A really fascinating look at ghost tours at various points in the US south and the stories they tell, especially about enslavement. Miles does a great job of offering up the details of the tours and including interviews with guides and docents. Some of the analysis feels a little stagnated--I was left with big questions about the ways these tours not only tell misleading, violent stories about enslavement that re-inscribe stereotypes and misconceptions while offering up avenues for white-settler moves to innocence, but also the ways that these tours invent ghosts (to make up for a lack of real archive regarding individual enslaved people? Why are we making up stories about extreme violence when real life stories about the extreme violence of enslavement exist?) which Miles herself seems to put aside rather rapidly even though the ghost she was initially drawn into the project with ended up to be untrue.

Otherwise though I think it raises a lot of questions about our engagements publicly with haunting and ghosts, and how the history can be elided through engagement--that avoidance of these narratives is not the only way to fail to grapple with history and its afterlives.