The United States should be the country in the world least hospitable to ghosts, writes the landscape scholar Yi Fu Tuan: "It does not believe in the sanctity of the past... The nation has its face to the future." -Introduction

Charles Gilbert Hine, an insurance magazine editor from Newark, New Jersey, who in the early twentieth century wrote a series of books on travel in the New York area, was by his own account a largely rational man "not much given to seeing things at night." Nonetheless, in writing of an extended walk he took down the west side of the Hudson River in 1906, Hine admits that he experienced some moments of uncertainty. -Chapter One, "How Come the Hudson to This Unique Heritage?"