cacakerbamakhlukpolitik

Hi, Rose here! As I mentioned in my last post , I'm doing research for my next book, about a revenue officer, a governess, and a ghost in Orkney (tentatively titled The Ghost and Miss Moore ). I've always liked stories with ghost characters, but real-life ghost sightings have never been much of an interest of mine, so I'm reading The Haunted: a Social History of Ghosts by Owen Davies. It's a fascinating book and it's been giving me lots of ideas for how I want my ghost character to work! He's a murder victim seeking justice (or maybe vengeance...he's not entirely a nice ghost), which has been a popular kind of ghost over the centuries--so popular, in fact, that murder investigations have been opened because of ghost sightings, up through the early part of the eighteenth century. In one case in 1660, a Westmoreland magistrate investigated the death of Robert Parkin because of a report that Robert's ghost had appeared to a man in the parish church crying ...

I'm not a fan of horror movies---you know the chase-em and chop-em up kind of scream/shock movies that are just violent for the sake of being violent. Hate em in fact. Boring, abusive, and I admit I've never seen a whole one. I do, however, enjoy a good Gothic romance, with a big old haunted mansion and ghostly dead (or sometimes not so dead) first wife in the attic. I also like the spooky grave side scene in Wuthering Heights (poor, crazy Heathcliff), and I even quite enjoyed the oldie "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir." Truly, a love story like no other. I am also always interested in the history, the ghostly history, of battlefields, old houses and castles, maybe because the ghosts are from long ago and there is a human element to the story I can relate to as a historical writer---great loves and losses, tragedy and triumph, with heroes and heroines who were real. Civil war ghost stories draw me in. Civil war and Victorian ghost and sightings are so sad (particularly of wom...