About This Project
Ghost stories often avoid discussing race. Which is interesting because sometimes when you share that lived history, things can actually get more creepy.
This project examines how American pop culture paranormal narratives perpetuate settler colonialism. BIPOC communities have rich ghost traditions and folklore of their own. What gets systematically ignored, sanitized, or erased is how those traditions get filtered through the pop culture machine — Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, haunted tourism, true crime podcasts — and whitened in the process.
These "haunted" sites are often locations of real racial trauma, repackaged as sanitized tourist attractions. The ghost stories that sell tickets aren't the ones that implicate America.
Ghostwritten
Popular ghost stories vs. the histories they're built on
Myrtles Plantation, Louisiana
"Chloe," an enslaved woman in a green turban, poisoned her master's family and now haunts the grounds.
The plantation sits on Tunica burial grounds. Visitors report seeing a Native American woman's spirit. Nearly 200,000 Indigenous people were enslaved in America, often undocumented. Who was "Chloe" really?
A comfortable slave revenge story sells rooms. The truth about desecrated burial grounds doesn't.
Cahawba, Alabama
A glowing orb in the garden maze, the ghost of Confederate Colonel C.C. Pegues.
Pegues died 800 miles away in Virginia. Meanwhile, 5,000 Indigenous people were massacred on this land. As many as 1,800 Union soldiers survived Cahawba prison, then died when their ship exploded on the way home. The first Black congressman from this area vanished from the historical record entirely. How are there not more ghosts of color here?
A Confederate officer gets the ghost story. Indigenous genocide and Black political power don't.
Ridgeway, Wisconsin
A shape-shifting phantom terrorized this mining town for 60 years—the only known case of "murder by ghost."
While folklorists tracked the phantom, they ignored the illegal slave labor running the mines. Enslaved people were forced to pour a ton of lead a day on land where a Black veteran's mine was labeled with a racial slur on federal maps until 1961. How did hundreds of ghost stories manage to miss the people actually dying in the dark?
The government put a slur on the map. Folklorists put a phantom in the books. The enslaved laborers were left off both.
Mother Leafy Anderson, New Orleans
Mother Leafy Anderson was a Spiritualist who founded a church in New Orleans in the 1920s.
Anderson didn't just found a church. She built a national movement, trained dozens of women as ordained ministers, and helped give birth to a musical tradition still alive in New Orleans today. Her obituary lists a town in Wisconsin that never existed. No birth certificate has ever been found. The National Spiritualist Association expelled its Black members in 1922, and the official history of the movement reflects who stayed, not who built it.
She built an institution. The historical record barely knows she existed.
In Anderson's era: underdocumented, origins unverifiable, history unpreserved. Today: the same communities are the most surveilled in America. Same project. Different tools.
Lake Lanier, Georgia
A handless woman in a blue dress haunts the bridge where two women drowned in 1958. An estimated 700 people have died in these waters.
The viral story says Georgia drowned a Black town to build this lake. It didn't—and the truth is worse. In 1912, all 1,098 Black residents of Forsyth County were driven out under threat of death, their land absorbed for nothing. Decades later, the state flooded stolen Cherokee river bottoms and named the reservoir after a Confederate poet. Unmarked graves likely remain under the water. Why did the story need a submerged town when the county records tell a more gruesome story?
A ghost story gets the legend. A racial cleansing gets a myth that misremembers it.
