Satan in the Sewing Room

Okay so the title is a little dramatic, with just a touch of melodrama. But this is another true life ghost story I have gathered here for your consideration. I have no way of verifying these stories, and honestly I don’t really want to have a firsthand experience with the dark and scary, but I love to hear about the tales. And honestly they don’t keep me up at night, still I’m not ready to go out and become a paranormal investigator.

I had the pleasant experience of meeting Deb and her husband at my book signing for Shepherd’s Fall at Comics and Paperback Plus in Palmyra last Saturday. Deb wanted a signed copy of my book and then explained to me that her and her husband lived in a haunted house.

At first I wasn’t sure if she was kidding me, but her husband stood there nodding his head and explaining that although he could not see them like his wife, their house was in fact haunted. He went on to tell me that light bulbs burned out on a regular basis in several rooms. Sometimes only lasting a few weeks.

I guess I’m the eternal skeptic, because at that point I’m considering bad wiring. But then he also said that several of their children and friends of the family had experienced and seen the spirits as well.
One of the most disturbing tales involved the sewing room. Deb said that when she first set up the room, she couldn’t spend very long in the space. She felt like a current ran through her body and her stomach grew upset. She also had the sensation of being watched.

Later when she had a carpenter in to replace the windows, his assistant said he didn’t feel good when he was working in that room The carpenter finished the windows, but afterward told Deb that he felt like he wasn’t alone; there was someone in there who didn’t want him there.
Deb’s children also would not go in that room when they were little. They told her that a bad man was in there and they didn’t like to play in there.

For a long time Deb was uncomfortable with that spirit, until she learned from watching Sylvia Browne that she could tell the life-challenged spirits it was her house and if they wouldn’t live in harmony with the living they had to leave. She said after saying that to the dark, shadowy spirit in the sewing room, she no longer got the sick feeling in there.

Apparently Deb’s house is home to many spirits. One night while she was washing dishes she saw the reflection in the dark window above the sink of a man in a white hooded robe with gold trim walking across the kitchen behind her. When she turned to look, he had vanished.
She said by the time this had happened she was no longer afraid of the spirits.

She has also seen the ghost of a red cat fighting and playing with her other two living cats. Animal ghosts are something I had never really heard about until recently, but apparently it is not that uncommon. I wonder if you kill a mouse in a trap if you get a ghost mouse running around your house?

Deb is very sensitive to these things, but other visitors including one of her daughter’s friends have seen and heard the spirits, too. One girl who was friends with her daughter tried sleeping in Deb’s son’s room when she spent the night, because he was off in college. She was in his bed ready to fall asleep when a woman stood at the foot of the bed and told her to get out because she wasn’t Brad. Deb found the girl sleeping on the couch in the living room the next morning.
She would have found me sleeping in my car, but whatever.

Apparently Deb and her husband have found peace living with the multiple spirits in their home. They have lived there for a long time, over twenty years. And it looks like the spirits who inhabit their house have no intention of hurting them or leaving. Deb has grown used to them so she has no plans to send them away. I guess they buy their light bulbs in bulk.

So Much Fun, So Little Time

Life is racing along like a bullet train on crack. Okay, technically I don’t think drugs affect mechanical devices, but you get the idea.

I have been busy. Two weeks ago I had my launch party for Shepherd’s Fall. Thank you to everyone who attended, I am so grateful for your support. Last weekend I participated in an author panel with Cate Masters, Larry Kerr, Jennifer Harlow, Regge Episale, and Dennis Royer at Supernatural Saturday sponsored by the Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop and had a blast.

To top it off, I am working on the final draft of my first book in a new mystery series. More on that later. So, yeah I’m having more fun than circus clown on… well you know what I mean.

All Work And No Play

In honor of father’s day I just wanted to reflect on good dads and bad dads in fiction. Of course we all remember that Jack Torrance from The Shining was not exactly father of year. I don’t think I will ever forget the scenes of him chasing Danny through that haunted hotel.
And then on the good side there was… hmmm. I’m trying to come up with an exemplary father. Of course Harry Potter’s was dead, and Dorothy’s was dead, and Luke’s was thought dead, but turned out to be Darth, but in the end he turned out okay, I guess. Hercules had Zeus, and he was satisfactory in the father department, but he could be fairly tough. There was Pa in the Waltons and Pa on Little House on the Prairie, but I’m hard pressed to come up with a whole baseball team of fine fictitious dads.

Why is it so many dad’s are out of the picture in popular fiction?

I’m sure there are more examples in fiction; they just aren’t coming to mind. Because I have a great dad in real life, I guess I never thought about it before.

So on this Father’s day I want to say thanks to all the great real and fictitious dads. We don’t intend to take you for granted, but when you do your job well, we sometimes fail to remember.

Can you come up with any great dads in fiction?

The Eye of Sauron

With heartfelt apologies to J. R. R. Tolkien I titled my current post. After hearing this latest tale of a supernatural encounter, I had no choice.

Now anyone who knows me, understands I like chilling tales, at least from the safe distance of my imagination, but this story actually disturbed me.
I recently met a guy named Bob who sold me my new cell phone. In the course of him showing me how to use the cool device we started talking about the web, and I showed him my book trailer for Shepherd’s Fall. (I never miss an opportunity to hand out a bookmark or mention my novel. And why not? It took ten years of pounding away at the keyboard to get to this point, so I promote it everywhere I go.)

Anyway I digress. When Bob learned that I write ghost stories, you guessed it, he had one to tell me. And boy was this one a killer.
As a teenager, Bob awoke one night to discover a little girl standing next to his bed sobbing. The fact that he could see through her sent him crabbing backward and slamming into the wall his bed was up against. The girl vanished, and Bob spent a sleepless night.

Over the next few years he saw the girl several times--sometimes her entire figure, other times just a suggestion of body.

Once, a visiting friend took a break from playing video games and went downstairs to the kitchen in the middle of the night. He saw the ghostly girl standing facing the refrigerator. The friend didn’t want her to turn around and see him, so he crept back up to Bob’s room without a snack.
Bob has no idea who the girl is. His family built the home, so it is not like she had lived in it before she became a life-challenged entity.

Bad enough to have one ghost in the house, his father had an even stranger experience. This is the one I find most disturbing.

On the night his father got baptized as a Christian, he came home and saw a giant red eye staring in a window to the master bedroom on the second floor. Angered by the apparition, Bob’s dad charged outside to the window in question and searched for the specter. This to me seemed like one of those bad moves in a horror movie, but then again, this part scares me.
He didn’t see it, but he walked around the yard commanding the spirit in the name of Christ to leave the house, because it was protected by God. This was several years ago and things have quieted down since.

I’m not sure why I find the big red eye more disturbing than other hauntings, but I do, maybe because it reminds me of the red pig eyes in the Amityville Horror.

Luckily Bob and his family haven’t experienced any paranormal events for some time, and he is comfortable in the home. I think I would sleep with one eye open, but that’s just me.

Five Stone Bookstore, A New Independent Bookstore

For the last few months something was missing in our small town. Every time I went to the mall, I would sink into melancholy. It wasn’t hard to understand the reason. Walden Books, the only bookstore in our local town, had gone under.

As an avid reader, and writer, I felt an overwhelming sense of loss. Over the years I had spent a great deal of time and no small amount of money in that store.

I must admit that when I dreamed of being a published author it was in that store that I imagined seeing my books on the shelf. When my first novel Shepherd’s Fall was published in April the fact there was no local store in our town was a cause for slight disappointment.

But nature abhors a vacuum, or in this case business partners Chuck Garman and Bryan Foster realized that no town is complete without a local bookstore.

So I was thrilled to stop in and buy a few books yesterday at the grand opening of Five Stone Bookstore in the Lebanon Valley Mall. This community-minded, family-oriented, family-focused bookstore has a cool mix of books and games, with a section devoted to the local libraries to support their (book) sales throughout the year.

It is a warm, fun, friendly place. I even ended up buying a set of zombie dice after playing a game of it with Bryan. Any game with zombies and brains, and I’m there. Although not to worry, it is a fun dice game with no gore involved.

I encourage anyone in the local area to check out this new store, buy a few books, and try some of the games that the staff is willing to demonstrate. Once again another independent bookstore rises up, creating a warm community for readers and writers. I look forward to seeing Shepherd’s Fall on their shelves. Sometime dreams do come true.

The Joy of Holding My First Novel

Paperback:ISBN 978-0-9852490-0-7
Kindle: ASIN: B007WO1YXY
epub: 978-0985249021

It’s not quite the same magnitude as holding my son in my arms for the first time, but it’s still a rush. I’m taking a break from writing about other people’s true ghost stories, and my current work in progress (another dark tale of supernatural suspense,) to just say, wow! I’m sitting here in my office holding a copy of my first novel Shepherd’s Fall. It is a strange and wonderful sensation holding a book that contains my novel.

For me, the story is always alive in my mind, and to actually hold a physical manifestation of those fictitious events in my hands is odd and sometimes still catches me by surprise.

My son just turned twenty-one, and as a parent it is always amazing to watch your children grow into independent adults that are making their way out into the world to create their own lives. So it is strange to think of my book as taking a similar journey and now it is also going forth into the world.

While I will always be my son’s father, and my book’s author, they will both live on beyond me. How wonderful.

The Helping Hand

I find that many of the ghost stories passed on to me are about seeing spectral apparitions or hearing strange unexplainable noises. However this story is different. In this case a family actually had an intelligent response from their ghost.

            The Carters, (again a fictitious name in order to protect the privacy of the innocent. sheesh.) bought an old house in Horsham Pennsylvania that dated back to the revolutionary war period.

            The family fell in love with the home from the first visit, despite the fact that it required a great deal of renovation. Up for the challenge, they purchased the house, moved in, and proceeded to commence with the improvements.

            Cue the eerie music; this is when the strangeness began. When the dad, Chuck, (Not his real name, but sounds cool like Chuck Norris.) would start working on a project he would lose tools. This happened on several occasions where he would set down a hammer, screwdriver, or saw, return to use it later and not be able to find it.

            On one occasion he lined a row of nails up on a ceiling beam so he could work his way along it nailing up a board in the ceiling. Before he could climb the ladder with the board, each of the nails, one at a time, fell off the beam and landed standing straight up on the floor.

            The spirit in the house seemed to delight in making it hard on the Carters to change or modify the house.

            After a few months of this, Chuck and his wife were frustrated. So Chuck decided to appeal directly to the presence in the house. He felt foolish, but he stood in their living room and explained to the empty space around him that they loved the house and wanted to take care of it.

            That ended the disturbances, at least the disruptive ones. Going forward Chuck found all his missing tools. It also seemed like the spirit now wanted to aid in the houses upkeep. On several occasions when Chuck required a certain length of wood he would find pieces that remarkably were an exact fit.

            Coincidence or a spectral helping hand?  I’m not sure, but at any rate the Carters were able to remodel the home that both they and their ghost shared a fondness for.