Kathryn is going to tell you a little about ghosts.
A Ghost Story
by Kathryn Meyer Griffith
Because most of us are terrified
of dying and death, of losing all we know so well in this mortal plane, we want
to know: is there life after death? Do ghosts walk the earth? Vengeful or
benevolent spirits? Immortals such as vampires and werewolves? Does good always
win against evil? As human beings we’d love the answers to these questions and
if we can’t find them, prove them, well, then we’ll invent, create, worlds
where we can.
Now I must say that I can’t be
considered a true skeptic when it comes to the supernatural because at the
tender age of sixteen I saw a ghost, or what I believed was a ghost.
My great Aunt Mary had died two days before. Not unexpectedly. She was old, had
been in a nursing home for months, and we knew it was coming. Before the
nursing home, though, she’d lived ten years with my maternal grandmother, whose
name was also Mary, and had been happy there. The night before the funeral I’d
been sleeping in my bed and something – to this day I don’t know what it was –
woke me and I wandered down the dim hallway to use the bathroom.
And there was my dead Great Aunt
Mary standing at the end of the hall in an eerie pulsating ball of light. She
looked so real, as if I could reach
out and touch her and my fingers would feel flesh. She was gesturing excitedly
to me and rattling off a string of words that had to be German because I
couldn’t understand a word of it. The old woman had been an immigrant who’d
never learned our language, which is one of the reasons she’d been so content
living with my grandmother; they’d both spoken German. The only word I could
understand was Mary as she kept
repeating the word over and over. I assumed my aunt was calling for my
grandmother, as if my aunt were lost, and looking for her favorite niece. It’s
the only explanation I have for the visitation.
Why she appeared to me, I’ll
never know, but she did. I remember thinking: It’s Aunt Mary. Oh my God! But she’s dead. Dead. When it finally
hit me, I was so frightened I turned and scurried back to my bedroom and dived
beneath my bed covers. To this day, my mind swears I didn’t see what I thought
I saw…Aunt Mary’s spirit…but my heart and my senses chide me and say, yes, you did. You saw a ghost. A real ghost.
So there.
Since that day I’ve never been
able to laugh at the possibility of the paranormal existing. The thing is,
because I consider myself a down-to-earth realistic person (even though I’m
considered basically a horror writer even with the other genres I write) , if
someone asks me if I believe in ghosts and such I often as not hesitate before
I admit that I might have seen one.
Might. No one wants to be thought of as unbalanced. Seeing spirits is only one
step above seeing little green men or pink elephants.
I want to be taken seriously. I
mean, I’m a writer, not a nutcase.
All toll I’ve been a writer of
paranormal fiction for forty years and proud of it. I’ve written about spirits,
benevolent and malevolent; ghosts; angels; demons and all manner of vampires
and unexplained creatures; and even, once, a possessed gun, and a woods haunted
by an entity that was an eternal killer. Can’t get more spooky than that, can
you?
Happy Halloween!
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Be sure to check out all of Kathryn's works at Amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Kathryn+Meyer+Griffith#
Until next I ramble on...
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