Charleston is Haunted - Tours included

A couple of weeks ago, Jim and I, along with my sister and her husband, went down to Charleston, SC to spend about five days exploring.

Charleston is a beautiful city. It has kept its historic buildings intact, maintained some brick roads along with its slate sidewalks, and offers tantalizing glimpses of the ocean (as well as an amazing amount of humidity. That was probably the closest my Asian hair has ever gotten to a total frizz-out.) The houses are painted in pastel colors, and all of them have piazzas, Charleston-speak for balconies or porches that run the length of the structure in order to capture breezes from the ocean and keep the home interiors cool despite southern heat and ocean humidity. And homes there are built narrow and long for that reason. But Charleston is an old city, has a long and frequently violent history, and thus is abounding with haunts. 

As we always do when we go anywhere, we took a ghost tour. There are a ton of ghost tours to choose from in Charleston. There was one that bills itself as a ghost hunt and takes you through the Provost Dungeon, one of the old, old basement jails in the city. Since it also boasted, and I quote, "Murder, suicide, hanged pirates, voodoo curses, alleyway duels, dungeons and jails, and graveyards," all by candlelight, mind you, we took a pass on that one. It even states that it is an adults-only tour. I'm fascinated by ghosts, as you all know, but even I tend to want the PG-13 rating at most when I'm walking around haunted spaces. I'm a chicken.

There was the Ghostwalk tour that also toured the dungeon. What was it about that dungeon? Yes, at one time the British imprisoned signers of the Declaration of Independence within its confines, but the dungeon was also the site of numerous executions. Apparently even the tour guides don't like hanging around down there, so I'm pretty sure this cowardly tourist wasn't going to enjoy herself very much in that venue. Let's put it this way: I like a mild scare as much as the next ghost tourist, but if I'm too freaked out to be able to pay attention to the story being told to me, then I'm not getting my money's worth. I'm incredibly fainthearted, no? And a miser, apparently.

There were still more ghost tours being offered: ones that toured plantations, lots that focused on the old (and I mean OLD) cemeteries, and even a haunted pub crawl, I think. In the end we settled for a fairly short walking tour. This was a good idea since these tours happen in the dark of night and the streets and sidewalks in Charleston are designed to trip up and destroy a klutz like me.

Our tour guide led us to a haunted restaurant, a converted residence that features the ghost of one of the original spinster-sister owners. She's had her picture taken by a tourist. We went to a haunted hotel whose ghost, a woman from the 1800's, might be related to the huge earthquake that rocked the city back in 1886. We went to one of the oldest cemeteries in the city, where a photographer had snapped a picture just to use up the last of his film and captured the image of a woman kneeling and bent over a grave. The date the picture was taken was not the anniversary of the woman's death, but the anniversary of the baby she delivered stillborn before dying herself several days later. We saw that picture. We learned the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery: graveyards are built in connection with a church (churchyard is synonymous) and cemeteries have no church attachment at all. My husband asked me, "Did Neil Gaiman use the right word in his book title?" and I still haven't checked to see. He probably did, being Neil Gaiman.

There was a haunted alley, right behind our lodgings. Right after the tour I told the guide that we were staying in the place where he ended his tour and that we had heard it was haunted. Apparently, the honeymoon suite features a paranormal intrusion that was enough to send a couple on their way at one o'clock in the morning the first night of their stay. They couldn't even bring themselves to accept a substitute room; they just wanted OUT. What happened is that the fireplace turned itself on while they were in bed. The husband had no sooner turned off the gas and put out the fire when the taps in the bathroom turned themselves on. I hear it went back and forth with all sorts of things operating themselves for no reason in particular, and the couple finally had enough.

There apparently is also the ghost of a woman who walks the third floor of the place, and she looks short or incomplete because she's walking along the original floor which is a few feet lower than the present one. Luckily for us, we were on the second floor.

The tour guide told us he had heard stories about our resort, but maybe the place wasn't too keen on being part of an official tour. After all, while we were walking around the city in the dark, we ran into something like five other tour groups also walking around the city in the dark. And then there were the tours that used buses or vans, so probably by the end of it, Charleston nights are haunted more by tourists than ghosts.

But that's a bit harsh. Charleston is indeed a lovely old place, full of history and sad tales, tragedy and feats of heroism. I'm glad we had the opportunity to visit. I'm equally glad I didn't bring any "guests" home with me.

If you ever go, make sure you take a ghost tour. The history offered is great. But if you really want to know the history of the place, book a carriage tour with Classic Carriage Tours and try to get Mike as your guide. He was amazing, too.

Living Ghosts

A couple of weeks ago, Jim and I were having lunch with some friends and, since it was the day after Halloween, we got to talking about ghosts. Considering that these are friends of ours, I guess that's not such a strange thing to have happen.

And so we began swapping stories, and as frequently occurs, we started venturing past the traditional unexplained noises-and-apparition variety of story. First came the idea of being visited through a dream. I was happy to hear that at least one other person there felt that he had been visited by a deceased loved one in the guise of a dream. I have had the same experience, and when I awoke afterward, I've always felt that what happened to me wasn't so much a dream as it was an actual visit.

I don't imagine skeptical people will buy into that, but dreams that feel like visits don't evaporate like regular dreams. There is nothing strange or surreal about them, either. They pretty much involve having a conversation with the person in question and upon waking, the feeling is just like the person had stopped by for a chat and then left again. My father came to me like that twice. I remember both visits vividly and no one could ever convince me that he wasn't really there. The first happened about three days before he passed away, and the second was on the night of his passing. I have never doubted that he came to see me both times.

And then the conversation went just a little further into the strange when one of our friends said that he had seen ghosts of people who aren't dead. Okay, that statement needed some clarification. He proceeded to explain that one time he was sitting in his living room when he saw his wife go into the kitchen in her nightgown. The kitchen light never came on so he went in to see what she was doing in the dark. Of course, she wasn't in the kitchen and when he checked on her in the bedroom, she was sound asleep. He said that this had happened to him with one of his other friends, as well, when he spotted that person and then found out later that said person was asleep at the time of the sighting.

(I didn't think to ask if the person looked transparent at the time. I'll have to remember to do that.)

The only explanation that we could come up with was that the person was literally wandering out of the body while asleep. If that's the case, he said, then some of the apparitions we see may actually be living people, not dead.

I've had a couple of weeks to think about that and for some reason, the idea of seeing the spirits of the living freaks me out almost more than seeing that of the dead. I have no idea why. My sister once saw my brother and my father through the window of the front door, standing on the porch as if waiting for her to open the door. They would have been coming back from a dentist visit. The thing was, when she opened the door, they weren't there. When they did arrive home about fifteen minutes after she first saw them, she told me to open the door and let them in. She was still too weirded out to greet them herself. The even stranger thing about that, in retrospect, is that neither of them would have been asleep, not while driving home from the dentist. So maybe she saw their doppelgangers? But that's a whole 'nother paranormal topic!

At any event, the idea of a living ghost has been hanging around in my mind and I wonder if I can figure out something to do with it in a future story. For Cassie and Michael, tracking down a spirit who just happens to be that of a living person, well, that could lead to some interesting complications, no?

Bleeding at My Keyboard

 

Robert Frost once wrote, "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." 

Today I'm going to talk about that, with only a glancing nod at ghosts because without emotions, no ghost story would survive.

I write about people who have lost someone. I write about dead people who have lost their way. I couch all of this in terms of frightening apparitions and uneasy situations, but the bottom line is that I write about loss. And for me, the underlying current in all of my stories has been the profound sadness and confusion that comes with losing a loved one. I sometimes can't help thinking that such sadness is at the heart of every true ghost story, even if the spirit comes back vengeful and wicked and seeking to do harm.

Due to my chosen topic, I confront the idea of losing a loved one on a regular basis. And to tell you the truth, that does impinge on my everyday life. I probably think about dying and death a lot more than I should, even given my job. It's necessary but really uncomfortable. Who wants to think about losing a best friend, or a child, or a spouse? Just the idea can sometimes be a spear to my heart, and the tears that come with that thought are very real.

But Frost is right.

Saving Jake, which is a Bridgeton Park Cemetery Book even though it doesn't feature the same characters as those in the official series, is a book that took me fourteen years to write. That's because the pain I was dealing with when putting that down on paper was sometimes so severe that I needed to stop writing. Like frequently. I got to the point where I wrote a completely separate book during those fourteen years, but that's a different story, pun intended. What you need to know is that although Saving Jake exorcised some of my demons for me, it also put me through the wringer.

Enter Cassie Valentine and Michael Penfield. In Haunted, both of them are dealing with very heavy-duty losses. And the cowardly author who was trying to tell their story was hiding from it. When I finished my first attempt at the book, I handed it over to my editor at the time (the one who published Saving Jake) and she returned it with the comment, "This book is missing something. You." 

Point taken. She was calling me out for trying to dodge the pain and she was right. When I had the courage to try again, I wrote the draft that eventually became Haunted. The tears Cassie cries for Daniel tore through me as well. I felt the dreadful howling absence in her life that resulted from Daniel's death. And I felt every tentative step she took in learning to trust love again in the form of Michael Penfield.

I realize now that writing means routinely hurting myself. I know how absurd that sounds, but it's true. And I think it's true for all the authors I consider my instructors. In fact, when one of them (New York Times bestsellers, all) puts out a book that doesn't include anything of the author, much like the original first draft my editor rejected, I believe it shows. Stephen King lost himself in substance abuse for a few years and at least as many bestsellers. That fact did not come out until years later, but it explained why I found some of his middle-of-career books unreadable. They were missing something. Him.

Sometimes the writer who directs my fingers, who whispers the stories in my ear as I sit at the keyboard, is in a lighter mood and those stories will be a bit less somber in tone, sunnier, probably funnier (at least, I hope my readers find the humorous bits I write to be funny). But alas, such stories will also include at least a thread of that sadness due to loss. They must. I write ghost stories.

And what does that say about those of us who read these kinds of work? Maybe that we grope for ways to cope with the stunning losses we must all experience in this life? Maybe that we hope there is more than just this life, as short and brutal as it can be at times? Maybe that ongoing search for some kind of assurance that death is not so final, so very cruel, is the basis for the entire industry of ghost and even horror stories. An industry that is basically one giant coping mechanism.

I have no answers. I just know that as I write my little books, even as I'm trying to herd in the story line for Cassie's and Michael's next adventure, that I need to let myself feel that familiar pain and loss. Without it, my books will have no soul. Hemingway said it best: "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” 

The Art of a Scary Story

Tonight I have been invited to speak to a group of college students about writing horror stories. They are having Halloween doings, and in addition to having an art display of terrifying images (my own title for it), they decided to have someone who writes horror come in and give a talk.

I would have not chosen myself for the honors. I am beyond flattered because I love being invited to talk to a group of students about what I do. Who doesn't like bending someone's ear about what they love doing? And being invited to do it is like a treat. So of course I said "yes" when the invitation came and I have been rubbing my hands gleefully about it ever since.

But I still would not have chosen myself for tonight's activities. I write ghost stories. And yes, I realize that a lot of ghost stories qualify as horror. Flat-out horror. There are the horror stories of vengeful or malicious spirits that definitely fall into that category, from Freddy Krueger to whatever-that-was in the film "The Conjuring." Anything having to do with demonic possession wins the title of "horror" in my opinion. And ghost stories by certain writers qualify without a doubt (think Stephen King and Shirley Jackson). But my stories are pretty much on the mild side. I have the reviews to prove it! 

Also, the spirits in my story very rarely try to kill someone, unless it's incidental. That did happen on one occasion in my Bridgeton Park Cemetery series, and although the action was malevolent, the spirit itself was not a hunter. It did not set out to destroy anyone in its path. What happened to my character was simply that paths were crossed and there was a disagreement. (I am trying not to spoil the story for anyone who might not yet have read the book!) 

Oh, and I guess I did have a malevolent spirit that DID try to kill people. That would be in my short story, Hunting Spirits.

But for the most part, my books aim more at the glancing-over-your-shoulder, did-anyone-else-hear-that? kind of tale. I want people to feel a bit uneasy, maybe sometimes a little spooked. But my goal has never been to terrify my readers, and Stephen King has flatly stated that he  works to do just that. I'd say he succeeds, but that's a Captain Obvious statement.

So tonight I will talk about writing scary tales, structure, opening lines (crucial for every writer, not just horror writers), elements universal to tales of horror, and things like themes and motifs. I also plan to include a section on publishing, and other post-writing details. And I'm looking forward to all of it.

Sometimes when I do these, I get ideas for future stories. There are times students share ghost stories with me. Other times, ideas pop in just from the setting (who was the student in the back row, dressed in the fashion of another era, that never said a word, that no one else in the room recognized, and who disappeared without a trace? And why would he come to a workshop on writing stories about the dead...?) 

Writers work primarily in solitude so getting out and talking to other like minds is crucial. Exchanging ideas, listening to other points of view, getting asked questions that make me think about the whole process -  all of it gets me out of the single-person-working-in-a-room mindset. I can't wait to see what the students come up with for me tonight.

Losing My Protection

With all due respect to REM, I haven't quite lost my religion. It just morphed. I have, however, lost my protection. Twice. And that has been on my mind for the past week.

As I noted in my last post, my husband and I went on a ghost tour with some of our friends (like the notable Terri Reid and spouse, and the notable Donnie Light and spouse). Now, I also posted waaaayyy long ago about a different friend who wanted to give me something to help defend myself. And she gave me a St. Benedict medal. I put a picture of it on the page; some of you might remember that post.

At any event, I had that medal for years and I wore it everywhere. It seems St. Benedict (and his medal) protect the wearer from dark and nefarious entities, and I figure, given my chosen profession, my typical subject matter, and my penchant for taking ghost tours, wearing the medal just seems like a good idea.

About two years ago, that medal left me. It was somewhere up in Door County, and losing it broke my heart. Not just for the protection, but because it had been a present from a friend. So I set about trying to find a replacement. For some odd reason, at the time I went searching for it online, all I could find were either very expensive models, or medallions that were not made to be worn on a chain. That was fine. I got myself a St. Benedict medallion and carried it in my pocket.

I know I had it on the ghost tour. I know this because I always check. The next morning, however, St. Benedict was not in his usual spot. Now, I have a place on my nightstand where he lives, and I always put it there, except for the times I accidentally forget him in my jeans pocket. So when I didn't see him on the nightstand, I searched my jeans. And he wasn't there. I searched every pocket I had on me the night before: fleece sweatshirt, jacket. No Benedict. I even had Terri Reid searching her house and her car. No luck.

St. Benedict has left me again. I think perhaps he might run across someone who he thinks needs him more than I might at the moment, and so we part ways. He's done it twice and that's fine. I hope he is being helpful somewhere. But then I'm at a loss again.

I have ordered yet another St. Benedict, and this time, I did find a medal to wear on a chain around my neck. It's due to arrive soon and I hope it does. I feel kinda funny without him around. On the other hand, I really hope third time is the charm and that this one will stay with me a lot longer than the other two.

I'd really appreciate the protection.

Ghost Tours of Galena

Last Saturday, Jim and I got to hang around with incredible writer Terri Reid and her husband, Richard, as well as incredible writer/formatter Donnie Light and his wife, Barb, and one of our activities was going on a ghost tour in Galena, Illinois.

I have never been to Galena before, even though I've lived in Illinois all of my life. (Kind of like I've never been to most of the tourist sites in Chicago.) At any event, I was surprised by 1) how old the city actually is and 2) how much it reminded me of Savanna, Georgia. Galena, like Savanna, is built on levels, so sometimes traversing from one street to another means taking flights of stairs to another level. Streets run up- and downhill and some intersections resemble the switchbacks on hiking trails despite the asphalt and concrete. 

The tour, one of several offered by Amelia's Tours, was a bus tour that included use of an EMF meter, dowsing rods, a Rem pod, and a ghost box. Sites included an old cemetery that is haunted by a cloaked woman with glowing red eyes, drive-bys of at least two businesses that were former funeral parlors and are now eateries, the oldest still-in-business hotel in the state of Illinois, and a community center, among a slew of others. 

We stopped at the cemetery and made contact with the spirit of a woman who told us, through yes-and-no questions answered by dowsing rod, that she was buried there with her children. She was between the ages of 30 and 40 and we got the sense that she had died during a cholera or other epidemic. She did tell us that the cloaked woman with the red eyes was not only present, but that this red-eyed woman was not a friendly spirit. We left pretty shortly after that. 

But the best stop was haunted Ryan Mansion. The mansion was built in 1884 (or thereabouts) and after being recently uninhabited for a year and a half while owned by the bank, was finally sold to a family brave enough to want to live in a haunted house. The tour guide told us that the real estate agents had a hard time showing the place due to the hauntings. One agent who was touching up her makeup in a mirror there before her next client meeting, had looked down to take and respond to a text message, only to look up and find someone in the mirror staring back at her. She left and never took the meeting.

Doors open on their own, the piano in the formal parlor plays itself during the night, apparitions appear. While we were there, the tour guide did not only communicate with the dowsing rods. The EMF meter indicated that there was a disturbance in the electromagnetic field close to a door leading to the servant's hall (close to where I was standing, I might add). This was the door that would swing open by itself. It opened for the new lady of the house shortly after she moved in, and she took it as a welcome, indicating that the spirits there were happy that she had moved into the property. The owner's nine-year-old daughter stopped in front of the door and said, "You opened for my mom. Open for me." The door obliged. 

Since we got the EMF disturbance, the tour guide also set up the Rem pod and invited the spirit to touch it. And it did it twice while being asked to do so. The ghost box, a device that scans radio signals and allows spirit energy to form words from random radio broadcasts, spit out a few answers, but they were not very clear.

Ryan Mansion was the last stop on the tour and it would have been a hard one to top. From the original furnishings that still grace the first floor (since the house is occupied, tours are restricted to the first floor) to the modern dress-form mannequins that display period clothing, the house is an elegant nineteenth century example of upper-class living that is like a Hollywood movie come to life. With ghosts.

Like Dr. Evil Says

 

I want to watch a ghost story.

I want to see a really good ghost story movie because I haven't seen one in a long, long time. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that all the scary movies I have watched lately have been horror/demon type stories, as opposed to horror/haunting stories. I probably missed something, but I feel like the last true ghost story I watched was The Others, and that goes back fourteen (count 'em) years already. 

There have been a couple I watched that came from Japan, The Grudge being the most notable. But even that, disturbing as it was, rated more on my horror scale than on my ghost story scale. My favorite haunted house/ghost story movies are still The Haunting (the 1963 version, done in black and white and starring Julie Harris), The Changeling (1980, with George C. Scott), and probably The Sixth Sense (no notes needed). I like these films, these stories, because they are purely about ghosts, and not always malevolent ones. I don't cotton to the movies where the spirits in the story are beyond vengeful. I don't like slasher films made out of ghosts. I admit Nightmare on Elm Street is hair-raising, but it's still not my idea of the ideal ghost story. Maybe people think ghost stories just for the sake of the hauntings are boring?

So lately, I have been confining my ghost story viewing to things like Ghost Hunters and The Dead Files with occasional forays into A Haunting, Paranormal Witness, Paranormal Survivor, an occasional Haunted Highway, and when I can find one that I haven't already seen, Haunted History. Sometimes SyFy will do me a huge favor and repeat an old Haunted Collector, but for the most part, I'm in a ghost desert here. Cue to Dr. Evil imploring, "Throw me a bone, people." There's just not enough of the good ghost stuff out there.

The spark of hope lies in the fact that we are now in October, and programming will set its sights on appropriate Halloween fare. So more of my favorite shows are coming back this month: Supernatural and Grimm being the headliners. I love me some Winchester and Castiel stories, but boy, I wish they'd do one that was just a stand-alone ghost story, because the only other show that did such high-quality stand-alone ghost stories was The X-Files (golem, anyone?)

(Maybe that's not quite accurate. There was a short-lived British series on ABC back in the late Sixties called Journey to the Unknown that featured one-hour long supernatural stories each Thursday, and they grew progressively more frightening each week. Try watching that and going to sleep in a haunted house afterward! But boy, they were amazing and imaginative and truly scary and I miss that.)

Still, the old hope springs eternal. I am hoping that this month will bring me some good, chilling stuff having to do with haunted houses, or visitations, or apparitions in the mirror, or unexplained appearances on security cameras. My writing self lives for that stuff. I'll have to start looking for the paranormal offerings and specials that I hope will be coming up as we get closer to Halloween. I hope.

Throw me a bone, people.