Trees

I have always loved trees. When I was a kid, I used to wish I could climb as high as my brother did when he was trying to build his tree house out in the back yard. When the leaves would spiral off the branches in the fall, I always had an assortment of the most colorful maple leaves that I could find. In high school, I had my first trip to Vermont and spent some time hanging out under a stand of trees in a heavily-wooded area, listening to the autumn rain splash down on the leaves and branches above me and laughing when I would eventually get wet, which was surprisingly intermittent. The trees around me were that thickly interwoven.

As an adult, I traveled up to Door County, Wisconsin for the first time in July, and then again that following October. I felt as if I’d found paradise when I saw what fall splendor looked like with all of those trees, against the backdrop of both Green Bay and Lake Michigan. I can never fully celebrate autumn without a trip up north to see all those magnificent giants and their glorious streaming scarlet and flaming orange finery.

Today was a windy day here in Illinois, and the trees rustled and sighed in the gusts that both caressed and tossed their branches. And it’s when the wind is blowing in the fall, whether gentle or harsh, that I feel most as if the trees are talking to each other.

There is a road up in Door County that Jim and I love to walk. The total trip is just a little over three miles, and back when I was still running the occasional 5K, that was my favorite training route. There are trees all along the way, and when the wind gets going, the branches lean back and forth and make their little “talking” noises, and I swear they are having their conversations. During one of our many walks up and down that road, I realized why J.R.R. Tolkien would have come up not only with talking trees, but with Ents. If you were to take that walk with us, you would understand, too. The trees on this road are old and tall and majestic, and when they bother to lean toward each other at all, and only at the wind’s insistence, I would swear they are sharing observations and comments. The writer in me would swear they are conversing with each other. And I wish I could understand them.

People are drawn to different aspects of nature. My grandson, AJ, loves predatory animals like sharks and all of the big cats. His room is decorated with pictures of these critters and he always makes me think of a particular dialogue from Jurassic World: “We need more.” “More what?” “More teeth. We need more teeth.” (If you’ve seen the movie, this will make sense. If you haven’t, it will make sense when you do.) My other grandson, Johnathan, is currently obsessed with poisonous snakes and spiders. He just loves tarantulas and the fer-de-lance, and spends time reading up on “the most poisonous snakes” or “the biggest spiders” in the world.

Lots of my friends are gardeners and they have my complete respect and admiration. I’d garden too, if I didn’t have the unfortunate tendency to kill nearly everything I try to cultivate. It’s like they pop their little budding heads above the ground, see me, think to themselves, “Oh, it’s YOU,” and then curl up and die after giving up completely.

But trees? Trees are my buddies. I always feel better, no matter where I am, if I can look out the window and see trees. Even just one. I feel great when I get to go out among them, like in the north woods of Wisconsin. They make me happy. I think I might even be able to grow one without killing it, but I haven’t tried yet so that the fantasy can continue to thrive within my head. But one day, I may just try growing an acorn. If that lifted its head above the ground, saw me, and kept going, wouldn’t that just be amazing? In the meantime, I’ll continue to enjoy the ones out in nature. Maybe if I hang around them long enough, one day I might begin to understand their conversations.

Welcome To My World

"Welcome to my world" is a statement I write frequently when I sign one of my books for a reader. For this piece, however, someone else is offering me a welcome, and the world is one that only sometimes (thank you, God) touches mine.

Last week, I wrote about places that were haunted but didn't reveal anything in particular to me when I visited. The week before that, I wrote about places I didn't find out were haunted until after I had been there, and experienced something just a wee bit suspicious. Today is about going someplace that is reportedly haunted and coming away thinking, "Yup, that place is haunted."

On most ghost tours, Jim and I are treated to deliciously scary venues and fascinating history, great photo ops, and usually, not much else. That's fine; we enjoy ghost tours just for the experience. Besides, who doesn't like listening to a bunch of scary stories in the appropriate settings? But there have been at least two places that gave us more than a good story and an interesting site.

The first place was the Ryan Mansion in Galena, Illinois (and a big shout-out to Terri Reid, who suggested the Galena ghost tour in the first place!)  The Ryan Mansion is a 24-room private home/museum that was built in 1876. When we toured it, it had been renovated and restored and it was positively gorgeous. The upkeep is imperative or it could wind up easily looking like that house on the Munsters; as it is, the place is definitely worth a visit, ghosts or not. 

The ghost tour we took was the first I've ever been on that included a ghost box as well as an EMF detector, and dowsing rods for tour participants to play with on site. We went into the front room and were treated to a ghost box session. (For those of you who might not know, the ghost box is a device that picks up both AM and FM radio waves, in theory to allow spirit to use the energy to communicate. If you ask a ghost box a question, at some point it will spit out disjointed answers cobbled together from random words on different wave lengths.) The front room is known to be haunted, and there was definitely an uneasy feeling as random words were tossed out by the ghost box in answer to questions that the guide was asking. Incidentally, all the words spoken by the ghost box made sense in context of those questions.

The guide also handed out the EMF detectors and the dowsing rods so that people could pick up on different energies, or even communicate yes-or-no fashion with the dowsing rods. There was a door in this room that was known to open and close on its own, and if you stand close enough to it with the EMF detector, you will see the lights go up into the active zone as something or someone unseen passes close enough to trigger it. If you ask the dowsing rods about someone being present, they will give you a "yes" or a "no" answer. We got plenty of "yes-es" that night.

 I didn't see anything there, but I could feel something. It was cold, but it wasn't malevolent. It was just there. Perhaps whoever it was felt as curious about us as we were about him/her. So while it wasn't out-and-out scary, it was definitely unsettling, and very tangible. I won't say I was sorry when the guide said that it was time to leave. Especially since I felt as if we were escorted back onto the bus by something unseen.

The second place is from a little longer ago, up in my beloved Door County. There is a company up there called Trolley Tours, and  a ghost tour is one of their mainstays. It doesn't just run in October: it runs as soon as tourist season opens some time in May and keeps going through early November. We took the tour in summer, and had the good fortune of having one of those unusually cool summer evenings that made the tales just a bit more chilling, and the experience jut a bit more shivery.

One of the stops on the tour is a place called the Alexander Noble House, right in the heart of Fish Creek. The house is currently run as a museum and I know I've written about it before, especially since this past year they featured an exhibit called "A House in Mourning" that entailed the entire house being decked out for a Victorian funeral. When we visited last summer, our lovely tour guide had already had some weird experiences there, but then, the place is haunted.

When we visited for our very first time on the Door County ghost tour, we were led up into a bedroom at the top of the stairs and told that the mirror in the room frequently featured images that only showed up in pictures. "You won't see anything when you look at it," the guide explained, "but if you take some pictures of it, you might be surprised when you look at them later." That sounded interesting, so both Jim and I took a few pictures with our cameras.

We were allowed to roam the place for a few minutes after the official house tour ended, and then we were all shepherded back onto the trolley. "I didn't see anything," Jim said as we took our seats. I hadn't either, so as our ride pulled back onto the street and headed toward our next destination,we went through our pictures. He had taken more shots than I had and was just glancing through them quickly. "Nothing," he said.

But that's not what I saw. "Go back a few," I told him. "And look there." In one of the two pictures he had taken in the upstairs bedroom, there was the image of a face in the mirror. "What do you call that?" I asked.

I won't print his answer.

I'm going to be taking another ghost tour within the next few weeks, so if there is anything noteworthy, I will certainly come back and report.

Favorite Haunts

When I was in grade school, Scholastic Books put out an amazing collection of ghost stories. First of all, yes, Scholastic Books has been around that long. And secondly, yes, I have been collecting ghost story books for that long. To get back to the point, I still remember the cover of that paperback book. It showed a forest in darkness and over the black tree tops was a ghostly, veiled moon that cast doubtful light over the scene. The words "Ghost Stories" were written in puffy, smoky white cursive across the darkness. I still remember that because even then I was into cover art,  I guess.

One of the stories in that book concerned the ghost of a young pioneer girl who had died along the Oregon Trail. The story took place some where in the Midwest/West, where there were caves not far from the original wagon train routes. The setting was either a state or national park, and the heroine of the story was a local high school girl who was volunteering as a trail guide for the summer. At some point, someone on staff told her to be on the lookout for the pioneer girl; apparently the ghost appeared as dusk was heading toward darkness and could be spotted easily because her dress and her bonnet -along with the strings- glowed against the dark of oncoming night.

Of course, our protagonist is caught out on the trail near the caves at just that time and sees this pioneer ghost coming towards her, with the glowing dress that moved in the wind, and the bonnet strings that trailed behind her, each with their own particular illumination.

I have never forgotten the description of that scene. For one thing, however the writer phrased it, the image I got from those descriptive paragraphs has remained with me for decades.

For the other, however, I always wondered -and still do- why a ghost would choose to haunt such a lonely and secluded spot. Was it by choice? Was she doomed to walk that path for some reason unknown to the living? As an older, more experienced ghost aficionado, I also ask, was she just a residual haunting?

And that leads me to the question, if you could haunt anyplace in the world, where would it be? Would you stay in the same place? I have it on good authority that ghosts can haunt more than one place if there were several meaningful locations during their lives. Or would you maybe haunt a person instead?

My brother, who passed away at a younger age than he should have, was a great fan of books and movies. He left us before the last Harry Potter film hit the screens. He didn't live to see The Hobbit as brought to the big screen by Peter Jackson. And he has missed all of the amazing Marvel Comic adaptations from the earliest Captain America through Deadpool. He would have loved all of them.

But there are times I wonder if he isn't tagging along with me or his adult children when we go to see one of those films. Sometimes I get the sense that he pops into those movie theaters with us and enjoys the show much as he would have in physical form, except, of course, no popcorn or chocolate.

But I can't help thinking, maybe that's the way to haunt, if you're going to do it. Not just places special to the heart (find me in Door County frequently!) but also with the people and activities who were the most important in your life. If it's doable, I plan to pop into my children's and grandchildren's lives long after I'm gone. Not to frighten -they shouldn't even know I'm there- but just to check in. To see how they're doing. To see what they get up to as adults and as parents and grandparents themselves.

I guess if a place is magical enough, a person might want to come back and visit. Would that pioneer girl really have chosen to hang around a dusty, old road when she could be visiting with descendants? Or maybe spending time (if there is such a thing in the afterlife) with the people she had known and loved through the years of her short life? When I'm gone, I suppose a "sensitive" might feel my presence along Highway 42 or along the shoreline in Door County from time to time. I really do love it there. But I really do love my kids and grandkids, too, so maybe it's a safer bet to look for me to be visiting them just a little bit more often. Not to scare. Just to check in.

Saving Jake: The Story Behind the Story

Perhaps other readers like to know the story behind the story. I am the sort of person who loves hearing writers talk about how they got the original idea for their books, or how they got to the final version of the books they release. I can't claim to have the following of the average NY Times best-seller, but for those who have read my work and felt compelled to get in touch with me about it, these musings are for you.

Saving Jake took fourteen (count 'em, 14) years to write. I kid you not. The book is very loosely autobiographical and parts of it were so difficult to set down on paper that I kept putting them off. I even wrote an entirely different novel in the middle of that whole struggle. But I kept coming back to Jake and to Corts because there was a story there that I needed to tell.

Originally, the two main characters were male and female. That's right: to Philip's dismay, he started life as a girl named Amy. Jake was originally named Mark. And the working title of the book was Portrait of An Artist Off the Wall. Mark was an extremely depressed artist, Amy was his best buddy, and believe it or not, the book ended with his suicide. Not exactly uplifting, eh? I worked on it with various plans of attack before deciding that the whole thing was untenable. Of course, I was still attracted to the story of this very depressed artist. Fortunately for me, shortly after that Jake himself came and "rang my doorbell," as I always say. And he arrived in his army-green trench coat and red high tops, with long hair that looked like it had been badly trimmed at one point, and a smirk on his face that belied all the pain in his brown eyes.

Getting Philip on board was worse than pulling teeth. He gave me his name very grudgingly. I think if he could have made me write the whole book referring to him as "Character A" he would have been fine with that. But I did eventually get his name. Then he refused to reveal anything else about himself except that he was Jake's best friend. Again, we reached a compromise by letting him tell the story in his own words. No third-person tale-spinning for Philip Corts.

I already had a story ending in mind. I need to have an ending or I don't have a book. But arriving there was like the toil of two and a half marathons without any training. It was hard work, grueling work sometimes, and the end result wasn't always pretty. Fortunately, Jake is extremely patient and knew he wanted this story told, and eventually Philip opened up. Sometimes the scenes he shared overwhelmed me and at least one of them almost caused a car accident when it popped into my head, visually, while I was driving to work. I'm glad that only happened once. Most of the time, both the guys were a little lower-key than that, and I'm grateful.

The idea of merging my depressed artist and his reticent best friend with a shipwreck on Lake Michigan came to me while waiting for a classroom door to open (I was working as a sign language interpreter at College of DuPage at the time). I have a fascination with shipwrecks on the Great Lakes and was reading obsessively on the subject while working with Jake and Corts.

The places and venues in Door County -all of which are real, although one or two of them have morphed since the time of writing- were a given. Door County has always been my favorite escape, so I shared that with Jake and the whole thing took off from there. Especially since Door County is the haven of more artists than you can shake a stick at. Door County, like Jake, is wild and natural and creative. We both love it up there. Corts probably does too, although he'll never admit it.

At any event, I couldn't let Jake kill himself the way Mark did, but he needed an escape and he and Philip gave me a climax to their story that was far better than I could ever have imagined on my own. Hard to write, but very worth it.

I have been asked by readers if I have Corts's particular ability, and the answer is definitely not. Nor would I want it, something that he reminds me of from time to time. But here's the thing: I do know people -a few of them- with some weird and startling abilities, so gifting Philip with his particular talent was not much of a stretch to me.

Saving Jake was the first book I wrote completely from the heart and so I was delighted when my editor and publisher at New Leaf first called me and said, "I love your book and I want to publish it." I made her say it twice, just to hear it. And I'm grateful that there have been readers who enjoy the company of Jake and Corts as much as I do. If you want to read more about that world, please go find Missing Persons, either directly on Smashwords or through the link to Smashwords on my website (www.opheliajulien.com). And I hope you enjoy that story, too.

By the way, for those of you who are fans of the Bridgeton Park Cemetery series, I will eventually write a post on how Haunted came about and what it first looked like (nothing like what you've read, I'll tell you that right now.)

If you have questions about my topics, my characters, or anything like that, please feel free to email me through the website or catch me on FaceBook. I'd be happy to answer!!!

Old Attachments - No, Really

When I was growing up in my haunted house over on the north side of Chicago, there was a double room in the basement that we used for storage and that always made me sick. Literally. Our basement ran pretty much the full length and breadth of the house. When you got to the bottom of the stairs and into the main room, there was a hallway to the right that led back to the laundry room and the more disturbed part of the house-- in that house, a little like observing that rattlesnakes are more poisonous than, say, scorpions. At any event, if instead of turning right to go into that hallway, you continued across the room, you would arrive at a door (always kept closed) that opened into a double room. On the right was a large, musty, fairly dark space where my family stored bigger unused objects like stuff in boxes and old vacuum cleaners and other uninteresting things like that. On the left was an arrangement of shelves built into the walls that were used to store the toys we didn't play with often but were not ready to give away, and also the books that were collected by a family of child readers.

Sometimes I needed to go into that basement room to get a book or to look for something I wanted that had been carted down during the last upstairs purge. And I always dreaded it. Within about five minutes of going into that room, my stomach would start to hurt. And I mean hurt. Sometimes, if I tried to ignore it and stayed longer -for whatever reason: what was I thinking??- this pain would progress to actual, er, digestive tract adventures. Let's leave it at that. Anyway, the point of the story is that the room made me sick in every sense of the word and I avoided it unless I couldn't.

Fast-forward to earlier this month. Jim and I went north to our beloved sanctuary in Door County, and spent a long weekend with some really good friends, hanging out and doing adult things. One of those adult things turned out to be antiquing.

There should have been alarm bells going off in my head when they suggested we go exploring the antique collections of northern Wisconsin, but instead I said, "Sure, why not?" and off we went. And there are A LOT of antique stores in Door County. Go up Highway 42 a ways north of Sturgeon Bay, and if you are into antiques, you would be in pig heaven. (Jim has always inadvertently saved me from myself by taking Highway 57 north instead.)

Now, first of all, there is one antique store I actually like. It's north of Bailey's Harbor and is an antique barn attached to a farmer's market called Koepsel's. We go there every time we go north. And that antique barn is where I found my beloved writing desk, which is guessed to date back to the late 19th century. I love my desk. Here's the thing: this antique barn is completely open on one side, since it seems to have been an actual barn. There are doors that the owners roll shut when the day is done, but during the day, the entire east wall of the place is a large entrance and exit. God bless them.

The other antique stores were just that: stores. There were regular doors and then you were in a shop, some of them big as barns, but completely closed off. The first one we went into was airy and spacious enough that I was okay. But the second emporium started to bother me. As my older daughter puts it, there's a feeling of stuffiness in those kinds of shops. And not just from having so many old things in an enclosed space. The longer I stayed in that store, the twingier my stomach started to feel. Uh-oh. Fortunately, my companions decided that they had seen enough of the place and so -on to the NEXT antique store.

I managed to handle that one for about ten minutes before I could feel the pandemonium building up in my gut. And although I hadn't been in the basement storeroom of my childhood home for more than 16 years, I recognized that feeling when I got it. Okay, time to go!!! my brain was singing at me. And so I got. Jim found me sitting on a bench outside taking deep breaths of Door County air, trying not to lose my breakfast. (Sorry).

Some people may try to tell me this was due to allergies to dust. I am a very indifferent housekeeper - I KNOW allergies to dust and this wasn't it. Maybe mold? I have been in other enclosed stores in Door County that do not come close to affecting me this way. And when you're on a peninsula with Green Bay on one side and Lake Michigan on the other, sure, there will be some dampness. But the kind of visceral reaction I have being around the old items of lots and lots of dead people (how do I know they're dead? When you're looking at grandma's stuff from the 1800's, I'd say it's a pretty fair bet that the folks who owned these items are dead) says to me that I am walking into a web of something else.

There's a reason some of us smudge antiques or used items we bring home. We want any items we acquire to be new and fresh for our own homes; we don't necessarily want anyone who might have loved their possessions to come into our homes along with our purchases.

Sometimes when I enter a museum or historic site, I'll get a mild feeling of being crowded by the unseen. Definitely a feeling of not being alone. But nothing compares to the sensation in an antique store. There are crowds in antique stores, veritable mobs, and they have nothing to do with the shoppers.

Next time you go antiquing, stop and listen, focus, pay attention to what's going on around you. And see if you don't get a little bit of that feeling yourself.

In Door County

This column is about Door County, one of my favorite places on the planet. Door County, the little "thumb" on Wisconsin's east side that reaches into Lake Michigan and forms Green Bay on the west, is a land of water, woods, bluffs, farmland, and peace. It is a natural-born resort area but also a realm of hidden treasures, quiet back roads, and sheltering forest. It's the place I go to breathe.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't inspire that other side of me!

Under a golden sun, autumn in Door County is a bounty of iconic seasonal beauty: corn shocks, friendly scarecrows, pumpkins, mounds of apples and even larger mountains of pumpkins, ornamental ears of corn and wagon-loads of every imaginable squash and gourd known to modern agriculture. Fall is a time when the county shines.

Fall is also a time of gray and rainy days, chilly fall nights, the smell of wood fires, and when conditions are absolutely right, twilight fog. Ah, and that fog is as wonderful to me as the sight of autumnal riches. 

When our kids were still young enough to travel north with my husband and me, but old enough to bring along friends, we had a Friday night tradition of lighting a fire in the fireplace, turning out all the lights, and sharing ghost stories. I will never forget the night one of their friends had just hit a climactic part of the story and the log in the fireplace broke. We all jumped about twenty feet, and that turned out to be one of the best ghost story nights ever.

But to kick off an evening such as that, I would remind the kids, as we drove northward past meadows shrouded in dusk and fog, that this was the time when the shops closed and all the customers went home. At least, all the living ones. I would wonder out loud what came out in the foggy night to peruse the jars of homemade jams and the endless bakery cases of pie. I would invite the kids to think of all that could be wandering out in the damp and chill of those deserted fields, following paths that were once followed years and years ago. And if we ventured out, would we see any of them? Would we even -gasp- be invited to join them? A wonderfully chilling thought to ponder over mugs of hot cocoa or cider. Safely inside the cabin,of course

Door County in the fall is an amazing place. When you read this, think of me being up there, enjoying the sun and celebrating the fog. No writer of supernatural fiction would ever turn away from such a place of bright and dark magic.