| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley. By Judith Richardson. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. xiv, 296 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01161-9.)

A history of "the local" conjures up precise geographies, fixed origins, and specific regional accents. So it is with Judith Richardson's Possessions, which locates the mountains, gnarled trees, battlefields, and massacres of the Hudson Valley as sites of unresolved historical antagonism over memory, amnesia, and tradition. Her book also pursues less exact historical associations by giving voice to the shadowy legends, spooky visitations, and unearthly rumors that make the Hudson Valley one of the most haunted locales in the United States. Moving from folklore to archival research and ranging from Dutch settlement to New Deal–era preservation, Richardson crafts a transhistorical study of a region peopled by the ghosts of Native Americans, headless Hessian troops, and the mangled victims of industrial accidents.

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