Betsy Gaines Quammen

Betsy Gaines Quammen is a historian, award-winning writer, and author of American Zion, True West, and her latest book, This Haunted Land: Reckoning with Ghosts and the Stories that Shape America.

Fascinated by how cultural views shape the telling of history, her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Daily News, and the History News Network. Betsy, who lives in Bozeman, Montana, with her husband, writer David Quammen, three big dogs, a sturdy cat, and a lanky rescue python, is always up for a good ghost story.

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Awards: Reading the West Book Award

Books:

This Haunted Land

Reckoning with Ghosts and the Stories That Shape America
History / Biography
Torrey House Press
September 2026
ISBN 9798890920478
Hardcover, 0 pages

Why do humans need ghosts? And what do our ghosts have to teach us? “Gaines Quammen looks history straight in the eye. ” —LEAH SOTTILE, Blazing Eye Sees All This Haunted Land investigates some of America’s most enduring legends and uncovers how ghost stories can illuminate some of the most unsettling parts of history. With curiosity, a touch of skepticism, and an open-hearted willingness to learn from the living and the dead, Betsy Gaines Quammen takes readers on a journey into haunted towns, forgotten lives, and abandoned places. From a once-booming uranium mining community in Colorado to a fort on the coast of Florida that predates the United States itself, this riveting exploration of memory, mourning, folklore, and social anxiety shows that politicized efforts to rewrite history can only be defeated by bearing witness to the specters of the past. More/less