Well, we're back at Halloween -- my favorite holiday. In the past I've asked about whether houses in rural Virginia are haunted. But this time I want to post a picture of a courthouse here in North Carolina that some people believe is haunted: it's the Caswell County Courthouse up in Yanceyville. You know the one, with a segregated World War I monument out front. But the haunting is related to a racially charged murder there some decades before the World War, back when we were still working through the aftermath of the Civil War.
What I'm increasingly interested in, though, are stories where hauntings happen because of some injustice related to property and human rights. Take, for instance, the short story "The Scalp Tree," which is about a Native American man whose family is killed by white settlers. He then lives for decades on the margins of the white settlement to claim revenge -- and later, after his death, the land still seems to be haunted. While there are a lot of lessons to this story -- perhaps it was designed to stir up hatred toward Native Americans when it was published in the 1850s in the University of Virginia literary magazine. But it also recognizes that the initial violence against a peaceful Native community set further violence in motion. That is, the haunting is related to an initial injustice (even if it later turned into extraordinary vengeance).
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