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Halls full of memories

I have writ­ten a few ghost nov­els: Some­thing Upstairs, The Book With­out Words, Devil’s Race, plus a few short ghost sto­ries. My read­ers often ask, “Do you believe in ghosts?” My answer is, “No, but I believe in ghost sto­ries.” (See blog posts for Novem­ber 15, 2012 and Decem­ber 11, 2014). Each year I read, A Christ­mas Car­ol, a ghost story.

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Now I am about to pub­lish (spring 2016) a new ghost nov­el, The School of the Dead. It came about because I vis­it­ed a school which had been con­vert­ed from a very ele­gant pri­vate man­sion into a pri­vate school. Anoth­er school I vis­it­ed is a con­vert­ed men­tal insti­tu­tion which has a trou­bled tra­di­tion of its own ghost. In these schools much of the old archi­tec­ture was pre­served, which makes them fair­ly unique. It was these curi­ous mix­es of the new (young, mod­ern stu­dents) and the old (the build­ings them­selves), which gave rise to the idea that led me to this novel.

School of the DeadThink about it: schools are full of mem­o­ries, both actu­al and fan­ci­ful. The build­ing itself might be very old. My pub­lic ele­men­tary school, built in the 1920’s still stands, and is still a school. (Down the block is the ear­li­er school, now con­vert­ed into an apart­ment build­ing.) In many schools there are the sports tro­phies from years back, por­traits of retired teach­ers and/ or prin­ci­pals, pic­tures of illus­tri­ous alum­ni. In one of the schools men­tioned above, the library is a for­mal chapel—actually quite love­ly, but, well, strange. Some­time the schools are named after some­one from the past. In many schools you’ll see rather old class rooms and, not infre­quent­ly, very old books. Quite often you will see return­ing stu­dents whose hap­pi­est days were in that par­tic­u­lar school, who have come back to cap­ture a bit of that time. Maybe they are ghosts. As one of the char­ac­ters in the books says, “Noth­ing is emp­ti­er than a desert­ed school.”

These days, schools often have elab­o­rate Hal­loween events, with every­one, includ­ing fac­ul­ty and staff, in cos­tume. What could be a bet­ter set­ting for a ghost sto­ry? And so it is: The School of the Dead.

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