Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley

By Stefan Isaksson

Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley
Judith Richardson
Harvard University Press
296 pages
ISBN: 0674018524

For centuries (and obviously also before the first European immigrants arrived) Hudson Valley has been known for its splendid nature, and people started settling there quite early in American history. However, these are not the only reasons it’s famous. It’s only a very haunted area. Numerous ghost stories appear in local folklore, and over the years a very large number of people have been prepared to testify under oath that they’ve come face to face with all different kinds of ghosts.

The same stories – or at least different variations of a story – have returned from time to time during different eras, and why is that? How come a ghost story is brought up to begin with? And to what extent will local folklore – and history – affect the evolution of a ghost story? These questions, and many others, Judith Richardson attempts to answer in Possessions. It’s not a book where the author tries to explain what ghosts actually are, if they really exist or not, if there’s life after death, and so on.

No, instead Richardson’s methodology is using folklore and history, and instead of discussing whether ghosts are real or not she devotes much time and energy offering a historical survey of the area, its people, and evolution.

It really must be said that honestly, Richardson is a very skilled researcher. Every chapter and angle of approach is extremely thorough, and every single page is filled to the brim with copious footnotes, which in turn offer tons and tons of other sources for anyone interested in doing some research of his or her own. Out of the book’s 296 pages, 209 make up the main text, while pages 211-286 are footnotes only. In other words, you won’t find much reason to complain about lack of source material and references when it comes to Possessions.

But who, then, will do some of this independent research that the book can be helpful with? Well, one thing is for sure, it’s not going to be me.

And this despite her excellent research and easy to understand and well-reasoned text. Why, you say? Because quite frankly, I found the book to be extremely boring, drawn-out, long-winded, and overall uninteresting. Sure, the topic is definitely worth examining and Richardson’s book can without a doubt be interesting to some, but absolutely not to me.

I’m not American, and that’s probably one of the main reasons to why I didn’t find it interesting whatsoever. The main reason, though, has to do with the way the ghost stories are presented. In most cases they are put in contrast to the very specific history of the area, and this makes the book more interesting to people that focus on folklore and history compared to ghostbusters and people who simply want to know more about the phenomenon of ghosts in general. I belong to the latter category, and thus this book wasn’t for me.

Still I cannot say it’s a bad book, because it isn’t; this time it just happened to come into the wrong hands.