My Real Ghost Story

A guest blog post by Kathryn Meyer Griffith author of 16 novels including Evil Stalks the Night.

Now, first off, let me say that I have no magical powers; I’m not a medium or even a sensitive. Though, through the years, I have experienced some strange things. Let’s say I’m…intuitive. I imagine a lot of writers are; especially a horror writer. We write about the supernatural so it’s natural that sometimes we live it.

Like that Christmas night in 1971 when my brother, Christopher, was killed. I knew as the phone rang that someone had died. Someone very close to me. I remember feeling apprehensive all Christmas Day as I visited with my husband’s relatives and celebrated Christmas. Then when the phone call came late that night, for a terrible moment, I didn’t want to answer it…knowing something irrevocably bad had happened. It had. My brother’s friend, high on drugs supposedly, had killed my fifteen-year old brother by stabbing him. One of my six siblings, Chris was sort of the black sheep of the family, but he was loved. Missed.

Since then I’ve often seen Chris in my dreams. He seems lost. Not unhappy, but not realizing he’s dead. I don’t like those dreams at all.

So loss was a lesson I learned young.

And I have actually seen a ghost. Right after my Great Aunt Mary passed away, the night before her burial, I saw her ghost in my parent’s hallway (I was sixteen and still at home) and, let me tell you, it scared the bejesus out of me. But she was just looking for my grandmother, whom she’d lived the last ten years of her life with, and I knew she meant me no harm. It was still a shock. She appeared in a ghostly halo of mist at the end of the hallway beckoning me…her words in German. I couldn’t speak German but I got the idea. She was lost, didn’t know she was dead and was looking for my grandmother, whom she’d loved so much in life.

I ran, hid in my bed under the covers and pretended it’d never happened. Hey, but I know it did.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons I’ve always loved the eerie, the unexplained. The spooky. And perhaps why I write horror. Maybe.