That day when he climbed to the top of High Tor, Maxwell Anderson could see the wide expanse of the river below. The mountain often appeared in their paintings and poems. This, along with its distinctive shape, made it a favorite landmark among Anderson’s neighbors - something of a colony of artists, writers, and theater people. It was the highest point in the view from South Mountain Road. High Tor’s less- than-mountainous 832 feet were made sublime by their steep ascent from the Hudson River and the town of Haverstraw below. Thirty miles north of New York City, on the west shore of the Hudson, and adjacent to the river’s widest point, High Tor was the northernmost point of the Palisades, and the boundary between the towns of Haverstraw and Clarkstown. Anderson could see the mountain from his home of fourteen years, four miles away on South Mountain Road in the still mostly rural New City. The story begins one spring afternoon in 1936 when playwright Maxwell Anderson set out to climb to the top of High Tor. These tales of haunting, Richardson argues, are no mere echoes of the past but function in an ongoing, contentious politics of place. Reading Washington Irving’s stories along with a diverse array of narratives from local folklore and regional writings, Richardson explores the causes and consequences of Hudson Valley hauntings to reveal how ghosts both evolve from specific historical contexts and are conjured to serve the present needs of those they haunt. In Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley, Judith Richardson looks at why this region just outside New York City became the locus for so many ghostly tales, and shows how these hauntings came to operate as a peculiar type of social memory whereby things lost, forgotten, or marginalized returned to claim possession of imaginations and territories. The cultural landscape of the Hudson River Valley is crowded with ghosts - the ghosts of Native Americans and Dutch colonists, of Revolutionary War soldiers and spies, of presidents, slaves, priests, and laborers.
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