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

by Hannah Nordhaus

  Suicide or no, the cause was the same: she could no longer abide living. Her sadness followed her from Germany to New Mexico and back, impervious to geography and companionship. Whether she was a victim of her times, or her husband, or her circumstances, or her religion, she was also, in the end, a victim of her own constitution. If her soul was divided in death, as Sarina had explained during our reading, I realize now it was because she was never whole in life.

  She wanted to die, and yet her ghost story has kept her alive. She was invisible in all the years that she lived as flesh and blood—Mrs. A. Staab, an accessory first, and later, an invalid and recluse. She was rich by birth and marriage, but in her world, in her time, she was still barely there. Yet here she floats, buoyed by the tale of her adversity, while stronger souls have sunk into history. The philosopher Hannah Arendt once said that posthumous fame is the saddest sort. That is the bitter reward to which Julia has been consigned.

  This is what I’ve come to understand about ghost stories: it’s not so much the ghost that keeps the dead alive to us as it is the story. Ghost stories make visible the forgotten, the repressed, and the discarded. A hundred and twenty years after Julia was “called to her long rest,” people still talk about her. They lead tours to her home and write books about her—this fragile woman on the rough frontier, far from her family of origin and trapped in a world not of her making. Abraham dragged her across the ocean and the desert. But in death, she is the one who exerts a pull. She has dragged me into the past and made me custodian of her story, tracing a ghost outline of her years on earth.

  And I believe this particular story has something to teach us. Ghosts connect us both to memory and to the world we cannot fully know. It is an unseen world in which the questions are leading and the answers vague and often contradictory, taking us beyond the methods of research that I hold dear. But in attempting to visit that world, in asking the psychics the questions the archives couldn’t answer about motives and emotions and secrets, I became aware that those intuitive and emotional truths lie at the heart of most of the stories we tell ourselves. It is the truths between the facts that tell us who we are.

  I once thought of Julia’s ghost as a joke and an anecdote. Now I consider it a gift. It has lured me into a world I would have never known. So of course I believe in ghosts. I believe in the power of the past. I believe that we can be haunted.

  Julia has touched me, carrying a message about how we live and what we treasure and what we leave behind. It was not, in the end, Julia’s ghost that taught me these things, but her life. Observing how the task of living wore on her, I see how the past can engulf us. We can absorb and become our losses, or we can accept them and try our hardest to face forward and go on living.

  The evening after my first child was born, my parents and husband and I ate dinner on an outdoor balcony at the hospital. As we sat, the baby beside us in her bassinet, an owl flew onto the rail of the balcony. They say that owls are messengers from the other world. This one watched us in the gathering dusk, and we watched the owl and baby both, the air feathered with hope and memory, and we all felt the weight of the past—loved ones long gone, winging in to see the future arriving.

  We came home, and one sunny afternoon a week or so after she was born—a perfect May afternoon when the sun streamed through the open windows and the air held our skin in equipoise, the penstemon fragrant and groping toward life—I felt the softness of my daughter’s cheeks and lips and realized that there, swaddled and held close, was life beyond my own. She carried me forward; I linked her to the past. We named her Delia—for my husband’s grandmother and also for Julia’s daughter. There are Julias and Teddys and now Delias in our family, names that stretch across the generations, because the past can illuminate the future, and perhaps the future can also mend the past.

  I am at an age now at which death lurks more obviously and takes more readily. The worst things we fear, the things that haunt us at night, are certain to happen—those we love will die, the body will decline, and then we too will die. Life flees like a shadow; it slips by like a field mouse. However we live—weak or strong, rich or poor—we leave dust; words and objects; stories and documents; brick mansions and yellowed photographs and letters of light on a screen. Traces of genetic code found in ever more distant generations: a twisted double helix. But also, the earth under our feet, the mountains that hang above us, clouds, rocks, eagles, vultures, scrub oak, piñon, apricots, burros, alleys, streets, fences, lightning, snow, sleep. We leave them behind. Julia was resilient in death. I prefer resilience in life.

  After I checked out of La Posada, I stopped at the cemetery where Julia and Abraham are buried. It must have once been a pastoral spot on the edge of the city, the resting place of Santa Fe’s Anglo elite, but it had fallen on hard times. The once lush Kentucky bluegrass lawn was gone—the grass had died away when the cemetery’s board could no longer pay its water bill. Prairie dogs had found favorable territory here, digging networks of holes and tunnels that had begun to undermine many of the gravestones. When the graveyard was a going concern, I read, the indigent had been buried in winding sheets or cardboard coffins, which had later disintegrated. Burrowing animals had begun to bring up bones from below.

  I found no bones the day I visited Julia’s grave; only earth so barren it could barely support weeds, the ground returned to desert, red-beige and prickly, the once grand American elms and lindens and horse chestnuts also bare—dead, I feared, for lack of water, though perhaps spring came later to this place of the dead than elsewhere. Outside the chain-link fence was a busy six-lane road crammed with rush-hour traffic, and an electrical substation, wires and superstructure, and a state building of the institutional sort—thick walls and few windows. There was also, incongruously, a preschool play-yard providing the only splash of color in the entire tableau, aside from a few fake flowers laid on a few newer graves.

  I drove the perimeter of the graveyard looking for the Jewish section, which I assumed would be to the side or in the back, as it is in most cemeteries. I passed the ample mausoleum of Abraham’s crony Thomas Catron (b. 1840, d. 1921)—a volume of marble, Doric columns, intricate stonework, and sheer cubic mass taking up lots of real estate, as Catron had in life. I circled around the edge looking for a telltale Star of David that might point me in the right direction, then cut through the center to look on the opposite side.

  I was so focused on stars and Jewish last names that I almost passed the enormous, obelisk-like monument, which looked not much different from the one in the Santa Fe Plaza that celebrated the killing of “savage Indians.” It sat dead center, a Gothic “S” adorning the top and the word STAAB carved in simpler letters below. Of course Abraham’s plot wasn’t in the Jewish section. There wasn’t a Jewish section, because there weren’t enough Jews in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Santa Fe to have a section—and besides, Abraham was always in the middle of things; and Julia, too, by default.

  So their plot was at the cemetery’s heart, their monument the tallest I could see—fifteen, twenty feet high—topped with what looked like an urn draped in cloth, and carved of pale gray granite. At the obelisk’s foot was a square of dirt surrounded by a low granite wall. It must once have contained flowers or the grass that had blanketed the rest of the cemetery, but now it sheltered dirt and weeds. Surrounding the obelisk were five smaller gravestones and a wrought-iron fence, the only one in the cemetery—enclosures had been outlawed in 1903 to place an emphasis on “uncluttered dignity without ostentation.” But Abraham made his own rules; the iron barrier set the family apart, as Abraham always had—by station, not religion. And there the family was, still gathered around Abraham, ordered and contained.

  I yanked the wrought-iron gate and walked into the plot for a closer look. Carved in the marble curb at the monument’s foot were the words FATHER on the left and MOTHER on the right. This was how they wanted to be remembered in the end. On the tower itself were Abraham’s and Julia’s dates: set in stone,
impervious to rumor or myth. ABRAHAM STAAB, read the a simple, blocky font, FEB, 1839–JAN, 1913. And below, in letters more delicate, dates closer together, 1844–1896: JULIE STAAB. They spelled it the old German way, because even after thirty years in America, she was still German.

  The older girls had been buried in other cities with their husbands; the sons were all here. To the left of the monument lay Paul’s grave, a granite rectangle that flared slightly at the top, adorned with the same Gothic “S” as the obelisk. A large tumbleweed had come to rest against the stone. Julius’s grave flanked the spire to the right, the same shape as Paul’s, matching granite. To Julius’s left lay Teddy, under a modest polished marker, flat to the ground and covered in coarse red dirt and fire ants. Arthur’s grave occupied a parallel spot on the left, the same black marble and pattern as Teddy’s. Hadn’t he been banished? Why wasn’t he buried with his wife, his own Julia, for whom he had given up so much? More questions, the answers available only to the dead.

  To Teddy’s right, tucked away in the back corner, was the lost baby, Henriette. She had been given a small, sweet marker, white marble, a delicate squared-off arch. Its shape reminded me of Julia’s bedroom windows. It was of a soft stone, the day of her death too eroded to decipher.

  I took a few photos, and when there was nothing left to study, I pulled the tumbleweed from Paul’s grave and threw it out into the dust beyond the fence. Henriette’s stone was almost entirely obscured by a lilac shrub—a pretty little bush, the only living thing. The world moves on. They were dust, these ancestors of mine, ghosts: an aggregation of stories and dates, of fuzzy recollections and rhetorical questions, of faded photos and crumbling documents. I brushed the ants and earth from Teddy’s stone so the sun could once again shine on his name—so it could be read.

  Judith

  Her name was Judith. She talked to spirits using an L-shaped divining rod—she was a dowser. She had come recommended by a friend who had felt and seen ghosts in his home in Boulder’s northern foothills, a heaving landscape of striated sandstone and ponderosa pine. He’d wakened one morning feeling that someone was sitting on his chest. He’d contacted Judith, who came to his home. His house and the ground under it were crowded, she’d said, with the ghosts of four Ute Indians and two miners, seventeen demonic spirits, three negative vortexes, six celestial holes and 102 ancient curses. She expelled the ghosts, closed the holes and vortexes, and erased the curses. She had the power to do this.

  A ghost hunter told me once that there is no surefire way to exorcise a ghost. “If a ghost doesn’t want to leave, it’s not leaving,” he said. He believed that spirits sometimes have a message to get across, and if you acknowledge them and listen, they will fall quiet. Other times, you simply have to let ghosts know that a place is not theirs anymore. In the Jewish kabbalah tradition, ghosts linger when the soul is tortured by unfinished business. By finishing that business, you lay them to rest.

  “I think I met your great-great-grandmother about fifteen or sixteen years ago,” Judith told me on the telephone when I called her. This had happened before Judith had become a dowser, and although she was sensitive to spirits back then, she had no way of communicating with them. She had gone on a trip to Santa Fe and had slept in Julia’s room and felt uncomfortable—as if she was staying without permission. When she checked out, the clerk asked if she’d met Julia, and she realized that she had indeed felt a ghost.

  I visited Judith at her house on a golf course subdivision east of my place on a frigid December morning. She made me tea, and we sat in her living room—carpeted, with full-length windows, the walls hung with New Mexican art and knickknacks: santos and rusted-sage landscapes, blue-green oil paintings of adobe churches. Judith had short auburn hair, a smattering of freckles, a few wrinkles. She wore a fleece vest and red down slippers. Dowsing, she told me, was an ancient art—Moses used dowsers in the desert to help him find water; the pioneers took dowsers with them on their wagon trains. The early divining rods were simple forked pieces of wood, shaped like a “Y,” which would dip toward a line of water or energy.

  Judith used a copper L-rod, which spun forward or backward in response to the questions she posed to her spirit guide: backward meant yes, forward, no. She had been using it before I came in. Julia, she told me, had been messing with her energy for three days, and Judith was feeling very dizzy and jittery. “She’s in here with us right now,” Judith said. “She’s here because you’re here—she wasn’t here before you called me. I think there’s something she wants to talk to you about.”

  Judith sat in an armchair with her eyes closed and the rod in her lap. When she asked a yes or no question, she raised the L-shaped rod in front of her. “Julia, please tell us, did you long for Germany?” It spun backward: yes. She asked if Julia always longed for Germany. Backward again. Did she at some times love Santa Fe? Yes. Did she love Abraham? Yes. Did she feel that Abraham loved her? Did she miss him when he went away? Yes, she did. The archbishop—were they friends? Yes. Lovers? “Well, I don’t think they were lovers,” Judith said after a complicated series of spins on the stick, “but I think they did have a love for one another. Of course I have to rely on what she’s saying”—spirit conversations being subjective, as I knew by now. “Maybe she’s protecting him. Maybe she doesn’t want to tell me.”

  Judith asked about the pregnancies, the miscarriages. She asked about the insanity, and Julia again insisted that despite all the rumors, she had not lost her mind. But she was sad. There was an accident. “I’m getting a thought that maybe she got pushed into harm’s way. Did you get pushed into harm’s way?” Yes. A fall. “I don’t know how much of that is true,” Judith added. After the accident, Julia was an invalid—physically, mentally. She was restrained in her room. She had mental breakdowns, but Abraham never placed her in an asylum. He wouldn’t do that to her.

  Judith stood up in her red down slippers and vest, held the rod higher, and asked Julia about her death. “Did you feel you were in a living hell?” Yes. “Did you no longer want to live like you were living?” Yes. These were leading questions, but they led us to answers we wanted. Judith also believed Julia had drowned in the tub, after taking something—poison, laudanum, too much of something. And then Julia stayed on—she chose to stay, Julia told Judith. Not because of Abraham. Not because of her children still there. Because of the house. It was her security, and she was afraid to move away from it. “Did you feel you did not deserve to go to heaven?” Judith asked. Yes. “Do you still feel that way? That you’re not acceptable to God?” She didn’t. “She’s changed her point of view now,” Judith told me.

  “Is there something else you want us to know at this time?” Judith asked her. Julia said that she enjoyed being a mother. She loved her children. “And she loves you,” Judith told me. Julia was glad I was telling her story.

  And now she was ready to leave. “She wants peace,” she said. “She wants to go where Abraham is, and her children. She’s asking, Will you please take me home? She said, I’m begging you.”

  And then Judith started crying. She was sorry that she hadn’t helped Julia when she’d first met her in the hotel so many years ago, and she asked if it was OK with me if she set Julia free from the limbo in which she was suffering. It was fine with me, more than fine, and there, as I sat in Judith’s living room, talking to an ancestor through an L-shaped copper rod—an ancestor said to be confined in a strange halfway compartment of the afterworld where the dead dwell and the past still lives—my specific questions about Julia’s life and death ceased to matter. I just wanted her to find a place of rest.

  As the morning sun struggled to warm the frosted grass on the golf course, I closed my eyes and held Julia tightly. It was time to let her go. The dead are past our help, though it’s hard, sometimes, to live without them. They take a piece of us with them when they leave, and we must learn to live reduced. We must live and let the dead be dead. “Look at me,” Eurydice begged Orpheus, and he did. We look hard at those w
ho have left us, and then we let them go—that is what it is to love them.

  “There’s an archangel I ask to take people home,” Judith said. His name was Metatron—a Jewish archangel known as a “lesser Yahweh.” He had three pairs of wings and he was enormous and powerful; he taught us, Judith explained, to let go gracefully of the things that tether us. Judith closed her eyes and asked the archangel Metatron to remove all pain and suffering from Julia, to surround her with love and joy.

  This is what Julia has taught me: to embrace this world, this beautiful world, with every molecule I contain—muscle, tendon, blood, and brain—like my grandfather, like Wolfgang, like Flora Spiegelberg. And like Bertha, too, in the end. To seize it. And then to let it go.

  Judith smiled, eyes still closed, tears streaking her cheeks. “I am feeling that it’s like a celebration party, they’re all waiting for her, they’re all going, Yaaay! All your family is there for her, all of them who have passed on.” Now Judith addressed her questions to Metatron. “Is Julia still earthbound?” she asked. The rod swung forward: no. “Did she rise up? Did she go home?” Yes, she did. She did. “I knew she went home,” Judith told me. “I could feel the joy of her family. They were all waiting for her.”

  I want so much to believe it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Though I wrote American Ghost without any help from the spirits, as far as I know, this book was a communal effort—a testament to how our family stories keep the past from slipping entirely from our grasp. So I owe first and foremost a huge debt to those in my family who left paths for me to follow. Julia Schuster Staab and Bertha Staab Nordhaus were present in every page of this book. I hope they would approve.

  I am lucky to come from a family of storytellers: especially my great-aunt Elizabeth Nordhaus Minces, whose collection of family memories propelled this book into being; my grandmother, Virginia Riggs Nordhaus, a talented writer who, in another generation, would have had more opportunities to express that talent; my grandfather, Robert J. Nordhaus, who never saw an ear he didn’t want to bend; my father, Robert R. Nordhaus, who forgets nothing, ever; and my uncle and aunt Dick and Mary Nordhaus, who know how to cut straight to the drama.