Hauntings to History
1 media/Hauntings to History image_thumb.png 2023-04-19T13:09:44-07:00 University of Alaska Anchorage Department of English dfa0ec4bec9eb2e87270c48641b61a5da7951c18 42701 1 Photograph by Joy Grassman. plain 2023-04-19T13:09:44-07:00 University of Alaska Anchorage Department of English dfa0ec4bec9eb2e87270c48641b61a5da7951c18This page is referenced by:
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2023-04-05T14:03:48-07:00
Hauntings to History by ROBERT GANT
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2023-04-19T13:13:49-07:00
I’ve always wondered why they call them ghost towns.What makes them different from any other city?
People die in every city across every continent every day.
Hurricanes and tornadoes sweep away entire civilizations.
Yet people still set right back up again.
The main difference between a ghost town and a town where people die
Is that a ghost town defines itself by its tragedy.
They rebuild their deaths into a historic tourist attraction.
How do they define the moment when a haunting turns to history?
I grew up in an incredibly poor city where our only industry was our prisons.
But before the manufacturers left and prisons came, we were an affluent factory town.
You didn’t need to graduate high school to get a career as a craftsman.
It was a respectable and profitable decision for a young man
To drop out of school, build a beautiful home for his family,
And work at the factory until he died from the hazardous materials he worked with.
It sounds horrific, but everyone was eager to forgo their education
And work at these factories for the security that came with it.
Their lives may not have lasted, but they built legacies with their homes.
Their door frames were adorned with complicated spandrels
Built from imported wood hand carved into intricate patterns.
Today, many of these materials are unattainable.
Once the factories shut down, we were left with a lot of empty homes.
The survivors of the factories were bitter, uneducated, and jobless.
Many of them turned to crime.
The properties were affordable because they were surrounded by crime
But the maintenance of the craftsmanship put into these properties
Was so impossibly expensive that nobody could live there.
They’d sooner hedge their bets on the streets than be bankrupt by woodwork.
Eventually, the old buildings get condemned and torn down,
Their legacies bulldozed by townies and termites.
My mom loved to explore these old buildings and photograph the decay.
She would marvel at the woodwork with tears in her eyes.
Bitterness welled in her heart as she mourned the city not preserving the craftsmanship,
The same craftsmanship that prevented anyone from being able to afford living there.
The craftsmanship our men killed themselves and their futures for.
Was this history she was documenting or just a paranormal investigation?
In the end, the transformation from hauntings to history is as intangible as ghosts themselves.
ROBERT GANT is a senior pursuing a degree in economics. The autobiographical story of Hauntings to History is the reason Robert decided to go to college and study economics. At the conclusion of his college education, sharing this story feels like the perfect closure.
