Haunted Houses by Jenn McKinlay

JENN McKINLAY: I remember my first haunted house. It was put on by the boy scouts in our small northwestern Connecticut town. There was a lot of giggling and slimy stuff and jump scares. It was the length of the stage in the school cafeteria/gym but it felt like a mile to my seven-year-old self. 

Full disclosure: I was the kid who could never let a hand or foot be uncovered by my protective blanket lest the monsters that roamed my room at night grab me.

Needless to say, after one jump scare to many, I grabbed my mom's hand and death gripped it all the way through the exit where I turned to her in relief only to discover she was not my mom. Not a monster but not my mom. I was teased mercilessly about that for years.

When the Hooligans went through their first haunted house, oldest was fearless. Nothing scared him. Not the spiders climbing the walls, the snakes on the ground, the zombies trying to grab him, or the vampire rising out of the coffin. Youngest desperately wanted to go through but he was terrified. Our solution? I covered his eyes with my hand and we went through together and while he jumped at the creepy noises, he managed to get through it. Now, they both go to those elaborate Scream Farms, but I'm good. I don't see well in the dark and the potential for me to wet my pants is high (sorry for the overshare), so, no thank you.

             Tiffany Haddish and Andy Lassner visit a Haunted House

How about you, Reds and Readers? Are you haunted house fans or no? What experiences have you had in haunted houses?

What Scares You? Reds Confess.

RHYS BOWEN:

Well, I've managed to survive another Halloween! I have survived weeks of all the old movies on TV being horror, of everyone else saying what fun they have had in haunted houses and even walking through a drug store and having a coffin suddenly open beside me and a hand coming out! Confession: I'm a wimp. I do not like to be scared. The only horror movies I've ever tolerated were the "Giant killer tomatoes swallow New York" variety. Anything to do with noises in the cellar or possessed dolls and I'm out of there. If I saw something like that I'd wake at every creak of my house for weeks.

So I guess I'm a scaredy cat. I was even trying to come up with a Halloween costume that didn't require a lot of work and thought of draping a fake spider's web over my hair with a fuzzy spider clinging to it. Tried it in the store and couldn't do. I knew the spider was fake. I could hold it in my hand and see it was fake. But the thought of a big black spider on my head was simply too much for me.

Another confession: I'm scared of spiders. I know they are good for our environment. If I find one in the bathtub I put a glass over it, slide a piece of paper under the spider and carry it out to be released in nature. So you see I'm good and humane. But my hand is shaking all the time. I did this rescue once when my friends and I rented a house in Sedona, AZ. Big spider on the ceiling. I tipped him into a glass, carried him out and released him into the creek. Then a friend showed his picture to our jeep tour guide. "Oh my God. That was a brown recluse," he exclaimed. I had had one piece of paper between me and the most venomous spider in the US!  And I was once in the Outback in Australia and went to the loo. As I shut the door and sat on the seat I watched a HUGE huntsman spider come and sit on top of the door. You know, the kind of spider that kills mice? And I knew if I tried to open that door it would drop onto my hand. I contemplated spending the rest of my life in that loo. Waiting for the spider to die of old age or get hungry and go hunting elsewhere. In the end I moved my hand oh so cautiously toward the latch, lifted it, moved the door inch by inch and then ran like hell, all the time imagining that the spider was now sitting on my back!

So good reason to be scared of spiders. But I'm also scared of moths. I don't like the way they flutter about. I met a black moth with a twelve inch wing span in Mexico once. We had seen it flying around the gardens and then the kids announced it had flown into our condo and into my bedroom. I laughed. "Nice try." Then I pulled back the drapes and....... it flew into my face. So good reason to be scared of moths too.

And I'm scared of the dark. Too vivid an imagination, I suppose, and growing up in a big old house that was definitely haunted. But I'm not scared of snakes, or heights, or even clowns. Bad reviews? Maybe. People hating my next book? Definitely.

So now it's your turn, Reds. What are you scared of?

HALLIE EPHRON: The dark. Seriously. Going into a cave with no flashlight, or even with one freaks me out. Walking in a forest in the dark. No thank you.

Spiders? Not so much. We have so many, and the ones in the house are usually smaller than a nickel and as far as I know they're not poisonous. I just scoop them up and take them outside where they can feast on mosquitos and flies. Love their webs. Except when I walk into one in the morning. Ick.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Huh.. That is such a good question. Crazy drivers, driving at night on highways.. I can imagine all kinds of horribleness. I can kind of handle spiders, though I really hate walking through a spider web.  I am not fond of centipede and millipedes,  either of which send me screaming from the room. Oh, and those waterbug things.  Dark streets, sure. But that's..just common sense.

The thing I am most afraid of is being surprised. If someone leaps out at me, I freak.

And I always think the garbage disposal is going to grab my hand somehow.

I am also inordinately afraid of food poisoning. If food is slightly off, or even might be, I toss it. Does that count?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I'm with you on the horror movies, Rhys. I've never understood why people like them. Can you believe I've never even seen Psycho??? Not afraid of spiders, or snakes (except sensibly.) Or bats. I don't get clowns, either, but I'm not afraid of them. I am, however, more than a bit claustrophobic. I don't like being packed in with bunch of people, and I don't like being underground. So you can see why I take the bus whenever possible in London. Rush hour on a packed tube train in a deep tunnel is not my idea of fun! And I always think, "What if the train stops and we're stuck here????" Which happens often enough that it's not pure paranoia...

LUCY BURDETTE: No, no I don't like to be scared either! When talking about movies they enjoyed, my family will often add "but not for you, too violent, or scary, or pick your adjective..." Rhys, when we were preparing for our trip to Australia, I started reading Bill Bryson's IN A SUNBURNED COUNTRY. I had to stop partway through because of all the poisonous creatures he was describing. Did you read BLIND DESCENT by Nevada Barr? Her character had to go into deep, narrow caves, and so Barr did this to prepare for writing. Not for me--I'd have to switch to a different plot.

Debs, I don't like being in a crowded elevator either--I think being short is a disadvantage here because all you can see are the bodies pressed in around you. And I don't like highway driving either--too many crazies going way too fast and not leaving nearly enough room.

RHYS: Oh yes, Lucy. I agree about Australia. When I took my kids there for the first time my daughter Anne read out loud on the plane about every kind of lethal creature so that her siblings were freaked out when we went for a walk in the Bush. And I'm not really claustrophobic but like Hallie can't watch movies where divers have to squeeze through submerged caves.

But I don't have a fear of the garbage disposal. Pfew. However I now realize I am scared of the shower. I always worry about turning off the cold first and getting scalded or turning off the hot and getting frozen. What a bunch of neurotics we are. OR ON THE OTHER HAND, we are simply gifted with overactive imaginations, which is what we are such stellar writers!

So now it's your turn. What are you scared of?

Haunted...

HALLIE: After enjoying Charlaine Harris's visit to the New England Crime Bake, I've been thinking about the appeal of the paranormal, and how many otherwise perfectly normal people I've met are convinced that a house they lived in was haunted. A woman I used to work with told me how she could feel the cold air and many times saw the ghost of a woman in an upstairs bedroom. She and her family never used the bedroom, nor did the family that lived in the house before them.

So even though I've never put a vampire or a werewolf or a fairy into a novel, every once in a while I do put in a touch of woo-woo. Like when one my main character drank a glass of wine, imagined he was talking to his dead wife, fell asleep, and when he woke up there were two wine glasses beside him.

Have you toyed with the fantasy or paranormal in your fiction? What about in real life--anyone grow up in a house that felt haunted?

JAN: Well my new novel features an antagonist who may or may not be the devil, so I am definitely experimenting with Woo-woo (although I originally wrote this novel 21 years ago before I ever heard the term woo-woo)

About thirty years ago, my husband (then boyfriend) and I went to a bed and breakfast in Nova Scotia and we both woke up at four in the morning totally freaked out feeling weird energy in the room and convinced it was haunted. We gathered up our things, went out for breakfast and returned to check out by something like 6:30 a.m. We have never before or ever since felt that way or experienced anything like that, so we are not inclined to fantasize in that direction.

Not entirely sure about ghosts -- especially ones called up at seances - we believe what we want to believe -- BUT I'm a true believer in energy -- certainly the energy that we all project while we are alive. So its not that hard for me to believe that some energy lingers.

RHYS: I grew up in a haunted house. It was a big rambling old country house and my brother and I slept alone on the top floor with a long staircase between us and our parents. The mat outside my door used to flap even though no window was open and one night the window opened by itself in the middle of the night, causing me to freak out. I used to have a recurring dream of waking up and seeing a procession of hooded figures coming up the stairs toward me.

When I spoke to my brother about it recently and said I thought the house was haunted, he replied, "Of course it was." And he was only about eight when we moved away. I never saw an actual ghost and I suppose all the creaking and flapping could be attributed to drafts, but why would a little boy sense the presence of something paranormal?

And of course my latest book, Royal Blood, is a complete spoof on the whole vampire genre, but you never quite know in the end whether the vampire might have been real.

ROBERTA: Never lived in a haunted house--as far as I know! I did enjoy hearing about Charlaine's imaginative worlds this past weekend. I'm so stuck on reality! I guess the closest I'm coming is a tarot card reader in my new series. I'm going to have to trot down to the Mallory Square sunset celebration in Key West and get my cards read so I can write it realistically...

ROSEMARY: Uh...no. I'm a gardener. I compost. Nuff said.

HANK: Never lived in a haunted house. (That I know of, at least.) But ESP? yes, indeedy. There's more going on than we understand? Yes, indeedy. So who are we to dismiss things that happen as "coincidence"? I'm open to it.
HALLIE: I like it best in books, as in life, when there's something weird but you don't quite know what to make of it.

Please share with us your tales of ghost, visitations, or simply stuff you just can't explain.

AND COMING ATTRACTIONS: Tomorrow, Sarah Smith visits Jungle Red to talk about her new YA novel, "The Other Side of Dark," with a young girl who talks to ghosts and wonders if she's going crazy. It's a sweet and poignant.

Then, after Thanksgiving, Toni L. P. Kelner and Dana Cameron pay us a visit to talk about how their celebrated short stories are exploring the dark side. On Saturday Barbara Corrado Pope drops by to talk about her wonderful new historical mystery that only sounds like it's got vampires in it, "Blood of the Lorraine."