American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (11 page)

W
HILE
I
WAS WAITING
for my DNA results and working up the courage to spend the night in my own haunted hotel, I decided to sharpen my ghost-hunting savvy by visiting another famous spot. I drove from my home at the base of the Rockies up a narrow river valley that opened into a mountain-ringed basin, and pulled into a parking lot warm with afternoon heat. Before me, at the foot of a gigantic lumped-granite hillside, loomed a red-roofed, white-sided neo-Georgian colossus—the Stanley Hotel of Estes Park, Colorado. The hotel provided inspiration for the author Stephen King’s famous horror novel,
The Shining
, and it is said to have a head-spinning diversity of ghosts. F. O. Stanley, the hotel’s long-dead original owner, paces the lobby. His wife, Flora—the Julia of the establishment—plays piano in the ballroom. There is also a man in a dark gray suit, and a charred chambermaid, and a nanny who tucks in unsuspecting guests. Invisible children run down the hallways. Full-blown ghost parties rock the ballroom.

The Stanley runs nighttime ghost hunts each weekend in summertime; I had signed up for a Friday-night tour guided by two hotel-employed paranormal experts, Connor and Karl. Connor was blade-thin with downy blond hair, Karl more robust and jocular. We began with a briefing at a gazebo near the hotel’s front porch. There were thirty of us: a fair number of buzz-cut teenage boys, a group of ample middle-aged Nebraskans, and a handful of girls with headbands and flip-flops.

Connor and Karl began by laying out some rules: Keep our cell phones in airplane mode. Minimize talking and whispers.
If our stomachs grumbled, confess. (“It can sound like people screaming, women talking, demonic growls,” Connor said, “really!”) Karl and Connor couldn’t promise us a ghost, but they assured us they had seen plenty. “We’ve heard voices from nowhere,” Karl said, “heard footsteps, felt pants tugged, seen cell phones fly a few feet across the room. Sometimes a ghost will sit in someone’s lap.”

Connor told us that the Stanley’s guests most frequently encountered “residual” hauntings—historical memories that ran over and over, like a filmstrip: tinkling pianos, children laughing, the groans of trunks being dragged across the floor, smells of tobacco and rose oil, lights, shadows, cowboy silhouettes. Residual ghosts, Connor explained, have no idea that they’re dead. “Intelligent ghosts,” on the other hand—ghosts like Julia—can interact with people.

Connor then mentioned a type of ghost encounter called a “timeslip,” in which the present grazes against the past. Imagine two clotheslines in a row, he said. “Most of the time, the sheets hang down and are still, but maybe there’s a metaphorical breeze, a brushing between the sheets.” When the sheets touch, he said, people who don’t live in the same era see each other as ghosts—strangers in period dress. You peer briefly into their life; they peer into yours.

I liked this idea. It was exactly this that I was trying to do: riffle through the residua of Julia’s time on earth in the hope that I could generate my own breeze and look into her life. What I had seen, so far, was a sad bride who longed for home, who had no choice in what her life would be. I wondered what she would see if she peered into mine.

Next, Karl and Connor engaged in some polite debunking. Not every weird sensation portends a ghost, they explained.
Carbon monoxide can cause visual hallucinations. So can mini–epileptic seizures. Sounds that fall just below the human range of hearing can cause humans’ eyeball liquid to vibrate, making us see fleeting images out of the corners of our eyes. Our brains can play tricks, too, especially in that borderland between wakefulness and sleep, when reality blurs into dream—called a “hypnagogic state” when falling asleep, a “hypnopompic state” when waking up. We can also will ourselves into believing ordinary creaks and gusts are phantoms. That’s called apophenia—the tendency to see meaningful patterns in meaningless data.

Connor and Karl pulled out two metal suitcases full of gadgets that were supposed to help us avoid these kinds of mistakes: flashlights, a radiograph, an infrasound detector, a seismograph, a static detector, and an EMF “K-II meter” intended to pick up electrical frequencies. As dusk fell, they split us into two groups; mine would start in the main hotel building with Connor. We climbed four flights of broad, winding stairs and filed into a small room with a king bed, a sitting porch, an antique clock, and photos on the wall of women in turn-of-the-century, all-white dress. This was room 401. It was probably the most haunted spot in the whole hotel, Connor said.

We crammed in, thirteen of us, perching on the bed and leaning against the walls, and Connor turned out the lights. Blazes of lightning from a brewing storm burst intermittently through the gauze curtains, flickering on Connor’s face. He placed a seismograph on a shelf in the closet, then turned on a static detector, which looked and behaved like a spinning top; he then handed out a batch of flashlights and EMF detectors.

One of the teenagers, overweight and with fuzzy, dark hair and glasses, took his detector and smartphone into the bathroom. “EVP Session One,” he said in a slightly froglike voice.
He was hoping to capture an electronic voice phenomenon or an electromagnetic field—anything, really. “I got a spike in the bathroom!” he yelled. Others followed him into the small space; a traffic jam ensued. Connor told the rest of us that he suspected the room’s ghost was the evil Lord Dunraven, a brothel owner and land-grabber who had been run out of town in 1907. Lord Dunraven probably resided in the closet. “Lord Dunraven,” Connor asked, “what color is my shirt?”

They didn’t allow ghost hunters or tours into Julia’s hotel, out of respect; now I could understand why.

After a few suspicious radio squawks and flashlight blinks—nothing definitive, Connor told us—we transferred to the concert hall, where Karl would now be our guide. We wandered first through the dark entry hall and up to Flora Stanley’s private viewing box. “You often get a scent of roses here,” Karl told us, though I smelled only aftershave. From there we descended carefully to a cellar room full of pianos—unnerving in themselves, those dark coffins of sound. “We’d love to chat for a little bit,” Karl said to a ghost named Paul. Someone’s stomach growled. It was mine, and it did sound rather demonic. We heard a thump—the wind, I suspected, as the storm whipped up the valley—then nothing. Karl told us of the time he felt a ghost pass through his skull.

He also mentioned that a spirit named Lucy often came to visit the basement bathroom. According to local lore, she had been a squatter in the early 1970s—a hippie—who was found and evicted and later froze to death. A group of us filed into the bathroom and sat down on the floor. We unscrewed, slightly, the top of a flashlight and placed it beside us—this was an old ghost-hunting trick. The flashlight sat dark for a moment.

Then it turned on. Everyone got very excited. The light went
off, and on, and off again. “Lucy, if you’re here, turn on the light,” the EVP boy said. It didn’t turn on at first. And then it did.

“Lucy, if you want us to stay, turn off the light,” the boy said. The light remained on. We stayed anyway.

“What kind of music do you like?” asked the boy. Our guides had told us that Lucy liked music. “Pop?” Nothing. “Rock?” Nothing. “Country? Metal?” The light turned off.

“I think that was a delayed response to rock,” said the boy. A matronly woman from Nebraska disagreed: “No, I think it was country.” She turned to the flashlight. “I like country, too,” she said, in what I suspect was her sweetest voice. The EVP boy couldn’t believe that Lucy liked country. He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. “If you like rock, turn it back on,” he said.

It went back on, then went off and stopped cooperating. Everyone tried to coax Lucy back, but the light stayed off. The EVP kid called Lucy a spoiled brat; the woman from Nebraska swooped in to defend her.

I collected my flashlight and K-II meter and left the room. I couldn’t see what I was going to learn from this exercise. Perhaps there were ghosts here; perhaps Lucy really did lurk in the bathroom, debating her musical tastes. But this was no way to talk to the dead. This was no way to explore the bounds of our mortality. This was just stupid. I wasn’t sure that I would be any more successful than these hotel ghost hunters in my parsing of the scant documentary clues that Julia had left behind. But it seemed a far better course than sitting on a bathroom floor talking to a flashlight made in China, hanging on every gust and grumble and flicker.

If I was going to find Julia, I would have to do it some other way.

Santa Fe’s Saint Francis Cathedral.

Reverend John C. Gullette, Courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 13250, circa 1870.

T
he dead hold secrets that we can never know—and in that respect, ghost hunting and ancestor hunting are not so far apart. They both involve sifting through heaps of supposition, extrapolation, and unmoored clues.

As I pored through old books and articles about the Staabs, I encountered another mystery regarding my family and the archbishop.
This was the matter of the cathedral itself, the construction of which resumed in 1878, once Lamy was able to raise additional funds, and continued steadily thenceforth. In 1884 a vaulted roof enclosed the new nave. In 1886, the bell tower rose above the city. Lamy had finally realized his dream. The cathedral is the brick-and-mortar ghost he left behind, visible everywhere one stands in downtown Santa Fe. The building is not as grand as the archbishop had hoped—the ceilings lower, the nave narrower—but it is still impressive, so much more substantial than the rumors and apparitions that constitute Julia’s legacy. It is a sweet if stolid building, with Corinthian columns, a rose window, and rounded arches. But in the keystone of the entrance arch, Lamy commissioned something odd. Above the door, contained within a triangle, are four Hebrew letters,
YHWH
: the Hebrew word for God.

I had always been told that the archbishop commissioned those Jewish characters on his cathedral because of Abraham Staab. That’s what my family told me growing up; that’s what the history books said; that’s what the tour guides in Santa Fe say. The story goes like this: While Lamy was struggling to complete the cathedral—that physical manifestation of his spiritual goals for an untamed territory—he attended a poker game with Abraham Staab and other local merchants, lawyers, and politicians. The archbishop never gambled, the storytellers insist, but he liked to attend the games for company and fellowship, and on this particular evening Abraham noticed that his friend seemed particularly subdued.

Abraham asked Lamy what was wrong, and the archbishop responded that he feared he would not live to see the cathedral completed. “Times are hard,” Lamy said. He had run out of funds completely, he confessed to Abraham. Abraham didn’t hesitate. He asked Lamy how much he needed, and the archbishop said it would take somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand dollars. That was a considerable sum in those days, but Abraham promised him the money immediately. He
imposed only one condition. “Cautiously,” wrote William Keleher in his history of New Mexico,
The Fabulous Frontier
, “the man of God measured the eyes of the man of Commerce and Business and inquired: ‘To what extent, how, Mr. Staab?’ Staab replied: ‘Let me put one word above the entrance of the Cathedral, chiselled in stone.’ ‘And what is that word?,’ parried the Archbishop. ‘You must trust me, Archbishop,’ replied Staab.” And thus,
YHWH
, Yahweh, the letters Abraham requested, were chiseled over the entrance of the cathedral like a brand.

The letters are still there, carved into their stone triangle above the cathedral door. I had seen them many times as a child, but I hadn’t visited in recent years. So on one of my trips to Santa Fe, I went again to look, swept first into the nave with a gaggle of tourists on a hot August day. The cathedral was smaller than I remembered and a bit dark, with a large painted altar that reached almost to the top of the vaulted nave, rows of saints—the risen dead—stacked up to the ceiling. Burgundy-patterned hotel-style carpeting ran up the center aisle. Outside, though, little had changed since the archbishop had supervised the cathedral’s construction over a century before. The tawny sandstone glowed against a cloudless sky, and the Hebrew letters overlooked all who passed through. I listened as a tour guide told once again the story of Abraham and the archbishop to a visiting group.

This version was a slight variation on the one I had heard when I was younger. In this one, there is no mention of poker. Instead, the archbishop comes to Abraham’s office asking for an extension on promissory notes for money that Abraham has lent him for the cathedral. Abraham pulls the notes from his safe, tears them up, and throws them in the fire, forgiving the debt. My great-great-uncle Teddy, however, stood by the poker version, which he recalled hearing many times from his father—though he averred that “under no circumstances” would his father have traded money for the privilege of having Hebrew letters on the cathedral. “He did not bargain with the highest religious officer
of the diocese,” Teddy wrote in a letter to a local historian. Abraham did it simply because he was a good man, Teddy said, and Lamy wanted to thank him, placing the letters on the arch unsolicited. Another version, told to me by a third cousin, holds that the archbishop frittered away the cathedral money because he had a gambling problem.

Then there is the version told by Floyd Fierman, the historian and rabbi from El Paso, Texas, who wrote extensively about New Mexico’s Jews. In 1962, Fierman explored the letters between Lamy and his mentor in Cincinnati, and found no reference to “any communication with any known people of the Jewish faith, indicating a loan or a gift.” Given the lack of documentary evidence, Fierman began to wonder whether the story of Abraham and the cathedral wasn’t just “another of the legends that grows with such ease in the parched earth of New Mexico tradition once it is irrigated with the moisture of the lips and the tongue.”

As Fierman dug further, he learned something else: Lamy’s Hebrew letters were no Judeo-Southwestern novelty. They were enclosed in a triangle, and “in Europe,” he explained, “this was a common Christian symbol.” It was called a tetragrammaton, and it had been carved in numerous Gothic and Romanesque churches throughout northern Europe, including Lamy’s native France. There was even a tetragammaton in the cathedral in Saint Louis, where the Santa Fe Trail commenced. “It . . . could be, once the emblem was carved,” wrote Fierman, “that these Jewish friends, totally ignorant” that the Hebrew letters on the cathedral were not unique, “were actually pleased and did consider it a friendly gesture by Lamy! Which is all to the good in this world of strife and misunderstanding among peoples.” The story of Abraham and the cathedral was, in his opinion, merely a legend—a ghost story.

I hadn’t known, when I’d embarked on this hunt for my family’s ghosts, whether Abraham was a good person or a bad one—or some
combination of the two, as most of us are. But I’d known, because of the cathedral story, that he had at least been a generous friend; he had, for the small price of four Hebrew letters, helped to pay for the cathedral. This was an established fact. Except that now, it wasn’t.

Fierman’s article confounded me. The story of the archbishop had been handed down through my family as gospel; no one had imagined it was anything but real. But it was no truer, Rabbi Fierman suggested, than the ghost stories my family had always dismissed.

Still, everybody else believed the story of Abraham’s gift to be true. In 1967, Teddy, Abraham’s only living child (he was ninety-two at the time), received an award on his father’s behalf from the National Fellowship of Christians and Jews. The archbishop of Santa Fe, James Peter Davis, gave Uncle Teddy a scroll in tribute. If the story of Abraham’s gift was inaccurate, everyone was perfectly happy for it to be that way.

What tales can we believe? The submersive force of history—the sedimentary layers of narrative—seems to bury even the hardest facts, and only the physical clues jut above the surface: the hotel; the cathedral; the chiseled Hebrew letters; the apricot trees; and also DNA, those four letters that can peel open, tetragrammatically, our genetic past. These artifacts—a tantalizing few—are all we can trust. We see them, collect them, and try to grasp what they mean.

It’s not as if I expected my DNA results to support the hypothesis of my descent from the archbishop. No one besides Grandma Ginny—and my father, and myself, and a few conspiratorial cousins—had ever suggested there might be more to Julia’s friendship with Lamy than what was decorous. I loved the drama of the suggestion—hidden passions, forbidden love. I delighted in the idea that my heritage might be mixed up in Santa Fe’s own mélange of cultures and history, that I
belonged to more than one tribe, and might be able to claim a famous French archbishop as my forebear.

But I didn’t believe that he was. And it was easy enough to disprove, anyway: If my DNA test confirmed that I was, in fact, three-quarters Jewish, then it would be clear that the archbishop couldn’t have been my great-great-grandfather. If I were descended from the archbishop, I would be only 68.75 percent Jewish.

When the results came in, I went to a web page where I opened up a bar graph with orange and blue bars representing my “Middle East (Jewish)” and “European” heritage. As I’d expected, the orange Jewish bar was the larger of the two. But it was not as large as it should have been. A second test confirmed: I was 68.75 percent Jewish—missing 6.25 percent, which is exactly the proportion of one’s genes that each great-great-grandparent bequeaths. The results from each test also suggested that I was part French.

French
. Nobody had ever mentioned French ancestry. My mother, who had been tested already, was 100 percent Jewish. Thus the great-great-grandparent-sized deficit of Jewishness came from my father’s side—perhaps from a certain non-Jewish French archbishop.

Perhaps the French heritage came from other missing ancestors. There had always been conversions, affairs, rape, and intermarriage, even before the modern era. I could have tracked down more relatives from various branches of my father’s family, insisted they get swabbed, and compared their ethnicities with mine—but short of an exhumation, questions would remain.

Stories and reminiscences had provided no hard certainties about the cathedral and Abraham’s generosity. Nor could the tools of genetics shed any real light on Julia’s relationship with the archbishop. And even the supposedly objective documents of history—books, letters, artifacts—were beginning to confuse me. Online, I found a few of Abraham’s passport applications. In 1902, he swore, under oath, that
he had arrived in the United States in May 1857. In 1906 he stated, also under oath, that he had arrived in 1856. Elsewhere he placed his arrival as 1854.

The more I dug, the less I knew.

Still, Julia and Abraham did live once. They slept and woke, touched and tasted. They were there in the past; their traces could be found in the archives. They existed. Every time I saw the Staab name in a newspaper, in a ship’s log, or in the index of an old book, a chill scuttled up my neck: the dead came alive for a moment.

It was Lynne, the genealogist who dreamed of Julia’s death in the bathtub, who helped me retrieve Julia’s brothers from those records: Bernhard and Benjamin Schuster, crossing the ocean, arriving in Santa Fe, living in the house on Burro Alley and working for Abraham. She tracked them from there to El Paso, where they opened their own dry goods business. They were well respected there: civic leaders, businessmen.