I feel like I repeat myself a lot when I say things like this, but it doesn't make it

any less true.

Because we as a people think that we are in control.

We build fences.

We map things.

We buy insurance policies to protect us from the unforeseen.

It's comforting fiction, really.

The idea that the ground beneath our feet

is a passive stage for our short, busy lives. But the land has a much longer memory than we do.

And in some places, the dirt just doesn't hold the past. It sours it. In the northeastern corner of Nebraska, there is a bluff that rises 300 feet above the Missouri River.

To a casual traveler on Highway 75, it might look like just another ripple in the lowest hills,

a rugged, wind-swept formation of silt and sandstone.

But to those who live nearby and to the ghosts who allegedly never left,

it is known as Blackbird Hill.

It's a place defined by layers.

There is the geological layer, of course.

There is the indigenous layer.

Centuries of Omaha sovereignty and sacred tradition. And then there's the Gothic layer, the pioneer stories of jealousy, knives,

and a scream that supposedly repeats itself every year like a broken record.

We tell ourselves these stories to explain the shiver we feel when

the wind hits the tall grass just right. We tell ourselves that the screams we hear is just

a legend, and that the barren path where no grass grows is just a fluke of chemistry.

...