Day 5: Haunted Holland

Note: I begged Jennifer Graham, my awesome photographer friend, to let me borrow some of her famed cemetery photos for this post. All photographs are copyrighted. Please do not use without permission. I've included Jennifer's contact information at the bottom. I highly recommend liking her White Rabbit Creative Facebook page.    

When my oldest child was a toddler, we lived for a year in the Netherlands. Our neighbors joked that we inhabited the oddest house in all of Holland.  It was a brick row house that was built in the 1920s and ran eight meters across the front, like its normal row mates, but shrank to only one meter in the back—enough for a single door. When the rental agent showed it to us, we immediately fell in love with the oddball home and nicknamed it “The Wedge.” We signed the lease and drove out to IKEA to furnish our beloved wedge with modern Swedish decor. 

Soon, I became friends with our most interesting neighbor, an astrological adviser. Given her profession, I assumed that she was open-minded to the supernatural. I saw no reason not to ask her if she had noticed any weird occurrences at The Wedge or if she had heard stories of it being haunted. She looked at me, shocked, and said, “There are no haunted houses in Netherlands.” No haunted houses in Netherlands? My foot! I’m from the South. Everything is haunted (“got haints”). No amount of modern, minimalist furniture can excise persistent ghosts from the past.

The Wedge didn't possess bad energy. In fact, it was a sunny, cheery place.   My toddler son would giggle, wave, and carry on a delightful conversation in babble to an invisible person on the balcony.  Often I would return to the states and, alone at The Wedge, my husband would work late into the night.  He told me stories of how he had locked the balcony door, only to find it open again.  Once he looked into the mirror and saw the reflection of a man standing behind him. I guess my most interesting experience was waking up in the night to see a tall, reed-like man standing in our bedroom, wearing a dull 1940s suit, smoking a cigarette, and peering out the window.  He looked as if he had been drawn in charcoal.

I have since learned that these grayish, sketch-like apparitions are a particular classification of ghosts.  I understand that they can have yellow eyes. Luckily, I didn't get to see my night visitor’s glowing orbs.  

These were just isolated incidents in our time in The Wedge. I still remember the home with tenderness and warmth. Maybe it was so lovely there that its former inhabitant didn't want to leave.

Question: Have you ever had a supernatural encounter while traveling? If so, please share your story.

You can see more of Jennifer Graham’s work at the White Rabbit Creative photography website, Etsy, Twitter or Facebook. 

Susanna Ives is a mommy and romance writer living in Atlanta. Her upcoming book Wicked Little Secrets will be available on December 3^rd.  You can learn more about her books at www.susannaives.com, Twitter, and Facebook. 

Tag! Laura, you're next!

Day 6: My Sister's Story by Maryanne Stahl

This is my sister’s story.

My youngest sister lives on a hill where Indians once roamed, near the Long Island Sound.  Incredibly resourceful and blessed with wonderful taste, she has transformed what was a rather ordinary ranch-style house into a lovely, unique home that is open and bright, filled with vintage treasures.  In this house she has raised four sweet sons, three dogs, five or six or seven cats, four rabbits, several lizards, and some fish.  From her gardens the scents of lavender and roses mingle with the sea breeze. A haven, one would think.  And yet.

She didn’t notice anything when they first moved in. Life was busy and the signs were gradual. Her middle boys, twins, had trouble going to sleep at night.  They heard whispers in their ears, they said.  But what child liked going to bed when there were video games to be played and frogs in the yard to be caught?  “I hear whispers” seemed no more alarming than “I need a glass of water.”  Go to sleep, my sister would say.  Often, the boys would pile together into one bed.

“Shut the closet door,” they would plead when she bid them good-night, and she would do so. After all, she understood how creatures could seem to lurk in closets; at the least, shadows could be cast.  But the boys told her it was more than that.  Something bad was in there.  Or someone. The whisperer came from there, they were sure of it.

So the closet was kept shut.  And some nights, that was enough,

But the room was cold, the coldest in the house, no matter what window caulking was done or heat adjustments were made. The twins’ room was icy.  So the boys would hunker down under the blankets,  covering their ears, whispering to each other to keep from hearing other, creepier sounds.

And so time passed and the twins grew.  They did their best to ignore the whispers by playing music or the television.  They slept in their own beds now, but still piled on the blankets. Sometimes, the room was quiet for weeks.  They got to high school, grew tall, played sports.  They had a dog who would guard the house, barking when anyone came up the path, fearless, apparently, except where their room was concerned.  She refused to enter it.

One night when the boys were about eighteen, one of them was away, so the other slept alone in the room.  He didn’t hear anything as he began to drift off, but before long he sensed something: someone else was there in the room with him.  He felt someone near. Had his brother returned? He opened his eyes.

At the foot of his bed, bending, looming over him, was a huge, dark figure—with burning red eyes.  The kid screamed , leapt from his bed and ran to his parents’ room, where he spent the rest of the night, half ashamed, at age 18, to have acted in a way that was not at all usual for him, half still frightened out of his wits.

Shortly after that everyone started hearing the whispering. It moved between the twins’ room and just outside their door, in the hall.  It said my sister’s name one night, as clear as if she’d said it aloud herself, and she was not the only one who heard it.

For years my sister had tried not to upset the presence, whatever it was, but enough was enough.  It had been terrorizing her sons for too long and her youngest son was afraid it would one day haunt his room too. One day when no one else was home, my sister entered the twins’ room and spoke to whomever or whatever was scaring her family. She asked it to stop. She insisted. It was time for it to go. And then she lit a bundle of sage the size of her arm and spent an hour cleansing the room from bed corner to closet corner.

That was about a year ago and the presence has not made itself known since. Of course, both boys are out of the house now—one at college, one in the navy.  If the same entity is still around, it is manifesting itself differently. But that is a story for another day.

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Maryanne Stahl is the author of the novels Forgive the Moon and The Opposite Shore, and the chapbook Electric Urgency.

Tag, Susan is next.  Boo!

Day 7: The Postmaster by Ann Hogsett

Of all the more colorful ghosts in my small West Virginia hometown—the woman who shot her mother, the man who killed one, or was it both, of his parents with an axe—my phantom, the one who came calling that night in Apple Alley, was merely the Postmaster. Unremarkable in life. Doggedly persistent in death. Vengeful to the depths of his sorry soul.

We should never assume that the unpretentious apparition is not the one to be reckoned with. A ghost is a ghost is a ghost.

The Postmaster lived with Mrs. Postmaster, who was also The Postmistress, in a pretty cottage on the main street of town. Whatever else might have gone awry in his life, the house must have been his refuge, his satisfaction, his place of pride. At some point he told someone—someone who remembered and entered it into the saga of the town—that he was NEVER going to leave that house.

Then he died. There was a funeral. There was a burial. After that, he headed on home. His wife was still there for company but then she died, too. And when they drove her over to the IOOF cemetery, she stayed where she was planted. The Postmaster had the house all to himself.

For awhile.

Then an enterprising young couple with two lovely children and a cat named Olive Jones converted it into a bed and breakfast. Now there were guests. Things got crowded. And that’s when we showed up—for a class reunion weekend—in the room at the top of the stairs under the peak of the single gable, in the old bed that “came with the house” courtesy of the man who still preferred to sleep there. Alone.

They told us about their ghost. I knew him by name, of course. Remembered his face and his wife’s, both of them staid and efficient, managing our mail. The young innkeepers were quite merry about how he was still around. He was good for business now. The frisson of dread was entertaining at breakfast.

3 o’clock in the morning? No.

I remember moonlight filtered through lace. The silence everywhere. City people forget how still the night world can be in a lightly inhabited town. Still, still, still. Except, of course, for the sound of footsteps on the stair. Slow. Heavy. Closer and closer, as I rifled my mind for a reasonable explanation. Here’s what I came up with: The Postmaster is now standing right outside the bedroom door. 

I slipped out of bed, shivering in the sultry August dark. I stopped at the door. Now what? We were facing each other with two inches of old oak between us. I put my palm on the wood. He laid his on the other side. Palm to palm, me and The Postmaster’s ghost. I know this because my sweaty hand bonded to the door as flesh always does when it touches frozen iron. And I know because our minds froze together, too, and he showed me exactly what it was like to be dead.

It was not what I expected. 

Ghosts are realer than you. Truer than a Monday. More forever than a Sunday afternoon. 

And here. We are right here.

(Tag, Maryanne Stahl, you're next!)

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Ann Hogsett is a mom, wife, and novelist who lives ten yards -- ten! -- from the shores of Lake Erie, which she describes as "beautiful, compelling, threatening, raging by turns. Always impossible to ignore." You can share her adventures at her blog: Lake E.

Day 8: Huggin' Molly by Tina Whittle

Image courtesy of adamr / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Every community has its local legend, and my small hometown in Middle Georgia is no exception. Cochran has always been a sleepy little farming community, dotted with cotton fields and catfish ponds. When I was growing up, the railroad cut through the swamp behind my house. On summer nights I’d hear its keening wail and imagine it was some mysterious animal.

I wasn’t the only one to mythologize the midnight train. My friends and I made up stories about it— where was it going? where had it been? who rode those rails through the humid night, anonymous behind the glass and steel?—and imagined a life beyond the red clay ditches. Perhaps this was the reason for the legend that sprung up about the railroad tracks. Perhaps our parents and grandparents sensed the lure of the outbound train, headed for exotic new horizons. Perhaps it was they who first started the stories of Huggin’ Molly. Or perhaps her story really is true, and having passed from mouth to mouth down the railroad line, has become legend.

Cochran isn't the only Southern town who knows of her—there's a town in Alabama that has a Huggin' Molly cafe, and though they claim the legend is unique to that area, it's not. Their Molly is more benevolent than Georgia's version. A hug from their Molly is disturbing, but not deadly, as people who claim to have experienced her embrace will tell you. Cold and unpleasant, they say. Chilled them right to the bone, they say.

Our Molly, however...nobody ever made it out of our Molly's arms to tell the tale.

All I know is this: on moonless nights, when the train would come through, if you stood close to the tracks you could hear her crying for her lost lover. Her sobbing would mix with the train whistle. And then you’d better hide. You’d better move as far away from those tracks as you could get. Because even though Huggin’ Molly looked like any other woman, she always wore mourning clothes topped with a long black veil—and a sailor hat. And she had arms so long that she would snatch you right up off the side of the road, snatch you into her relentless embrace, snatch you onto the midnight train. And your scream would mingle with the banshee whistle and you’d be taken away down the tracks, never to be seen again.

I never saw Huggin’ Molly. But I cannot hear a train whistle without feeling a shiver race down my spine. Without taking a step backwards. Without imagining those long, long arms. 

(This post first published at Little Miss Train Wreck, a blog of fashion, book reviews, and author interviews)

TAG, Ann Hogsett! You're up next!

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Tina Whittle is a mystery writer living and working in the Georgia Lowcountry. Her current novel, Blood, Ash, and Bone — the third in the Tai Randolph/Trey Seaver series — is available now.

Visit www.tinawhittle.com to learn more.

Day 9: The Living House

As promised, here with are, in full Halloween paraphernalia, (well, I've got chocolate) starting our Nine Days to Halloween True Story Blog Series.

Unlike my Mojito sisters who all have a hard time coming up with more than one true ghost stories, I've got a pumpkin's head full of them right here.

That's because I lived in a very, very creepy house, in a very, very creepy neighborhood.  This is coming from a chick who is living right now in the #1 haunted city of all the United States, Savannah, GA.

No, this house I'm talking about wasn't in Savannah: I think it would have been too creepy for all these good meaning pirates, black cats, and fair maidens dwelling in these lovely Victorian homes.  This house was the thug of haunted places: think Amityville.  Think The Omen.  The kind of house that plays with your head, making you think at first you're a little tired, maybe, that maybe you really did leave the back door open four times in the span of one hour, and no it didn't really shut in your face when you went to lock it again for the fifth: surely it was the wind!  It was the kind of house that wants to terrify you slowly with sudden drops in temperatures, and a strange kind of energy that makes you feel like you're being watched and not in a good way; a house with creaky ceilings, missing items, and electricity gone haywire, voices of weeping women floating in as if from a radio hidden somewhere, playing at very low volume.  The kind of house that wants to kill you like a frog in a boiling pot.

When we first moved into this house I was a tween.  My family had just spent a year living in a condo in bustling uptown New York, but my father was seduced by the idea of realizing the American dream: a house in a quiet neighborhood with plenty of room for the kids to grow and play and sprawl, with so much land in the backyard and even a basketball hoop in the front.

We should have been tipped off to the weirdness by the address: 39-1/2.  We laughed about it.  Ha ha, these crazy Americans.  It became less funny when we realized that the guy who owned the original lot, the guy who now lived in #39 was a widower, a married widower, married, that is, for the seventh time.  Wife #7 was dying of cancer, by the way.

On the other side of the fence, in house #40, our neighbor was a very nice family: three kids, a man and his wife.  Except his wife died only after a few months after we moved in.  She drowned in her own swimming pool.  Not funny: the father, owner of #40, married again not six months later, and his brand new wife was, you guessed it, very, very pregnant.   A year later, however: so sorry.  Father also dies.  Drowned.

As for our house: all we knew about the previous owner was that he was an "Arab" (real estate lady's words).  His son, it came out once, long after my dad had signed the mortgage, had tried to axe "the Arab" to death.  We could, in fact, still trace the axe mark in the room across the hall from mine, a room we called the yellow room because when we first bought the house, every room was painted a bright pastel color.  Whether there had been any casualties, we could only guess.

What we didn't have to guess was that something was wrong with the neighborhood altogether.  Not only were our friends to the left and to the right of us contaminated with serial death.  We were, like our Amityville friends across the bay, built on Indian burial ground.  I hated walking home from school after dark: it was like I could feel the darkness watching me and hating me.

The worst part was "the howl": it happened exactly at 4:30.  It sounded something between a tortured dog and an agonized human, more like a dog than a human. The howl was so chilling, so painful or angry or...something that it literally chilled the bones to hear it.  It went on for about 30 seconds, long enough for any one unlucky enough to hear it to make us drop our jaw and try to understand :WHAT THE HELL IS THAT, HUH? WHAT IS IT? WHAT THE HELL IS IT?  Then it was gone. And it always sounded like it was coming from everywhere. From the north, from the south, no, no, from there, from there back in the woods! Who knew.

When we asked our neighbors they said they hadn't heard it. Then they heard it and they said it was the woman who was sick of cancer who lived in the house in front of us, from where, I was sure, the howl had not issued.  And why was it always coming at 4:30?

I told my friend at school about it and she thought the story interesting enough to nod. Then one afternoon she came home with me and we played hoops, and I was beating her ass, but she got the basketball and 4:30 ticked in and the howl came.  My friend dropped the ball and began to shake.

"I told you!" I said to her. By  now I was used to it.

"I have to go home now," she said. And she never came to my house again.

As for the house: at night I heard the unmistakable sounds of someone in high heels walking the length of the bedroom a floor above mine.  She'd go to the end of the room, stop, and then walk the length back.  Only problem: there was no floor above mine, only a lot of insulating material, not the kind of place anyone could walk on, let alone in high heels.

The house also had fun playing with electricity: the garage door opened and closed at will.  The lights would turn on and off in different bedrooms, sporadically.  The drier was in the habit of starting a cycle all of its own will.

My father, a skeptic to the end, called an electrician to inspect the house.  "Nothing wrong," said the electrician.  We complained about the garage door opening and closing at all hours of the night.  "It's another garage door opener that's somehow got its signal mixed up," said the pragmatic man.

"But what about the alarm?" my dad inquired.

The alarm had gone off throughout the whole house a few night before the electrician came, setting the whole house a-ringing, tearing us out of bed in the wee hours of the night.  It shut itself off after we had all scurried out of our rooms and met with wide, glassy eyes in the hallway, looking to one another for the next thing to do.

"What alarm?" said the electrician like we were trying to trick him.

"The alarm" my dad pointed impatiently to the windows, where he imagined it would have been installed.

"Sir," said the electrician backing away from my dad, "I've checked your entire system, outside and inside. There is no alarm set up in this house."

Once, after school, as usual we called my mother to pick us up.  She said, "I'm on my way," and hung up. An hour later, she still wasn't there. We decided we could start walking towards home, like we often did, and meet her on the way.  But we went all the way home and Mom hadn't left the house. When we got inside, we found her stomping around, crying, holding her hair and cursing under her breath.

"My car keys," she cried, as soon as we stepped in.  "Did you do a joke on me?" I dropped them right there, right there!" she pointed at her bed.  We (my brother, my sister and myself) all searched the bed, we retraced the steps to the kitchen as we tried to calm her down, to the bathroom, back to the bedroom.  Not trusting my own eyes, I began to feel the whole length of the bed from left to right, then again from right to left. I removed all the pillows and searched again.  No keys.

I went to look for my sister, who was in her bedroom, looking at a creepy doll she kept on the pillows of her bed and, not seeing me there, she asked the doll in all earnestness: "Was it you? Did you eat the keys?"

I left my sister's bedroom and turned back to my mother's bedroom, and there, like a bad joke, the keys of the car sat on the bed, just as my mother said.  I pointed, I said "There!"  My mother looked, her breath failing her.  "I swear," she muttered, "I swear I looked."

She looked that same way another time, too, also in the middle of the night, on a night when my dad was traveling.  She woke us up with a terrified scream that went on and on and on and on.

We ran to her bedroom and found her in bed, all the lights in her room on.

"What happened?"

She was holding her head, looking agape at all the different lamps, her bed lamps, her three way light standing lamp across the room.

"The lights turned on all at once!" she finally gasped.  "All at once. All of them."

They were each on different switches and different systems.

You will hear a lot about this house, especially on Halloween, when I tell you the motherload of all the Ghost Stories of 39-1/2.  But for now, this will do.

Tag, you're it, Tina Whittle.

Laura Valeri is the author of Safe in Your Head (Stephen F. Austin University Press) and The Kind of Things Saints Do (U of Iowa Press) both award winners.  Visit Laura Valeri's blog at www.lauravaleri.com

True Ghost Stories: The MLS Halloween Blog Tag

You've heard of the twelve days of Christmas, the song with the pear trees, the calendar with the chocolate treats, and blah, blah, blah.

Well, it's almost Halloween, and we at the Mojito Literary Society believe that fine traditions start with wise women...us!

We believe that as a citizen of the world, you have a right to be frightened to death, and so, we say, in the spirit of Halloween, the MLS is read to provide to you an opportunity to make you so chilled that you'll want to reach for the nearest mojito, with cranberries and caramel apples at that! (Any recipes, mojito sisters?)

The Mojito Literary Society hereby presents:

THE NINE DAYS TO HALLOWEEN TRUE GHOST STORY BLOG TAG,

wherein

each of us mojito sisters will tell you a story about ghosts and weird phenomena, guaranteed true, 100%, either because one of us was there and experienced it or because it came from the lips of someone we personally know and trust not to bullshit us and try to impress us.

So expect this:

1 True Ghost Story
4 all of 9 days
each story followed by a "TAG YOU'RE IT" to another Mojito Sister

In other words,

WE'RE FIXIN' TO SCARE ALLS Y'ALLS

(That one came from the Savannah Chapter Mojito Sister)

because we at the MLS want to wish

ALL YOUR HALLOWEEN NIGHTMARES COME TRUE

So grab a blanket, a broom, salt, a crucifix, and get ready to read some true stories about those rent-skipping inhabitants of yours' all's abodes: DA GHOSts of Halloween.

Starting tomorrow, October 22, 2013

Love in The Age of Immortality: A review of Will McIntosh's Love Minuse Eighty

Will McIntosh was a psychology professor at Georgia Southern University until recently, when he won a Hugo Award for his novella titled "Bridesicle" (Asimov's 2009).  Then he turned his sights to his lifelong passion, writing, and we are all benefitting for it now with the many books that McIntosh has already written.

"Bridesicle" was a story about dating in a futuristic age where it is possible to revive dead people -- for a lot of money. It is disturbing and touching and, like much of MacIntosh's work, it raises question about our social dynamics and how they might complicate our already complicated personal connections in a not so distant future.

Will McIntosh

McIntosh now churns out books like there is no tomorrow, and so far all of them have been gripping -- and I'm not saying this just because I know him.  It was a humbling experience getting to read McIntosh's work, since I was the tenured fiction professor at Georgia Southern, and he was the aspiring writer who, from time to time, sought me out for advice.  There was a lot of ego swallowing involved. Writers aren't the most generous critics when it comes to their contemporaries, but McIntosh's imagination is so lively and so prophetic, and his stories so full of heart, that it's hard to resist putting down his books.  Moreover, his style of writing is always breezy and efficient: you get just what you need, without fluff or ornaments. He's one of the few writers who are simply just born with the ability to tell a story and to get out of its way.

Love Minus Eighty is yet another complete success.  Based on "Bridesicle," the award winning novella, Love Minus Eighty is a lively story about how looking for love continues to be as messed up, dysfunctional, problematic, and irresistible as it has always been, even in an age when people play with interactive holographic romance games, and, yes, can even take the dating scene to the morgue.

In spite of all the futuristic glamor, the novel really is grounded deeply in the way that people are. The need to find a soul mate, even when, or especially when, the world is collapsing seems to be one of McIntosh's trademark themes. We get to experience what that need would look like if our technology advanced just enough for humanity to cheat death -- at least for a little while.

In McIntosh's near future world, "freezing insurance" is on almost everyone's benefits package, and it will pay to freeze cadavers taken to a facility storage with the possibility of being revived at some point in the future -- but the revival itself is so costly that only the most obscenely rich can afford it.  As in previous stories, McIntosh drives home the problematic rift between social classes, and touches on other very contemporary themes: the voyeuristic culture encouraged by social media; the certain loss of personal privacy; and the dark side of science and technology advancements which, along with  miracles, also bring about more opportunities for exploitation, disconnectedness and dehumanization.

But the dominant theme is a classic one: our very human inability to confront and accept our own mortality.  The super rich will languish in protracted agony just to steal another breath, while those who rely on other's money are willing to sell their hearts and souls just to be revived for only a few minutes.

This basic human fear, the chilling terror of the unknown, is the driving force behind the plot, and it causes characters to act in sometimes abominable, and sometimes saintly ways.   Some of these characters are already trapped in a stasis between life and death, stored in a Cryogenic facility that revives them only for an exclusive, high-browed clientele of unimaginably rich people who can afford to throw millions away for a "bridesicle," a trophy wife who may yet be revived for a last chance at life.  Only the beautiful and the young get to enjoy this special "privilege" but only some actually make it out of the creche and then at the expense of their happiness and freedom.

The premise may seem dreary, but most of the novel is  humorous and light hearted, probably because most of the characters that we follow are so perfectly lovable. My favorite is Veronika: a neurotic, too-smart-for-her-own-good, sassy dating coach who, in spite of having an unparalleled talent for setting up her clients with the loves of their lives,  is completely incapable of getting over her crush with Mr. Wrong. Then there is Lycan, a neuroscientist genius with zero social skills who won't even be allowed the dignity of committing suicide without his employer's interference. And Lorelei, an attention-junky who will go to any lengths to attract more viewers, even breaking up with people she loves.

In the end, this is a story about love, about friendship and about the things most of us would be willing to put ourselves through if we had a chance to take back or make up for our worst mistake.

As with other McIntosh novels, this is a breezy, fast read, the kind of book that you look forward to sneaking away with on your lunch break. And yet the novel leaves you with so much more than just the pleasure of an imaginative and fast-paced story. McIntosh is such an astute observer of human character that you'll feel like he was lurking in your closet, spying on you and on all your best friends when he created these lively and so true-to life characters. Scary. But all in a good way.

And now this novel has been picked up by Warner for a possible movie adaptation.  I can see why: the setting of a futuristic bi-leveled Manhattan connected by a high-speed elevator between the rich people's High Town and the blue-collar Low Town surrounded by the wilderness of abandoned suburbs inhabited by the Raw Lifers, all promise visual candy of the most sophisticated kind.

And just to tantalize you a bit more, here is the trailer for the book, one of the best I've seen yet.  Enjoy.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cRzEB5d1xhc]

Laura Valeri is the author of Safe in Your Head (Stephen F. Austin University Press) and The Kind of Things Saints Do (U of Iowa Press) both award winners.  Visit Laura Valeri's blog at www.lauravaleri.com