A new book explores the history of some of America's most haunted places, many in the West. Betsy Gaunes Quammen visited Indian boarding schools, dam sites, buried mining towns and old forts. The author leaves space for the places blessed with miracles, like Cokeville, Wyoming. Betsy Gaines Quammen really loves ghost stories. She grew up telling them, lived in a haunted house in Colorado Springs and once encountered what surely must have been the ghost of Ernest Hemingway. In 2022, she stayed at Hemingway’s house in Ketchum, Idaho, for a writer’s retreat. The guest room was below the home where the great American novelist killed himself in 1961. This July 30, 2007 file photo shows an interior view of the house formerly owned by Ernest Hemingway outside Ketchum, Idaho.The ownership of the Idaho house where Hemingway wrote some of his last works before killing himself in the main entryway in 1961 has changed hands but will remain off limits to the public. | Ted S. Warren, Associated Press The place is grand, fitting for a worldly couple like the Hemingways, but Quammen immediately found the energy unsettling. Which was only emphasized over the first two days as, despite being alone on the property, she heard movement upstairs and saw things stirring out of the corner of her eye.After watching the sunset on the third evening, she attempted to close her room’s door but it was pushed open “violently” before she could latch it. Stunned, she sensed a presence and thought that maybe it was the ghost of “Poppa” himself paying a visit. She babbled off some compliments about his books and got ready for bed.The Ernest and Mary Hemingway House is seen in Ketchum, Idaho, in 2022. It is the last place the American author lived and where he took his life in 1961. | Betsy Gaines Quammen As she lay down, however, she felt something — someone? — grab her firmly by the shoulders. Once whatever it was let go, Quammen got up, left and checked into a nearby hotel. A haunted landWhile it was not Quammen’s first encounter with a ghost, she said it was the scariest among the more than 10 or so haunted places she visited while researching her latest book “This Haunted Land: Reckoning with Ghosts and the Stories That Shape America.” Torrey House Press To write it, Quammen spent time in and dove deep into the history of several of the country’s most haunted places, including some that haunt her personally. While she does spin several truly spooky yarns, the historian and author is more inclined toward research and uncovering the hidden underpinnings of stories whose details have long been forgotten. “I came to realize that, as I explored American ghost stories, that they really were reflections of our collective memory, or lack thereof,” Quammen said in an interview with Deseret News. “So, they became much more substantive, I think, as I began to explore them as a historian.”A headstone in Lone Tree Cemetery in Telluride, Colorado remembers John Barthell, a union miner shot by a Sheridan Mine guard during a strike in 1901. Nearby Uravan is a former uranium mining town closed down in the 1980s to address radioactive and chemical contamination from decades of uranium and vanadium mining. | Betsy Gaines Quammen From that vantage, the haunted places changed from a kind of entertainment into insights about American society. “When I think of a ghost story — and maybe it’s a fleeting shadow or scent of perfume or an unexplained noise — that’s just the very beginning,” Quammen said. “Then you start to look at what historical circumstance is behind that spooky event. I also love the idea of mystery, and I love the idea that we don’t know everything, we can’t explain everything. To me that’s an invitation.” And with the context she unearths, the country’s ghosts — the very existence of the supernatural she does not question — offer a glimpse of what’s really haunting us. One that comes with a healthy lesson. “If this country is haunted by its history,” she wrote, “then the living bear responsibility to listen to bygone voices and redress the past.”The meaning of hauntedFor Quammen, “haunted” means “a person who’s deeply troubled by a past tragedy, or a landscape that holds a memory of a defining event.” She adds that it’s also “a place where ghosts dwell.” She defines a ghost as “the dead who visit the living,” known by many names such as “spirits, souls, shades, specters, phantoms, poltergeists, presences, apparitions and revenants, ” she wrote. Within those definitions, however, there’s room for broad interpretations of what “ghosts” still “haunt” the United States. While the majority of what she includes fits what one might expect, Quammen finds room to include a wide application of her definition. One counterintuitive example has all the trappings of a true, horrific tragedy but ends in a way that elicits a very different feeling than fear. It’s a place in Wyoming that now carries the memory of a defining event that many believe — with good reason — to be miraculous. But more on that later. America’s unsettled past Rather than rehash the haunts Americans are most familiar with — places like Salem, New Orleans or Sleepy Hollow — Quammen sets her attention on stories that shine a light on some often-overlooked parts of the nation’s history. “The way I chose my stories were really meant to be reflections of America’s unsettled past,” Quammen said. And as she’s a West-focused writer — she lives in Montana now, but spent time in Colorado, Oregon and Kanab, Utah, and has written several books about the West — many of the haunted places and unsettled histories she featured are on the Rocky Mountain side of the 100th meridian. The Concho Indian Boarding School was a federal Native American boarding school in central Oklahoma. Artist Steven Grounds painted a series of murals across the property, which is now owned by the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, honoring tribal ancestors and elders. | Betsy Gaines Quammen “So, I did look at unsustainable extraction. I looked at the legacy of Indian boarding schools. I looked at cultural erasure and stolen land. I looked at the history of slavery and, and also the Underground Railroad movement. I looked at violence,” Quammen said. “I looked at the idea that in the West, we’re haunted by the scarcity of water.” To illuminate those issues, she encountered a ghost haunting an old brothel in Butte, Montana, where its past as a ruthless mining town left ample spirits wandering the raised and rebuilt city streets. She also visited what used to be the town of Uravan, Colorado, on the other side of the mountains from Telluride. A mining company buried what it had built near mineral deposits, including homes and schools, after the collapse of the uranium industry in the 1970s. The town is “haunted by promises unsustained,” Quammen writes, and “the American Dream lies beneath layers of gravel and sand.” Quammen also went to the Concho Indian Boarding School in Oklahoma, where supposed paranormal activity tours turn a profit off of Native American trauma, adding a new layer or exploitation to an already difficult cultural reality. Instead of letting the haunted narrative dominate, however, a local artist turned the school into an art gallery, with murals celebrating the community’s ancestors and heroes covering its walls. Of the supposed dead bodies dropped into the concrete of various western dams, she did not find much compelling evidence. What Quammen did find is that those dead bodies, while ample, are mostly outside the foundations, as well as upstream and downstream of the barrier. In her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, Quammen spent time at the Six Acres Bed and Breakfast, a haunted inn that in another lifetime was a famous outpost of the Underground Railroad. She even searched for the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker that some believe is still chiseling its way into Arkansas’ forests. They don’t exist anymore, Quammen said, but she “would love to believe that they do.” Either way, perhaps their ghosts still do. Quammen went to St Ann’s Retreat in northern Utah’s Logan Canyon. The former nunnery has long been a place ghost hunters and teenagers flock to thrill seek but it also represents a collision of differing systems of belief that are foundational to America’s spirituality. A dark, beautiful placeBut the “most haunted” place she went to was on the East Coast. The fort Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida is the oldest mason built structure in North America. It dates back to 1672. Now a national monument, it hosts many different ghost hunting tours that are privy to centuries worth of stories that are each harrowing in their own right. For starters, the fort’s located in the oldest European settlement in North America and represents the origin point for diseases that wiped out large percentages of Indigenous populations. As a fort, too, people were literally executed there. Pirates were held inside its walls, and the English and Spanish fought over it often. It’s also where Osceola, the Seminole warrior, was (unsubstantially) rumored to have been beheaded. But it has connections to the West, too. The federal government shipped people from the Apache and Comanche tribes to Castillo de San Marcos after the Apache wars. And that detainment led directly to the creation of the Carlisle Boarding School model the federal government used to force assimilation of Native American children.“That place encapsulates so many American chapters. Many of which are dark, but it also is a place that’s pretty awe-inspiring,” Quammen said. “I mean, it’s an incredibly beautiful fort.” The Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, is shown in this aerial photo Saturday Oct. 8, 2016, in St. Augustine, Fla. | Chris O'Meara, Associated Press Do you believe in miracles?According to Quammen, even if it doesn’t fit with America’s other haunted stories, there was another place so defined by an otherworldly event that she felt it needed to be included in the book. It’s Cokeville, a small town on Wyoming’s southwest border with Utah that is predominantly made up of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “If we were looking at America’s relationship with the supernatural, I really felt like it was going to be an important chapter to have an LDS experience,” Quammen said. “The Miracle of Cokeville is astonishing. It’s remarkable. There’s so much that’s unexplained.” What is now commonly referred to as a “miracle” — in part because of the name of the movie made about what happened — started in a way that was so ugly. On May 16, 1986, a disturbed husband and wife walked into Cokeville Elementary School with a massive homemade explosive device and took 154 people hostage. Of hostages, 136 were young children. It was Teddy Bear Week, Quammen wrote, so many of the children were clutching their stuffies. One boy, Jeremiah Moore, turned seven that day. Everyone sang “Happy Birthday.” After a tense two-hour standoff with the entire school sequestered in the same room as the explosive, the bomb was inadvertently triggered. Despite having enough firepower to have killed everyone in the building, only two people died that day: the perpetrators. Every single captive survived. Such an outcome is seemingly inexplicable. That is, until 6-year-old survivor Nathan Hartley recalled what he saw. Quammen found his transcript. “I was sitting in the classroom playing with a toy when something made me look up. That’s when I saw the angels,” Hartley said. “Everyone seemed to have an angel ... My angel ... landed on my shoulder. She said, ‘Don’t be scared, Nathan. Get up and go to the window. The bomb is about to go off.’” At the time, the town had a population of about 500. Whatever happened that day — an angel, a ghost, a series of fortunate events — prevented an unspeakable tragedy in the community. For the townspeople and many watching from afar, it looked exactly like providence. Quammen called what happened a marvel, and that tragedy averted certainly cast a shadow — or a very bright light — on the town, which it will carry for a long time. “It was the kind of story that I read,” Quammen said, “and just, you know, I wanted to believe in miracles.” Cokeville Elementary School was the site of a hostage crisis and bombing on May 16, 1986 when former town marshal David Young, 43, and his wife Doris Young, 47, took 136 children and 18 adults hostage and held them for ransom. After the bomb inadvertently went off, David shot and killed his injured wife and later himself. All of the hostages survived, although many suffered severe injuries. The incident is sometimes referred to as the “Cokeville Miracle.” | Betsy Gaines Quammen Do you believe in ghosts?For time immemorial, cultures have shared stories about ghosts. There’s evidence of killed warriors haunting battlefields in Mesopotamian cuneiform scrolls. Ancient Greeks and Romans wrote about them. So did Pliny the Elder. Buddhists texts mention them.In Quammen’s experience, even those that say they do not believe in ghosts have had their own encounters. “I’m not exaggerating, I’ve had several people say to me, ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, but I had this one thing happen that I can’t explain,’ (and), ‘Until I read your book, I hadn’t remembered a moment that happened where I felt like I was visited by somebody I loved and lost.’” She said that she thinks sometimes people rationalize experiences they can’t explain.“And when we think back, we do have things that happen that maybe are not quite right — that we can’t quite verify them,” Quammen said, “but they stick with us.”For Quammen, it started well before she ever stepped foot into Hemingway’s house.From the time she was eight until she was 18, she volunteered at the Cincinnati Zoo. She did everything, including helping at the children’s zoo and animal rehab center, cleaning stalls and walking the grounds with a boa constrictor around her neck. She even worked with an entomologist and spent countless hours with butterflies. But she spent a lot of time in “Martha’s Mausoleum,” the final home of the world’s last passenger pigeon, a now extinct species. It was in that room that ghosts became incredibly important to her. “Every time it rained — and it would rain like crazy — I would walk in there and, by myself, be with Martha’s ghost,” Quammen recalled. “Being in that mausoleum with the last passenger pigeon and truly believing that I was in her presence made me realize, number one, ghosts are with us. And number two, they’re very important, and that their presence can be just as substantive and impactful as the living.”That foundational awareness of ghosts’ impactful presence — and the loss they might represent — helped shape what became the ultimate point of her book. She writes that we cannot ignore our history, because — quite literally — it will come back to haunt us. Nor can Americans pretend that their current actions will not be the cause of future hauntings. Like Ebenezer Scrooge’s third visitor in Charles Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol,” America is creating today the “ghosts yet to come.” Quammen has a list of a few things she thinks might come back to haunt us — relevant to AI, environmental issues, immigration — but there are too many outcomes to forecast all of them. Some could be, if someone believes in them, just what seemed to have happened in Cokeville: miracles. Regardless, Quammen said, “I think we’re just haunting America.”