by Tamara Thorne

t's all about the ghosts. It always has been and it always will be. No matter what I write, from the first time I put Ticonderoga to paper for my own satisfaction in the primary grades to the present day, fingers to Toshiba to write a novel, the ghosts come out to play, to titillate, to frighten, and amuse. I love ghosts and I love to write. It's a match made in the Twilight Zone.

When you're a kid, there's a house in every neighborhood -- or even on every street for some of us - that you designate as haunted. The reasons you choose a house are many and varied, but pretty much boil down to (1) the house is empty, preferably in disrepair (2) the house (preferably in disrepair) is occupied by a mean old man who is rumored to have (a) buried his wife and children in the cellar (b) eat kids or (c) yells at you to stay off his damned lawn. (Usually the old guy with the nice lawn keeps his house immaculate, but that means he's even scarier because he's careful: he kills kids in the bathtub, rinses away the gore, wraps the body parts up neatly in garbage bags and keeps his knives clean. In fact, his clean knives are the worst because his wife, assuming he hasn't murdered her, doesn't know and she uses them every week to cut up beef - or what she thinks is beef - for stew.)

What does this have to do with ghosts? Everything! Ghosts are the driving force behind all of these things, and every kid knows it. There are sad ghosts of victims, and ghosts who possess mean old men. There are cruel ghosts who like to scare you by hanging from phantom nooses, their eyes bulging, their fat lolling tongues drizzling green ecto-pus in an audible drip-drip-drip that hits the floor at your feet - then disappears. There are ghosts of bloody children, hacked to bits, there are evil dark bogeymen and mysterious ladies in white or black or gray. There are headless ghosts and ghost-heads without bodies. There are hitchhiking ghosts and ghosts of children who fell off their bikes into storm drains, who appear to other kids on bikes when it's raining, their heads still attached to their bodies only by white knobs of spine glistening in what's left of their drain-shredded necks.

The possibilities are endless. All kids all know this. That's why they check under their beds and close the closet doors. Supernatural things exist in dark places - and when the lights are out, all bets are off. Everything comes out to play.

Most people outgrow ghosts, but some of us never forget. And some of us, even as kids, don't take ghosts at face value. We aren't necessarily scared of them, not unless we want to push that fun and thrilling fright button on purpose. We're more likely to stage a séance than be frightened by one. (This doesn't mean the mean old man on the corner or any other humans lurking in dark corridors or around corners weren't frightening. They were, always. They still are. Humans have strength and physicality: they can grab you and slice you up into sausage meat or feed you to the pack of rabid weasels they keep out back, trained child-killers all.)

I was like that. Loved the ghosts, was titillated by them, but I really didn't want to meet the gang from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That seemed too real. Instead, I was a folklore fan from the earliest days, and to me ghosts and folklore intermingled, fiction dotted with truths. I idolized Houdini and found a grail -- the obscenely titled Book of the Damned by Charles Fort by the time I was ten. Between these influences -- Houdini's books on exposing fraudulent spiritualists and his stated desire to find proof of an afterlife, and Fort's cool reporting of falls of frogs, the ghosts and other phenomena got mixed in with science and resulted in heavier research into the origins of ghost stories.

Today, I do what I love: I write for my own pleasure. I make up scary stories to entertain, to scare, to stir up thoughts and doubts, and maybe even make a little laughter now and then. That these tales also amuse a few other readers is icing on the cake. It means that as a novelist who lives by Mark Twain's wicked quote about journalism, "Get the facts first, then distort them as much as you please," I get to pay my mortgage by doing what I love.

Best of all, novelists must research their books, so I get to travel to haunted places, stay in haunted hotel rooms, get behind-the-scenes tours and hear stories from all sorts of people who have experienced the paranormal, even people who ordinarily can't talk about such things, like doctors and cops. And better than best, over the years I've experienced all sorts of phenomena myself, some of which I can't even begin to explain away beyond a muffled reference to quantum physics.

While I can't explain some things I've seen or heard or sensed in some other way, they are the fodder for ghost stories. I just start with the facts, then distort them until I'm pleased. The joy of life is mystery and if it blows in on a cold zephyr breeze and curls your toes and prickles up the hairs on your neck, and maybe even whispers your name in your ear, it's the best mystery of all.