Today I am very excited to introduce you to a library worker here in IL who is a expert on true ghost stories. Her new, nonfiction book is great and a MUST BUY for all public libraries. I will have a mini review and giveaway of a finished copy from the publisher tomorrow, but first, I wanted to let the author introduce herself to you first.
Sylvia Shults is the author of several books of paranormal nonfiction, including Spirits of Christmas, Fractured Spirits: Hauntings at the Peoria State Hospital, and 44 Years in Darkness. Her new book, Days of the Dead: A Year of True Ghost Stories, collects 366 tales from all over the world. She has spent the past twenty-odd years working in a library, slowly smuggling enough words out in her pockets day by day to write books of her own. She sits in dark, spooky places so you don’t have to. She is a recurring guest on Ron’s Amazing Stories with the popular segment “Ghost Stories With Sylvia”, and has made over a hundred media appearances, including a spot on SyFy’s Ghost Hunters. She is also the writer, director, producer, and host of the true ghost story podcast Lights Out With Sylvia Shults. Find out more about her books, both fiction and nonfiction, at www.sylviashults.wordpress.com.
I love featuring fellow nonfiction horror authors here on the blog, not only because they are similar to what I do, but also because paranormal investigations are among our most popular books and media ion our nonfiction collections.
Shults has spent her professional life working in a library and investigating true paranormal events. Let her tell you why she loves this genre and then look out for a give away of Days of the Dead: A Year of True Ghost Stories tomorrow.
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By Sylvia Shults
My father tells me that I taught myself how to read at two years old. That could just be a proud papa (a book lover himself) talking, but I believe him. I cannot remember not knowing how to read. Even today I read voraciously and omnivorously, and I’ve been fortunate enough to nab jobs that have kept me in the midst of books for my entire working life – my first real job was as a page at LaGrange Public Library at the age of sixteen, then I drove the Bookmobile at Bloomington Public Library for a while, and I’ve spent nearly a quarter-century at Fondulac District Library. I’m surrounded by books, and they pay me to be here!
My author bio says that I work at the library in order to smuggle enough words out in my pockets to build books of my own. That’s a great way to put it, actually. One of the joys of working in a library is realizing that someone human wrote every single one of those books – and whaddya know, I’m human too!
I started out writing horror and romance – I know, fine line between the two – then found my niche writing paranormal nonfiction. Making the jump between fiction and nonfiction was, surprisingly, not as hard as I thought it would be. I think it’s because horror fiction and true ghost stories have quite a lot in common.
I picked up Stephen King’s Pet Sematary in grade school – well before I was actually prepared to read it – and was flummoxed by the opening line … so I put it down. I gave it another try in high school, and by then, the first line – “Louis Creed … never expected to find a father as he entered his middle age …” – held much more meaning for me. I was better able to appreciate the slow burn of the fuse that led to the dynamite of the meat of the story …
And even later, re-reading it as an adult, I realized further that the fuse was part of the meat of the story. The setup is just as important as the payoff. The day-to-day business of living is just as crucial to the story – any story – as the fireworks of the story’s climax. And in a horror story, the day-to-day business of living is what makes the climax so intense. Here you have some goober just going about his or her business, and they run afoul of a vampire. Or a shambling herd of the undead. Or a serial killer on the prowl. They were just doing their thing, man, and everything just blew up around them. The ordinary business of living is what makes the horror so horrible.
This was a valuable lesson for a young horror writer to internalize, and it served me well as I explored the new world of nonfiction. In addition to writing about ghosts, I became a paranormal reporter, going out and experiencing haunted places for myself. This cemented that lesson, that the story is just as vital as the payoff. I firmly believe that you can’t understand the ghost stories of a place without knowing the history behind the story. After all, that’s why we have these stories. People had an experience, which led to a haunting, which led to a ghost story.
Take the legend of Lizzie Borden, to pick a story completely at random. Whether or not you think she took an axe and “gave her mother forty whacks”, there’s a complicated backstory that led up to the violence of that hot August morning. Years of family disfunction, simmering resentment, and chilly politeness erupted into a killing frenzy. Whether Lizzie was the killer or not, there is a wealth of interesting psychological detritus to wade through.
And this is true for any ghost story out there. It’s the history that makes the story, and it’s the people that make the history. The murderer who was hanged, and who cursed the courthouse clock he could see from his jail cell, saying that the clock would never count down the hours of someone’s life ever again … and which has shown a different time on all four of its faces ever since. The jilted girl who committed suicide who now haunts her apartment building, now home to a chocolate shop, where every Valentine’s Day she knocks over the displays of heart-shaped boxes while leaving the rectangular ones on the shelf. The victims of a nightclub fire who still manifest as whizzing balls of light in nearby clubs. The building they partied in is long gone, but they have simply moved to another location, still eager to continue the revelry.
A lot of paranormal investigators, myself included, feel that their exploration of the supernatural has led them to a greater peace when it comes to the inevitable fact of our own death. It’s hard to explain – especially to skeptics! – but once you’ve experienced contact with the Other Side, to your own satisfaction (and of course what constitutes “satisfaction” is highly personal), it’s something that stays with you. Knowing that there’s something after death to look forward to makes dealing with one’s own mortality just a tiny bit easier.
There’s another reason I adore horror fiction so very much. I discovered horror in the Eighties, one of the high points in the genre’s checkered history. There’s a reason Stranger Things is set in the Eighties – it’s a gloriously silly callback to one of the Golden Ages of horror fiction. It was the decade of excess, and the decade of enormously cheesy horror, the kind that you enjoy partly because it’s so bad, and partly because it’s so bad it’s good – a classic, like A Nightmare on Elm Street. I didn’t get to do much reading for pleasure in college and grad school, but when I had a few moments to myself, I reached for a horror novel. They were a sort of “comfort food” during my college years. I knew that whatever grueling grind my own life was at that point, at least I wasn’t living in a Stephen King novel. As stressful as my life was, it was a walk in the park compared to the trials these horror novelists put their characters through. And at the end, I could close the book and say to myself, with a sigh of relief, “At least I just have to write yet another paper on ‘Commerce and Trade in the Ancient World’. I’m not being stalked by some drooling horror from beyond this world.”
And writing horror became equally as cathartic. If I was feeling stressed at the prospect of another final exam, I could pick up a pen and put my own characters through excruciating hardships. I could take out my frustrations by writing them down – and by being so mean to the characters who made their way from my brain onto the paper. Short stories were my gateway drug. Then after college, when I had more free time, I turned to writing novels. And I adored every gory moment. It’s fun for a horror writer to put her characters through the meat grinder.
Now, as a collector of true ghost stories, the characters – the people – have already been through the meat grinder. I don’t have to do anything frightful to my characters now … they’ve already lived through it all. All I have to do now is tell their stories, and honor their memories. Again, it’s because of the people, and their experiences, that we have these stories.
So yeah, that’s why I love horror, and also why I love ghost stories. Both are stories of people doing terribly interesting things, or having terrible things done to them. But the people are the backbone of the story (or the guts, maybe? Some gooey body part, anyway …). And when you close the book, turn out the light, and snuggle under the covers to listen to the fall rain dash against the windows, it’s the people that will still be whispering in your ear as you slip into your dreams.
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