A Ghost By Any Other Name

When I was senior in high school, a new girl transferred into our class. She was new to the area, new to the school, and ended up sitting next to me in homeroom. We introduced ourselves and, unsurprisingly since it was me, we wound up conversing about the supernatural. She told me that the Romanian language has fourteen different words for "vampire." She was ahead of her time: although she smelled overwhelmingly like Patchouli and wore flowery, gypsy-looking clothes until her school uniform came in, she had a thing about fanged beings already. Well, then again, vampires never really go away, do they? Figuratively, literally-unless staked or left in the sun, and even in terms of literary fashion. Vampires are always with us. What Bram Stoker has wrought, huh?

At any event, I never forgot the idea that a language could have fourteen different words for the same concept. Rather like finding out that the Eskimo people have so many words for snow. (This has been considered a myth, recently, one based on the research and book written by anthropologist Frank Boas. However, a study done by an anthropologist at the Smithsonian says that there may be as many as 53 words for snow in the native tongue of the Canadian Inuit. At least, according to an article in the Washington Post that popped up when I googled "Eskimo Words for Snow.")

So one time, lacking nothing better to do, (okay, looking for a blog idea) I looked up the word "ghost" in my Roget's Thesaurus. My version of the reference book gave me a list of twelve different words, including two I had never heard of before. I was familiar with spirit, shade, apparition, wraith, phantom, etc. But who ever heard of eidolon or manes? If you know either or both of these two words, I bow to your much superior vocabulary. I had to go to the dictionary, however, after finding these in the thesaurus.

Eidolon (I-do-len, accent on second syllable) means a phantom or apparition, according to my American Heritage Dictionary. It has its roots in the Greek word for form or shape.

Manes ((May-nez or Ma-nayz) is basically the revered spirit of someone who has died, possibly even deified as a minor god. This is from the Romans, and trust the Romans to make it more complicated: this is a plural noun used with a singular verb. Okay.  (I'd probably use the first pronunciation for fear that any listener might think I was referencing the sandwich condiment, if I used the second one.)

I think it's interesting that there could be fourteen different words for vampire in the Romanian language, but that we have twelve different words for ghost in English. There may be more; my dictionary is a college student edition as opposed to the huge two-volume tome that requires a magnifying glass. Still, twelve words is pretty impressive.

And while my dictionary gives me two definitions (of nine) that refer to a ghost being the spirit of a dead person, my own personal definitions remain 1. (noun) Something I would rather not see in the mirror and 2. (noun) Something I never want to see by my bed.

The Superpower of Words

Back when I was pregnant with my second daughter, I took a part-time job as a clerk at a local library. This meant that my duties consisted of checking books out (remember those old-fashioned machines that stamped a return-date card with a satisfying "ka-chunk"?  I miss those!) as well as shelving books and other materials that had been returned. Sending me out to the shelves with a full cart of books was a dangerous proposition; I could get lost in those shelves while purportedly emptying the book cart. But management kept me on the job anyway.

And it was at this library that I discovered my three hero writers: two British writers by the names of K.M. Peyton and Robert Westall, and one American writer named Richard Peck. They all wrote books that were Middle Grade to Young Adult, and my introduction to each of them involved a story of the supernatural. At the time, Mr. Westall and Mr. Peck pretty much wrote nothing but supernatural tales, and while K.M. Peyton did not, she has an outstanding ghost story titled A Pattern of Roses. If you have a chance, check it out. It's a fantastic read. All three of them gave me the direction I needed with my writing, because I had not yet realized that YA Supernatural was where I wanted to be. I learned this about myself when I realized I wanted to be like them.

While I wrote fan-girl letters to Ms. Peyton and got two hand-written letters in reply (safely tucked into my binder of letters from real authors), Mr. Peck gave me one of the best moments of my entire writing life.

Writers work in isolation. Unless you are the sort of writer who likes a writing group (that's not me), we pretty much labor alone. What feedback we get is from our beta readers ("here are the things you need to fix"), our friends and family (usually pretty positive), and reviews on sites like Amazon, where the comments can range from very nice and heartening to incredibly mean and soul-wrenching. I have had reviews that have kept me up at nights, or have caused a three-day paralysis where I don't go anywhere near my work and sometimes shed a tear or five. We are real people behind those books and trust me, no matter how often it happens, bad reviews wound.

But we also get really great stuff from readers - people who tell me they are waiting for the next book, or that they're having a really good time with my characters, and that's like a balm for a wounded soul. As Mark Twain put it, "I can live for two months on a good compliment."

 So back to Mr. Peck. I was lucky enough to attend a weekend conference courtesy of The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) because I am a member of the organization. The conference was a writing and critiquing event and not only was Mr. Peck our keynote speaker, he was actually going to hear us read an excerpt of whatever we were working on at the time. I read the invitation and realized even though I was terrified of reading my work in front of my hero, I would have regrets for the rest of my life if I didn't take this chance. I took it.

And so Mr. Peck got up in front of the classroom we were using for this event, and gave a talk about writing and the journey of publishing. Then it was our turn to read our own work, one at a time. I was sitting way in the back as is my custom, and I listened in awe as my colleagues each read several pages of their work. They were all so good at what they did. I was thinking I wasn't even at the same starting line as these people, but I had committed to this and there was no choice. 

When it came to my turn, I took some pages from my yet unfinished book, Haunted, and read aloud to the room and to Mr. Peck the scene where Cassie meets Daniel for the first time. I was both chilled and sweating bullets while I read, but not enough that I wasn't aware that my hero had gotten up from the teacher's desk at the front of the room, walked around to the back, and perched himself on an unoccupied desk across from mine. I kept reading, so nervous that the papers I held were trembling. And then I finished.

I looked up and the first thing I saw was him staring down at me, and then he said, "Well, you're very good, aren't you?" holding my gaze and giving me a little smile. 

I almost fell off my chair. He hadn't said that to anyone else although it seemed to me that there were at least fifteen other writers in that room who would have deserved that. I don't even remember what I said in reply. I think I managed to thank him. But I'll tell you what: I never looked at that stack of papers the same way again, and I went on to finish writing that book. And hopefully some of you have read it. 

So when I get those bad reviews, when my sales start to tank, when I get stuck at the keyboard and those ideas just aren't coming, I think back to when Richard Peck said that to me and feel about as awestruck as I did at that time. And my soul smiles a little. His compliment (that I have been living on for eight years, let alone two months) is side-by-side with that of a professor I had for a fiction writing class in college who told me, "You're really pretty good at this. Have you ever considered doing it for a living?" Just three short sentences, twenty-one words, when taken altogether, but enough to prop me up when my writing life feels too hard or too sad or too depressing or too dark.

Some people say words are just words, but I beg to differ. My hero writer and my college professor gave me words that help keep me validated even at my lowest. Words are powerful and lasting and they can be used to destroy or to affirm. Even when not at my keyboard, I try to be careful how I use them.

Ghosts Ships - A Sort of Book Review

I have been reading all of the true ghost story collections I mentioned a few posts ago, and find it somewhat ironic, being high and dry in the Midwest, that the book that is frightening me the most is the one about ships. Really.

I read the books about Washington, DC, Florida, and Philadelphia before picking up the one concerning ghosts stories known throughout the Navy. The ships covered in this collection go all the way back to the Revolutionary War and so do some of the spirits. But the ones that are freaking me out the most are from the WWII era. There are stories about quite a few haunted battleships. This would make sense, since any ship seeing battle -and every ship mentioned here did- would have numerous deaths and tragedies included in its history. And some of those histories are pretty long.

There were tales of the usual sorts of haunting: footsteps when no one else was on board; doors opening and closing by themselves, including heavy iron hatch-type doors; faces peeking through port holes; voices coming from empty rooms-everything from screams to arguments to simple statements. One of the ships is haunted by a malevolent presence that announces itself with bone-chilling cold and then a feeling of dread and terror that forces anyone present to leave immediately. There was mention of at least two different tour guides, dressed as sailors from the past, who evidently were not on any current staff list but who certainly knew a great deal about the ships that they guided unsuspecting tourists through; and there were the inevitable reports of touches, tugs, strokes, and pats from unseen hands. 

Almost all of these ships are museums, now, so you can always go and check them out for yourself. The Lexington is at Corpus Christi, Texas, and saw action in the Pacific during WWII. The Yorktown is at Patriot's Point in Charleston, South Carolina, and also fought in the Pacific during WWII. It remained posted to that area long enough to have served during the Vietnam War as well. And then there's The Sullivans, the ship named for the five brothers who served on the light cruiser The Juneau, also during WWII, and also in the Pacific. All five lost their lives after their ship was first shelled and then torpedoed. The Sullivans was commissioned in their honor and sent into action within months of their deaths. It remained on active duty through Korea and the Cold War (including the Cuban Missile Crisis), and is now a museum at Buffalo and Erie County Naval & Military Park.

 Navy bases also have their fair share of ghostly visitors but are not necessarily as accessible to the general public. Actually, I think the haunted ships would be enough for me; I don't think I'd be wandering the haunted bases as well, even if they were open for that.

The history is fascinating, the stories of restless spirits and ghosts that range from friendly to flat-out malevolent, and the compelling way the book is written, are enough for me to highly recommend the book that is my source for all of the above information: Eric Mills' The Spectral Tide: True Ghost Stories of the U.S. Navy. 

I have a fascination with ghost and haunted ships, so it should come as no surprise that I am devouring this book. Even if you aren't necessarily a fan of the same but do like ghost stories, you might want to give this book a try. I live nowhere near any ocean, but the stories have lingered around me like a sea mist every time I close the covers on another chapter that I've finished. It's a great book for the close of day when the sunlight is fading and the darkness is creeping in.

The Energy of Children

I sometimes find it odd that skeptics will point to science as their bedrock argument against the paranormal. Science has stuff in it that's far stranger than anything paranormal, as far as I'm concerned. On the other hand, science believes in the reality of energy, and there is a theory that the energy of children can produce things like poltergeist activity. I've read that the really disturbing physical manifestations that are related to poltergeists are frequently centered around a young child, frequently an adolescent. So maybe this paranormal phenomenon is actually an example of uncontrolled psychic energy.

Some years ago between career shifts -and I've had a lot of those- I spent a little over two years as a special education aide in a K through 5 grade school. I was a one-on-one aide to a girl who was deaf as well as challenged, and I had the opportunity to work in a self-contained special ed classroom. My first year there, we had five children, one lead teacher, and two of us one-on-one aides. That may sound like adult overkill in a room with five kids, but trust me, there were times that three of us weren't enough. Kids are clever and fast. 

I enjoyed the job: my co-workers were both relaxed, easy-going, and funny women and we did our jobs with a sense of humor. There were times that a sense of humor was the only thing that was going to see us through. Yes, even with only five kids.

But one thing we did notice was a certain amount of  -I guess we can call it energy- in the room. As if there was an overflow of activity, even if all the students were sitting at their desks. The door to the classroom opened on its own pretty frequently. We had things fall off of shelves. Maybe because the kids were super active when not sitting and something became unbalanced enough to fall over the edge of a shelf an hour later? Possible. But it happened a lot. I noticed drafts in the room when the doors and windows were closed. And one of the students saw things no one else did. That was possibly part of her condition. And then again...

I was only in the field for two full school years and two summer school sessions, so I never got to have much conversation with teachers who weren't in the same school I was. But I've always wondered if other special ed teachers, tutors, and aides who might be open to the paranormal concept have experienced the same kinds of things in their classrooms. Maybe even more. I do remember one time the principal of the school dropped into our room to see how things were going and asked if we needed anything. We told him we needed a candle, a Bible, and an exorcist, and I don't know how much we were joking. 

I read somewhere that the ancient Greeks considered mentally handicapped people to have been touched directly by God. I sometimes wonder if people who are challenged in our culture are perfect in another dimension or world that overlaps ours, if perhaps they have a conduit to other realms, as it were. I could see how being between two places could raise problems in ours.

At any event, I finished up my second session of summer school and went on to a job in health care. Last year, though, I actually ran into my one-on-one charge when she was on a shopping trip to Sam's Club with her mother. Her mom remembered me and we had a good conversation. My one-time little student is now an adult in her early thirties. As always, I was taken by surprise by that fact, even though academically I knew she had to be an adult. I don't know if she remembered me, but looking at that face brought back a lot of memories, including how active that classroom was, no matter if the kids were up and doing something or sitting at their desks doing work.

Maybe someday I'll meet some special ed teachers who'd be willing to talk about what went on in their own classrooms. That is, besides teaching special students.

Who Is It This Time?

 Something in my house is trying really hard to get my attention.

I know, I know. I write constantly about the noises and disturbances that turn up when I'm writing. This is nothing new to anyone who knows me or to some people who write the same kinds of things I do. I know others who have mentioned the same kind of thing happening to them when they work. Maybe we ought to form a support group, but that's another story.

At any event, whatever is going on now is remarkably more assertive than the usual footsteps or sounds of furniture shifting that I normally experience when I'm goofing around with my ghost stories. Maybe it's because I'm working on two projects at the same time?

(And there's another thing people who know me well are aware of: I rarely write two things at the same time. I read somewhere that Isaac Asimov used to write at least two different books simultaneously. I don't know if he split his day between the two or had two different typewriters set up so he could move between them, or what. I just remember that upon reading that particular fact, I was totally impressed. I couldn't imagine doing it. And I remember thinking that my brain would explode if I tried.)

On the other hand: I wrote a nice little novel called Ghostwalk (that may make its debut as a Bridgeton Park Cemetery Bonus Book at some point in the future) while I was working on Saving Jake. I also had Missing Persons going on my back burner while I was completing Drawing Vengeance. And to top it all off, I also had to complete my short story "She Loves You" for the anthology Lyrical Darkness over that same stretch of time. So maybe I ought to just realize that yes, there have been times I have worked on two (or, gasp, maybe more) writing projects at the same time. 

I suppose it's like being at school and having homework in different classes simultaneously. Maybe I can look at it like that.

But back to what I'm doing now and what's going on in the house. I am currently struggling with, er, writing Book 4 of Bridgeton Park Cemetery. I have also been invited to write a longish short story (say, 25,000 words) by a good friend for something she's got coming up in June. Needless to say, I accepted the invitation. But more on that at a later date. So right now, I should really be working on two things at once. Because of that, I have ghosts on the brain. (Did I mention I'm also deeply immersed in the books I wrote about buying for research a couple of blog posts ago?) I should be steeped in the supernatural little buggers.

And so the house is now behaving accordingly. It started last week when I was in the bathroom (doesn't it always?) finishing up my morning routine and heard someone walking around in the house. That happened twice, and both times I literally searched my entire house to find all the doors and windows locked and no one there. Of course there was no one there. But over the weekend-and once again in the bathroom in the morning-I heard the TV going and decided that Jim had come home from his workout early. I could hear the background voices chattering away. So I opened the bathroom door to greet him but the noise stopped as abruptly as it had started. Jim wasn't home. The TV wasn't on.

That afternoon while we were indulging in a series we're currently binge-watching, I heard a strange noise from around the corner and down the hall. It sounded to me like a cabinet opening, or maybe closing. It sounded mechanical. I looked at Jim and asked, "Did you hear that?" "Yes," he said, and added, "It sounded like a cough." 

A cough? He heard a cough? That bothered me more than the idea of a cabinet opening or closing although I'm not exactly sure why. No cabinet should have been making noise and no one should have been coughing in our hall when all two of us in the house were in the same room.

Things continue in this vein: footsteps walk past the door when I'm in the bathroom. I've heard the refrigerator door open (a very distinctive sound, with our appliance.) More than that, there's a feeling in the house now. Like someone waiting. I just have no idea what they're waiting for. Oh, and just for the record, while I was typing this sentence, I heard a loud tap from the direction of the kitchen. Clearly someone wants something.

Maybe if I finish my writing projects, it will go away. 

And then, of course, when I start writing the next book something else will arrive...

Time Travel, Physics, Ghosts

I have been keeping an eye on Missing Persons since it launched last week, and was pleased and somewhat puzzled to find that the last time I checked, it ranked #228 in the category "Time Travel." Brief note: #228 might not sound like a very high ranking, but in view of all the millions of books Amazon lists, I'll take it! And so I was pleased.

But the category Time Travel? Really? I am trying to figure out how that happened with this particular book. I guess I could see that label applied more easily to Saving Jake (no spoilers - no additional details included in this post), but Missing Persons? Well. Maybe. If you read it and can find more than a very slight connection, please do write to me and let me know.

But the idea of time travel as it applies to the paranormal made me think of an episode I watched on PBS. I think it was on the Mystery series. But you know, it's been a while so I'm not exactly sure. At any event, this particular story was entitled "Miss Morrison's Ghosts" and was about two somewhat elderly schoolteachers who visited the palace Versailles in France some time in the early twentieth century. While they strolled through the gardens surrounding the palace, they passed a man working around the shrubbery. Since it was the height of summer, this would not be unusual, except that the man was wearing clothing more appropriate to the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, that could be explained as historically correct clothing required of the groundskeepers. Shortly after that, they passed a woman who could have been Marie Antoinette's twin sister sketching within the small gazebo just to the side of the path.

At that point, things grew a little fuzzy, and both women remember being overwhelmed with a feeling of dread, of disaster on the immediate horizon. They looked around themselves and suddenly heard the shouts of what sounded like a group of people -angry people- approaching. Alarmed, the two ladies, hid themselves from the mob that soon swarmed the path. 

I'm not clear on, and maybe they weren't either, exactly what happened next, except that the mob vanished as quickly as they had appeared and the two were again alone on the path in the garden. Both of them felt overwhelmed by what they had just experienced and retired from their visit to Versailles to rest up at their lodgings.

After extensive research, the younger of the two ladies inevitably came to the conclusion that they had somehow stepped back in time to the French Revolution and the moments just before the angry citizenry of Paris stormed Versailles and captured the royal family. Her companion wanted nothing to do with that explanation, and didn't choose to speak of what had happened again. But the woman who decided upon this somewhat extraordinary explanation for their experiences wrote the story down, which is why it was eventually turned into an episode of Mystery.

The point of this story is that it has caused me to sometimes wonder if some of the hauntings people experience aren't related, in some way, to a kind of time travel. Physics, if I remember correctly, has proven that time is relative to the person in a particular moment of that person's awareness. This posits that time is not linear, as most of us conceive of it, but something else. Some years back, there was a teacher at my community college who taught a class titled "Crazy Horse and Einstein Are Cousins." The teacher was Native American, and his intent was to show his students that his Nation did not see time as a linear construct: that is, they did not categorize events as past, present, and future. Instead, everything is happening in the moment. That is why events and injustices that will seem to be so long ago - centuries!- to the western mind, can seem like something that just happened this morning when a person is of another culture and perceives time differently.

Note: I think physics and the paranormal are closing in on each other pretty quickly and it's just a matter of time before all those "silly supernatural things" that can't be proved in a laboratory actually will be. After all, we couldn't prove the existence of molecules and bacteria and supernovas and quarks and other things of that ilk until technology caught up with the concepts. It's just a matter of time and research, I think.

That aside, I have a feeling that people who see some ghosts are actually seeing something from what we call the past. If the people in that past moment could see the witness who is observing their existence, those people might consider our twenty-first century observer to be a ghost herself. If they could all see each other.

I don't think this explains all hauntings, but I have read quite a few stories that involve someone seeing a person, or a scene, or an event, that would make quite a lot of sense if the person who is witness to this type of paranormal scene had accidentally stepped out of his own time for just a moment, and gone to the place where said historical person existed, or when that historical event happened. And there have been numerous stories: the woman at the college in Kansas who walked into a room at the library and found herself staring at another woman in turn-of-the-twentieth century (ie, 1899 to 1902 or thereabouts) apparel standing in front of an unfamiliar bookshelf, replacing a leather-bound volume; or the poor tourist who took the elevator at an historic fort down to the basement in search of the restrooms only to find himself in a Civil War surgery complete with blood covered physicians, wounded soldiers crying out in pain, and the expected sights and sounds of wounded battlefield survivors being treated; or the motorist north of London who somehow ran into the ancient queen Boudica and her horse drawn chariot, armed with her spear and a slew of other weapons; or those travelers who swear up and down that they have seen Lincoln's ghost train with its black bunting and the solitary coffin lying on an open car passing through the station.

Having something in the house that makes noise and moves things around is one thing. I tend to call that thing a ghost. 

But perhaps stumbling upon a person or a scene out of history could be another thing entirely?

Never Say Never

I had thought I would be coming to this post with a ghost story, but I postponed that because I need to talk about something really neat.

Some months ago, I released a sequel to my novel Saving Jake as a download on Smashwords. I like to think people noticed, although I doubt it. I know that I don't tend to peruse that site myself very much. But then something unusual happened.

Saving Jake was published by New Leaf books back in 2002. Good grief, it has been a while! At any event, shortly after that I started a sequel to it because I missed working with Mr. Holdridge and Mr. Corts, and I wasn't working on anything new yet (Haunted had yet to cross my mind). I stopped working on the sequel after getting about a third of the way through it, after making the acquaintance of Cassie Valentine and Michael Penfield. And they became my new friends.

But Jake and Corts were always in my head. They live in the same neighborhood, after all: right around Bridgeton Park Cemetery. So after releasing Drawing Vengeance late last summer, I took out the partially-written sequel and decided to finish it. Now, since Jake is on contract with New Leaf, I know I couldn't release Missing Persons on my own for profit, so I asked my buddy Donnie Light to format it and put it up on Smashwords for me. That happened in November, 2015.

Fast forward to early 2016. I met up with my editor from New Leaf after she had asked me how sales were for Missing Persons. I told her it was a free download at the moment, and that was fine, but we had a dinner meeting and she offered to read it. About two weeks later she told me she had finished it and wanted to publish it as an e-book only since Missing Persons is shorter than a full-length novel.

I was flabbergasted. I had told myself -and probably you, as well- ad nauseum that I would never traditionally publish again, not after launching the Bridgeton Park Cemetery series on Amazon myself. HOWEVER, my editor is a lovely woman and if she is willing to give my little sequel a shot, who am I to say 'no'?

So here is the announcement: going back completely on my proclamation to be an indie author first, last, and always, I want to tell all of you that Missing Persons will soon be available as an Amazon exclusive!!!! I will go on FaceBook and Twitter and my author page at Amazon to announce when it is available, which should be pretty soon. Hopefully, this week, if the planets align. The cover art (see above) is gorgeous as always because Carmen Elliott always does gorgeous work. 

There is a big disclaimer that I do want to add: SPOILER ALERT!!! Please, please, please do not read this story if you have not yet read Saving Jake. To do so would ruin the emotional investment in the first book as well as blunt the last message at the end. So please don't do it.

That said, I hope that those of you who made friends with both Jake and Corts will enjoy reading a follow-up story. I had fun writing it - I hope you have as much fun reading it!