John's Reviews > Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era

I had already read Miles's "All That She Carried," and then I heard this great piece on This American Life about Savannah, GA, and ghost tours. And they talk about this book. And I happen to be teaching a class on colonial America and museums at this very moment! So I knew I had to read this book. I had my students listen to the radio piece and then, even though we aren't talking about colonial ghosts so much, we discussed the popularity of ghostly, macabre tourism. I mean, we were already discussing Salem anyway.
Miles makes so many good points here. This was really interesting. I confess, my experience of ghost tours is limited to New England and a little bit British Isles, so I knew nothing of this whole southern genre of ghost tours and how they all seem to involve slavery. And the whole "voodoo" angle - I did go to New Orleans once and though I didn't take a ghost tour, I remember all the voodoo stuff. One thing that I hadn't ever considered but really struck me, was Miles noting that the villains in these stories tend to be French - like "French creoles", or "white refugees from St. Domingue (Haiti)," or "mysterious potentially secretly mixed race French creoles." Most of these supposed hauntings involve particularly evil slaveholders and murdered enslaved people that haunt the house forever. So it's like, if we are going to have super evil slaveholders (as opposed to all the normal evil slaveholders) they have to be French? Because it's a little exotic and foreign? Weird. Also I don't get why the ghosts of enslaved people would haunt these houses two hundred years after their enslavers died. Wouldn't the point be "restless spirits" who want to punish their tormenters? Why would they still be hanging around in 2023?
It's funny the way these museums try to have it both ways. They want to say, "well slavery wasn't so bad, but sometimes it was REALLY bad, and probably because of the French. So ghosts." And if you go to the Salem Witch Museum, the whole spiel is "OK, all these people were innocent, witches aren't real, but WHAT IF THEY WERE??? SATAN CAME TO SALEM!!"