Books: Friend of Ghosts

GHOSTS IN AMERICAN HOUSES (229 pp.) —James Reynolds—Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($12.50).

James Reynolds is an author (Fabulous Spain), artist, and friend of ghosts. Some years ago, he set out to paint a gallery of outstanding American homes, but before long, he was more interested in the haunts than in the houses. The result is as lively and eerie a procession of American spooks as the reader will encounter in a month of Halloweens.

This is a thoroughly democratic company, with aristocrats and harlots, gutter murderers and great ladies rattling their bones together in funereal camaraderie.

There are famous figures such as Mad Anthony Wayne who appears regularly and in several guises—most notably as a hell-for-leather horseman on a brimstone nag, riding around New York's Storm King Mountain whenever a storm approaches. There are bloodcurdling ghosts, and friendly ghosts, and even some sad little ghosts. The South, with its romantic and blood-drenched history, produces surpassingly satisfying ghosts, but there are other excellent entries, too. Samples: ¶ Charles ("Brickbat Charlie") Dorsey, a murderous debauchee, and his ripsnorting consort, a Hungarian slut named Rose Mataz ("Razzmatazz"), lived it up lecherously and lethally in Natchez-Under-the-Hill in the 18705 until Charlie did Rose wrong with a waterfront wench, and Rose did him in with chilling finesse.

They found Charlie eventually, floating in the Mississippi River, a smoking carcass gnawed by river rats, in a wooden dugout.

Rose wisely left town, later became the plushiest madam in Oklahoma City, and died in her big, satiny bed. Since then, so the story goes, she has haunted her old haunts around Natchez, wearing a classy red dress with a bustle.

¶ Alta Cossart Lawson, a ferocious doyenne of Vincentown, N.J., returns now and then—they say—to stalk up and down -in front of the ruin of her mansion, in extirpation of the night she forced her drunken, demented son to lop off the head of his meek little wife with an ax. ¶ Lettitia Dalton, the vain and vicious wife of a rich Virginia planter, was quite a dame. One night she sent her sister Caro to an old greenhouse on her York River plantation to get some grapes. Poor Caro fell into a trap, died horribly in a shower of splintered glass panes. Next, Lettitia sent her husband crashing to his death from a rotten balcony. Before she herself died (of a migraine), Lettitia 1) dispatched a slave in a quicksand bog, and 2) ordered her personal maid's young daughter into the "stud cabin" in the plantation's slave quarters, where the child died of a brutal raping. Lettitia's penance seems mild in comparison to some others. True, she is occasionally heard screaming in the night, but more often the fire-gutted shell of nearby Rosewell plantation is the scene of ghostly revelries, with the shades of colonial governors, young bloods and belles moving through the pedimented doorway amid flickering candelabras and the sounds of violins and harpsichords in the black of the moon.