CBH Talk | Haunted Brooklyn: Ghosts, Folklore, and the Stories We Tell

imprisonment, violence, and ghostly encounters for generations. Andrea Janes, founder of Boroughs of the Dead and an expert in New York City’s haunted histories, is joined by a formidable panel to bring the lore of Melrose Hall and other Brooklyn ghost stories to life. Leila Taylor, author of Darkly and Sick Houses, considers how race shapes what and whom we fear. Colin Dickey, whose work Ghostland and other investigations centering the strange and supernatural, looks at why haunted places and the stories attached to them persist in our collective imagination. And acclaimed novelist Victor LaValle, whose fiction uses horror and the fantastic to probe race, family, violence, and American society, explores what the gothic can reveal that more conventional storytelling sometimes cannot. Together, they move between folklore, literature, history, and the gothic imagination to consider how tales of the supernatural expose very real anxieties about race, gender, sexual violence, social order, and power, and what Brooklyn’s ghosts might have to tell us about the world of the living. Picture above, clockwise from top left: Andrea Janes, Victor LaValle, Leila Taylor, Colin Dickey, Melrose Hall Participants Colin Dickey is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places; The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained; and Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy. He also co-edited (with Joanna Ebenstein) The Morbid Anatomy Anthology. He lives in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Andrea Janes tells ghost stories for a living. She is the co-author of the Stoker-nominated nonfiction books America’s Most Gothic and A Haunted History of Invisible Women and the owner and founder of Boroughs of the Dead, a boutique tour company dedicated to dark and unusual walking tours of New York City. She is currently at work on a history of Brooklyn’s most scandalous haunted house, Melrose Hall. Her personal obsessions include weird history, slapstick comediennes, witches, ghosts, and all things nautical. She lives in Brooklyn where she can usually be found roaming in a cemetery, swimming in the ocean, or telling stories to her daughter. Victor LaValle is the author of seven works of fiction including The Changeling, The Devil in Silver, The Ballad of Black Tom and Lone Women. He is also the creator and writer of two comic books, Victor LaValle's Destroyer and EVE. His novel, The Changeling, has been adapted for Apple TV+. He adapted The Devil in Silver as a limited series for AMC television, serving as its creator and showrunner. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Shirley Jackson Award, American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens. He is the Chair of the MFA Writing Division at Columbia University. Leila Taylor is a Brooklyn-based author, speaker, and designer whose work focuses on the intersection of history, horror and the gothic in contemporary culture. Author of Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread and Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, her work has appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, The Repeater Book of the Occult, Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay, and the graphic novel Bitter Root. By day, she is Creative Director for Brooklyn Public Library.