The Pennsylvania State University

The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School GHOSTS AND THE IMAGINED PAST A Dissertation in Sociology by Christine Bucior © 2019 Christine Bucior Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2019 The dissertation of Christine Bucior was reviewed and approved* by the following: Alan Sica Professor of Sociology Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Gary J. Adler Assistant Professor of Sociology Jeffery T. Ulmer Professor of Sociology and Criminology Associate Department Head, Department of Sociology and Criminology Stephen Browne Liberal Arts Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences Jennifer Van Hook Roy C. Buck Professor of Sociology and Demography Director, Graduate Program in Sociology *Signatures are on file at the Graduate School ii Abstract When persons tell ghost stories, they imagine the past. Ghost stories are complete when they include both an account of paranormal happenings and an account of previous, this-worldly events that ghost-storytellers can use to explain those happenings. But ghost-storytelling differs from other activities in which persons imagine the past (like history education, monumentation, and museum-work). For one, there are no barriers to ghost-storytelling. For two, ghost- storytellers do not set out to imagine the past. They do so because the past is useful for their storytelling purposes. Hence, ghost-storytelling gives a “bottom up” view of the past; it shows what ordinary persons, as part of their unselfconscious assumptions about social life, think the past was like. I explore what that “bottom up” view of the past looks like in Pennsylvania. I ask who it includes. The first chapter maps out the kinds of persons—both in terms of demographic attributes and of social roles—Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers say haunt places. I ask when the past occurred. In the second chapter, I outline the historical settings of Pennsylvania’s ghost stories and how ghost-storytellers indicate what those settings are. I ask what kinds of events ghost-storytellers expect it to include. Ghost-storytellers assume some happenings should create ghosts. I address those in the last chapter. Data for this project come from four sources: twenty ethnographic interviews, three commercial ghost tours (all in Gettysburg, PA), HauntedPlaces.org (an online, user-generated archive of hauntings), and a series of books by an amateur folklorist (the Pennsylvania Fireside Tales). iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables…………………………………………………………………………………………... v Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….... 1 What Ghost Stories Give Us…………………………………………………………….…. 4 The Past in Ghost Stories……………………………………………………………,…….. 7 This Project………………………………………………………………………………… 9 Chapter 2: Who Is in the Past? Representation and Ghost Stories…………………………………….. 19 The Demography of Pennsylvania Hauntings……………………………………………… 20 Military Ghosts……………………………………………………………………………… 28 Academic Ghosts…………………………………………………………………………… 34 Religious Ghosts……………………………………………………………………………. 39 Ghost Brides………………………………………………………………………………… 41 Ghosts of Industry………………………………………………………………………….. 45 Ghostly Domestics………………………………………………………………………….. 50 Ghosts and Crime…………………………………………………………………………… 52 Ghosts of Personal Pasts……………………………………………………………………. 57 Chapter 3: When Is the Past? Time and Ghost Stories……………………………………………….. 61 Part I: Time in Ghost Stories is Not Calendrical…………………………………………… 61 Part II: The Temporal Topography of Ghost Stories………………………………………. 81 Chapter 4: Making Sense of the Who and the When…………………………………………………… 84 Making Sense of the “Sweet Spot”…………………………………………………………. 84 Making Sense of the Hot Spots…………………………………………………………....... 88 Making Sense of Non-calendrical Time Reckoning……………………………………….. 90 Chapter 5: Sensationalism and Ghost-causing Events…………………………………………………. 95 Defining Sensationalism…………………………………………………………………… 97 Sensational Pasts and Ghost Stories………………………………………………………… 99 Conclusion: Ghostly Sensationalism vs. “Real History” or Ghostly Sensationalism and “Real History?”…………………………………………………………………………….. 114 Chapter 6: Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………. 119 References…………………………………………………………………………………………….. 125 iv LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Distribution of Ghost Stories by Temporality Type………………………………. 61 Table 2. Distribution of Ghost Stories by Century……………………………………….... 80 v Chapter 1: Introduction On a summer’s night in 2004 or thereabouts, my friend Kat told me a story. She said a ghostly woman could be heard crying at night in Old South Cemetery on South Main Street, close to the town line between Glastonbury, CT (where we lived) and Portland. Weeping Mary, the ghost was called, or maybe Wailing Mary. Why does she cry? In the 1770s, she and her husband owned a mill that produced gunpowder for the Continental Army. The mill exploded one day, while Mary’s husband and all four of her sons were inside. Mary weeps for the family she lost. I was never brave enough to venture into that cemetery at night, so I never encountered Weeping or Wailing Mary for myself. As a point of fact, it would not have been Mary that I encountered. It would have been Weeping or Wailing Eunice. Eunice Cobb Stocking was her name. Otherwise, the details of Kat’s story are mostly true. Eunice and her husband, George Stocking, owned a gunpowder mill on the Roaring Brook, in what’s now Cotton Hollow Nature Preserve. Like Kat said, the Stockings sold powder to the Continentals during the Revolutionary War. The mill exploded on August 23, 1777. George, three of the four Stocking sons, and two others were killed in the blast. I found the stone that marked one of those two others’ graves later that summer, or maybe the next. He was interred in Green Cemetery, Glastonbury’s oldest burial ground, which sits (as its name suggests) behind the town green on Hubbard Street. Historically-minded, I liked to wander there as a teen. Some years later, I learned that a plaque marks the former site of the gunpowder mill (it was put there by the Glastonbury Historical Society), and that the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution is named in Eunice’s honor (CTDAR 2013). A few years after that, a member of the historical society published an article about the Stocking mill in the town newspaper. A recent, curiosity-driven 1 internet search led me to another article about the explosion of the mill, which appeared in the regional newspaper about a year after that (Marteka 2013). But I should state explicitly where I did not hear the story of the Stocking gunpowder mill: I did not learn about it in school. Neither did my older sister. This might not seem surprising. She and I left the public-school system in 1999, just as she was about to enter sixth grade and I, fourth grade. But in Glastonbury in the 1990s, students studied local history in fifth grade and third grade. If the explosion had been part of the curriculum, one of us would have learned about it. Instead, it took Kat—and Weeping Mary—to introduce me to that piece of my town’s past. Still, I would be lying if I said that Kat intended her story to teach me about the explosion of the gunpowder mill. We were two girls in our early teens who were looking for a way to pass the time, and who found the prospect of the supernatural thrilling. Weeping Mary and the exploding mill were suitably spine-tingling, was all. If I learned some history from listening to the story, that was coincidental. Stories like Kat’s are at the heart of this dissertation. I am studying the ways that persons imagine the past when they tell ghost stories. Ghosts and haunting as a type of historical consciousness has been a sociological theme since Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters (1997). For Gordon, haunting is a metaphor for the lingering, but unspeakable, presences of the past that weigh on social life. This is quite different from what I mean when I talk about ghosts and hauntings (terms I use interchangeably) in this dissertation. I mean the words in their usual, folkloric definition. A ghost is a supernatural manifestation of someone, or something, that has died. A haunting refers to the activity of a ghost somewhere in the living world. When I say that I am interested in ghost stories, I mean I am interested in stories in which storytellers make 2 claims about a ghost in this folkloric meaning, which the storytellers and their listeners may or may not believe. What do I mean when I say I am interested in “the ways that persons imagine the past?” Generally, I am talking about what commonly is called collective memory. I eschew that term for two reasons, though. One, it is linguistically problematic (see also Gedi and Elam 1996). A collective memory necessarily implies a collective mind. This is a holdover from the Durkheimian roots of the concept, at least as it exists within sociology. A collective memory should require that the persons who share it had some experience of the thing that is remembered. A person cannot remember a thing he has never encountered. But, when we sociologists speak of collective memory, we often are talking about “memories” of events that happened decades or centuries ago, long before anyone who we say is “remembering” was alive. This is why I prefer to keep my terminology centered on the past, rather than on memory. Second, what I am interested in encompasses something less concrete than what’s usually meant by collective memory. Memories are of something. Another linguistic shortcoming is evident here. Collective memories often include events that never

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