How to Write a Ghost Story, with author Betsy Gaines Quammen

Why do humans need ghosts? What can ghosts teach us? Explore these questions and more in this writing workshop for adults. Learn how to build tension, ground stories, and write with compassion.

In this 90-minute workshop, participants will learn how to:
- Build tension by weaving hauntings into full and compelling backstories.
- Ground stories, and phantoms, within their historical framework.
- Write with compassion, giving specters dignity and fullness beyond a mere set of tragic circumstances.

Ghost stories should give the dead a voice without exploiting them.

About the author and her work:
Betsy Gaines Quammen is the author of American Zion and True West, which won the 2024 Reading the West Book Award. She examines the intersections of extremism, public lands, wildlife, and western communities, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Daily News, and History News Network. She received a PhD in history from Montana State University, an MS in environmental studies from the University of Montana, and a BA in English from Colorado College. She lives in Bozeman, Montana, with her spouse, writer David Quammen.

"While writing This Haunted Land, I learned that creaks and cold spots are only the beginning of a ghost story. Mysterious perfume, fleeting shadows, strange footsteps, glowing orbs, a stray giggle or whisper—these phenomena are certainly worth consideration when they occur, but they’re merely the beginning of the tale. A flickering light or the yank of a tress will grab our attention, but the heart of a ghost story isn’t just things that go bump in the night, but the backstories, the compelling accounts of folks who simply refuse to stay in their graves." - Betsy Gaines Quammen

In This Haunted Land, Betsy Gaines Quammen investigates some of America’s most enduring ghost stories and uncovers how ghost stories can help us come to terms with our unsettled past. With curiosity, a bit of skepticism, and an open-hearted willingness to learn from the living and the dead, Gaines Quammen takes readers on a riveting, sometimes spooky journey into the haunted towns, lands, waters, and parts of history that we too often ignore. From a once-booming uranium mine community now entombed in Colorado’s Mesa County, to America’s oldest fort on the east coast of Florida, This Haunted Land interweaves memory, mourning, folklore, and social anxiety — and shows that politicized efforts to rewrite history can be defeated by listening to the specters of the past.

THIS HAUNTED LAND: Reckoning with Ghosts and the Stories that Shape America (Torrey House Press, September 2026)

Age group: Adults
Event length: 90 minutes