Haunted Historians: Ghosts, Ethics, and Consent in Historical Scholarship

Historians, particularly those who study interpersonal and systemic violence, often describe being “haunted” by their work. This paper explores broader ethical and methodological questions in historical writing by reflecting on a feeling of being haunted by a historical subject. That subject, Leonard W. Snyder, was a prolific conman who posed as a minister interested in children’s welfare in order to bilk donors and gain sexual access to vulnerable boys. Snyder sexually abused dozens, if not hundreds, of youth. The paper engages the work of Tiya Miles, Colin Dickey, and Avery Gordon to place the sense of haunting by Snyder within the framework of the broader cultural and historiographical work that ghosts and hauntings perform: embodying communal anxieties, stitching together fragmented pasts, exposing unresolved legacies of violence and oppression, and gesturing toward historical continuities that conventional archives cannot fully capture. At the same time, the paper suggests that this particular “haunting” is a manifestation of unease about the troubling ethical and consent issues raised by writing about historical sexual abuse and grappling with the asymmetrical—and one might even say non-consensual—intimacy between scholar and subject. Historians recover and narrate lives without the consent of the dead, sometimes reducing their lives to moments of trauma and amplifying the legacies and memories of those who caused harm. As historians navigate their own inherently uneven subject positions with dead about whom they write, ghosts can embody a deeper wish: to be answered by and answerable to our subjects and to imagine, however fleetingly, a more reciprocal encounter with the past.