Occasional literary links, amusements, culture, politics, and rants

On heaven, hell, certainty, and doubt

by Maud | April 30th, 2012

“My Son Went to Heaven, and All I Got Was a No. 1 Best Seller,” my essay about Heaven is For Real, my own fundamentalist background, and my lifelong doubt, appeared in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, underneath this illustration by Tom Gauld.

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The Begats

There are few things I love more than haunted hotel stories, and stories of hotels haunted by ancestors are the best of all. I’m still waiting for my copy of Hannah Nordhaus’ American Ghost, about her great-great grandmother and the swanky La Posada, but until it arrives I’ve found an excerpt and a bit of the story online.
It began late at night, as these stories do. It was in the 1970s, at a hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A janitor was mopping the floor in an empty downstairs room. He looked up from his bucket and saw a dark-eyed woman standing near the fireplace. She wore a long, black gown, in the Victorian style of a hundred years earlier, and her white hair was swept up into a bun.
She was also translucent. Through her vague outlines, the janitor could see the wall behind her. She was there and yet she wasn’t. She looked into his eyes, and the janitor worried that he might be losing his mind. He looked down and told himself to keep mopping. When he looked up again, she was gone. She had possessed, he told a local newspaper, an “aura of sadness.”
The janitor’s account was the first the world would hear of the shadow woman in the hotel, but it would not be the last. Some days later, a security guard saw the same woman wandering a hallway. He took off running. A receptionist later saw her relaxing in an armchair in a downstairs sitting room: there, then gone.
Strange things began to happen in the hotel.
STRANGE THINGS BEGAN TO HAPPEN IN THE HOTEL.
(Thanks to Colleen Mondor for bringing this book to my attention.)
02/28/15

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