Ghostland

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places is Colin Dickey's road trip through the country's most notorious haunted sites: the grand mansions, shuttered hospitals, derelict prisons and disputed burial grounds where America keeps its ghosts.

Dickey is less interested in whether the ghosts are real than in what the stories are doing. He tracks how each legend has shifted over time, who told it and why, and what anxieties the retellings smuggle along — arguing that the past we are most afraid to speak about in daylight is the past that lingers in the stories we whisper in the dark.

The result is an alternative history of the United States, assembled from unfinished business, unsolved crimes and the places people insist are haunted. It was named one of NPR's Great Reads of 2016.