Hunting for ghosts in Durham

or: moving away from Durham and experiencing its gentrified shell wherever I went...

Something is rotten in the city of Durham. A spectral WeWork logo illuminates the CCB plaza with its fluorescence well into the night. The American Tobacco Campus hums with the undead trickle of a man-made stream. And luxury apartments, like dandelions, infest the soil of downtown. 

“A common theme on our tour is that a lot of our historical buildings have been converted into luxury apartments,” Evelyne, our tour guide, said. It was a blisteringly cold January night, and I was on the prowl for ghosts or, at least, some confirmation that Durham was haunted. 

My friend Jess had suggested that we go on the tour. One, she loved ghost tours. She had an impressive resume of municipal ghost tours in Savannah, New York City, New Orleans. In fact, she once went on a tour with a man who brought an EMF detector to identify spectral activity. Two, she suggested that a ghost tour seemed like a convenient way to talk about a lot of what was most difficult to talk about in Durham those days. 

To live in the South, or just America, really, in 2019 was to live in a present haunted by a contested past. Confederate monuments were pulled down and demolished by activists. Aerial banners campaigned for Silent Sam in our Carolina blue skies. And committees were formed to map and name and suggest just how we might go about making sense of this past in our graveyards, our street names, our statues.

In the midst of this, Durham was gentrifying, had already been gentrified, depending on who you asked. It forced a different kind of conversation about our past. Who had we been and where were we going? And what did we owe to each other? 

A ghost tour seemed like a way to talk about our past in a way that might offer yet another avenue for us to enter into this conversation without an armor of op-eds and hashtags at the ready. After all, every ghost story is a frame narrative: a story within a story. A tale about a person who is haunted frames a story about a person was made to do the haunting. It’s a cause and effect that stretches across time, showing the way violence inflicted in one moment of time reverberates into another time. Ghosts collapse what has been into what is now. 

So, I expected a ghost tour fraught with the violence that I knew was a part of our Durham past. But, to be honest, the tour was rather milquetoast. A Kress department worker is haunted by her dead father who locks her in the supply closet. A secretary disappears from her office, leaving behind a heartbroken boyfriend. A beloved tobacco factory worker falls while changing a lightbulb on his last day of work. Race and gender and class were at the background of these stories — workplace sexual violence is implied by a ghost who haunts two people working late in their cubicles; the tobacco worker’s name, “Mr Willis,” racializes his character — but it certainly did not come to the foreground of the tour. 

Which is to say, none of our ghosts were explicitly the slaves or workers of the Duke family; none of them were the families displaced by the building of Highway 147; and none of them were the individuals lynched or murdered in the Triangle. Nor were our ghosts Confederate war heroes, tobacco magnates, or plantation owners. Despite their immense influence on the making of Durham, it seemed none of these historical figures had chosen to haunt our city. Instead, it was the everyday denizens and their domestic and professional dramas; each story could’ve been plucked out of a ‘90s sitcom, the kind where politics seems to exist outside of the frame of the story, rendering them palatable and contextless. So, I kept searching.

I interviewed some of the other tour guides. One was particularly passionate about the paranormal. One was an alumna of the colonial Williamsburg tour circuit. I interviewed the owner of the tour company who was a nice enough middle-aged man and considered himself a history buff, as so many white middle-aged men do, and had decent enough business acumen to know that such a tour could be modestly profitable in a “revitalized” Durham. He didn’t have much to say to my questions about History and the Discourse, nor did he put his foot in his mouth in any telling way. 

I’ll admit, I was disappointed by the failure of the ghost tour to titillate through familiar stories of violence. I was disappointed that the tour didn’t easily shepherd in stories about our fraught past relevant to our equally fraught present. And I was disappointed by the fact that I did not know how to write about it without making the tour company an unwilling synecdoche for Durham in its knotted complexity. 

So, I reached out to genuine ghost hunters. I wanted to find real ghosts, not just symbolic ones. I was asked if I had had any personal experiences with paranormal activity in Durham, but I couldn’t say that I had. (I only had brief moments of Proustian transcendence when smelling the warm breeze of laundry from White Star or dusting pollen off the bridge of my nose: moments I knew I had done before and would do again, moments that dislodged me in time. But was that an encounter with the paranormal?) We debated visiting the Mapleview cemetery, or perhaps the old hospital or Stagville Plantation.

I thought changing the direction of my reporting might help the story curdle into something solid and publishable. But the most enthusiastic ghost hunter, the one who had replied to all of my emails to the group, cancelled on me twice for personal reasons. And it felt wrong to exploit his enthusiasm for a useful metaphor. So, I gave up. 

At the same time, I was poking around some other story ideas that seemed interesting and publishable. I was going to community meetings held in a church in Walltown and listening to citizens talk about how the Northgate mall foreclosure was going to impact them. Additionally, I was also talking to workers who were laid off from their union jobs with Kroger when the grocery store chain merged with the higher-priced Harris Teeter. And I was looking into a story on funeral homes, specifically the story of the only local funeral home that did proper Jewish burials and how it was closed due to high-end property developers purchasing their historic building in order to develop it into a combination living-working space. 

The reporting was stochastic and disorganized and spare; I drove to community briefings when I could, called up sources during my lunch breaks and while walking my commute, and dug up old newspaper articles when I wasn’t doing my actual day job. (Apologies to my boss.) But it mostly was a collection of Voice Memo-recorded interviews and hastily scribbled notes in my journal. 

I got too busy to finish any of these stories, or so I told myself. Around this same time, I was preparing to quit my job and move away from Durham after a cumulative six years in the city. These stories felt like unfinished business in the city — they still do — and I knew that what drew me to them was the fact that they were all about how Durham was changing, had changed, and the relative powerlessness I felt as an individual in the face of this change. If I could just report it all out, document them in a story, maybe I could feel some sense of control. Maybe I could be sure to remember my Durham before it changed beyond recognition. And before I changed into someone who couldn’t recognize it either. 

Consider Ninth Street. I’ve probably walked the length of it on average once a week, if not more, for the full six years that I lived in Durham. I remember when Ninth Street Coffeehouse was Market Street Coffee was Bean Traders. I remember a time there was no Harris Teeter, and no Panera, or Barre gym either. I sneezed, looked up, and luxury apartments suddenly dotted the skyline. 

When I walk down Ninth Street, I feel like I’m walking through a dream where the landscape is just unfamiliar enough to feel unreal. There’s a muscle memory to the walk that doesn’t match the disorientation caused by the rapidly changing landscape. It feels like time travel or like entering an alternative dimension.  

Jace Clayton, DJ Rupture, wrote about this disorientation in a chapter on Beirut in Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture. He writes of riding in a taxi where the cab drivers’ points of references were disappearing and thus, their grasp of their map of the city:

“Architecture—real or imagined—prompts memory so efficiently because our brains are hardwired to recall things-in-places and unusual or disturbing scenes. Memory-quiz champions envision fantastic images that correspond to what they want to remember and “place” each icon in some specific nook of their mental building. These mnemonic aids are called memory palaces. Their effectiveness speaks to how when a place is destroyed or erased, all the personal histories linked to it slip further into the past.”

He was writing about a Saudi-financed buildings evoking an aesthetics of the past while still ushering in a commercialized present. But it resonated with how I had been feeling about moving through Durham in my final weeks there. On some level, I was scared that if someone didn’t record the ways that Durham was changing — had changed — that I’d lose my capacity to remember. I already felt like the shiny newness of so much of the city made it feel like history, personal and communal, was out of reach. The failure of the ghost tour to invoke any sort of titillating history seemed to prove this to me. 

“Globalization is the story of how ghosts die,” Clayton writes in that same chapter. I circled it and added a few exclamation points when I re-read it months after the ghost tour. I had already moved out of Durham and was traveling through a city that didn’t feel entirely different from Durham despite being an ocean away. It, too, felt infiltrated by carbon-copy Brooklyn hipsters in Everlane wardrobes and Warby Parker glasses, myself included. Cranes populated the skyline, heralding new apartment complexes. The coffee shop I was in was not dissimilar to any of the slew of new coffee shops in Durham, decorated with industrial lighting and wood panels, offering cold brew and vegan banana bread. 

If globalization kills ghosts, maybe gentrification does too. After all, they are twinned phenomena. When we talk about globalization, we’re describing a process by which capital makes the world in its image. When we talk about gentrification, we’re describing a process by which capital makes a city in its image. Their differences lie in scale, not in kind. 

But how does it go about killing a ghost exactly? As oxygen is to living bodies, context is to ghosts. Ghosts thrive on relations to people and places; without those relations, ghosts become floating atoms, consciousness without memory. Gentrification asphyxiates ghosts by depriving them of context. And it deprives them of this context by producing sameness, making places seemingly indistinguishable from each other. 

It’s this infuriating, propagating sameness that allegedly caters towards the tastes of a specific consuming class, of which I am ostensibly part. The fact that these phenomena cater to me made me feel a strange mix of complicity and shame, as if disliking iced coffee could stop gentrification in its tracks, as if humbler desires could ever be an equal and opposite force to the momentum of global capitalism. But globalization and gentrification don’t cater to desires, they produce them. 

Of course, the stakes of gentrification are not that our desires are unoriginal; it’s that even when we we don’t choose to live in gated communities or attend private schools  or partake in any of the sort of actions that cloister off resources and access, the decision is already made for us — and the decision is already made for the people for whom gentrification represents not just a specific aesthetic, but the end to a way of life. 

This includes Walltown where gentrification is not just a buzz word describing cookie-cutter coffee shops, but a fundamental threat to a community. Many families that have lived there for generations are being forced to move out because it is no longer affordable for them. Nearby Northgate was foreclosed which means that nearby residents they might lose access to walkable, affordable shopping. They also could lose access to their closest Durham Public Library location, the offices of free tax assistance, and a sheltered place to sit undisturbed. And the nearby Kroger also closed. This means not only the loss of jobs for hundreds of union workers, but also the loss of an affordable and safe grocery store. The Harris Teeter down the road is markedly more expensive and many locals have not forgotten the store’s willingness to use a taser on a black teenager who was accused of shoplifting — though, of course, no stolen goods were found on his body. These are just a handful of the effects of gentrification, and this is just in reference to one neighborhood in Durham. And how do we even begin to describe the deeper cultural and economic losses: the stripping of the promise of the security of home ownership through rising home prices and ghastly property taxes?  The loss of a cohesive Black middle class living and thriving together? The stories and relationships and lives made in those 6 blocks of community? 

Robert Caro, in an interview with The New York Times, said his biggest regret from writing “The Power Broker,” his book about how Robert Moses made modern New York City, was cutting a chapter about how physical displacement bred social alienation and the dissolution of whole communities. 

When I was working on “The Power Broker,” I’d be interviewing people from that neighborhood who were forced to move away, and the word “lonely” kept reappearing in my notes. And at some point when I was working on that section, I saw “Fiddler on the Roof.” There’s a song called “Anatevka,” and the line in the center is “Anatevka,/Where I know everyone I meet./Soon I’ll be a stranger in a strange new place,/Searching for an old familiar face.” So I wrote a chapter in “The Power Broker” called “One Mile (Afterward),” and in it I wrote about what it’s like to be lonely, to have a neighborhood all your life, and then you’re suddenly dispersed. None of that is left in the published book. I just saw “Fiddler on the Roof” again, twice, and I have seldom felt worse than when they got to that song.

Going on the ghost tour threw into relief just how alienated Durham had come to feel to me, an alienation that extended to our city’s own history. And it was an alienation that so many people I spoke to while reporting for Indy Week were also feeling.

I didn’t find out who actually haunted Durham, but I did find out what haunted Durham: industrial capitalism. The currents under each ghost story were about the building of railways, the expansion of the tobacco industry, and the making of Durham into a city that now plays host to real estate speculation. And it was precisely these forces that rendered so many of our ghosts indistinguishable from each other, convenient avatars for convenient narratives told in the archways of historical warehouses turned luxury apartments. 

I write this now from the vantage point of another Southern city seen as both under the threat of gentrifying and having already been gentrified. In so many ways, it is exactly the same and precisely not the same at all as it was in Durham. I hope not to be so egotistical as to assume that the entirety of the story of gentrification in Durham can or should be told from my experience of living there, because it can’t. But Durham was a place where I first got to witness some of that change for myself, and that witnessing changed me and how I approach telling stories.

This is why I believe the work of reporting is such sacred work because it is the work of paying attention. In it is invested the hope that what you report will compel others to pay attention too. And as the adage goes: attention is its own form of love. Of course, journalism is not the only way to pay attention. The Black Lives Matter protestors who took over the highway, Batala practicing their drums in the park, the annual pride parade, the toppling of the Confederate statue, all of these taught me what it looks like when a community insists on paying attention and exercises its right to its own fierce and loving desires outside of the banality of picking iced coffee or danishes. 

I recognize on some level that part of the ego of feeling the need to tell those specific stories had to do with the fact that I was afraid that if I didn’t tell them, no one else would and then they would disappear under the currents of time. Of course, that’s a very silly idea. Durham is not made by one person’s attention, and Durhamites of all stripes continue to pay attention in ways big and small. Often in the pages of Indy Week, but also in Pauli Murray murals, the rotating exhibits of the Durham History Hub, the drag shows of The Pinhook. 

But you want to know my favorite insistent aberration to the encroaching sameness of a gentrified Durham? The teal SUV that reliably looped a figure-8 through downtown Durham at sundown everyday, blasting R&B ballads, Southern hip hop, sometimes even heavy metal. 

I frequented Criterion downtown with a crew of bar regulars: the bartender, the home renovator, the couple who brought their dog, the rapper and her twin sister academic. We always waited for the teal SUV, planned whole smoke breaks around it. We knew it was coming, and when it finally did come around the bend, just over the derelict train tracks, the booms of the stereo would hit us — literally, the bass was a physical force, as if something otherworldly had slammed through us like breaking through a wall — and it felt like joy, it felt like resistance, it felt like continuity, a reminder that this was still Durham, that the city could still speak over the sameness. 

Apologies for typos and run-on sentences and all of my other frequent grammatical and literary sins. This newsletter is without an editor.