SOURCE: Brogan, Kathleen. “American Stories of Cultural Haunting: Tales of Heirs and Ethnographers.” College English 57, no. 2 (February 1995): 149-65.

In the following essay, Brogan examines the unique characteristics of American ghost stories.

As I sat in the darkened theater of the Yale Rep, watching the 1987 opening performance of August Wilson's new work, The Piano Lesson, it occurred to me that new spectres were haunting America—specifically, that ghosts were populating African-American literature in growing numbers. The play's action turns on the ghost of a murdered white slave-owner who haunts the descendants of his slaves. The spectre's power must ultimately be exorcised through the invocation of the black family's own ancestral ghosts. Toni Morrison's Beloved, which dared to make a ghost a central, fully bodied character, made its stunning appearance in the same year. I recalled, too, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983), in which the emotional development of the...