American ghost

?A haunting story about the long reach of the past.??Maureen Corrigan, NPR?S Fresh Air?In this intriguing book, [Nordhaus] shares her journey to discover who her immigrant ancestor really was?and what strange alchemy made the idea of her linger long after she was gone.? ?PeopleLa Posada??place of rest??was once a grand Santa Fe mansion. It belonged to Abraham and Julia Staab, who emigrated from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. After they died, the house became a hotel. And in the 1970s, the hotel acquired a resident ghost?a sad, dark-eyed woman in a long gown. Strange things began to happen there: vases moved, glasses flew, blankets were ripped from beds. Julia Staab died in 1896?but her ghost, they say, lives on.In American Ghost, Julia?s great-great-granddaughter, Hannah Nordhaus, traces her ancestor?s transfiguration from nineteenth-century Jewish bride to modern phantom. Family diaries, photographs, and newspaper clippings take her on a riveting journey through three hundred years of German history and the American immigrant experience. With the help of historians, genealogists, family members, and ghost hunters, she weaves a masterful, moving story of fin-de-siècle Europe and pioneer life, villains and visionaries, medicine and spiritualism, imagination and truth, exploring how lives become legends, and what those legends tell us about who we are.