What can haunted houses and their history tell us about American history and culture? Writer Colin Dickey sets out across America to investigate America’s haunted spaces in order to uncover what their ghost stories say about who we were, are, and will be.
suicide
Posted inNonfiction
Letter to an Ex, on the Occasion of His Suicide
In the wake of a troubled ex-lover’s suicide, novelist Masha Hamilton tries to make sense of it in a correspondence to his ghost.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Letter to an Ex, on the Occasion of His Suicide
In the wake of a troubled ex-lover’s suicide, novelist Masha Hamilton tries to make sense of it in a correspondence to his ghost.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Suicide in the Family
In the literary magazine Post Road, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about how her grandmother ─ a smart, talented woman born in repressive times ─ committed suicide for unclear reasons.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The High-Stress Life of a First Responder
You don’t know what it’s like to be an emergency services provider until you’ve stood in the piss-soaked bedroom of a house and watched a team of medics try to revive an old, lonely guy though 15 minutes of automated CPR. It’s a small part of the job, but unavoidable. When the call goes off […]
Posted inProfiles & Interviews
‘It’s not too much of a stretch to say that this story fundamentally changed me as a person’
All reporters have pieces that stay with them, stories whose characters and components linger long after the last revisions have been rendered and the paper put to bed. For Jennifer Mendelsohn, Sean Bryant was that character. Mendelsohn first encountered Sean Bryant shortly after his death, nearly two decades ago. Transfixed by his short, vivid life and subsequent suicide, […]
Posted inNonfiction
Everything to Live For
Jennifer Mendelsohn | Washingtonian | June 1998 | 36 minutes (8,995 words) Jennifer Mendelsohn is the “Modern Family” columnist for Baltimore Style magazine. A former People magazine special correspondent and Slate columnist, her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Washingtonian, Tablet, Medium, McSweeney’s and Jezebel. This story first appeared in the June […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Everything to Live For
Jennifer Mendelsohn | Washingtonian | June 1998 | 36 minutes (8,995 words) Jennifer Mendelsohn is the “Modern Family” columnist for Baltimore Style magazine. A former People magazine special correspondent and Slate columnist, her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Washingtonian, Tablet, Medium, McSweeney’s and Jezebel. This story first appeared in the June […]
Posted inQuotes
'There are patterns in the language that are the language of suicide'
Back in the 1970s, as part of his own research, Shneidman asked a group of men at a union hall, “If you were going to commit suicide, what would you write?” The union hall experiment was, by contemporary research standards, ethically ambiguous at best. “You couldn’t do that today,” Pestian says. But the notes turned […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Complicated Relationship Between a Reporter and a Source
In the Tampa Bay Times, Leonora LaPeter Anton examines the suicide of one of her sources, a woman named Gretchen Molannen who was suffering from an embarrassing genital arousal disorder. Was there anything Anton could have done to prevent the death?