Mention Route 66 and we think of ghosts. Ghost towns, those spindly remnants of good times gone past, such as Glen Rio at the New Mexico-Texas border, a town where you can check into the motel without doors or beds; a town where there are more chickens than people. Or Oatman, Arizona, where the town’s closed-down motel has quite a reputation for paranormal activities.
Then there’s ghost lights, those eerie floating globes of light found along Route 66 in northeast Oklahoma and west Texas, out where the swamps produce gasses that seem to ignite in the air.

            And then of course there are the ghosts themselves. Floating tricksters with a menacing grin. Abandoned widows and the love-lost. Armed invaders, whom you can stick your hand through, if you’re brave.
I will present some of these narratives now, in the context of performed culture, folklore, dependent on the function and audience for these tales. (Here this function is adduced, from tales in print.)

            And maybe I’ll tell you my own ghost story from Route 66. I swear it’s true!

            As I prepared this talk, I found myself wondering, what is the present role of oral tradition, in a print-and-net-driven era? Once upon a time, “oral” and “aural” were the ways in which folktales spread. One could even track them back, via the Finnish Method, to the supposed source or ur-text. But surely some of the old roles of transmission persist, even though we are more likely to find information with a click or a turn of the page than by listening to grandma.

Haunted Highway

Of course Route 66 ghosts appear in fiction as fiction. Murder on Route 66 reminds us of deadly blind curves where distraction proved fatal. And from the beginning, we find self-conscious performance factors in such tales: “Oh that was the story of the volunteer farm back in Palenville told the story, anyway, to their eager audience of schoolboys. With each telling, they made more improvements to it.

            Folklore is heard as well as told. And the storyfying effects before an audience have always been an essential part of a folklore text. In Lost on Route 66: Tales from the Mother Road, we’ll find a ghost turning a shower curtain into a “molten sheet of dark glass with ominous shadows, threatening to engulf me.” Here we see the self-fulfilling affects of reading and talking about ghosts: “A weird experience, one I attributed to the fact that I’d been reading the collection of newspaper cuttings about the Bristow, Oklahoma Gas Station ghost . . . . Is it true that ghosts have a great affinity for gas stations, movie theaters, and motels?” But the best material are two (2!) books on the subject of ghosts on Route 66. Haunted Highway: The Spirits of Route 66 and Ghostly Tales of Route 66, both self published (typical on the ghost trail of 66 of the fugitive literature).

            The authors of these works don’t guarantee you a sighting, even though their work is opportunity endorsed by the American Ghost Society and the International Ghost Hunters’ Society.

            Ghost tales of Route 66 even have their own typology. There’s intelligent haunting, which is those who stay behind, tending unfinished business, or those simply confused and unable to pass over to the supposed next world. There’s residual haunting, which is like a recording of the past, with sounds and images of another time floating before one. And finally, portal haunting, the door to the other world, l’outretierre – these tend to be in cemeteries. Watch where you step.

            Fine. The distinctions make as much sense to me as any others. What’s significant about these tales is that they are told as true, the classic trope of folklore collecting, typically something like: “It didn’t happen to me, but it happened to someone I knew well. Really.”

            The ghosts of Route 66 seem to fall into categories by their activities. There are those who are cantankerous or mean: who kidnap children, bark all night but remain invisible, flash lights, and argue with guests about whose room it is, anyway. Ghosts who can shoot and who can set fires.

            Then there are the ghosts who are mischievous and helpful. They swing you in a hammock, block a woman’s restroom door, order food and vanish, play music and make the floorboards creak with their dance, play air guitar, sing to you at night in Joliet, Illinois and shovel graves for you in East St. Louis.

            Then finally there are the ghosts who are just plain spooky, where the spirits of John D’lenger and Will Rogers. They have pet unicorns, float above the watcher, parade in gowns, drive haunted tractors in Oklahoma. They even, conveniently enough, fit nicely into classic tale types such as the “Vanishing Hitchhiker,” a tale type recorded in dozens of countries in more or less the same fashion. A young woman dressed in white, hitchhikes, takes a ride home, and then disappears. Such is the tale of Resurrection Mary in Illinois’s Route 66.

            And then they do the usual ghost tricks too, slamming doors, rocking chairs, breaking glass, tossing coins in the air, dropping chains from above, blowing in peoples’ ears and vanishing – and that’s just in Illinois!

            There are innocent ghosts and guilty ones, ghosts unknown and famous, such as Enrico Caruso, holed up in a theater in Tulsa where he caught pneumonia.  Abe Lincoln rocking in his chair in Springfield, Illinois; the widow of Lucky Baldwin, after whom the city of Baldwin is named in Southern California, who tries still to wave down conductors on trains at the whistle stop installed on Baldwin’s estate a century ago.

            Some of these tales are performed with lucre in mind, as owners of bed and breakfasts prod ghost hunters into their bedrooms. Some are told for tips. Others exist at night, in the quite, hushed tones of the reverent.

            Are they received as true by their audiences? Do people believe in ghosts? Do you believe in ghosts? Do you need to believe in ghosts to appreciate the vital oral tradition of those who are not vital at all?

            As to the function of such tales, in contemporary American society, we are a nation under siege, if you dare watch television or contemporary films. We are being invaded by zombies on all hands, haunted by ghosts, and damned at all corners in contemporary pop culture.

            Freud has something to say about this in Totem and Taboo. It goes to the very function of folktales as a means of educating children in rules for safety (the Boogieman or la Llorona, in my part of the country, New Mexico). It’s implied in Christianity’s core notion of a holy ghost. In some, it keeps the idea of an afterlife alive (excuse the pun).

A Ghost Story

And sometimes ghosts can be so troublesome, it’s easier to live without them, such as the now-closed Oatman Hotel. Built in 1921, six years before Route 66 would wind its way up the dry, unforgiving hills of Kingman, Arizona and towards the Colorado River. Oatman is an old, hard rock mining town in a canyon full of cholla cactus and prickly pears. Its most famous ghost is Oatie, a cowboy, or a miner in some accounts, who became drunk because he missed his family, far away. I’ve talked to bartenders who will tell me where the empty beer bottles inexplicably rolled. I’ve talked to tourists who were scared to go up to their room. The Haunted Highway insists that, in Oatie’s old room, you can’t keep the window shut or turn the page in the guest book. Or ruffle the bedspread the wrong way. Intrigued, as a radio producer for NPR, more than a dozen years ago, I decided to test this spot out myself.

            You see, the Oatman Hotel actually has three ghosts. Movie stars Clark Gable and Carol Lombard spent their wedding night in this tin-walled miners’ outpost. Then, while on a war bond tour in 1943, Lombard’s plane crashed into a cliff near Las Vegas while (it is said) Gable sat waiting in a hotel room in Oatman, an hour’s drive away. Some say his spirit never left.

            And that’s where I stayed one summer with a period wedding gown draped over a chair and a toiletry set with a pearly mirror and comb. The place was basic, with a bath down the hall and a shower that pulls down from a closet. The only other guests were a family; and by the time I turned in, they had already had their change spread across the room while they were out at dinner. Oatie was maybe keeping them company that night. Like it or not. The kids were crying and asked if they could sleep in the car.

            Now I’m not sure I believe in ghosts, or I’m not sure what’s so scary about them, anyway. What difference would it make if ectoplasms were moving among us that we just can’t see?

            So there I was, lying on the bed where Carol Lombard and Clark Gable had their honeymoon. The very bed. Around me were costumes from Hollywood, 1930s crinoline lace, dried flower bouquets, and a giant picture of Clark Gable, 4 feet by 2. He’s smiling, he’s smoking a cigarette. About 2 o’clock in the morning, the doors began to bang. Somebody definitely tried the door outside my room. And I heard this faint humming, the sound Carol Lombard might have made after she told her man she would fix him a little food, singing to herself while she did. It was a woman’s voice and humming. When I got out of bed to check, there was no one in the hall. Just silence. Anyway, it was just me and that other couple with their frightened children.

            I left my recorder going that night, and of course there were no sounds on it. But I know the noise was so loud in the hall that I had to put in ear plugs. But there was no money sprinkled on my floor. No other signs of the ghost. And if I had seen the picture in the room downstairs, I wouldn’t have rented the room at all. It shows the same room and a wide blur, like a man smoking a cigarette. He even resembles Clark Gable, vaguely. The white blob is floating two feet above the surface of the bed. As I slept there, I would have put my head through Clark Gable’s stomach if I had sat up.

            Thank you. And be careful the next time you drive Route 66.

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