Michael Norman’s Haunted Heartland is a light-hearted read that provides an enjoyable collection of retold narratives that detail supernatural and paranormal experiences across the central lands of the United States of America. I have personally struggled with how to best review this book, not because I did not enjoy reading it, but because the folkloric material in this text is not handled with the careful interpretation expected from a text that deals so explicitly with folkloric material.
Norman, a journalist, provides a brief preface to the second edition of this text (the first was published in 1985), wherein he discusses the motivation behind publication of these stories: to create an encyclopedia of ghost stories from the Midwest. Indeed, an encyclopedia it is. Norman presents stories organized state by state: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Each state has a range of seven to thirteen stories labeled by both spirit identifier and by location (e.g., “Devil Baby [Chicago]”).
The stories about the spirits are all interesting to read. Each narrative is tightly structured with careful language and almost always an omniscient narration. Other times, Norman does use the wording of the person who sighted the spirit. Surrounding the narrative of the paranormal or supernatural sighting there is historical context about the area or, in most cases, the history behind the spirit’s presumed identity. The historical context provides a depth to the narrative that can sometimes be lost with memorates when they are printed verbatim. Moreover, each section has information regarding story variants in other sources, even though the variants are rarely printed or discussed in depth.
For example, in “The Stump” (75-78), a popular story from Bloomington, Indiana, Norman begins the entry by setting the scene in an idyllic cemetery outside of Bloomington. Moving from the scene-setting, Norman begins to identify a popular version of the legend: a woman whose child unexpectedly died cursed a stump next to the child’s grave so that anyone who sat there would die one year later. Using information from the Folklore Archives here at Indiana University, Norman moves on to presenting different variations of the legend and showing how the story has evolved over time to intersect with popular urban legends like “The Hook” (77). While he offers us a fascinating and enlightening version of this legend, a lot of his observations feel superficial because there are not any in-text citations that provide sources or relevant scholarship that might reinforce his interpretations.
I was hoping that, to help bolster his references, the bibliography would connect sources to the stories. However, I was disappointed to see that the structure of the bibliography was by state and type of publication (book, periodical, unpublished sources). While it may have been tedious to structure the bibliography in such a way that the sources used would directly correlate with the stories, I believe it would benefit the overall goal of the work, and would be more useful to future academic researchers who may be interested in the text for a specific locale or narrative.
The most frustrating aspect of this text, however, is the lack of awareness of folkloristics. While, yes, Norman does reference the Folklore Archives at Indiana University, the preface indicates a disconnect between our discipline and his work: “Some of the stories fit within the parameters of folklore while others involved experiences from contemporary individuals who said they have seen a ghost” (xii), or “Even if they occur within a region’s folklore traditions, they seem to have originated with some sort of supportable event” (xiii). Even though Haunted Heartland was not written from within our discipline, the sheer number of references to our collected texts makes these oversights difficult to pass over without mention.
Yet, despite my concerns with this text, I do wish to emphasize that it is fun to read. To his credit, Norman approaches the stories he presents as true and treats the people who experienced these supernatural phenomena with respect and reverence. I could see how excerpts from Haunted Heartland would be great for inclusion in undergraduate classes, especially as an introduction to legendary traditions and narrative construction. Or, if you are someone who simply enjoys a collection of good ghost stories, this would be a great text to delve into—especially with a relaxing beverage and a warm fire (and potentially a good audience to read to).
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[Review length: 728 words • Review posted on February 27, 2020]