I love classic ghost stories. They combine my love of history with my fascination for the supernatural. These are my favorite stories by ten of the very best writers of weird fiction. Some names may be familiar to you. I hope you will take a chance and explore the names you don’t recognize. There are few better ways to celebrate the spooky season than curling up under a warm blanket with stories that will give you a definite chill.
Horror movies are a long tradition in my family. Back in the 1930s, my grandfather worked at Universal Studios, home of the classic monster movies such as Frankenstein and The Mummy. I grew up on Seymour’s Creature Features and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, along with The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. Allow me to share with you my Top Ten Scary Movies.
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Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum — This gem comes from Korea and tells the story of the fateful night the crew of The Horror Times web series investigates an abandoned psychiatric asylum with a very dark past. If that sounds trite, believe me, this movie is anything but. I’m fond of paranormal movies from Asia because the cultural factors are so different from what we’re all used to here in the largely Judeo-Christian West. The intrepid explorers who go inside the asylum are directed by their leader who holes up in a big tent with all the computer equipment necessary for the livestream. There are some classic jump scares, but they’re mixed into many fresh moments. The story will keep you guessing right up until the chilling finale.
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21 Days — Jacob, his girlfriend Shauna, and his buddy Kurt pack up their ghost hunting gear and set off to spend twenty-one days inside and abandoned house that may or may not be haunted. Rumor has it that anyone living in the house for more than twenty-one days comes to a bad end thanks to the evil spirits there. One family faced such a disaster. Another family got out in time. Jacob thinks the local First Nations tribe is fueling rumors about evil spirits because the tribe wants their land back. Neither family will say a word about their experiences, so fearful are they of supernatural vengeance. A strong set up for Jacob & Co. having themselves boarded up inside the house so they can make the documentary that will lead to fame and fortune. The steady escalation of wrongness on the property makes for good tension and suspense.
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The Abominable Dr. Phibes — Vincent Price plays Dr. Anton Phibes, a brilliant but twisted man who blames his wife’s medical team for her untimely death. Dr. Phibes unleashes vengeance in the form of attacks based on the Ten Plagues of Egypt. This gets a whole lot weirder before it’s over. The art deco production design and Dr. Phibes’ own makeup must be seen to be believed. If you want to have your own freaky film festival, watch this plus the sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again followed by Theatre of Blood.
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Creature From The Black Lagoon — A team of scientists go on an expedition to the Amazon, hoping to find the mysterious “Gill-Man” whose existence has been revealed by fossils of a webbed claw. They find the Creature, who wears one of the greatest suits in cinematic history. Released in 1954, this movie combines the classic story of Beauty and the Beast with the xenophobia of the time. I think I was in elementary school when I first discovered the Creature. I couldn’t understand why the scientists were bothering the Creature, taking the tramp steamer with its smoke and gasoline and oil into the waters where the Creature lived. My child’s mind already saw that as bad for the environment. I already wanted to be a marine biologist, so I was firmly on the Creature’s side.
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The Legend of Hell House — Based on the book Hell House by Richard Matheson, this movie is intense. A scientific paranormal investigation results in the investigators getting attacked, possessed, and exposed to at least two generations of nastiness. No way should I have seen this movie when I was still a kid. We’re not talking Mario Bava or Dario Argento levels of kink, but still. This movie exposed me to the kind of evil that can exist among both the living and the dead. (This is no relation to The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, aside from being in the supernatural horror genre.)
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Grave Encounters — Released in 2011, Grave Encounters was among the earlier movies about a team of paranormal investigators who lock themselves into an abandoned mental asylum for the night hoping to document the activity reported to arise from the evil doctor who experimented on his patients. I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I say the investigation does not end well. The story held my interest. The characters are worth watching, especially team leader Lance Preston, played by Seth Rogerson. The ending is hard to take, but it does deliver on everything leading up to it. The sequel, Grave Encounters 2, is also good thanks again to a strong performance by Seth Rogerson.
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Phantasm — To describe this movie at all is to give away some of the twists. If you know, you know. I found Phantasm really disturbing not least because it’s tricky knowing whether what’s happening onscreen is happening in the real world, in a dream, in another dimension, or another reality altogether. Beware the Tall Man and his silver sphere! Watching this movie will make you sleep with the lights on!
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Aliens — I’m not a big fan of science fiction or space opera, but I really enjoyed Aliens. I’ve watched it four or five times. I did watch the first movie, Alien, as well. Thanks to H.R. Geiger, the aliens raised the bar when it came to scary monsters. Sigourney Weaver as Ripley has become an iconic female bad ass. Lance Henriksen, that horror rockstar, does a great job in his role as Ash.
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REC — In Spain, a news crew riding along with a fire and rescue team enter an apartment building where the outbreak of an unknown illness leaves them sealed inside by the law enforcement and the military. As the infection spreads from person to person, the news crew starts piecing together the strange events tied to the building’s history. The actual source of the illness is one of the weirdest and most impressive plot twists I’ve seen in the zombie/found footage genre.
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Bad Ben — Tom Riley sinks all of his money into a house available at a Sheriff’s auction. Problems start right away, prompting Tom to have security cameras installed. This leads to the viewer seeing strange activity both inside and outside the house. Tom digs into the history of the property and finds a whole lot that’s bizarre. The suspense, the occult forces at work, and Tom’s own pragmatic approach to the problem is a lot of fun to watch. There are now eleven movies in the series. I found the first three are the best, but they’re all a hoot.
I have mixed feelings about paranormal investigation. Let me say up front that I am not a paranormal investigator. I make no claims to any form of expertise in that field. What I do know is based on reading a whole lot about the supernatural and related folklore around the world. I write and publish fiction based on fifty years of persistent fascination with things that go bump in the night.
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There are genuine investigators out there, people who have been trained in the scientific method along with the kind of investigative techniques used by law enforcement agencies. The most credible examples I’ve come across are Amy Allan, Cindy Kaza and Steve DiSchavi of The Dead Files, which has been running on the Travel Channel since 2011, now available on Discovery+. Whether or not one chooses to believe the results of their investigations, I think the show is worth watching. The variety of paranormal problems and the solutions suggested are based on solid research. All too often I’ve come across the recycled basics, the grab-and-go kinds of paranormal cliches that come from superficial research regurgitated by people who just parrot what they pick up from other amateur paranormal YouTube channels and don’t bother doing their own homework.
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Speaking of which, a case could be made for saying the most well-known paranormal investigation show is Ghost Adventures, headed up by Zak Bagans and his team. Their show premiered on The Travel Channel in 2008. Zak Bagans’ technique back then involved provoking the spirits with a variety of rude and stupid remarks. It’s in very poor taste to disrespect the dead and try to make money from doing so. I hated that, I hated Zak Bagans, and I hated the show. There was nothing to it, just a lot of leveraging the power of suggestion and the ghost hunting gizmos going off at dramatic moments.
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Let’s think about this. Suppose you were in mourning, spending every moment of every day trapped in the endless pain of your grief. You’re cut off from the life you’d been living, from the person or people you’d built your life around. The last thing you’d want to deal with is a bunch of TikTok wannabes running around the place you inhabit, badgering you with questions about private matters that are none of their business. They bring with them lots of cameras and sound equipment and all the gizmos favored by ghost hunters who are desperate for any kind of “evidence” that will get them more followers. I feel a great deal of sympathy for whatever spirits suffer this kind of onslaught. These “paranormal investigators” just keep nagging and poking around and trying to stir up trouble until they get anything they can construe as a response. If I was the ghost being exploited this way, I’d want to lash out just to give these jerks what they want so they’d pack up and go home.
The trouble is, they don’t just go home. They get on social media and tell everybody they got results, which brings even more mobs of wannabe Zak Bagans barging into the location with the same equipment and the same lack of genuine compassion. With this in mind, I was overjoyed to discover this excerpt of a stand up routine by comedian Matteo Lane.
In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story that explored in fictional form concepts that would later be examined in the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The title of the story, The Imp Of The Perverse, has passed into the English language as a turn of phrase referring to self-destructive urges or behavior. Poe himself describes it this way:
“We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink away from the danger. Unaccountably we remain… it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height… for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it.“
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As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, when I was a teenager I had a strong curiosity about all things supernatural. I read a lot of books, both fiction and nonfiction. I watched a lot of movies, both documentary and total make-believe. All of this research and exploration churned inside my mind and gave rise to this poem, published by editor Emerian Rich on HorrorAddicts.Net.
It’s October! Let’s kick off the 30 Days of Scary Fun with a ghost story.
I once had the delightful experience of volunteering in my younger son John’s seventh grade Creative Writing Class. On Back to School Night I’d been chatting with John’s teacher and she discovered that I write for a living. John’s Reading 180 workbook, which included a unit on Edgar Allen Poe. With Halloween right around the corner, I thought a writing lesson about something spooky might be fun. And then the real inspiration struck. What could be more perfect for Halloween than a haunted house story? We’d start out by thinking up all the different kinds of places a haunted house might be. A grass hut on the beach in Tahiti, an igloo in Alaska, a hotel or a camping tent or the traditional shabby manor house with strange lights and weird noises. Then we’d explore the basic idea using the journalist’s five questions: Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How!
The Haunted House
I asked the students what makes a classic haunted house. I encouraged them to think beyond what they’d already seen on TV or read about in books. What other kinds of buildings could be haunted? What other places where people could live might have ghosts? One young lady suggested a haunted fort. That was a great idea and I said so. One of the quieter boys spoke up about a space station. Another wonderful idea. When the students caught on to my enthusiasm and encouragement, more and more of them started speaking up.
Who
Who would be the main character? Would it be a living person? A ghost? Maybe even the house itself? I talked about each of these options, doing my best to keep it simple so the students had clear choices. It’s best to keep the number of characters small when writing a short story. This led to another major step in fiction writing, giving the main character a name. I spent a few minutes on the importance of names, where to find them, and how to make them up in a way that makes sense and sounds right.
What
What’s haunting the house? Is it a traditional ghost? One boy had chosen a pyramid as his “house.” The clear choice there: a mummy. The students were quick to mention the classic monsters such as werewolves, vampires, and Frankenstein. Cara, the student teacher, asked about different types of ghosts. I collect ghost story anthologies from the turn of the century. I’ve read about the mournful ghost, the vengeful ghost, the banshee, the Black Coach and the poltergeist. We focused on the poltergeist, the “noisy ghost,” a favorite element in scary movies. Once I explained this ghost’s talent for throwing dishes and furniture around, I saw the face of one boy light up. He wanted that kind of ghost. He started scribbling on his notepaper with a speed I recognized. Inspiration had struck!
Where
“Where?” is multifaceted question. There’s the location of the haunted house itself. The students talked about clifftops and deserts and swamps and the main street of a big city. I explained how the different countries and cultures where the story was set in are also key elements. A haunted house in Japan would be very different from a haunted house in New York City. Again I saw that faraway look in the eyes of the boys and girls as the wheels of their imaginations kept turning.
Why
Of all the five W Questions, “Why?” is my favorite. I asked the students to think about why the ghost was haunting that particular place. The young lady who chose a haunted fort told me her ghost was a soldier who wanted to go on guarding the fort. I said that made sense to me. The soldier had been dedicated to his duty in life, and that dedication remained even after he died in the line of duty. I asked for more ideas about why a ghost would haunt a particular place. We came up with buried treasure, some business the ghost hadn’t finished before he or she died, and the frequent motivation of revenge.
When
The question of when requires some complex thinking. When does the ghost do its haunting? At sunset? Midnight? When could also be the time of year. There are summertime ghosts, but the most dramatic time of year is the long winter night. I told the students about some of the greatest ghost stories ever written by such enduring names as A.M. Burrage, M.R. James and E.F. Benson. On the subject of winter, I used Hugh Walpole‘s “Snow” as my example. A truly chilling story, in many senses.
How
Every good story starts with a problem the main character has to solve. If the main character is the ghost, the question becomes how is the ghost haunting the house and how is that going to solve the problem? The kids had some great ideas, from scary noises and faces at the window to seeing weird things in mirrors. One of the boys really got into his story. He must have filled in at least three notebook pages and showed no sign of slowing down.
The students had done well, paying attention and participating. Then came time to bring out the art supplies. Construction paper, fuzzy black spiders, Halloween pumpkin stickers, googly eyes, and a big bag of cotton balls. I challenged the kids to tell me how many ways they could use the cotton balls to create a picture of their haunted houses. John himself suggested clouds. Another boy said spiderwebs. Someone else said ghosts. I showed the kids how to stretch the cotton very thin and glue it along the ground level to make the kind of low-lying mist you might see in graveyards. Those kids went at it with such energy and pleasure, making their visions become real before their eyes. The pyramid was marvelous. The space station was terrific. And John’s hotel looked positively grand.
This year’s BayCon promises to be marvelous. So many fun things to do, so many wonderful people participating. The Programming Ninjas have given me quite an exciting schedule!
SATURDAY
Readings
1 Jul 2023, Saturday 13:00 – 14:30, CA Ballroom 8 (Santa Clara Marriott)
I’ll be reading from my new short story, To Reach For The Stars, from Jewels Of Darkover.
Travel is more complicated and risky than ever. What should writers do? Take readers away to foreign cultures and alien worlds? Or show readers what a forbidding landscape exists right outside the front door?
Medicated And Motivated
1 Jul 2023, Saturday 16:00 – 17:30, CA Ballroom 8 (Santa Clara Marriott)
How do you keep writing when you have to face the daily battle of chronic pain?
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SUNDAY
Why Movies Mean So Much to Us
2 Jul 2023, Sunday 10:00 – 11:30, CA Ballroom 4 and 5 (Santa Clara Marriott)
From “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, You’re my only hope!” to “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” we all can quote lines from our favorites. Movies have been a deep and enduring part of our entire lives. What good do they do for us? What bad?
At some time in your writing career chances are you are going to work with an editor, but many authors know next to nothing about the field of editing. Copyeditors, acquisition editors, managing editors, line editors, developmental editors—What do they do? How do you know what kind of editor you need? How do you find a good editor? How do you work with an editor of a magazine, anthology or publishing house? Everything you need to know but were afraid to ask.
The dealer’s room will probably have at least some of the anthologies where you can find my short fiction. If all goes well, I will have book cover postcards available for $5 each, suitable for signing.
“A person attracted to that which is foreign, especially to foreign peoples, manners, or cultures.” YourDictionary.com
In Kyoto you will find 400 shrines and 1600 temples. Of the many larger and more famous temples, Kiyomizu-dera is truly one of a kind. If I had to name just one single reason for going to Kyoto, I would say I had to visit Kiyomizu-dera. This was the number one item on my bucket list. Thanks to my husband’s kindness and generosity, this dream came true.
I’ve been a lot of places and I’ve seen a lot of things, and I’ve written about many of them. This is the first time I have deliberately gone to visit a location where I have already set four short stories. My steampunk short fiction, which appears in 12 Hours Later and the forthcoming 30 Days After, centers around Kiyomizu-dera. If there’s such a thing as a literary pilgrimage, I made one, and it stands out as one of the highlights of my strange and adventuresome life.
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The Pure Water Temple stands halfway up Mt. Otowa, near the Otowa Falls. Primarily a shrine to Kannon (aka Kwan Yin), the Goddess of Mercy, the main hall is home to the Eleven-Headed and Thousand-Armed Kannon Boddhisatva. There’s a lot to know about Kiyomizu-dera. Please follow the links to discover fascinating facts about this temple and Kyoto itself, both ancient and modern.
There must have been hundreds of people visiting the temple the day Pat and I were there. People were dressed in traditional kimono or yukata, modern street wear, or school uniforms. When a tour group of high school boys passed by, a dozen manga sprang to mind.
The best times of the year to visit Kiyomizu-dera are springtime for the cherry blossoms and autumn for the maple leaves. Few things are more beautiful to me than the sight of late afternoon sunshine seen through the red leaves of a Japanese maple.
Here I stand on the veranda overlooking a thirteen meter drop. Known as the Stage, the veranda is built from over four hundred cypress boards. The Stage contains not a single nail. Wooden pegs were used instead.
In “A Demon in the Noonday Sun,” this is the spot where Dr. Harrington must protect the Abbot against the anger of Amatsu Mikaboshi, the Japanese god of chaos. The Abbot is sitting in a steampunk wheelchair at the time. Amatsu Mikaboshi keeps blasting it with black fire. Poor Dr. Harrington, a scientist to the bone, has to make a rather sudden adjustment to the reality of Japanese gods and monsters!
This is the view of the Stage from the opposite direction. I stood at the corner on the center left.
There are several shrines on the temple grounds. This is an excellent example of a shrine to Inari, god of rice/wealth. I love those fox figurines. Strangely enough, I could not find a shop that sold them.
Kiyomizu-dera is known for its shrine to Okuninushi, the god of romance and matchmaking. The statue of him makes him look like a tough samurai. Standing beside him is a rabbit that could give the one in “Donnie Darko” a run for its money. The rabbit holds a haraegushi, a “lightning staff” decorated with those paper zigzags called shide.
Now for the rather chilling part of this expedition. The sign below explains the history of the god whose name is never spoken, the one who will punish playboys and heartbreakers. A wronged woman can take a straw figure that represents the man who hurt her and nail it to the cypress tree behind this particular shrine. The god-with-no-name will then bring down some hard karma on the man responsible.
Note, please, that the second thing to scare me in the Haunted House at Toei Kyoto Studio Park was a falling tree. Pat told me later she noticed it was a cypress with a straw figure nailed to it. We didn’t understand that at the time. Now we do!
The ema plaques below give one insight into the hopes and dreams of many people. I was surprised to discover some of them had English writing on them, not just kanji. Pilgrims come to Kiyomizu-dera from all over the world. Most of the plaques we saw had a sheep on them. Still not sure what that was all about.
Here are the three waterfalls that grant particular blessings. On the far right, wisdom. In the center, long life. On the left, success in scholarship. I meant to drink from the water of longevity. Turns out I drank the water for wisdom instead. I suspect that’s probably what I really need!
Soon it was time to head back down the mountain. This took us back along the Sannen-zaka, a narrow lane lined with shops selling maneki neko, fans, mochi, dango, all sorts of postcards and cell phone charms and the items pilgrims might need such as prayer beads.
I bought a hat embroidered with a battle between the God of Wind and the God of Lightning. Pat found a number of items on her souvenir wish list. If you love shopping, you simply must visit the Sannen-zaka. We also enjoyed a singular snack: pickled cucumber on a stick. Legend has it that cucumbers are the favorite food of Japan’s most famous monster from folklore, the kappa. I have to say the giant pickle on a stick was crunchy and refreshing, right up until the moment when I bit into the stick.
The older I get, the more I realize how much I don’t know. Take love, for example. I don’t know much more about what love really is than I did when I was in elementary school. For me, love started out being this big exalted dream of perfect happiness, perfect harmony, and total devotion to each other. I think I got that from reading fairy tales. (Disney movies also have a lot to answer for.) Then I listened to what older girls said about their boyfriends. I got the impression that having a boyfriend was one of those Rules for Living that showed everybody else you knew what you were doing.
One night when I was nineteen years old, it was so bitterly cold my body heat wasn’t enough to warm up the sheets and blankets. I lay there alone, shivering and miserable, thinking if only I had boyfriend. If only I could find a boyfriend to keep me warm, inside and out. The intense desire to avoid another night like that one prompted me to do some pretty stupid things. As I look back at that cold night from the perspective of fifty-plus years, I can see that I could have saved myself all kinds of trouble if I’d just bought an electric blanket.
Ever since I met my first crush when I was in the grade, I thought the right guy was the solution to all my needs and problems. I don’t know how I got this idea. It must have been all those fairy tales, because I certainly didn’t learn it from my family. My grandparents got divorced twice and married three times. (It’s true. I have photos of two of the weddings.) My parents divorced when I was eleven. My older sister never has married. My brother had to divorce his first wife. Why on earth did I think attaching myself to some boy who probably had even less of a clue than I did would somehow result in that magical state called “true love”?
When I was on the debate team in college, the first rule was “Define your terms.” That way both the Affirmative and the Negative teams knew exactly what the Affirmative team meant by the resolution being debated. When it comes to the search for love, I think the same rule should apply. After all, the statement “I love you” can have several different meanings and those meanings often depend on context. Matchmakers, dating services, and our best friends all ask the same question, “What are you looking for in a partner?” This is where it starts to get really complicated. Does the resulting list of characteristics represent the idealized image of the person whom you want to fall in love with? Or does it represent the person whom you want to fall in love with you? Are you really looking for a healthy relationship based on mutual give and take, or are you looking for a human transitional object that will soothe your insecurities and pay for your evening entertainment?
At this point in my life, I can see that wanting this perfect person to fall in love with me meant more than just having a boyfriend so I could go out on dates. It meant proving to the world that I had achieved the ultimate validation, the concrete emotional evidence that I wasn’t a loser, I wasn’t the last person chosen during schoolyard games. I wasn’t cold, alone, and miserable anymore. That’s what I hoped. Life hasn’t worked out that way.
Right now there’s all that Easter candy out there on the shelves. Most of it is chocolate. As adults, we know which brands are better than others. We know how to compare them and get the most value for our money. This skill comes from time, maturity, and a lot of taste-testing. Kids are different. When it comes to chocolate, kids don’t care. In the Dollar Tree you can find the phrase “chocolate-flavored” on many of the Easter items. There’s no actual cacao, just a lot of artificial colors and flavors. Unfortunately, the same can be said of some people. In the quest for love, some of us who crave True Love, the Real Thing, can become so desperate they will settle for the off-brands that are cheap, flashy, and artificial. It’s so hard to resist the temptation for a quick fix that will silence those nagging cravings and insecurities. It took me a while to learn the importance of patience, of saving up for the quality chocolate and the quality people.
My mother had her opinions about my boyfriends. When I was in middle school and awash in all kinds of hormonal angst over whether or not I’d ever get a boyfriend, Mom said I was “boy crazy.” Accurate, if not all that flattering or sympathetic. Years later, after I’d graduated high school and had spent some adventurous years working the Renaissance Faires, Mom managed to sum up both the quality and the quantity of my efforts to find love: “Well, at least you won’t wonder what you might have missed out on.” Once again, neither flattering nor all that sympathetic. Thanks, Mom.
So now that I’m a woman of a certain age, do I really know any more about love than when I first started dating boys? I’ve been married for thirty-four years come July, but that’s less of a testament to romantic love than to maintaining a stable home life for my sons. In a world of uncertainties, I know three things for sure: I love my sons, I love my cats, and I love really good dark chocolate.
On Valentine’s Day I stopped at Safeway. The eleventh hour romance shopping was in full swing. On the big flower-giving holidays I tend to loiter around the bouquets and potted plants. There’s always somebody standing there looking perplexed. Thanks to writing in the Victorian period, I know a bit about the language of flowers. Now and then I offer a helpful suggestion.
I was about to take a shortcut down the beer aisle. There stood a husky fellow in shorts and a T shirt, contemplating the six-packs. In one hand he held a sad bunch of four red carnations. No fern, no babies-breath. Oh no. I was looking at a train wreck just waiting to happen.
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Right about then the guy noticed me standing there. I apologized for staring, then flat out said my fairy godmother alarm was going off. The guy laughed. I told him I didn’t want to be rude or anything. I was just concerned because most people associate carnations with funerals.
The guy’s whole vibe changed. He turned pale. I was afraid I had offended him, so I started to apologize. He made a shushing gesture, thanking me up one side and down the other. His lady had lost her father recently. When he said that, I could see him remembering the flowers at that funeral.
About 20 minutes later I headed out to my car. Oddly enough, I crossed paths with the same guy again. Now he held one of the fancy mixed bouquets. He thanked me again, saying he “really thought this must have been a God thing.” The relief in his voice made me feel the same relief.
I'm a professional writer living in Northern California with my husband and two sons. Fantasy in various forms is my reading and writing pleasure. I'm a history buff, a Japanophile, and I love to learn about language(s). I enjoy making jewelry, using natural materials such as wood, bone, semiprecious stones, and seashells. I collect bookmarks and wind chimes.
Worldbuilding is essential for crafting a strong fantasy story, whether it’s writing a novel or creating a RPG. This tool kit can be yours!
Hopes & Dreams: My Writing and My Sons 
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