Ghostlore - by Lynn Rainville (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In Virginia, not everyone gets to become a ghost

Virginians have been claiming to out-haunt the rest of the country for over a century. Newspapers and books put the boast in print, and local ghost tours have been repeating it ever since. In Ghostlore, Lynn Rainville takes the claim seriously, though not in the way it was intended. Rainville treats Virginia's hauntings not as claims to be verified, but as evidence to be read.

Who gets to become a ghost, and whose stories make it into print, says more about the politics of memory than about the dead. For example, if ghost stories followed suffering, enslaved Virginians would haunt every plantation in the state. Instead, the lady in white waits at the upper window of plantation after plantation, while the men and women who built those houses and labored inside them rarely turn up in the published lore.

Ghostlore traces haunting tales from the Jamestown churchyard to Washington's restless shade at Mount Vernon, from Civil War battlefields to the corridors of women's colleges, from a Lynchburg cradle that rocks unattended to the cemeteries, prisons, and vanished houses of historic neighborhoods. Maps of four haunted cities let readers walk the routes themselves. What emerges from these supernatural tales is a record of who a community mourned, who it feared, and who it forgot altogether.

About the Author

Lynn Rainville is founder of the Hidden History Group and author of Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia.