The town of Butte, Montana, is a great place to tell ghost stories and there are a lot to tell. On an early spring afternoon, I sat down with Jim McCarthy, a Butte Silver Bow County volunteer at the archives, to share such a tale. He’d already offered a few of his own, and it was my turn. This one took place not in Butte, but in Idaho. In 2022, I was generously put up at the Hemingway House as a writer-in-residence at the one-time home of Mary and Ernest Hemingway in Ketchum. Ernest died there by suicide in 1961 when he shot himself after years of deteriorating health, multiple head injuries, alcoholism, and depression. Mary died in New York twenty-five years later when her own demons caught up with her. There is a heaviness in the concrete walls of their former residence, this place of exile from Finca Vigía in Cuba. Today, a renovated garage below the former Hemingway quarters serves as a studio apartment for visiting writers. The couple’s home remains separated from the accommodations by locked doors.

 

Early into my stay, the property’s caretaker gave me a tour of their house. I headed up to the big, stone porch and entered into the Hemingways’ former life. The main floor, with its Atomic Age furniture, minimalist and clean (think Jetsons), had been artfully arranged. Mounted African antelope trophies and framed bullfighting posters hung near a large picture window that, when the drapes weren’t drawn, looked out towards the Wood River Valley. On the second floor, above the kitchen and living room, there was a bathroom with the very first bidet in Idaho. In one of two bedrooms sat a black trunk emblazoned in lipstick-red paint with “HEMINGWAY,” evidence of the author’s far-flung and sometimes dangerous travels. This chest, with its stickers—Cabina, Fragile, Sidarma Societa Italiana Di Armamento Venezia—was stored at the foot of a large bed draped with a down comforter under some type of tawny hide. On the nearby writer’s desk rested a lamp, clock, rotary phone, and crimson-framed reading glasses; Ernest Hemingway’s empty chair stood behind, backlit by a sun shaft sneaking through closed crème-colored curtains.

 

The dwelling’s rustic charm and futuristic sophistication felt fitting for a couple as worldly as the Hemingways. But for all of the home’s nostalgic and noteworthy appeal, there was something unsettling about the place. Whether it was the gloom (all of the drapes were pulled shut), an awareness of the author’s suicide, or the strange uneasiness of a home no longer occupied by the living, things just didn’t feel right.

 

My two-week stay had started out well. I was writing away on my book True West and feeling proudly productive. But the house tour left me shaken. From the studio apartment, I began to hear movement upstairs. I would also, occasionally, out of the corner of my eye, catch a glimpse of something stirring, though I was alone. I was jumpy. On the third evening of my retreat, I walked outside to see the Idaho sky go pink with the sun sinking behind broad, gray mountains. When I came back inside, I closed the door behind me. It had two heavy-duty locking mechanisms, a deadbolt and a latch. Before I could throw the bolt, the door blew violently open. Okay, that’s a yikes, I thought. 

 

Hello? Umm . . . Hi! 

 

Oh, god! Was this Hemingway’s ghost!?!

 

So, thanks for letting me stay here. It’s great.

 

I’ve read a lot of your books.

 

Ummm . . . 

 

The apartment was silent but I’d heard that ghosts like conversation. So, I kept going . . .

 

A Moveable Feast. That’s my favorite. 

 

Book, I mean . . .

 

Actually, I can’t remember what I said exactly. I know I sounded a bit shrill. I do love A Moveable Feast, but I was worried that if I was with the ghost of Hemingway, he’d somehow know that I didn’t love all of his work. I mean, I liked Old Man and the Sea. I read it in seventh grade. For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises I’d picked up somewhere over the years. I didn’t actually finish Big Two-Hearted River because I lost interest. Could he know this?

 

Anyway, ummm . . .

 

The room was quiet. I stopped talking and got ready for bed.

 

After pulling on purple striped cotton pajamas and brushing my teeth, I turned off the light and scootched under the covers. I told myself I was being silly. Then I felt someone grab me by my shoulders. 

 

It wasn’t aggressive, kind of like an overly friendly coach assuring a player—a quick go get ‘em, tiger. The dark room began to flicker with pastel and swirling dots of light. I was sharply aware that my back faced the door of a staircase connecting the basement studio to the Hemingway home. The shoulder grasp was brief, and at some point, the lights stopped. I’m not sure how I got to sleep that night, but the next morning, first thing, I drove to a hotel and checked in. It was off-season and I found the cheapest place in town. For the next two days, I tried to get a grip on my nerves. When I finally did, I returned to the apartment. All was quiet for the next week and a half. Although I was skittish, nothing else happened.

 

Well, that’s my story, I said to Jim McCarthy, that day in the Butte archive conference room. An older gentleman, with a serious countenance and an interest in discussing ghosts, looked at me with no small amount of annoyance. You mean a ghost visited you and you just left? Do you know how lucky you were to have had one approach you? A ghost appeared and you took off? That’s not what you do with ghosts! You listen to them. 

 

He made it clear that I had squandered a very big opportunity. Lesson learned, Jim McCarthy.

 

◊◊◊

 

Ghosts want to talk. They have so much to say about their own lives, tragedies, injustices, and lessons. And they’re everywhere, in bedrooms, boardrooms, back alleys, abandoned homesteads, and lonely backroads. Roaming vast plains, dammed rivers, towns, and cities. They wander the halls of boarded-up schools, loiter in flooded cypress forests, and drift down abandoned mines. To note their voices and absorb their tales is another way of exploring our vast, tumultuous nation and its history. We’ve got a lot of ghosts.

 

First let’s take a second to define haunted. It can mean a person who’s deeply troubled by a past tragedy, or a landscape that holds a memory of a defining event. It’s also a place where ghosts dwell. It seems all three of these definitions apply to the Hemingway home.

 

And what are ghosts? They are the dead who visit the living. They are known by many names—spirits, souls, shades, specters, phantoms, poltergeists, presences, apparitions, and revenants. Each can have different meaning depending on the context. And they inhabit every corner of the world. In Mesopotamian cuneiform, Irving Finkle, a curator at the British Museum, found records of fallen, unburied warriors roving battlefields. Homer, Plato, and Pliny the Younger all pondered ghosts in their writings. Christianity, a religion with the most adherents in the world, is based on a ghost story, one could argue. Buddhism gave us hungry ghosts in the sacred Avadanasataka. Writer Lisa Morton muses that perhaps the ochre animals sketched on stone walls across the world could be the ghosts of wild game. Dante, Shakespeare, Washington Irving, and Charles Dickens wrote of ghosts long before their modern counterparts such as Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, and Hari Kunzru. As long as people have lived and died in this world, we’ve had ghosts. 

 

We need ghosts, especially today. They often have complex histories to explain. Parul Sehgal, an art and literary critic for The New York Times, wrote in a 2018 piece: “Ghost stories are never just reflections. They are social critiques camouflaged with cobwebs; the past clamoring for redress.” Right now, people in power are seeking to erase history, believing that by removing word of historic, and sometimes excruciating events, from classrooms, libraries, national monuments, and museums, they can somehow remake the past. They can’t. 

 

Native spirits have lingered since time immemorial across what is now North America before Europeans came and loosed their own shades. The interlopers arrived bringing enslaved Africans, who too came with phantoms. Generations of Asian and Latino immigrants coming to North America also had shadows in tow. Phantasms, both imported and native, stamp this country from coast to coast. 

 

So, what exactly is a ghost story? It’s not just an unexplained noise, it’s a digest. There are stories beneath stories, unveilings from beyond the veil. They hold all the ingredients of the human experience: violence, arrogance, resistance, heartbreak, hope, bravery, bigotry, industry, opportunity, greed, and yearning. Aside from giving us chills, they can help to confront histories otherwise too painful to face in order to come to terms with our mistakes. Once we hear the stories of the dead, or face the specters of past deeds, we can then find succor in reconciliation and restoration. Ghost stories are an invitation to listen and to atone. They can point out things we might have forgotten or tried to cover up. Sometimes they whisper to us and sometimes they scream.

 

Why do ghost stories matter? They are tied to our humanity, even when ghosts aren’t deceased humans (animals can be ghosts too!). They connect us to our past and present. Everyone who lives will die, leaving those who are left behind to wonder about what happens after death. But beyond this question, there are reasons ghost stories are central to our humanity. They serve key purposes within cultures across time and geography, offering a multifaceted tableau to preserve personal and collective memories. They can be cautionary tales of various societal crimes and wrongdoings, reinforcements of anxieties or biases, or frameworks to grapple with the mysteries of the unknown. Most importantly, they bind cultures with shared histories and common stories, though unique cultures construe ghosts—and their messages—very differently. Depending on how they are told, stories of the dead can scare, shock, aggrieve, reveal, or comfort. They force us to face horror and coax us to confront trauma. And phantoms, like their narratives, are ubiquitous. Everyone has stories, whether they’ve heard them or experienced them. Because we live in haunted places. 

 

As writer Colin Dickey pointed out in his wonderful book, Ghostland, America is haunted. It is through a reckoning with ghosts that we can tend to injustices in our history. Not every encounter is as vivid as my night in Ketchum. In the following pages, we’ll trail ghosts and hear them out, visiting haunted landscapes and gathering true stories, tall tales, and unsettled histories. We’ll meet the specters who show us the immense tolls taken on people, animals, waters, and terrain—losses that continue to unsettle our present and future. In exploring some of our country’s painful and heartbreaking moments, I’ve tried to center the vulnerable, the voices I’ve paid the closest attention to.

 

So, what did Ernest Hemingway, or whoever it was who grabbed me in Idaho, want to say? I’ll never know, because I didn’t listen. There is much clamor to be heard. I won’t make that same mistake again.