An Old-Fashioned Ghost Story

I hate to admit it, but as a child, I was a reluctant reader. Truthfully, I was a reluctant everything, daydreaming being my favorite pastime. But reading was far down on my list of favorite things to do. I’ve come to discover as an adult that it wasn’t the reading itself that turned me away, but the lack of material that interested me.

When I was in fifth grade my school library owned a book called The Thing at the Foot of the Bed and Other Stories by Maria Leach. If you could find the library index card from that year, you’d probably see my name (in pathetic penmanship) written a dozen times. I couldn’t get enough of it. I searched for similar books, but they didn’t exist. At least not at my school. And the public library was just as bad. There were a few ghost story collections in the adult section, including a popular Alfred Hitchcock compilation of stories too scary for TV. I read them all several times.

Growing up with the classic Universal Studios monsters, I continually thirsted for horror. I literally thrived on it, even though my teachers and family felt it was an unhealthy obsession. “Have you tried Nancy Drew? Mary Poppins?” Of course not. I was a reluctant reader, remember?

It wasn’t until I was twenty-years-old that an author heard my prayers. That’s the year Carrie was released. God bless Stephen King! He launched a whole trend of genre horror that kept me up until 2:00 am on most nights of the week, then had me sneaking a book during my lunch break the next day — wolfing down my meal, but digesting the twisted plots and characters spelled out before me. It was nirvana.

I realize now that had Robert Stine and his Goosebumps series been around when I was a child, I wouldn’t have been labeled a reluctant reader. He gave elementary and middle-grade kids of the 1990s what scores of us thirsted for in the 1960s. And though many of his stories were just Twilight Zone clones, it was still a brilliant move, launching a new generation of unhealthy reading. I was most definitely born too early.

My genetic predisposition for horror never faded. I’m still early in line when a first rate horror film hits the theaters (okay, the second rate films too), and a great ghost story will still chill my spine. I guess that’s why the majority of books and stories I write include monsters, ghosts or the supernatural in some form. Heck, even my latest picture book has a monstrous theme. So is it any surprise that I’d include an old-fashioned ghost story in my Fortune Tellers Club series? And though it’s true that book five, Hand of Fate, was a ghost story as well, it dealt mostly with fate. My latest edition, The Ghost of Shady Lane, is a throwback to my childhood days of haunted houses and rattling chains. And my thirst for more.

The Ghost of Shady Lane finds Anne researching “Boogerman’s House,” the local haunted mansion. The lady of the house hanged herself there one-hundred years prior, and over time it had become difficult to separate fact from fiction. The Fortune Tellers Club not only delves into the legends, but uncovers a horrific secret kept hidden those many years. A ghostly twist, you might say.

The Ghost of Shady Lane may not curl your hair or shiver your toes, but I bet it’ll have you sleeping with the lights on. And we all know how much fun that is. Or at least it is for me. Happy hauntings.