\u27The Herbage of Death’: Haunted Environments in John Neal and James Fenimore Cooper

Dickinson wrote this enigmatic, single-sentence letter without commentary, but while she did not elaborate on her assertion, she seems conscious of how the idea of haunting emerges in artistic endeavors as well as in general perceptions of the nonhuman environment-here conceived of as a haunted house. To be sure, many of the American literary works that preceded Dickinson fall under the category of those that try to be haunted. And these texts that strive to house the ethereal and uncanny comment on the ftrst part of her statement by presenting an imagined environment inhabited by spectral entities and marred by violence