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

by Hannah Nordhaus

  I owe a special debt of gratitude to my aunt Betsy Messeca, who has been tireless in tracking our family’s path through Europe to America. Without her laboriously archived photographs, maps, emails, and family trees, I wouldn’t have known where to start. My father’s cousin Nancy Paxton provided a number of family documents and photographs that also helped point me in the right direction. Nancy’s late sister Judy Paynter kept diligent track of our family’s legacy; her daughter Rhonda Paynter is caretaker of many important things, and I owe her huge for finding that diary.

  Betty Mae Hartman, Don Wallace, Tom Wallace, Lee Meyer, and Wolfgang Mueller were all generous in sharing their time and stories, offering the view from other branches of the Staab and Schuster family trees. Wolfgang did not live long enough to read the manuscript; with his great gusto for being, I somehow thought he would live forever. Thanks also to Sonya Mueller for her help in finding photos, and to Felix Warburg for photos and tales of the Spiegelberg family.

  I was fortunate to have found such generous and well-informed German historians to help me trace the Schuster family’s path in the Old World. I can’t offer enough gratitude to Margit Naarmann, who has spent a career chronicling the lives and difficult times of the Jewish families in her corner of Westphalia. I am also grateful for Manfred Willeke’s extensive research on the history of the towns of Lügde and Bad Pyrmont, and his gallantry in squiring us through those worlds.

  My German-language skills were woefully inadequate for such a German-intensive project. Jim Robinson, a masterly translator, helped me make up for those deficits. Many thanks also to Lynne Sullivan, Buzzy Jackson, and Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak for their help in guiding me through the mazelike world of family genealogy and DNA research. Willie Sutherland helped me sift through newspaper stories and provided bibliographical backup; young eyes are very helpful when engaging with old microfilm. Joanna Hershon, who wrote The German Bride, the evocative novel based on Julia Staab’s life, offered unconditional support and information.

  I am also grateful to John Lorenzen, Jonathan Mason, Judith Mangus, Juli Somers, Steve Hart, Sarina Baptista, Ilene Blum, Ed Conklin, Judy Cooper, Misha Johnson, Karl Pfeiffer, and Connor Randall for sharing their visions of the world beyond. My mother-in-law, Toni Barkett, is not only clairsentient, she is also courageous—game for both visiting psychic colonies and tending toddler grandchildren. My travel companions on various ghost-hunting adventures, Monica Nordhaus and Emilia Noullet, did not get the credit in the book that they deserved. But wasn’t it fun? Big thanks to Kristin Lepisto and the staff at La Posada for hosting me and letting me snoop around the place. Thanks also to the Stanley Hotel for its hospitality.

  My monthly writers group provided such helpful feedback: Morgan Bazilian, Deborah Fryer, Buzzy Jackson, Carol Kauder, Radha Marcum, Michelle Theall, Rachel Walker, and Rachel Weaver. My other gang of writers—Hillary Rosner, Melanie Warner, and Florence Williams—pitched in with advice, support, and indispensable lunchtime getaways.

  To those who muddled through various incarnations and pieces of this manuscript—Coralie Hunter, Buzzy Jackson, Bob Nordhaus, Mary Nordhaus, Ted Nordhaus, Rhonda Paynter, Myra Rich, Hilary Reyl, Hillary Rosner, and Melanie Warner—thank you, thank you. You made this a better book.

  Carol Byerly—historian, friend, fellow stickler—read an especially early and troubled draft. I can’t thank her enough for her merciless feedback. Rachel Walker, too, gave the manuscript the thorough and acute read it desperately needed. Meg Knox helped me channel my inner memoirist and aided in transforming the manuscript into something far more crisp and elegant.

  Richard Pine, my agent, seemed to know exactly when to be encouraging and when to take me to task. Many thanks to him for his warmth and enthusiasm, and also to Eliza Rothstein for her input and help. Michael Signorelli took a chance on my first book and advocated for the second, then left me in great hands with Maya Ziv, who brought a fiction editor’s eye to the book’s pacing and plotting and kept me working at it until we were both happy.

  And then there is my mother, Jean Nordhaus: traveling companion, translator, reader (of everything except maps), editor, counselor, and all-around word guru. How could I possibly write this book—any book—without you?

  I always knew I was lucky to be married to Brent Barkett—companion, friend, child-whisperer, griller of rare meat, laundry folder, cycling domestique, voice of reason, and force of calm. But after spending three years thinking about life with nineteenth-century husbands, I find myself even more awed by and appreciative of all he is and does. Our children, Delia and Milo, bring me the future, keep me in the present, remind me of our connection to the past, and always make it fun. A world that contains these people is an infinitely better place.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  My research for American Ghost was vast and varied, ranging from old territorial newspapers to nineteenth-century travel journals, from historical monographs to biographies to Internet genealogy forums. But it began with one dusty, slim volume that I found in a leaded-glass bookshelf at my great-grandfather’s mountain home in the eastern Sangre de Cristo Mountains. My great-aunt Elizabeth Nordhaus Minces wrote The Family: Early Days in New Mexico the year of her death in 1980. Without both the information and the inspiration contained within it, American Ghost wouldn’t exist.

  Nor would my family’s story have been nearly as engaging for me without the great luck of finding the 1891–93 travel diary of my great-grandmother Bertha Staab Nordhaus, a scuffed, leather-bound notebook that surfaced in a neglected moving box just when I needed it, and opened up a world. My grandmother Virginia Nordhaus’s reminiscences of her own years as a young bride in New Mexico, Unsent Letters, also helped me understand what it might have been like for “cultured” women from the East in the days when a move to New Mexico was akin to a journey to another planet. These family memories and documents are remarkable gifts; they tell us where we came from. I am fortunate that the women in my family felt compelled to write about their days and their memories, and thus saved them for the rest of us.

  Supplementing those penned reminiscences were oral histories. There is no one left in my family who remembers Julia Staab, but I was able to interview a number of relatives, distant and close, who knew Julia’s children. My interviews with Betty Mae Hartman, Wolfgang Mueller, and Don and Tom Wallace provided essential insight into the Staab and Schuster family cultures. Other relatives—my father, Bob Nordhaus, uncles and aunts Dick and Mary Nordhaus and Betsy Messeca, along with my father’s cousin Nancy Paxton—shared memories and gossip in more informal settings.

  I found additional information on the Staab family in historical and online archives. The New Mexico Jewish Historical Society has compiled extensive files on New Mexico’s early Jewish families, including the Staabs and the Spiegelbergs. Those files are kept within the New Mexico State Archives. Another batch of Staab folders resides in the Museum of New Mexico History Archive, where I also perused the papers of Julia Staab’s physician, W. S. Harroun. The Bloom Southwest Jewish Archives at the University of Arizona contain the papers of Floyd Fierman, who conducted extensive research on Southwestern Jewish families, including the Staabs, in the middle of the last century.

  I was lucky to embark on this research project in an era when so much that once languished in dusty and far-flung archives is now searchable and readable online. The depth and breadth of the newspaper archives now available on the Internet are truly a gift to any historical or genealogical researcher. I conducted my searches through GenealogyBank.com, NewspaperArchive.org, and Newspapers.com. Through those services, I found references to the Staabs in nearly forty newspapers across the United States. The Santa Fe New Mexican, the Santa Fe Weekly Gazette, and the Albuquerque Journal were particularly valuable resources in my search.

  I also found a wealth of first-person accounts about the early days in territorial New Mexico. Josiah Gregg’s Commerce of the Prairies, which recounts his journeys across the Santa Fe Trail in the
1830s, is a Western classic, masterfully written and spectacularly observant. Susan Shelby Magoffin’s diaries of her 1846 journey to Santa Fe, Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, is the earliest known first-person account of that trail written by a woman, and it provides intimate detail of a female traveler’s adventures and tribulations. Sister Blandina Segale’s At the End of the Santa Fe Trail, a not-to-be-missed rendering of a young nun’s days in territorial New Mexico, is full of life and sass and magnificent detail. The archaeologist Adolph Bandelier’s four-volume Southwestern Journals also provide insight into the conditions and social scene in Santa Fe in the years when the Staabs lived there.

  Other useful sources on the Staabs and other Jewish families in New Mexico include Henry Tobias’s A History of the Jews in New Mexico; Floyd Fierman’s Roots and Boots, a survey of Jewish history in the American Southwest; and Fierman’s journal articles, “The Staabs of Santa Fe” and “The Triangle and the Tetragrammaton.” William Parish’s The Charles Ilfeld Company studies the early merchant capitalists in New Mexico. Tomas Jaehn’s Germans in the Southwest, 1850–1920 discusses both New Mexico’s German Jews and the general German experience in the desert Southwest.

  Other useful histories of New Mexico’s territorial years include Paul Horgan’s The Centuries of Santa Fe, The Far Southwest by Howard Lamar, Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides, and the recently published Chasing the Santa Fe Ring by David Caffee. Paul Horgan’s Lamy of Santa Fe is the definitive biography of Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy, offering an intimate and intricate portrait of the world Lamy found and shaped when he arrived in Santa Fe in 1851. Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop looks at the archbishop’s life from a fictional vantage point, but her observations of landscape and character in old New Mexico are sharp and crystalline—it is a classic of Southwestern literature. The two most detailed accounts of Abraham Staab’s dealings with the archbishop and the cathedral come from Ralph Emerson Twitchell’s Old Santa Fe and William Keleher’s The Fabulous Frontier.

  In researching Julia Staab’s health, I consulted a number of sources on nineteenth-century medicine and the treatment of mental illness in Julia’s era. They include: David Dary’s Frontier Medicine, Judith W. Leavitt’s Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health, Barbara Sicherman’s “Uses of a Diagnosis” in the Journal of the History of Medicine, Norman Gevitz’s Other Healers, and Susan Cayleff’s Wash and Be Healed, a history of the water cure movement in America. Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes’s Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness Before 1914 provides a useful overview of the ways nineteenth-century physicians approached mental illness. Sarah Stage’s Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women’s Medicine is another fascinating history of women’s health and patent medicines in nineteenth-century America.

  In researching the nineteenth-century spa movement, I came across a number of detailed and sometimes comical contemporary descriptions of the medicinal benefits of the “healing waters,” in Bad Pyrmont, where Julia Staab visited during her 1891 quest for healing, and other German spas. Those books include Thomas Linn’s 1894 handbook, Where to Send Patients Abroad for Mineral and Other Water Cures and Climatic Treatment and Sigismund Sutro’s Lectures on the German Mineral Waters and on Their Rational Employment for the Cure of Certain Chronic Diseases. Meanwhile, Dr Seebohm’s Wegweiser in Bad Pyrmont mit Umbegung, by Adolf Seebohm, lists the specific benefits of the waters of Bad Pyrmont in archaic, flowery, and often laughable Germanic detail.

  On the subject of German Jewish history, there is no better book than Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743–1933, which begins with Moses Mendelssohn’s journey to Berlin and ends with the Nazi takeover. I also consulted W. Michael Blumenthal’s The Invisible Wall: Germans and Jews, a Personal Exploration, H. G. Adler’s The Jews in Germany: From the Enlightenment to National Socialism, and Julia Wood Kramer’s This, Too, Is for the Best: Simon Krämer and His Stories.

  Stephen Birmingham’s “Our Crowd”: The Great Jewish Families of New York is required reading for anyone interested in the German Jewish immigrant experience in New York. Avraham Barkai’s Branching Out: German-Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1820–1914 was also a useful resource. Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father, written in 1919, offers anguished insight into the conflicts between German Jewish fathers and their modern sons at the turn of the twentieth century.

  For specific details of the Jewish experience in Lügde, I relied on Manfred Willeke’s Genealogie: Die Geschichte der Juden in Lügde (Genealogy: The History of the Jews in Lügde) and Willy Gerking’s article in the Historisches Handbuch der jüdischen Gemeinschaften in Westfalen und Lippe (Historical Handbook of Jewish Communities in Westphalia and Lippe). The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln is essential reading for those seeking to understand the experience of Jewish women in Germany in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

  I first learned of Emilie Schuster’s death in the Theresienstadt ghetto through my conversations with Wolfgang Mueller, but it was in Margit Naarmaan’s history,“Von Ihren Leuten wohnt hier keiner mehr”: Jüdische Familien in Paderborn in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismzus (“None of Your People Live Here Anymore”: Jewish Families in Paderborn During the Nazi Time) that I learned the awful specifics of her loss. Gerhard Schoenberner’s The Yellow Star: The Persecution of the Jews in Europe, 1933–1945 provided documentary information about the deportation of the Paderborn Jews through Bielefeld to Theresienstadt. There are many good histories of Theresienstadt online and in books. I found particularly useful the Terezín museum’s publication Terezín in the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” 1941–1945: Guide to the Permanent Exhibition of the Ghetto Museum in Terezín. Jana Renée Friesová’s book Fortress of My Youth: Memoir of a Terezín Survivor, describes the conditions at Theresienstadt in heartbreaking and horrific detail. Finally, Wolfgang Mueller’s memoir, Wolf: Persecution, Escape, Survival, Triumph tells of his own personal journey from Nazi Germany to New Mexico and beyond.

  On the website Ancestry.com, I located numerous immigration, census, and birth and death records, in addition to a number of family trees that helped me understand my connections to more distant relatives. Other important online genealogical resources I used in tracing my Jewish genealogy and history included the Jewish Virtual Library and the Leo Baeck Institute Archives, where I stumbled upon Ernest Schuster’s 1985 “Chronicle of the Schuster Family,” which traced the Schusters back to Lügde, Germany, and on through the subsequent generations in Germany and America.

  As a neophyte in the world of ghosts and spirits, I had a lot of catching up to do. I am grateful to those historians and science writers who made it easier, first and foremost among them Mary Roach, whose book Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife surveys the world of ghost research and renders it engrossing to the rest of us. Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death is an engaging history of the efforts of the American Society for Psychical Research to cast the light of empirical science on the mediums and psychics who proliferated in the years after the Civil War.

  Peter Ackroyd (the comedian Dan Ackroyd’s father) wrote a fascinating and comprehensive history of the larger Spiritualism movement in A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Séances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters. The author Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame, was also a noted Spiritualist who penned his own chronicle of the movement, The History of Spiritualism. Hugh and Susan Harrington published a comprehensive biography, Annie Abbott: “The Little Georgia Magnet” and the True Story of Dixie Haygood, of the woman whose levitation act Bertha Staab watched in Los Angeles in 1891, during Spiritualism’s heyday.

  Judith Richardson’s book Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley is a historical study of the supernatural legends of upstate New York that explores how ghost stories—whether we believe
them or not—operate as a sort of “social memory” within our cultural landscapes. I also consulted a number of books and websites about the ghosts that inhabit the particular cultural landscape in which I was writing—Santa Fe. Those include Allan Pacheco’s Ghosts-Mayhem-Murder and Antonio Garcez’s Adobe Angels: The Ghosts of Santa Fe.

  Finally, there were the imaginative works in which Julia played a role: Joanna Hershon’s The German Bride: A Novel and my third cousin Kay Miller’s Jews of the Wild West: A Multicultural True Story.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Interviews and Oral Histories

  Baptista, Sarina. Loveland, CO. February 12, 2013.

  Blum, Ilene. Boulder, CO. May 31, 2013

  Blum, Ilene. Boulder, CO. September 5, 2013.

  Conklin, Ed. Cassadaga, FL. March 28, 2013.

  Hartman, Betty Mae. Albuquerque, NM. May 14, 2012.

  Johnson, Misha. Telephone interview. Boulder CO. February 14, 2013.

  Lorenzen, John. Santa Fe, NM. March 29, 2012.

  Mangus, Judith. Boulder, CO. December 14, 2012.

  Mason, Jonathan. Tesuque, NM. September 20, 2013.

  Mueller, Wolfgang. Telephone interview. Boulder CO. May 22, 2012.

  Mueller, Wolfgang. Washington, DC. October 15, 2012.

  Paxton, Nancy; Nordhaus, Dick and Mary; Messeca, Betsy. Albuquerque, NM. May 14, 2012.

  Somers, Juli. Santa Fe, NM. February 19, 2013.