Welcome to Part 2 of our conversation with Colin Dickie, author of the book Ghost Land in American history in haunted places.

When you're out there and you're looking for these locations are there certain locations that seem to have

more lore around them than others?

Of course I mean you know and one of my initial questions for the book was, you know, what makes the building sort of more or less likely to have these kind of stories? So, you know, why our haunted house was always Victorian mansions

and never, you know, mid-century modern tracked homes,

you know, why, why does every,

when it when you picture a haunted insane asylum why do you picture a clock tower in the front of the building

You know with a kind of wing spreading out to either side you know like and that that's that kind of thing you know drew me to a lot of these you know the

the places that became chapters in the books is sort of trying to answer these questions I mean you know I was

looking I think I was just casting a broad net for haunted downtowns because I was like what

does that mean to have a haunted downtown and you know one of the places that I

came upon was Richmond Virginia and I thought okay you know one of the places that I came upon was Richmond Virginia and I thought okay you know

cool I don't know much about Richmond let's find out why it's haunted and I you know

started just reading all of these stories about haunted Richmond and you know just something in the back of my head triggered at some point and I thought you know this was the this was the capital of the Confederacy this was you know the second most heavily trafficked slave trading market in the in the south

how come all of these ghost stories about white people you know and again it was just sort of like

well you know why these stories and not other stories, you know, and so, you know, in many ways I think most of the chapters, the books started from a place of, you know, why this building and not this other building?

Why, why this place and not some other place?

Why these stories and not other kind of stories and trying to sort of understand that for myself?

What sort of conclusions did you come to, for example, when you were investigating Richmond?

Why this versus that?

Yeah, I mean, I think it was really interesting really interesting because you know with with the South in particular

you know not just in Richmond but what I found is you would get stories of, you know, slave owners but not enslaved Americans, you know, so you would

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