Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles (review)

It has been fifteen years since the publication of Jennifer L. Eichstedt and Stephen Small’s Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (Washington, D.C., 2002), which documented the absence and trivialization of African American lives and experiences at historic sites across the South. In the intervening years interpretative content about African Americans at southern sites has increased substantially through a relatively new type of tour: the ghost tour. In Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era, Tiya Miles explores this phenomenon, focusing on the Sorrel-Weed house in Savannah, Georgia; the Madame Lalaurie house in New Orleans, Louisiana; and Myrtles plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana. Miles’s interest in this subject developed on a tour of the Sorrel-Weed house. There she heard a horrible yet beguiling story about a male enslaver and Molly, an enslaved woman, that ended with the suicide of the enslaver’s wife and Molly’s murder. The ghosts of these two women haunted the house, the guide claimed, and an evening tour told these ghost stories. As Miles recounts it, she “could not let the terrible story go,” and so she returned that night to hear the “supernatural story” (p. xvi).

At each of these sites, visitors hear claims (often, Miles contends, unfounded) about enslaved African Americans whose ghosts haunt the premises. These stories, Miles argues, allow people to maintain a “safe distance” from history, which both gives listeners more room to imagine the horrors of slavery and enables them to avoid facing the consequences of such accounts by relegating the stories to the realm of “fancy” (p. 7). Although African Americans play significant roles in these tours, Miles concludes that “ghost tourism at historic sites of slavery appropriates African American history in a way that outweighs the value of inclusion” (p. 123). She observes, for example, a troubling pattern in the ghost tours’ reliance on African American religious expression—most often Voodoo but also the beliefs of Gullah and Geechee people—“to increase the level of threat and titillation” (p. 119). These elements convey nothing about the complexity of the religious beliefs that have played a critical role in constructing black identity in America.

Tales from the Haunted South is a page-turner, as Miles describes both the tours and her own apprehensive feelings as she ventured out to historic sites after dark to hear these scary stories. It is appropriate, then, that Miles considers why ghost stories are so beguiling. Her conclusion resonates far beyond sites associated with slavery, observing that “ghosts represent history in a way that feels like magic.... [T]he ghost story is an intensified version of the magic of historical interpretation writ large—the weaving of words, ideas, and events into a pseudo-spell that can spirit us back to days gone by” (p. 125). Finding ways to connect visitors with the past is a noble goal, but historic sites must be mindful of costs that can be associated with these methods.

The tours that Miles experienced made clear the problems with how historic sites have incorporated African American history into ghost tourism. At the same time, African American experiences far too often continue to be excluded altogether from other kinds of tours offered at historic sites. In the tradition of Eichstedt and Small’s work, Tales from the Haunted South should serve as a call to historic sites to undertake the hard work of telling complex stories about the past that enable visitors to gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of African American lives under slavery. I highly recommend the book to public historians, scholars of slavery and its current-day legacies, and anyone interested in the gothic...