I See Dead People: Glimpsing Ghosts

No, that isn't my house below. I just think it's a cool pic, and it leads into my blog this week.

At times, you hear me mention that it's been a quiet week here in my haunted house, although I still glimpse my paranormal residents now and then. To a lot of people, even a glimpse would send them screaming into the street and either calling a priest or putting the house on the market. Not me.

As I look at the thesaurus here in my word processing program for "glimpse," it also says I could use: see, catch sight of, glance at, peek at, peep at, and look at. What happens around here can range along the entire spectrum of these words, and it's so ordinary, I don't record a lot of it.

My glimpses of ghosts run the gamut of catching a slight movement out of the corner of my eye to full blown apparitions. If I call it a glimpse, though, even the full blown apparitions are brief, usually only a split second. And those are the types of "glimpses" that can actually startle me, even though I'm well aware I live with ghosts.

This happened to me one day this week. I used the Molly Belle Suite shower that afternoon, because hub is still doing some work on the master bath. I wandered out of the bathroom into the bedroom, still rubbing my wet hair with a towel….

And halted so abruptly I almost stumbled.

In the rocking chair on the other side of the room, next to a closet, I'd seen a white-haired woman. Aunt Belle and I both have the ability of total recall as to a ghost's appearance when we see one even briefly. The woman was small, wore a long, old-fashioned dress, and disappeared as soon as my eyes fell on her. She definitely was not the lady in my kitchen, since the kitchen lady is much plumper.

I have a stuffed Eeyore on that chair, which I gave to my sister Annie when she stayed here. Annie didn't have room to take it home with her, so Eeyore and her stuffed dinosaur are waiting here. But Eeyore hangs over the back of the rocking chair. The lady was sitting in it, feet on the floor, possibly rocking. However, the chair wasn't moving when she vanished, so I'm not sure of that.

"Uh … hello," I said. She didn't reply, so she's either shy or not ready to chat with us.

Aunt Belle is coming in Thursday to stay a few days, and the rocking chair lady reminded me of someone related to us both. This relative has crossed my mind a few times recently, and she's not someone I've thought of in a long while. So I'm wondering if it could possibly be her. Maybe I'll keep quiet and see if Aunt Belle notices her, so I'm not going to even mention her name. My aunt sometimes reads minds, y'know.

Aunt Belle has said on her last two or three visits that someone in the bedroom keeps watching her, but whoever it is hasn't made contact yet. Maybe this time she will, if it's this elderly lady who's doing that and whom I'm thinking of. I always like confirmation, and it happens frequently between Aunt Belle and me. Maybe this will be one of those times. Stay tuned and I'll let you know next week.

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I did some more writing this week on Dead Man Ohio, and am now pretty well into the last half of the book. I'm at that stage where I always think: How on earth am I going to tie all this up? But after nearly thirty books (more than that if you count the under-the-bed, unsold manuscripts from when I was still learning to write), I know this is normal for me. I want to give everyone who shows up in my story plenty of time on the page so everyone, including me, can enjoy them.

I'm a seat-of-the-pants writer, so I don't plot or outline ahead of time. I enjoy the story unfolding to myself as I go along, and if it starts to bore me, I know it will bore my readers. Besides, it's a lot more fun that way, not knowing what's going to show up on the next page, or sometimes even in the next sentence.

I also did some work on the Beckham stuff, and got a DVD of our film of Chris Rhodes last week to Angela. She's behind right now, since her daughter was quite ill for nearly a week, but when she gets to it, I know it will be cool.