The Haunted Past

In 1937, workers with the Federal Writers’ Project (F.W.P.), a New Deal program for unemployed writers, were dispatched to collect the testimonies of the last surviving generation of American slavery. The surveys, devised by the white folklorist John Lomax, included questions that could fill in the historical record, such as “Who were your masters?,” “How were you treated?” and “How did you learn that you were no longer a slave?” But interviewees were also encouraged to provide details about Southern Black life that would presumably titillate white readers. They were asked about folk remedies (“What charms did they wear and to keep off what diseases?”), music (“Tell about the baptizing; baptizing songs?”) and ghosts. “Do you believe in spirits?” one questionnaire read. Another did not even bother to phrase it as a question, simply commanding respondents to “tell about the ghosts you have seen.”

In the end, more than 2,300 narratives were gathered, and scholars who’ve examined them have detected what seems to be a bias among the collectors in favor of ghost stories. In her book, “Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project” (2016), the historian Catherine Stewart noted that, of the material on Black folklore collected in Arkansas, for example, “superstitions” and “ghosts” were the second largest categories, “folk songs” being the largest. In the Arkansas batch, there were 123 pages on “ghosts” and fewer than 20 on “births.” Across the slave narrative collection, the ghost stories stand out as literary marvels, showcasing Black storytelling prowess and deep spiritual engagement. But F.W.P. interviewers often took them literally, as the “embodiment of the naïveté and superstitious tendencies of Black folk.” Back in Washington, the white editors in charge of assembling the narratives into anthologies saw the ghost stories as something that could “provide color and human interest” for F.W.P. publications.

It’s no secret that F.W.P. slave narratives are compromised historical documents. Scholars have long discussed the various factors that affected their reliability, not least that the interviewers were overwhelmingly white. (Some were even related to the owners of the former slaves being interviewed.) However, the presence of an exoticizing white gaze does not diminish the objects themselves. Black spirituality might have been perceived through a racist lens, but there are other ways of seeing. The ghost stories — or “hant stories,” as they were colloquially called — were part of a belief system that, as the historian Lawrence Levine argued, prevented “legal slavery from being spiritual slavery.” In “Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom” (1977), Levine writes that the spirit world was an alternative to the one in which masters and overseers dominated. For the enslaved, it was “a world they shared with each other and which remained their own domain, free of control of those who ruled the earth.”

Though the last F.W.P. slave narratives were collected in 1939, the ghost stories continued to be extracted and reprinted much later, including in books like “Ghosts and Goosebumps: Ghost Stories, Tall Tales, and Superstitions From Alabama” (1981) and “Slave Ghost Stories: Tales of Hags, Hants, Ghosts, & Diamondback Rattlers” (2002). While the stories are by no means uniform in style or detail — some informants were more skilled storytellers than others — patterns do emerge. An unfulfilled yearning echoes across these stories, a palpable desire for divine justice in the absence of any earthly one. This is clear from the number of stories about slave owners being haunted by slaves. Jane Arrington, a former slave from near Raleigh, N.C., told her interviewer a tale her grandmother relayed to her about a slave named John May who was beaten to death by his masters but came back as a ghost to haunt them. “The white men groaned in their sleep and told John to go away. They said, ‘Go away, John. Please go away,’” Jane explained, adding, “John wouldn’t go away.” In another story, a slave named Joe tries to attack his master with a fence rail, but the master kills him instead. Joe then haunts the trees by the master’s home, shaking the branches whenever his favorite fruit, persimmons, are being collected.

Other stories suggest the enslaved turned to the supernatural realm in order to subvert the conditions of slavery itself. In a story recounted by Di of Charleston, S.C., who served as a cook in her master’s kitchen, a black serpent is imbued with ominous portent, becoming an excuse to evade work. One day, Di reported, she saw the snake on the way from her home to the main house and said to her owner, “I’m sorry I got to give up my job, but that black devil ran over my path this morning, and I sure can’t come to that house no more.” In another story, a slave runs out of the forest where he was working, telling his master he heard a ghost chopping wood and got scared.

Similarly, there are ghost stories that are really love stories, in which the physical separation of sweethearts — a common occurrence when owners sold their slaves — is surmounted in the afterlife. Joe Williams of Charleston County, S.C., told his interviewer about an incident that occurred when he and a friend were walking on a path near a thicket and came across a tall, faceless man floating a foot above the ground. Williams said that a strong wind suddenly blew him and his friend to the ground. Later, an old lady informed them that the man Williams saw guards the path “because he lost a girl he loved and that was where she was buried.”

Other stories are simply beautifully told, filled with evocative imagery, such as one about a slave in Alabama who went to shake hands with a pretty woman only to find smoke. Still others will strike a chord with anyone who experiences the cadences of Black humor as familiar and familial. That was the case for me when I read the Gogolian story of George Brown, also from South Carolina, who spoke of having had his coat stolen by a ghost with a “thieving habit.” He let the ghost keep it. As he put it to the interviewer, “I ain’t going to follow no ghost to hell for no overcoat.”

Yet what comes through the most in these stories is how often the tellers recall being told them as children by their elders. These ghost stories were many things: containers for a syncretic spirituality, oral histories of the dead, cathartic narratives in which people like them had magical encounters that took them away from the drudgery of daily life. But they were also practical, clearly intended to frighten kids — to stop them from running off at night or straying too far from home. Ghost stories were a way of keeping Black children safe from a host of terrors, including ones that still scare us today.

Jennifer Wilson is a contributing essayist at the Book Review.