My Lifelong Obsession With Ghosts

It's almost October, which means it's almost Halloween, which means I'm thinking about spooky things, like ghosts, for example. I love a good ghost story. I love the gooseflesh that breaks out when someone tells a story that scares me. As a kid, I believed absolutely in ghosts, and I wanted to see one and speak with it. I felt it was only a matter of time before I stumbled across a ghost. After all, a lot of people had lived and died before I ever came along, so somebody's spirit was bound to be hanging around.

The Stanley Hotel, which inspired the Shining

Over the years, people have told me their personal experiences with ghosts, or with unexplained phenomenon that they attributed to ghosts. I found this exciting, and further proof that ghosts exist. I was going to see one any day. I grew up in an old house, I went to undergraduate school on the grounds (and in the buildings) of an old fort, and I even hung out with dead bodies my entire first semester of graduate school.

But I got nothing. Nada. Zip. Not even an inkling of being watched. I began to think that either ghosts didn't exist at all, or they didn't like me. After all, being super eager to speak with ghosts could very well be off-putting to them.

So I decided to write about ghosts in The Necromancer's Inheritance series. Or rather, I decided to write about a person who can see and talk to spirits. In a way, it's me working out my idea of what the afterlife might be like, if an afterlife exists. Does everybody really zip right on to the next place, or do some people hang around for various reasons, and what would those reasons be? Do ghosts really exist, or do people see things they interpret as ghosts because of the power of suggestion or the random firing of synapses in their brains?

At this point in my life, I've pretty much given up on seeing a ghost. I'm not sure I would want to. I'd be as likely to have a heart attack as to strike up a conversation with it. But I still love a good ghost story and the chills that come along with it.