Listening For Ghosts

Last weekend I visited a haunted house. I don't mean the commercial kind that springs up in your town before Halloween. This was Selma Mansion, an 18th century house with a long history of unexplained phenomena. In fact, the building's been studied by 3 different paranormal investigative groups.

Last Saturday, to raise funds for restoring and maintaining the old landmark, the Norristown Preservation Society ran historical tours of the place, followed by presentations by the Pennsylvania Underground Paranormal Society (P.U.P.S.).

Now, I admit, I do believe in ghosts, the same way I believe in God and the afterlife and black holes and other things I haven't seen. But I also believe in scientific method and the kind of good deductive reasoning you find in a great murder mystery, so I'm likely one of the biggest skeptics of what constitutes "evidence" of ghosts.

I tend to ignore photos of "orbs" (what looks like bubbles of light). In my experience as an amateur photographer, orbs are always cause by odd light angles and reflective surfaces in just the wrong spot. I was glad to hear P.U.P.S. say they didn't bother with orbs.

They did play some recordings that sounded like wood cracking. Yeah, in the silence of an abandoned house in the middle of the night, a loud crack of wood can be pretty unsettling. Yesterday morning at about 4 am, I heard a loud crack out in my hallway. Not a ghost, but the wood of one of the balusters on my stair railing, contracting as it cooled. My stair treads and some of the floating panels on my doors do the same thing. In an old house, especially after several layers of paint make it hard for wood to naturally expand and contract, cracking sounds are every day events. So I wish paranormal investigators would ignore them, too.

They showed some infrared videos. Except for one film, I either couldn't see the extra shadows or lights they claimed were there, or I thought they could be attributable to optical illusions. One did show a light that seemed to go on by itself. That was cool.

What did fascinate me were the digital audio recordings. I have pretty good hearing and, trained as a musician, I think I can separate individual sounds out of cacophony fairly well. On some of the recordings, I wasn't convinced that the "ghost voices" P.U.P.S. said were present really were. However, on a lot of their recordings, I distinctly heard faint words, some even seeming to answer direct questions. Assuming there was no hoax involved (and I hope there wasn't, because the investigators all seem to be genuinely nice people), this was impressive. The house also contained old servants' bells and buzzers, all disconnected, but I could hear an occasional tingle or buzz on the recordings as well.

Whether or not these recordings prove the existence of ghosts at Selma (or elsewhere where similar voices have been recorded), I have to say I was completely intrigued by the visit. And of course, it's fodder for my writing.

Paranormal investigation of Selma Mansion will be featured in the coming weeks on the Ghost Detectives TV show.

Happy Haunting,
Elena

Why Do You Choose Certain Authors?

I attended the Malice Domestic Convention this past weekend.  Malice Domestic celebrates traditional mystery literature, the kind Agatha Christie wrote, with bodies in the library and such.  Nowadays, the definition is a bit broader, with bodies everywhere from Cabot Cove, Maine to the mean streets of LA, and around the world, but at Malice, you'll still find more whodunits than dark, gritty thrillers.

I could write pages about all the terrific fans and writers I met.  I found some new authors, like J.J. Murphy who writes about Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, and John Cullen, who deciphered Dame Agatha's handwriting and transcribed her writing notebooks.

Instead, I'll mention one discussion that got me thinking about  why readers choose certain authors.  We were talking about law mysteries.  One lawyer friend of mine said she doesn't read them.  She reads to escape and doesn't want to spend time in the same setting where she works.  Then she admitted that she does read Margaret Maron's Deborah Knott series, saying "but she's a judge."

I thought about why I read the Deborah Knott series.  Not for the law aspect.  Maron's Carolina settings bring back to me the happy times I've spent vacationing and eating my way through that region.  I like the character of Deborah.  She's intelligent and down to earth, a person with whom I love to spend time.  I like  her big family and all their antics, all the brothers that I can't keep straight.  The mystery plots are always good.  Maron's prose is beautiful.  If you took the courtroom scenes away, I'd still read the series.

Lisa Scottoline's novels have lots of "law" in them, but I read those books more because I feel at home in them.  Mary DiNunzio's family isn't so different from mine.  I understand their notion of food equaling love.  And, having grown up in the Philadelphia area, the settings are familiar to me.  I can even vividly picture the Federal  Courthouse, because I did jury duty there.  Lisa makes the "law" parts of her books interesting, but frankly, I don't choose her novels because of them.

Still, lots of readers probably do read law mysteries for the law in them, just like some readers pick up cat mysteries specifically because of the cats, or cooking mysteries because of the food.  Yet, it's still important for authors to make their characters, plots and settings strong, to win over those readers not otherwise interested in their subject matter.

I had one fan this weekend say, "I don't normally like history, but I like your series," and another say the same thing about not usually liking ghosts in books.

That to me proves that what a lot of readers want is simply a good story.  I'd be interested in hearing your opinion.

Peace,
Elena

GHOSTS vs. GEEKS

Most people know I'm a history buff. Kind of obvious from the books I write. But I'm also a science geek. I read Science News. I watch NOVA on PBS. I grew up with the Franklin Institute practically in my backyard. I've been known to get up at 3 am to watch a meteor shower. And once I poked a pin hole in a Xerox box, held it up in front of a sunny window, and showed everyone at my office job a solar eclipse.

The geek genes came from my dad, who used to take us rock hunting, stargazing, birdwatching, you name it. Back when America was gearing up to go to the moon and our local library had a weekly kids' program about NASA rockets, he'd bring us and sit in himself. When Star Trek made its debut, he watched it along with us. And family lore says that he and his brother Charlie had a respectable turtle skull collection. As I clean out the house (see my blog on Clutter a couple weeks ago), I expect to find that collection in the cellar.

When I created the character of Beth Ann Lee, I didn't plan on her being a geek. She simply was one, from the start. Part of it, I suppose, came from my own frustration at seeing so many girls turned away from math and science at a young age, merely because someone thinks females aren't supposed to be good at those subjects (Hello! Marie Curie! Jane Goodall! Sally Ride! to name a very few).

I've been asked why, if I like science all that much, do I put something as unscientific as ghosts in my books? I've been asked this by folks who fancy themselves scientific thinkers.

Okay, call me crazy (lots of people do), but isn't the whole point of science to try to explain the unexplained? So my standard answer, when asked if I believe in ghosts, is that I believe in the possibility of ghosts--just like I believe in the possibility of life on other planets and undiscovered life forms on this one. Ghosts aren't out of the question, just not proven or for that matter, disproven. I can bend my brain around ghost theory a lot easier than I can string theory (if you don't know what that is, picture something a physicist might dream up after eating hallucinogenic mushrooms).

I've been reading up about ghost hunters who do their research armed with electromagnetic field meters, infrared and ambient thermometers, motion sensors, digital voice recorders, cameras and other serious technical equipment. I applaud their collection of data, but frankly, most of them need to think more scientifically. They point to an "orb" (what appears to be a ball of light in a photo) and call it a departed human being. I'm not saying it isn't, just that I don't see a clear line of evidence and logic between the phenomenon (the orb) and the conclusion. I could offer other theories. I said I believed in the possibility of undiscovered life forms--maybe that's what an orb is. Or, like the aurorae, an effect of solar wind on Earth's magnetic field. Or simply a trick of light and humid air.

No ghost hunters I've met seem interested in explaining the physical conditions that creates an orb. Why wouldn't ghosts be subject to the same laws of physics, even if they exist in another dimension? (String theory says other dimensions are possible--or maybe you just feel extra-dimensional after eating those mushrooms.)

Anyway, will some scientist out there please work on ghost phenomena? Stop wussing out because you think the world will laugh at you. I'm guessing there's a Nobel Prize in store for the mind who cracks this mystery.

To answer the question: Why do I put ghosts in my books? Ghost tales are probably the oldest form of storytelling. No civilization known to history has been without ghost stories. People like them because they're entertaining. Me? I write ghost stories because I like them. And I put science in my books because I like that, too. They can go together.

Oh, and to my cousins, Uncle Charlie's kids? When I find those turtle skulls, you're entitled to half. Only fair.

Live long and prosper,
Elena