Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? Join the mailing list and receive more conversations like this in your inbox.
I first met Andrew Wice in his capacity as the director of the Madrid Film Festival in the small town of Madrid, New Mexico. On my most recent visit to the festival, I noticed posters for the Ghost Town Ghost Tour, an audio walking tour Wice put together that features first-hand accounts of paranormal activity around Madrid.
Situated in the hills between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, Madrid has a fascinating history. It began as a coal mining town in the 1880s and grew to be a community of around 2,500. Coal from Madrid powered the Manhattan Project during World War II, but the town was abandoned when the coal market collapsed in the 1950s. Beginning in the early 1970s, hippies, artists, and other members of the counterculture movement reclaimed the ghost town from the desert, one building at a time. Today, Madrid is a thriving – and extremely quirky – community of around 200 people, filled with shops, galleries, and it would seem, ghosts.
Enjoy my conversation with Wice about his oral history projects, and what people can learn from ghost stories whether or not they believe in the supernatural.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Yonder: You’ve collected dozens of hours of oral histories and stories. How did these two projects – first the oral history of Madrid, then the ghost tour – come about?
Andrew Wice: I’ve always loved local histories, folk tales, all the things that give a place its own soul and character. And you can really feel it in Madrid. If every little town has that one eccentric person, this is where all the eccentric people got together and made one town. Everyone is some type of artist, and everyone lets their freak flag fly, and so that makes for great stories, and it makes for great storytellers.
It all started in 2018. I raised money locally, and I just started recording people. I did 70 hours of recordings. And because I had raised money, I was able to pay them which made it feel like this was a balanced thing, and not just me taking something from the town. That was really fulfilling to do, and it had a really strong response.
It was Lily Whiteswan who approached me with the idea of doing a ghost tour. To be honest, I’m really not that into ghosts. I don’t believe in ghosts. I like stories and folk tales and all that, but that’s not my favorite kind of story. But I certainly saw the potential and had heard stories over the years. Once I put out the word, I got to hear some really fun stories from a lot of really interesting people, and the result of that is the Ghost Town Ghost Tour.
After the coal market collapsed in the 1950s, Madrid was abandoned. But in the 1970s, the town was rediscovered and repopulated by artists, hippies, and other members of the counterculture. (Photo courtesy of Andrew Wice)
DY: Madrid is not a very big community, but it seems like there are ghosts on every corner. How do you explain Madrid having such a high concentration of ghost stories?
AW: Of the 10 worst coal mining disasters in New Mexican history, half of them happened in Madrid. And those people are still buried down in mines two miles beneath the town. The nature of coal mining and of living in a coal town, it’s capitalism at its most exploitative. The real horror was just trying to survive in a place like that.
So there’s an inevitable backdrop of tragedy in this place, and that lends itself well to what we think of as where maybe ghosts come from, trapped spirits that haven’t reached a feeling of peace, or letting go, or there’s some sort of anguish, or their body is unburied, all of those bad things. It can be a spooky place after dark, which helps. And those buildings, which are so bright and cheerful during the day, look a little more run down at night.
I think that that background of tragedy is one of the main throughlines that you hear in all of the ghost stories, and another one is that as Madrid came back from the dead, came back from being a ghost town, it’s attracting people that lived on the fringes of society. And so these are people who are maybe more likely to fall into tragedy or find tragedy themselves. A lot of people in pain and therefore inflicting pain on others. So that’s the background of Madrid, and for all of its fun and freedom during the day, there’s elements of real danger that also accompany the place. It is authentic in that way.
Five of the 10 worst mining disasters in New Mexico’s history occurred in Madrid. Wice thinks that these tragic events contribute to the high concentration of ghost stories that are told around Madrid. (Photo courtesy of Andrew Wice)
DY: How did Madrid’s history as a coal town and frontier of the countercultural movement manifest in the ghost stories you collected?
AW: Because of the backdrop of Madrid, it becomes inevitable that you’re going to get these things mixed up in the ghost stories. You’re going to get some of the soil of the town itself. And the stories become a way of getting people to engage with the past. They might come to Madrid and think that it’s an interesting, weird-looking place, but not really understand why. And then it opens up the entire story – a ghost story that involves a miner suddenly appearing and walking through a room, and you can smell his sweat and the stink of the sulfurous coal on him. That brings not just a faster heartbeat, but also the fact that it’s a coal miner Is significant. So ghost stories of the kind that are found in this ghost tour and this kind of oral history are really about getting people to just pause for a minute and look a little bit deeper. Because what is below the surface can blow your mind.
DY: You said yourself that you don’t believe in ghosts. But the people who shared their experiences on the tour are completely certain of what they saw. Has putting together the tour changed your perspective at all?
AW: What I love is when you have different people telling a very similar story with a very similar figure. These stories might be happening decades apart and [the people telling them] don’t know each other’s stories because I’m interviewing them one at a time, and they don’t know what I’ve heard. So those sorts of things really tickle the imagination and do make you say, “I don’t believe in this. But what if? What if there’s some kind of grain of truth?” So I’m never willing to completely slam the door shut.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post Q&A: Collecting Ghost Stories With Andrew Wice appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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