They See Dead People

One of the coolest things I get to do with my job is interview interesting people, and what I learn shows up in my books. I'm careful to research certain details when I write because I know that nothing is as annoying as finding a mistake in a novel when it relates to a subject I know something about. (I've never quite forgiven a particular author for her use of the misnomer "judo chop.") Details, right or wrong, can strengthen or derail an author's credibility. So I find people to talk to.

Some of the people I talk to see the dead. I ask them lots of questions because what Michael Penfield is able to see, or what Cassie Valentine is able to glean from the departed, is crucial to my stories. Since I like tales that have to do with the paranormal, this is one of the more enjoyable aspects of my work. On the other hand, it can be a little unsettling.

One gentleman I know was driving to his lady friend's house one night and as he was pulling into her driveway in back, he noticed that she was standing on her back porch, clad in a long, white nightgown. I'm sure I hardly need to continue this story but here it is for your verification. He got out of the car and she was no longer on the porch so he went around to the front door, the path he usually took when he arrived. She let him in and he looked at her. "What happened to the white nightgown?" he asked.

"What white nightgown?" She was bewildered.

"The one you were wearing when you were standing out on the back porch a minute ago."

She looked at him like he had sprouted another pair of ears. "It's winter. Why would I be standing on my back porch in a white nightgown?" Because, of course, she hadn't been.

I have to admit that I am glad I don't have the ability to see random ghosts. I don't know that I would handle it as gracefully as my friends. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't, given what happened over the summer! But they seem to take it very much in stride.

Another gentleman I know joined me for a book signing in my home town, since he is also a writer. After our three-hour stint of meeting people and selling our wares, I walked with him to the parking lot behind the store and asked him about seeing dead people. He told me it was something he has always been able to do. He didn't always like it, but there it is. He explained how he sees entities in people's houses, or in random buildings. He even explained that ghosts don't always appear the way one might expect. "There's a house down the street from me that's haunted by a young girl, maybe seven or eight years of age. But I know that she was in her nineties when she died. She just likes to project that image of herself." I had never heard of such a thing before that conversation, but have since run into that aspect of a haunting at various locations; he was just the first person to tell me that such a thing might happen.

We chatted a little longer and then decided we should part ways, since he had about a two-hour drive to get home from the bookstore. But he stopped for one last moment and said to me, just before he left, "You know, there's a dead guy watching us from a window in that building across the street." Then he grinned at me and went to his car.

I looked at the building in question and I didn't see a thing, but I would never look at it the same way again.

But...round about that time, Michael Penfield gained his ability to see the dead.

Past Owners

There is a common trope in ghost stories that adults who saw specters when they were children no longer have the ability to do so as they grow older. Children seem to lose their imaginary friends. A woman I knew who had regular visits from her deceased grandfather no longer saw him after a certain birthday. (By the way, she didn't know it was her dead grandfather until she saw a picture of him in an old family album and learned who he was; he had died years before she was born.)

Some people say children don't yet know that they're not supposed to see the dead. Then as they get older and they learn that "there's no such thing as ghosts," or that what they saw "must have just been their imagination," they lose the ability to see beyond the physical. I'm not sure what the reason is, although it seems that some people never lose that ability. Thus we have mediums, psychics, and those that are considered to be crazy. 

I believe in ghosts and I believe in mediums and psychics, so I must fall into the last category. Crazy. But I kinda like it here. 

At any event, my oldest grandson, like his mother, sees ghosts. I guess I shouldn't be surprised; it does seem to run in this family. He used to talk about who and what he saw more often; I can't decide if these conversations are becoming less frequent because he is beginning to realize that others don't see the same thing he does, or if it's because he's actually outgrowing the ability to do so, the way so many people do. But he did give me one last ghost story. a year or two ago.

Jim and I decided to redo our kitchen. Our house was built in 1961 and the kitchen was original to first construction. It was tired and worn and totally bedraggled in some areas, so after my sister and her husband renovated their kitchen, we decided to follow suit. The process took several weeks (that's a LOT of frozen dinners and take-out, by the way) but it was so worth it. Our beautiful new cabinets gleamed and the floor no longer looked like 1960's linoleum with many decades' worth of ground-in stains and marks.

Shortly after it was finished, I was standing in that kitchen when my grandson came to me and said, "Who lived here before we did?"

I was surprised by the question. "An older couple," I said. "They retired and decided to move back to the East coast because that's where they were from originally and they wanted to be close to their families."
 

He thought about that, and then he said, "They're dead."

That made me just a little uneasy. "Well, I guess they could be," I answered. "They were a bit older when we bought this house from them."

He nodded. "They're dead," he said again. And then he turned and started heading back to his bedroom.

"Did you see them?" I called after him.

But he didn't answer.

For me, he didn't have to. Yes, I'm pretty sure he did see them. Probably even spoke with them since he knew who they were. After all, they had lived in this house since it was built and were very proud of it as it was. I'm sure they wanted to find out what was going on, and who better to speak with than the child who could have that conversation with them? I hope they liked what they saw when the renovation was completed. 

I think they probably did, because my grandson never mentioned them again.

The Last Ghost of Summer

     

So one last ghost story from this past summer season.

Last September, Jim and I went to Mackinac Island with two other couples. We had never been there before, and had always wanted to see this interesting island that didn't allow motor vehicles and promised all sorts of interesting sites to visit.

We weren't disappointed. We arrived by ferry from the mainland, and spent hours on our self-guided walk, checking out Fort Mackinac, wandering through the historic cemetery, enjoying the spectacular water views, and dodging bicycles as well as horse-drawn carriages on the paved streets. Mackinac Island is an amazing place.

We only had the one day visit (on a round-trip ferry ticket) and the day we chose to visit was hot. I mean HOT. After hours of walking around with occasional stops to rest and frequent sips from our water bottles, we eventually decided it was time to get lunch in an air-conditioned restaurant. Now, the main street there is a tourist hot spot with souvenir shops, candy stores featuring Mackinac Island Fudge, ice cream venues, hotels, and eateries. After some speculation, we wound up in a hotel restaurant and amazingly got a table for six after a fairly short wait. The serving staff was friendly, the food was good, and -very important- the room was wonderfully cool.

After our meal, we readied ourselves to walk back out into that fiery hot sunlight, and this included a quick stop at the restroom. Anyone who has read this blog since its inception knows that I have frequently wondered why ghosts choose to haunt bathrooms. I mean, seriously. If I were a ghost, I don't know that I'd want to hang around the women's room day and night. For what? But then, I'm not a ghost and I don't know how they think -if they think- so I can't explain it.

While I was drying my hands in one of those devices where you put your hands between two blowers and "slowly draw them upwards" as the sign indicates, I turned my head and noticed, for just a flash of a second, that there was a woman to my right who was watching me. I blinked and looked again, and she was gone. That was odd. I know there was only one other person in the lavatory with me, one of my friends, and she was finishing up in a stall. So why did I see a woman standing there, watching me? I thought, that was weird, and went back out to the lobby.

A few moments later, my friend joined the rest of us and before we headed out, she said, "There was a woman in the bathroom." I said, "Really? I thought we were alone." And my friend said, "That kind of woman." And then I knew she meant the dead kind. "I saw her, too," I admitted. "She was just standing there to my right, watching me dry my hands." And my friend said, "Exactly."

I didn't get a long enough glimpse of the lady to describe what she was wearing, although I will say she didn't seem to be dressed in contemporary fashion. My sense of it was that she had on a long dress, and that her hair was done in style that suggested turn-of-the twentieth century.

I might have doubted what I saw if my friend hadn't volunteered seeing the same thing. And if it lends any credence to this story, the friend who also saw this ghost woman was none other than the acclaimed and highly-talented paranormal writer, Terri Reid, herself.

Validation!

The Portable Ghost: Part II

We went to Gettysburg on a Wednesday and drove home from Pennsylvania on Saturday. All day Thursday and Friday, the uneasy sensation in our hotel suite came and went. I spent my time thinking, he's here. No, he isn't. Yes, he is. No he's not. Back and forth as the feeling of being followed around came and went. When Saturday morning finally arrived, I let him know that I was leaving, that he was not to follow me any longer, and that he needed to go back to the battlefield.

But did he listen? HA! I have written ghostly characters in my books that are stubborn and persistent, and I was far from thrilled to find out that they can be like that in real life. I didn't see him again, but I could still feel him around, even back in our own house, a handful of states away from Gettysburg.

Now, I was in the middle of writing Touching Shadow, Stealing Light, book 5 in my series, and having an extra paranormal guest around was distracting, among other things. One day, in desperation, I asked my older daughter if she had seen a Civil War soldier hanging around the house. She said no, she hadn't seen one. That made me feel better, since she has Michael Penfield's ability to see the dead. And some time after that, the sensation of having him lurking about began to abate. I figured he finally left for familiar territory.

But out of curiosity, a month or two later, I asked my daughter point-blank about seeing my soldier. And then she confessed that while she had never seen him, she had certainly felt him around. "Yeah, one time he was in the hall while I was watching TV." My reaction was not what I would call entirely calm. She went on to describe him (rather like Cassie could describe a ghost for Michael that she had never seen - see Haunted, book one of The Bridgeton Park Cemetery Series) for me. "He was a Union soldier, right? And he was wearing a coat. His hair was a little on the long side, but I couldn't see his face because he was wearing a hat." After some discussion about what that hat looked like, I pulled out a picture of General George Custer wearing the slouch hat favored by so many during that war, and she said, "That's it!" She had described my soldier exactly as I had seen him. Then she said, "I knew he was around. He followed me to my friend's house one time." And I said, "What the WHAT?"

She told me her sense of him was that he was just curious about us. I told her my sense of him was that his name was Henry, I had no idea why, and I wondered if he was from Illinois himself. I found myself searching for pictures of ghosts at Gettysburg, and ran across the one that's featured on my Facebook page today. If you've seen the picture, you have a great idea of what my guy looked like, and finding that picture gave me goosebumps. Particularly since Jim and I had spent so much time in that museum. Is that where my ghost and I accidentally forged some kind of freaky connection?

Anyone who has read my blog posts long enough, or who actually knows me, is aware that I was the only one in my immediate family who had never seen a ghost. Ironic, considering I grew up in a haunted house, and spend my time writing ghost stories, but there it is. And I was good with that, really. And then last summer happened, and a trip to a national battlefield changed my life.

After that whole incident, I figured I was good. I had seen my first ghost. I had survived. And I never needed to see one again.

But I guess someone else thought differently - and that's another story...

The Portable Ghost

 

Gettysburg is a place that my husband, Jim, and I have wanted to tour since forever. We read Michael Shaara's Killer Angels back in the '90's, enjoyed the "Gettysburg" movie based on the book, and were enthralled by what my sister and her husband told us about their own visit to the battlefield.

Plus, it's haunted.

Last summer, we had our chance to go, and we took it, using the one free day we had for the visit. In most ways, it didn't disappoint. While the battlefield itself has its museum, its bookstore, its cyclorama, the entire town is so packed with history that living there would be mind-boggling to me. There's no street that wasn't somehow involved in that three-day conflict, and very few areas that didn't see some of the tragedy.

And it's haunted.

We stayed long enough to visit the museum, take in the cyclorama, and then enjoy the bus tour. (Did you know that the guides on the bus tour must be certified in their knowledge of the battle? Our guide was impressive, to put it mildly.) Then we had dinner and drove back to Hershey, where the rest of our family was enjoying the water- and amusement parks.

That night, I couldn't sleep. Sometimes that happens: I'll be tired enough, but as soon as I lie down and pull up the covers, my eyes open up again and the feeling of sleepiness departs for a few hours. So as I always do, I went out into the other room, put on a lamp, and read for about two hours. I decided at that point that I should go to bed and get what rest I could because the next day was going to be a busy one. I'll state here that I was feeling uneasy, had been feeling that way since arriving from the battlefield, but I was doing my best to ignore it. I turned off the light, went into the bathroom, and then came back out into the darkness of the bedroom.

Where I almost had a heart attack. As I passed the closet area on the way to bed, I caught a glimpse of a union soldier standing just to my left. He was in full uniform, possibly even had a long blue coat on over his blue trousers, and he definitely was wearing a hat. More than that I couldn't tell you, because I stopped looking! I pretended that he wasn't there, went to bed, and closed my eyes, eventually falling asleep.

The morning was bright and sunny, like an August morning should be, and I thought about seeing that soldier standing there, trying at the same time to make the memory a distant thing. Or part of my imagination. But that wasn't happening. There was now an uneasiness in our hotel room, much like the uneasiness I had sensed all over Gettysburg, and I knew my visitor had chosen to stay.

I did tell Jim about what I had seen. He took my word for it, but didn't say much else. At least he never laughs at me! Then I did what I've been told (and what the characters in my Bridgeton Park Cemetery series have been told) to do: I asked him to leave.

I asked him several times. After a while, a sense of calm came back to the room and I felt better. The Union soldier had undoubtedly gone back to Gettysburg and things were back to normal.

But I was wrong. 

Read the rest of the story right here, next week!

The World is a Scary Place-Stories As Coping Mechanism

Years ago when Stephen King released his non-fiction book Danse Macabre, he spent some time on the topic of xenophobia and how a rise or fall in the popularity of horror films could be related to uneasiness within the nation. He correlated the number of monster and alien horror movies to the Cold War and the USA's citizenry dealing with such frightening concepts as bombs, possible Communist attacks, and the during- and after-effects of McCarthyism. Interestingly enough, the fear factor in the scary movies being released as entertainment (and what King considered to be a pressure-relief valve in troubled times) was two-fold: sometimes the monsters came from outside of our world, and just as (or more) horrifying, sometimes they came from within our own environment. For every alien attack on the Earth, there was another monster that was bred from radiation or other catalyst that originated on our own planet.

We're only two weeks past Halloween, and deep into the season of short days and long, dark nights, so perhaps it isn't fair to lay the uptick in horror movies being released during this time at the feet of our most recent election and attendant campaign season. Perhaps. The past decade, at least, and maybe longer than that, has seen a decided rise in horror stories, and not just in the movies. Stephen King first came to national attention in the '70's, and along with him were Clive Barker, Dean Koontz, and (including him because I must) John Saul. Since the '70's, more writers have been taking on the topics of monsters as well as the supernatural. Vampire popularity is a sine wave, rising and falling but never quite going away altogether. Then there are the zombies, the werewolves, and thanks to M. Night Shyamalan who reintroduced the ghost story with The Sixth Sense, spirits, vengeful and otherwise, as well as demons, are a mainstay.

I know these are uneasy times on the home front (not to mention the rest of the global community) and so in light of King's observations, our current cornucopia of not only horror movies, but TV shows, books, and graphic novels is no surprise.

But I would venture to throw in a little bit of hope. With the onslaught of scary movies has also been a rise in the number of superhero flicks. The amount of hope generated by beings who have superpowers and use them to protect us mere mortals is both satisfying and a relief. Maybe as great a pressure-relief valve as the horror movies that give us a basically safe place to deal with fear.

These are unsettling times and it will be interesting to see what kinds of stories result from this uneasiness. I'll be looking forward to the ghost stories -but I'll also be looking forward to the superheroes. (And not just because the guys are always so hot!) While the ghost stories give me a place to deal with fear, the superheroes give me hope and usually, a bunch of laughs, too. We all cope the best way we know how. Ghosts and superheroes? I'm there.

Comfortable With the Dead?

 

One week ago was Halloween, and six days ago was All Saints' Day, or, in Mexico, The Day of the Dead. Jim and I are currently taking conversational Spanish classes, and our instructor, a very fun and funny gentleman named Rene, talked about The Day of the Dead a little bit in class. I've seen pictures of it and it's been featured in movies, but I don't know very much about it.

I know that Japanese culture also has its particular time to honor ancestors who have gone before, although the Obon festival lasts more than one day and usually happens in July or August.

Both traditions include visiting the cemetery and bringing offerings to relatives who no longer walk the earth. Sometimes meals are eaten there. The grave sites are also spruced up during the celebration.

And all of this got me thinking - are people of other cultures on to something that our western culture used to have but somehow lost? A little over a hundred years ago, people in this country just seemed more, well, "used to" the concept of death. Dead relatives were waked in their own homes. Portraits were taken, sometimes posing those no longer alive next to their living, breathing family members. Nowadays, portraits like that disturb the heck out of us - I admit it. Memento Mori portraits are something I generally avoid unless I'm being macabre or have a reason to look at them. But why is that?

We have separated ourselves from the idea of death to the point where I think our culture is obsessed with youth and the idea of living forever. We kind of ignore the fact that all of us are going to go at some point or other, and focusing on that is considered maudlin or depressing or any number of things, none of which are very good. Stephen King once joked about how separated we have become from death and how we can remedy that by suggesting field trips to an undertaker, rather like a fast food outing, where children could learn about what happens after death. He added in his typical dark humor that the highlight of the trip would be "the viewing of the McCorpse."

I went to my first wake when I was about seven and I was so overwhelmed (and not in a good way) by viewing the body up close and personally that I needed weeks to process the vision out of my head. I wasn't scared the way I was when I watched a horror movie. And I wasn't sad because I didn't know the person except by name. But the glimpse of a dead body in a casket stayed with me for a very long time and even years later just the sight of a casket, even closed, would bring everything back to me in unhappy fashion. I wonder if kids growing up with their great-grandparents being waked in their own homes didn't have a better handle on the reality of death.

I write about dead people a lot. It's my job and one I generally enjoy doing. On the other hand, writing what I do forces me to focus on dying, death, all attendant procedures and props (like wakes, funerals, gravestones, and the like) and what may (or may not) happen after one has shuffled off Shakespeare's mortal coil. And sometimes I'm fine with it, and sometimes, being a product of my culture, I become depressed.

But in the end, death is just another part of life, right? Someone else's passing, our own - no one gets out of here alive, as they say. I don't know if I can pull off Robert Louis Stevenson's "Glad did I live and gladly die," but I sure hope to exit in peace and with grace.