American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (31 page)

Her name was Judith. She talked to spirits using an L-shaped divining rod—she was a dowser. She had come recommended by a friend who had felt and seen ghosts in his home in Boulder’s northern foothills, a heaving landscape of striated sandstone and ponderosa pine. He’d wakened one morning feeling that someone was sitting on his chest. He’d contacted Judith, who came to his home. His house and the ground under it were crowded, she’d said, with the ghosts of four Ute Indians and two miners, seventeen demonic spirits, three negative vortexes, six celestial holes and 102 ancient curses. She expelled the ghosts, closed the holes and vortexes, and erased the curses. She had the power to do this.

A ghost hunter told me once that there is no surefire way to exorcise a ghost. “If a ghost doesn’t want to leave, it’s not leaving,” he said. He believed that spirits sometimes have a message to get across, and if you acknowledge them and listen, they will fall quiet. Other times, you simply have to let ghosts know that a place is not theirs anymore. In the Jewish kabbalah tradition, ghosts linger when the soul is tortured by unfinished business. By finishing that business, you lay them to rest.

“I think I met your great-great-grandmother about fifteen or sixteen years ago,” Judith told me on the telephone when I called her. This had happened before Judith had become a dowser, and although she was sensitive to spirits back then, she had no way of communicating with them. She had gone on a trip to Santa Fe and had slept in Julia’s room and felt uncomfortable—as if she was staying without permission. When she checked out, the clerk asked if she’d met Julia, and she realized that she had indeed felt a ghost.

I visited Judith at her house on a golf course subdivision east of my place on a frigid December morning. She made me tea, and we sat in her living room—carpeted, with full-length windows, the walls hung with New Mexican art and knickknacks: santos and rusted-sage landscapes, blue-green oil paintings of adobe churches. Judith had short auburn hair, a smattering of freckles, a few wrinkles. She wore a fleece vest and red down slippers. Dowsing, she told me, was an ancient art—Moses used dowsers in the desert to help him find water; the pioneers took dowsers with them on their wagon trains. The early divining rods were simple forked pieces of wood, shaped like a “Y,” which would dip toward a line of water or energy.

Judith used a copper L-rod, which spun forward or backward in response to the questions she posed to her spirit guide: backward meant yes, forward, no. She had been using it before I came in. Julia, she told me, had been messing with her energy for three days, and Judith was feeling very dizzy and jittery. “She’s in here with us right now,” Judith said. “She’s here because you’re here—she wasn’t here before you called me. I think there’s something she wants to talk to you about.”

Judith sat in an armchair with her eyes closed and the rod in her lap. When she asked a yes or no question, she raised the L-shaped rod in front of her. “Julia, please tell us, did you long for Germany?” It spun backward: yes. She asked if Julia always longed for Germany. Backward again. Did she at some times love Santa Fe? Yes. Did she love Abraham? Yes. Did she feel that Abraham loved her? Did she miss him when he went away? Yes, she did. The archbishop—were they friends? Yes. Lovers? “Well, I don’t think they were lovers,” Judith said after a complicated series of spins on the stick, “but I think they did have a love for one another. Of course I have to rely on what she’s saying”—
spirit conversations being subjective, as I knew by now. “Maybe she’s protecting him. Maybe she doesn’t want to tell me.”

Judith asked about the pregnancies, the miscarriages. She asked about the insanity, and Julia again insisted that despite all the rumors, she had not lost her mind. But she was sad. There was an accident. “I’m getting a thought that maybe she got pushed into harm’s way. Did you get pushed into harm’s way?” Yes. A fall. “I don’t know how much of that is true,” Judith added. After the accident, Julia was an invalid—physically, mentally. She was restrained in her room. She had mental breakdowns, but Abraham never placed her in an asylum. He wouldn’t do that to her.

Judith stood up in her red down slippers and vest, held the rod higher, and asked Julia about her death. “Did you feel you were in a living hell?” Yes. “Did you no longer want to live like you were living?” Yes. These were leading questions, but they led us to answers we wanted. Judith also believed Julia had drowned in the tub, after taking something—poison, laudanum, too much of something. And then Julia stayed on—she chose to stay, Julia told Judith. Not because of Abraham. Not because of her children still there. Because of the house. It was her security, and she was afraid to move away from it. “Did you feel you did not deserve to go to heaven?” Judith asked. Yes. “Do you still feel that way? That you’re not acceptable to God?” She didn’t. “She’s changed her point of view now,” Judith told me.

“Is there something else you want us to know at this time?” Judith asked her. Julia said that she enjoyed being a mother. She loved her children. “And she loves you,” Judith told me. Julia was glad I was telling her story.

And now she was ready to leave. “She wants peace,” she said. “She wants to go where Abraham is, and her children. She’s asking, Will you please take me home? She said, I’m begging you.”

And then Judith started crying. She was sorry that she hadn’t helped Julia when she’d first met her in the hotel so many years ago, and she asked if it was OK with me if she set Julia free from the limbo in which she was suffering. It was fine with me, more than fine, and there, as I sat in Judith’s living room, talking to an ancestor through an L-shaped copper rod—an ancestor said to be confined in a strange halfway compartment of the afterworld where the dead dwell and the past still lives—my specific questions about Julia’s life and death ceased to matter. I just wanted her to find a place of rest.

As the morning sun struggled to warm the frosted grass on the golf course, I closed my eyes and held Julia tightly. It was time to let her go. The dead are past our help, though it’s hard, sometimes, to live without them. They take a piece of us with them when they leave, and we must learn to live reduced. We must live and let the dead be dead. “Look at me,” Eurydice begged Orpheus, and he did. We look hard at those who have left us, and then we let them go—that is what it is to love them.

“There’s an archangel I ask to take people home,” Judith said. His name was Metatron—a Jewish archangel known as a “lesser Yahweh.” He had three pairs of wings and he was enormous and powerful; he taught us, Judith explained, to let go gracefully of the things that tether us. Judith closed her eyes and asked the archangel Metatron to remove all pain and suffering from Julia, to surround her with love and joy.

This is what Julia has taught me: to embrace this world, this beautiful world, with every molecule I contain—muscle, tendon, blood, and brain—like my grandfather, like Wolfgang, like Flora Spiegelberg. And like Bertha, too, in the end. To seize it. And then to let it go.

Judith smiled, eyes still closed, tears streaking her cheeks. “I
am feeling that it’s like a celebration party, they’re all waiting for her, they’re all going, Yaaay! All your family is there for her, all of them who have passed on.” Now Judith addressed her questions to Metatron. “Is Julia still earthbound?” she asked. The rod swung forward: no. “Did she rise up? Did she go home?” Yes, she did. She did. “I knew she went home,” Judith told me. “I could feel the joy of her family. They were all waiting for her.”

I want so much to believe it.

T
hough I wrote
American Ghost
without any help from the spirits, as far as I know, this book was a communal effort—a testament to how our family stories keep the past from slipping entirely from our grasp. So I owe first and foremost a huge debt to those in my family who left paths for me to follow. Julia Schuster Staab and Bertha Staab Nordhaus were present in every page of this book. I hope they would approve.

I am lucky to come from a family of storytellers: especially my great-aunt Elizabeth Nordhaus Minces, whose collection of family memories propelled this book into being; my grandmother, Virginia Riggs Nordhaus, a talented writer who, in another generation, would have had more opportunities to express that talent; my grandfather, Robert J. Nordhaus, who never saw an ear he didn’t want to bend; my father, Robert R. Nordhaus, who forgets nothing, ever; and my uncle and aunt Dick and Mary Nordhaus, who know how to cut straight to the drama.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to my aunt Betsy Messeca, who has been tireless in tracking our family’s path through Europe to America. Without her laboriously archived photographs, maps, emails, and family trees, I wouldn’t have known where to start. My father’s cousin Nancy Paxton provided a number of family documents and photographs that also helped point me in the right direction. Nancy’s late sister Judy Paynter kept diligent track of our family’s legacy; her daughter Rhonda Paynter is caretaker of many important things, and I owe her huge for finding that diary.

Betty Mae Hartman, Don Wallace, Tom Wallace, Lee Meyer, and Wolfgang Mueller were all generous in sharing their time and stories, offering the view from other branches of the Staab and Schuster family trees. Wolfgang did not live long enough to read the manuscript; with his great gusto for being, I somehow thought he would live forever. Thanks also to Sonya Mueller for her help in finding photos, and to Felix Warburg for photos and tales of the Spiegelberg family.

I was fortunate to have found such generous and well-informed German historians to help me trace the Schuster family’s path in the Old World. I can’t offer enough gratitude to Margit Naarmann, who has spent a career chronicling the lives and difficult times of the Jewish families in her corner of Westphalia. I am also grateful for Manfred Willeke’s extensive research on the history of the towns of Lügde and Bad Pyrmont, and his gallantry in squiring us through those worlds.

My German-language skills were woefully inadequate for such a German-intensive project. Jim Robinson, a masterly translator, helped me make up for those deficits. Many thanks also to Lynne Sullivan, Buzzy Jackson, and Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak for their help in guiding me through the mazelike world of family genealogy and DNA research. Willie Sutherland helped me sift through newspaper stories and provided bibliographical backup; young eyes are very helpful when engaging with old microfilm. Joanna Hershon, who wrote
The German Bride
, the evocative novel based on Julia Staab’s life, offered unconditional support and information.

I am also grateful to John Lorenzen, Jonathan Mason, Judith Mangus, Juli Somers, Steve Hart, Sarina Baptista, Ilene Blum, Ed Conklin, Judy Cooper, Misha Johnson, Karl Pfeiffer, and Connor Randall for sharing their visions of the world beyond. My mother-in-law, Toni Barkett, is not only clairsentient, she is also courageous—game for both visiting psychic colonies and tending toddler grandchildren.
My travel companions on various ghost-hunting adventures, Monica Nordhaus and Emilia Noullet, did not get the credit in the book that they deserved. But wasn’t it fun? Big thanks to Kristin Lepisto and the staff at La Posada for hosting me and letting me snoop around the place. Thanks also to the Stanley Hotel for its hospitality.

My monthly writers group provided such helpful feedback: Morgan Bazilian, Deborah Fryer, Buzzy Jackson, Carol Kauder, Radha Marcum, Michelle Theall, Rachel Walker, and Rachel Weaver. My
other
gang of writers—Hillary Rosner, Melanie Warner, and Florence Williams—pitched in with advice, support, and indispensable lunchtime getaways.

To those who muddled through various incarnations and pieces of this manuscript—Coralie Hunter, Buzzy Jackson, Bob Nordhaus, Mary Nordhaus, Ted Nordhaus, Rhonda Paynter, Myra Rich, Hilary Reyl, Hillary Rosner, and Melanie Warner—thank you, thank you. You made this a better book.

Carol Byerly—historian, friend, fellow stickler—read an especially early and troubled draft. I can’t thank her enough for her merciless feedback. Rachel Walker, too, gave the manuscript the thorough and acute read it desperately needed. Meg Knox helped me channel my inner memoirist and aided in transforming the manuscript into something far more crisp and elegant.

Richard Pine, my agent, seemed to know exactly when to be encouraging and when to take me to task. Many thanks to him for his warmth and enthusiasm, and also to Eliza Rothstein for her input and help. Michael Signorelli took a chance on my first book and advocated for the second, then left me in great hands with Maya Ziv, who brought a fiction editor’s eye to the book’s pacing and plotting and kept me working at it until we were both happy.

And then there is my mother, Jean Nordhaus: traveling companion, translator, reader (of everything except maps), editor, counselor,
and all-around word guru. How could I possibly write this book—any book—without you?

I always knew I was lucky to be married to Brent Barkett—companion, friend, child-whisperer, griller of rare meat, laundry folder, cycling domestique, voice of reason, and force of calm. But after spending three years thinking about life with nineteenth-century husbands, I find myself even more awed by and appreciative of all he is and does. Our children, Delia and Milo, bring me the future, keep me in the present, remind me of our connection to the past, and always make it fun. A world that contains these people is an infinitely better place.