| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Judith Richardson. Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 296. $29.95.
This book offers a cohesive interdisciplinary project that enhances our appreciation of regionalism, folklore, local history, and the transforming uses of cultural memory in response to demographic as well as industrial change. Romanticism is key to the genesis of Judith Richardson's narrative, for, as she explains, although there would have been a proliferation of ghost stories in the Hudson River Valley without the impact of that movement early in the nineteenth century, it made what she calls hauntings "eminently valuable, [and] fueled the elevation of hauntedness to a regional aesthetic and encouraged the proliferation of local tales" (p. 39).	1
Richardson highlights three periods: the age of Washington Irving and the notable influence of his popular tales; the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and the 1930s and 1940s. In the first phase, social change and instability become central to her explanatory scheme. In the second period, a shifting configuration of ethnic communities in the valley is crucial to the persistence and transformation of "spooky" narratives in oral tradition and regional publications. For the final phase, Richardson relies heavily upon the nostalgia and anti-modernism of Maxwell Anderson's stage play High Tor, which enjoyed considerable appeal in 1937. The title refers to a small but mysterious "mountain" located at the north end of the Palisades on the west side of the Hudson River.	. . .

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