Do You Believe In Ghosts?

 

I write ghosts and inexplicable occurrences into my books and screenplays, and I’m not going to brag or apologize for it. I just do. I never started out to write about ghosts and I’m not a freaky ghost-loving fanatic, but those things just seem to creep into most of my books whether they were included in the character list, the original storyline, or not. I’ll be writing a perfectly sweet little story and the next thing I know something moves the curtains or there is a tap at the window that can’t be explained.

When I was a child, I was very frightened of ghosts. Even as a teen, I remember being told to say out loud that I did not want any ghost to present themselves to me. Apparently, the spirits that surround you will protect you from anyone coming through if you let your parameters be known. I was not open to messages or visions from the other side. At all. I believed in ghosts and I was terrified of an entity using my belief to gain access to me.

My grandmother was a believer and when my grandfather died, she felt him in the bed with her for the nights afterwards. I grew up hearing these stories. When she died, my aunt tried to contact her with a Ouija Board and a message came through for me that only my grandmother and I knew about. That’s probably the one moment that made me a believer.

Over the years, I’ve had a few occurrences, including the vision of my recently deceased dog going around the corner in our house a few days after his death. I saw him along with my daughter who was ten at the time. “Did you just see Sammy do down the hall?” I asked her. Needless to say her eyes were wide with disbelief and we still talking about seeing our dog in the house. One could say it was imagined except for the fact that we both saw him.

I wrote my latest book series about a woman whose mother used her telepathy as a child to do ghost readings. Bryndle Moody is all grown up now and has a YouTube show called Moody Paranormal Investigations in which she investigates ghosts and films her findings. She’s a medium, which is different from a psychic, although she is also psychic. And she’s newly blind. When she inherits a house on the Oregon Coast with a ghost whose presence allows her sight, she never wants to let him go. But his request is to investigate his death in 1850 to let him pass on. I turned this story into a series and I’m hoping the Netflix exec who has this on their desk sees the potential.

For the series, I drew upon stories my book readers tell me about their experiences with ghosts. I hear a lot of ghost stories because people know I’m a believer. I have even seen a few photos of ghosts on people’s phones and the stories I’m told are incredible.

I once visited my sister right after a demonic entity had entered her bedroom in a dark corner near the closet and we had to sleep with crosses around our necks. Needless to say, the visit wasn’t as chill as I’d hoped, and I went home tired from lying awake in her King bed staring at the bedroom corner all night.

I watch ghost shows to scare myself and also to get the terminology for my books. Just last night I was watching Jack Osborne’s Portal to Hell show and in between snorting and shaking his head at the heavily dramatized findings and scary background music, my husband asked me what EVP was. I was able to knowledgeably inform him that Electronic Voice Phenomena is when a spirit speaks through an electronic device like in my book and screenplay The Dream Jumper’s Promise. Then, he asked what a MEL Meter is and I was able to tell him I used one of those when I went ghost hunting in underground Seattle in the middle of the night a few years back. We got some incredible readings on our Mel Meters to record electro-magnetic changes near the site where a bank teller died at the bottom of a staircase. We had a laser grid set up to record ghostly presences moving around that night but came up empty. However, I was at the end of the line of people, almost in the shadows and I fully expected a tap on my shoulder only to turn around and see no one there.

It's fine if you don't believe in the afterlife, ghosts, mediums or don't enjoy reading about any of these things. Enough people do and are intrigued. I do care that there will come a day when science supports the existence of alternate realities and ghosts existing alongside us and I hope to live long enough to say I told you so to many people who think I’m a wee bit nuts.

People thought the world was flat until a journey proved otherwise. I look forward to the unequivocal evidence someday to prove ghosts are real. Scientific statements that prove my dog was lingering in my house after his passing or that the tap on my shoulder as a child to alert me to not step off the curb when a car was coming was a ghostly presence. And until then, those ghostly characters will continue to creep into my stories when I least expect them, often taking over the hero’s journey and making me wonder if I have a ghostly muse, dying to have her story told.

KIM HORNSBY is the bestselling Amazon Author of The Dream Jumper's Promise, Book 1 in a Supernatural Suspense series. An awarded author and screenwriter, Kim lives in the Seattle area and writes stories for women about overcoming tragedy, adversity and coming out the other end. Some are funny, scary, romantic, suspensey but all are hopeful.

Find her on Amazon Books.

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