A Haunted History of Invisible Women
Author Andrea Janes explores female ghost stories — from Lizzie Borden to Triangle Shirtwaist victims — and what they reveal about women's erasure in American history. Free.
Why we picked this
The best books about ghost stories aren't really about ghosts — they're about who gets remembered and who doesn't. Janes uses figures like Lizzie Borden and the Triangle Shirtwaist victims to ask what haunting reveals about women's erasure from the historical record.
Ghost stories about women are everywhere in American culture — but why those particular women, and what do those stories actually tell us? Andrea Janes, founder of the Boroughs of the Dead ghost tour company and co-author (with Leanna Renee Hieber) of A Haunted History of Invisible Women, argues that female hauntings are rarely just entertainment. They’re a form of cultural memory that preserves — and sometimes distorts — stories of women whose lives were otherwise ignored.
Janes moves through figures both famous and forgotten: Lizzie Borden, Marie Laveau, the anonymous victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. In each case, she asks what the ghost story records that official history left out, and what it obscures. The framework is part feminist history, part folklore studies — and it recasts familiar American legends as evidence about how a society treats women it can’t quite account for.
The talk takes place at the Morbid Anatomy Library inside Industry City, Brooklyn — a fitting venue for a book that takes seriously the cultural work that death and haunting perform. Free to attend.