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official name was Adolph. Though many nineteenth-century German Jews still addressed each other with Hebrew names in their households, they gave their babies proper German names for use in the world—Karl, Heinrich, Maximilian, and also Adolph, before Hitler rendered the name permanently unfashionable. Thus, Adolph was Abraham’s German name. Abraham was his Jewish one.
    Still, it was fitting that Julia’s husband had been given a name that was loaded, in hindsight, with such malignant associations. Julia’s ghost story had started as whispers in the halls of La Posada and the houses of Santa Fe, then migrated to the newspapers and from there to the ghost books and ghost tours and the Internet. And as Julia’s tale grew and morphed, Abraham’s ill repute did, too.
    Abraham had, in the years after his death, been remembered as a leader and a builder. But now people thought him a far less upstanding man. He was a tyrant and a grasper, who treated Julia as a possession—“arm candy,” said one website devoted to the ghosts of Santa Fe. He imprisoned and murdered her, explained another, “so he could resume his powerful position and social standing in the community.” This was not the Abraham I had learned of as a child. This was an entirely different creature—the kind of predatory male that all modern women fear.
    Lynne certainly believed Abraham to have been such a man. She and I hadn’t ever met face-to-face, but our emails grew more and more personal. I learned that she was divorced, not at all amicably, and that she had some bitterness toward her ex-husband. I learned that she lived in Arizona, suffered from neck pain, and had three blond granddaughters. I found her picture online as well—she looked trim and adventurous; in her sixties, probably, with sporty blond hair.
    As we shared our histories and information, I came to understand that Lynne’s engagement with my family’s history was a passionate and visceral one. Through these dry genealogy websites—the census records and ships’ logs and family trees—she constructed a far fleshier life for the dead than I dared to imagine. I parsed dates and tidbits, turning them over and over like stones, hoping for a small glint of insight. But Lynne looked at the same stones and built castles—gothic constructions with plots and passions, demons and dungeons, moats and parapets and matrons in distress.
    Lynne believed, she told me, “on a psychic level,” that Abraham was responsible for Julia’s decline. This speculation had “no foundation in any document,” she readily admitted. But this is what she concluded: Abraham had chained Julia in her room at the end of her life. He may also have chained her in the basement, because a hotel employee told Lynne that Julia had left “clawed marks in the walls.”
    This was after Julia had become utterly undone—though Abraham was, Lynne believed, responsible for that earlier unraveling as well. Lynne thought that the “pivotal assault” on Julia’s sanity was the death of her child—that same dark baby whom Misha had found so disturbing. Abraham, Lynne told me, had arranged the child’s death.
    Lynne had arrived at this belief after staying at La Posada the year before—in a casita on the grounds, as I had on my recent trip. In the dark hours of the night, she had had an encounter, and she left the hotel “feeling convinced,” she wrote in an email, that something terrible had happened to the baby. Not just its death—something worse.
    Three men came to Julia, Lynne explained. They told Julia that she would have to kill the baby. If she didn’t, they would.These men were Abraham’s surrogates, sent to Julia’s room to do his dirty work. He couldn’t abide the sight of the baby. He didn’t want it to live, Lynne wrote, because, “Abraham did not believe this last child was his!”
    It had been seven years since the previous birth. . . . He had built quite an empire and was not about to allow a