroke the previous August, and he walked unsteadily with a four-footed cane. When he sat, he draped his paralyzed left hand carefully in his lap. His body had an uninhabited look about it, as if he had lost a great deal of weight.

  Jonathan had worked as concierge at La Posada for three and a half years starting in 2002. He’d been anxious about taking the job, he said, because he had heard there was a ghost there, and he was “sensitive.” He had known this since he was eight or nine, maybe ten, when he woke up in the middle of the night in his family’s New York apartment, screaming, ‘There’s someone in the house! There’s someone in the house!” His father told him to be quiet or suffer a spanking. His father gave vigorous spankings, so the next time it happened Jonathan didn’t holler; he just watched as a dark figure walked around the corner into the bedroom he shared with his younger brother, past the large dresser, and then approached the beds. It was dark in the room, and the figure was even darker. It absorbed all the light, “yet I could describe to you exactly everything that this figure had on.” A work shirt, a hat, a cane. When Jonathan told his mother the next morning, she showed him a photo of his dead grandfather. It was the same man.

  That was Jonathan’s first ghost. The second lived in his college fraternity house, a land spirit that fretted over his safety. There was a dead woman who sat sewing at a bay window in his rental apartment in San Francisco, and an angry Indian warrior whom he could feel lurking outside the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe when he walked by. When he was more able-bodied, Jonathan told me, he would always cross to the other side of the street to avoid it.

  After he went to work at La Posada, Jonathan steered clear of the second floor, “for obvious reasons.” But finally he was asked to take a group of guests to see Julia’s room. Halfway up the stairs, the feeling hit him. “I’m breaking out into a sweat and I’m holding on to a banister as I’m going up,” he said, “As I’m talking I’m getting dizzier and dizzier and feeling the sweat pouring down me.” His knees buckled, and he had to put his hand behind himself to keep from sliding down the wall. When he went back downstairs, he felt instantly better. Twice more that week, he had to take guests up the stairs, and both times, he felt overcome.

  Soon after, he received a visit. He was sitting at the concierge desk on the ground floor when he felt someone come up behind him as if walking fast—“their breeze.” He saw someone standing just outside his peripheral vision, wearing black, but when he turned to look, there was nobody there. It happened again the next day; he felt as if someone were going to tap him on the shoulder. It happened again the day after. And then he knew. He walked to the foot of the old home’s staircase. “Julia,” he said, “I know that was you. I bothered you three times without telling you that I was coming up. I bothered you three times; you bothered me three times—touché.”

  Jonathan offered Julia a deal. “This is what I’m going to do. Every time I go up to show someone your room I will always let you know that I’m coming, because obviously it bothered you.” He promised that as long as he was in her house, he would also wear a pin in his lapel, a mother-of-pearl rose, because Julia loved roses. They had an agreement.

  Julia communicated with him in different ways over the years. Sometimes when he got to the top of the stairs, a feeling of euphoria would come over him, “like a curtain coming down, and I knew it was her arms embracing me”—a “spirit hug,” he called it. Sometimes when he spoke about Julia to coworkers or guests, lamps would flicker. Once, he gave a tour to a six-year-old boy who had brought Julia a rose—a wilted supermarket stem. They left it drooping limply in a Coke bottle in Julia’s room. The next morning, the boy visited the room again, and the flower had revived. “I’ve never seen a more gorgeous crimson flower in my life,” Jonathan said. “It looked like it had been freshly picked.” Julia loved children, Jonathan explained. They had been her life.

  Only once did Jonathan see Julia’s face. It was Halloween, and ghost tours had been coming in all night. Jonathan sensed that Julia was feeling anxious. He walked up the stairs and sat down in the sitting area on the landing of the second floor. “I know you’re upset,” he told her, and he saw a reflection in the hallway’s front windows. “There she was, standing in the corner wearing a Victorian cloak. Her hair was pure white. A feeling of euphoria came over him. “That was the first and only time I’ve seen her,” he said.

  But they spoke. She told him about Abraham. He had many lovers, she told him. “Of course she was not happy about his paramours—but she realized that there was nothing that she could do, and that’s why her children became everything.” I asked him how this particular conversation came about. “That’s my secret,” he told me. He smiled. People said she was crazy; Jonathan defended her. “She was a victim of her times,” he said. “She had no choice.”

  Regardless, Julia was, in the end, too much for Jonathan. The hotel planned another renovation, and Jonathan started “feeling weird.” He was getting angry all the time, especially at the decorators. And then one Monday the director of operations came in with a group of interior designers. “All I saw was red, I got so angry.” He got up from his desk and charged at them, yelling about the changes they planned to make to the house.

  This wasn’t Jonathan; these weren’t his words. He felt removed from himself, as if possessed. Later, he went to the staircase and spoke with Julia. “I’ve got to separate myself from you,” he told her. “We’re too close, this cannot happen again.” The next day he got a call from another hotel offering him an interview for a concierge position. By Friday, he had tendered his resignation. He visited occasionally after that, and always wore his rose pin and said hello, but that was the end of it.

  I asked Jonathan why he thought Julia stuck around. “Because,” he said, “I think later in her life, that was the only thing she had left: the house.” There was nothing else.

  thirty

  THE RECORD OF WHAT WAS

  Room 100, the Julia Staab Suite.

  Courtesy of the author.

  There was nothing left for me, either. I had combed the deserts, the Westfalische riverbanks, the archives, and the Internet, prodding the dead, the dead prodding me. I had read all I could find, summoned every newspaper article and history book, interviewed every aging relative, consulted a boundless stream of psychics. Now there was only the house. I had walked through it so many times before, not realizing that every rosette and fixture and plaster molding had a dream behind it, a story that began in rural Germany and ended in the hands of strangers. It was time to visit Julia’s room. To learn, once and at last, if the connection I had forged with Julia was real.

  On a warm afternoon in late March, I swiped my key card and entered the “Julia Staab Suite”—room 100. The lock flashed green, the door creaking as it opened. I set down my bags and looked around. The room had changed since I’d seen it as a younger woman. It was bigger than I remembered—lighter, high-ceilinged, with a large four-poster bed made up cleanly in white linens. The walls were white, and also the curtains. Equinoctial sunshine streamed through the four arched windows. When I had visited before, the room had been stuffed with heavy furniture and dark drapery, the bed swathed in an intricate Victorian coverlet. There had been a rocker in the room—the one in which, perhaps, Julia had sought to comfort herself. That was gone. There had been a mirrored vanity, too, and a hairbrush that, the hotel staff told us, Julia had moved around from time to time. That had also disappeared.

  The room now felt crisp and uncluttered, although there was an ornately carved settee and matching chairs that I was tol
d had belonged to Julia, along with an elegant assortment of Victorian furniture that had not. Over the fireplace hung a portrait of a pale, dark-haired woman with rosebud lips. She wore a white gown, florets adorning her arms and décolletage. Many of the Internet postings I’d read suggested that the woman in the portrait was Julia, but this woman looked nothing like the photos that I’d seen, nor like any of the Staab girls, and I could see from the signature that that portrait had been painted in 1936, around the time the Nasons bought the house—another stranger in Julia’s room.

  A small writing desk sat in front of the windows that once had overlooked the home’s front entrance and from where, I imagine, Julia could gaze out at the passing street life, the hustle-bustle of human hope. The view today is different. I could still see the mountains in the thickening dusk, but I couldn’t see the gardens or the street below—just the flat roof of the adobe addition that housed the restaurant and reception area.

  I poked around the room a bit, peering into the closets and under the bed. The bathroom harbored an air of slight decrepitude that even a luxury resort couldn’t buff away: crumbling black-and-white tile beside the bathtub—probably not the same tub, but perhaps one located on the same spot where Julia had died. I felt the general scalp-prickle one experiences when thinking a ghost might be present; my heart rate ticked up a notch. I perched on the end of the four-poster bed and watched the mountains darken.

  I had dinner on Water Street, around the corner from the spot where Abraham’s empire had once been headquartered. I ordered a huge mound of soggy blue-corn enchiladas that Julia, with her continental palate, would probably have abhorred, then wandered back through the still-warm March night to the hotel bar that was once the family parlor. There was a jazz band entertaining a number of sleek people who looked like they were from Los Angeles, with sport jackets and gelled hair that crested above the scalp in stiff, calculated peaks, like meringues. I sat on a velvet love seat and ate lemon curd, observing those invaders in Julia’s home, and then, when I had run out of excuses, I headed up to sleep in the room where my great-great-grandmother had died.

  My night in Julia’s room would be that simple: a night in Julia’s room. I would brush my teeth, take off my clothes, and climb under the sheets. I would bring no equipment—EVP recordings and EMF monitors held no persuasive power for me. My two years of poking around in the world of ghosts had convinced me of one thing: no amount of evidence can persuade anyone not already inclined toward the supernatural that ghosts walk the earth, that a dead woman named Julia still visits the living.

  That isn’t to say I wasn’t nervous—I was. I both wanted to feel something and feared that I would; wanted a visitation and knew it wouldn’t satisfy me. I read for a while, then turned off the light. Sleep came, and then it went, interrupted by the noise from the bar below and the click of the heating system and the rhythms of my own unease in that place between sleep and waking where reason is no defense. I was in the center of that desert city, as Julia had been. Sounds carried far in the sharp air. I imagined her sitting in the room while Delia’s wedding went on below, too consumed by the demons of her past to live in the present. Voices rose and fell, the jazz drums pattered, a saxophone warbled. I drifted off and woke. I got up and fetched a lighter blanket. I drifted off again—I know this because I dreamed that Julia was pulling the covers off me. I woke in a sweat, covers still on, and got up to turn on the room’s fan.

  In the daytime, I am an optimist. I can find a comforting explanation for every disturbing detail—for setbacks and weakness and failure and loss. I am, while the sun is up, a generally resilient and practical person. But at night, when sleep creeps in or fails to, I become an altogether less rational creature. I fret; I agonize; I assume the worst; I suffer terminal conditions. It is in those hours that I inhabit a world of darker designs. It is in those dark hours that Julia’s despair makes perfect sense. In the depth of the night, I believe in unhappy endings. I believe in my ghosts.

  I drank some water. I went to the bathroom once or three times. I looked out the window at the roof of the adobe structure below, its skylights and ductwork, open-ended shapes in the dark, subject to interpretation. I heard clatter and chatter, drums pulsing, heaters clunking, footsteps on the stairs, good-byes being said, locks sliding, doors opening, doors closing, and oddly, a dog barking in the front hallway, bar stools protesting, glasses clinking, floors creaking, walls settling, and then mercifully, silence. I slept.

  Then, just before dawn, something happened—though it sounds less convincing to me each time I tell it. I had fallen asleep on my side. I awoke just before light, not with a start this time, but slowly. I opened my eyes, and on the wall in front of me, just above the doorway to the bathroom, were green lights. They were moving. I was barely awake—or perhaps still asleep, in a hypnopompic state—and I first thought that they were indicators on a burglar alarm or smoke detector. But they seemed to dance with no particular rhythm, or rather they danced with a rhythm all their own. They moved ever faster and more intently, and then, just as I was about to sit up and investigate, they turned red and orange, zipped off to the right, and disappeared.

  Like that. There was nothing else. I didn’t have time to run or to fall down the stairs, much less dismiss them.

  The vision happened quickly and ended quickly, and I wasn’t at all sure that I had seen something, except that I had. I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I had spent the day thinking about ghosts—I had orbs on the brain. I didn’t know if I was awake or asleep, and I couldn’t be entirely certain that I hadn’t in fact just seen flashers from a police cruiser on the street below, though the room’s blackout curtains let in only a narrow crack of light from the street. Only when it grew light enough for me to see out did I recall that the view of the street was obscured completely by the adobe roof below; if the lights had come from a police car, they would have had to double reflect in some inexplicable way. Nor was there a burglar alarm or a smoke detector on the wall where I’d seen the lights. In those hazy early hours, it seemed completely reasonable that I had in fact seen orbs—a gracious sign from Julia, as if she had wanted to say hello: I’m here.

  Make of it what you want.

  Even as the moment happens, it’s over. All we have left are blurry recollections, clouded by self and predisposition and the limits of the human brain. I didn’t sleep any more that early dawn. I lay there and stared at the wall and thought about Julia. I didn’t feel scared. I felt lucky. I felt touched—in the demonstrative sense, and perhaps in the crazy sense as well. My father would suggest later that perhaps I had seen the lights from a UFO. This is how my family contends with the inexplicable—we joke. Other families—Jonathan’s, for instance—might take those signs more literally. And thus our beliefs are transmitted. Memory becomes news, the stories we share, sifted by the sharers; news becomes the record of what was. The story and the truth are not always the same. Sometimes they are.

  I checked out later that morning, and the woman at the reception desk asked, of course, if I’d seen any ghosts. The higher the sun climbed in the sky, the sillier I felt. But I told her about the lights. And she told me that a woman in room 310, just above the spa in Julia’s old gardens, had awakened in the night to lights in her room, too. They moved around on one wall as well, though in her case it was three in the morning, not five. They came and went quickly, like mine, and that woman, too, hadn’t slept the rest of the night. She had already checked out. There would be no comparing of notes, just perception and suggestion and memory and myth, mingling in an indistinct swirl, like dust motes—like orbs.

  thirty-one

  Dust

  The Staab plot at Fairview Cemetery.

  Courtesy of the author.

  When I was in Prague, I visited the old Jewish cemetery—a teeming jumble of waferlike stones pressed together in a walled-in courtyard. It was an astonishing sight: twelve layers of graves, fallen into each other as the earth heaved and sank, each generation more deeply
buried by the settling of earth and history. There were so many souls there, their stones worn to anonymity, their names forgotten.

  Yet we remember Julia. She was no monarch or saint or martyr. She left behind no art or letters, only children and a legend—and perhaps a spirit—that keep her from slipping underground for good. Her story persists, changing with each generation, each summoning, each novel, each website, each whispered exchange in the hallway. It changes with each teller.

  Now it’s mine to tell.

  Julia Staab sailed from Germany to a life that didn’t suit her. Her health, physical and mental, was fragile. Life’s gusts tossed her around. She missed her home and the life she would have had in Germany among her sisters—she had no way of knowing how that land would one day turn on them. She found motherhood to be taxing, each child taking a part of her until there was little of her left. She lost her last baby—the child of the darkness. But the darkness was not in the baby, but in herself.

  Julia had few sources of relief available to her: no community of sisters, no cognitive-behavioral therapists, no serotonin reuptake inhibitors. The husband who chose her may not have understood her, though I believe he tried. Perhaps he was a despot—he was certainly no angel—but if so, he was a despot of his era; no better or worse. He wanted to help Julia, but he couldn’t. And so she faded slowly into herself, and away from her family and the world. She failed—mentally, physically, both—and she died, in her chamber, in her bathtub perhaps?