It was all very straightforward, at first. I’m a scholar with particular interests in 19th-century burial and memorialization. Accordingly, I spent a lot of time in old graveyards over several decades. I lectured on the subject, toured thousands of people through those graveyards, wrote and published papers. Throughout it all, I clung to an academic perspective: neutral, objective, trying to evade the question most of my listeners and readers asked: “Are there ghosts?”
Privately (that is, when academic colleagues and various journalists were absent), I thought there probably were. I’d experienced the cool, gliding fingertips of the paranormal just often enough to make belief possible. Barely. Just.
And then, because scholars aren’t wealthy and my history walking tours of a National Landmark Historic Neighborhood weren’t making enough money to pay my parking fees, I decided to advertise my tours as ghost walks. I was the first in that locale; it wasn’t yet trampled by herds of ghost-curious tourists and people in capes happy to take their money.
My tour wasn’t much different than before I hung out a new shingle. The neighborhood was old, the buildings were old, and the place had a history of violence and vice. Fertile ground, in other words, for unquiet shades—if there were any.
There weren’t. Month after month, I shepherded my little crowd of ghost hopefuls into bricked alleys and deeply shadowed alcoves. We learned, we had thrills and chills, we saw nothing.
Until we did. Let me be accurate. I did. The extramundane got real for me on a muggy late summer evening when a strong smell of gardenia—a popular perfume in the 1800s—came from a particular doorway and settled around me like a fur stole. With it came the conviction that a female someone was quite literally breathing down my neck.
I told myself all the things rational people say in the face of the Other. I’m imagining it, it’s someone in the group whose perfume I didn’t notice, it’s a vestige of someone who passed through earlier today and I’m misreading it…
That worked the first time. It did nothing to explain the subsequent dozens of times the phenomenon repeated. I was both honored and terrified by the persistence of what I was by then calling “my ghost.” Mostly, I was resigned to it until finally—for reasons I don’t understand any more than I understand why she appeared in the first place—my ghost went away.
So, here’s the instructional point of this post. You can’t find ghosts. They find you. My suggestion—not remotely strong enough to be advice—to someone who hopes to make contact with what Prof. Sybil Trelawney called “The Beyond,” is the same I’d give to someone hoping to find true love.
Be yourself, at a likely place, wearing the right clothing, and with your cellphone turned off. Like true love, it’s a one in a million chance that someone from Over Yonder will find you, but—trust me on this—it’s the best chance you’ve got.
My protagonist, Celeste ‘CeCe’ Gowdie, in Bound Across Time is drawn from life: mine. She’s a historian from the American South. Rational, objective, fact-seeking. And CeCe’s driven toward success; she doesn’t need any distractions. Like the fiercely attractive man she’s just encountered in the tower of the Welsh castle where she’s found her dream job. Could her dream job have come with a dream man?
It did and he is. What’s the catch?
He’s been dead since 1761.
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Excerpt from Bound Across Time, by Annie R McEwen
You’re
an idjit, Patrick. Death was always too good for you.
He
should have gone slower with her, no doubt about it. He was a lout, a brute, to
startle her so thoroughly, and that was never his intent. He could have—no, he
should have—whispered, or moaned, or shimmered from a distance. Instead, he was
hasty.
Hasty?
He was a burning brand of desire. Who could blame him after two
hundred-fifty…how long had it been? He’d lost count of the years.
That
was still no reason to be an imbecilic knave, popping up like codswalloping
Punch on a puppet stage while wearing the same filthy linen he was tipped
overboard in when the Earl didn’t have the decency to give him a proper burial.
At least the sea water had washed away the blood.
His
honor, his common sense—perhaps they’d washed away as well. Within reach of
this woman, he could remember nothing he’d learned of subtle romance and
courtly manners. All he could think of was making her his, now until the end of
time.
What
an embarrassment he was, to his sainted mother, to his upbringing, to the
gentleman he was reared to be. An embarrassment to every Irish bard who ever
sang songs or wrote poems about women who were doves, and lilies, and other
things he couldn’t remember.
He
did remember that they were fragile and easily startled. Easily driven away.
Next time, I will be slow. I will slowly and gently explain things to her.
Unusual things. Highly unusual, uncanny, frightening, nigh incomprehensible
things.
Sure,
now, Patrick, me boyo, that’ll be a stroll along the banks of the Shannon.
By
the right hand of God, but she was beautiful. Slumbering on the stone floor,
her skin smooth ivory but gilded, as though the sun had kissed her once and
then fallen in love, unable to leave. She’d lost her cap, and her hair—rich,
deep brown and burnished with red, like brandy—tumbled around her neck and
shoulders. Her sun-brushed skin, high and perfect cheekbones, the delicate
slant of her eyes, the plump swell of her breasts above the top edge of her bodice,
the curves of the body he could imagine pressed to his own aching and lonely
one…
Beauty
itself, she was, not only of body but of mind. In the weeks before she’d seen
him, he’d watched her exercise that beautiful mind among the slower thinkers of
the Castle, who doubtless envied her. She was stubborn, spirited, and
quick-witted—he liked that.
He crouched over her crumpled form, not touching, only taking in her scent.
Rose attar and mint—he liked that, too.
The
only thing he didn’t care for was the name she went by, See-see. What sort of
name was that? It was something you called a canary. He would never call her
that, not when the French name with which she’d been christened was just like
her.
Céleste,
meaning heavenly.
She
was waking now. He rose and backed away. Time for him to depart, as he must,
and breathe a prayer. Not for himself, there was no point to that. If God had
ever listened to him, he wouldn’t be where he was, and he deserved no better.
His prayer would be for her, the angel who defied or escaped God’s curse to
light his endless night.
Come back, Céleste Gowdie. Please come back.
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