I’ve had several paranormal encounters as a young adult. Thankfully none as an adult. This is probably a good thing as I recently lived in a 250-year-old house that was fortified with three hand-forged locks on every door. To keep the Red Coats out?

Hmmm…not sure, but I can imagine the bloody battles, deaths, and mayhem that may have gone on around that old house in Pennsylvania. I’m glad to not have lived with the ghost of a bludgeoned robber or poor murdered farmer defending his land (that I’m aware of!).

This was not the case with the old house I grew up in situated in the Helderberg Mountains of Upstate New York. It didn’t harbor a malevolent spirit though, but a sad one. She was a young woman who wore a high-neck lace dress with a cameo at her throat. She would float in my room, stand at the end of my bed, and look sadly at the wall over my head. Who was she? Someone who died there or lost a loved one? I’ll never know.

I would also hear hammering coming from our falling down “buggy” barn when no one was in it. Was it the ghost of the worker who long ago had been hammering on the three-story ceiling? Had his fate been to fall to his death on the spikes that the horses were tied to below in the earthen pit?

Then there were the ghost horses in the barn that whinnied wildly. Their screams floated on the winds to my room. Were they the horses that once fell through the rotted barn floor and had to be shot and cut up to be hauled out? It still gives me shivers.

I’ve always been drawn to the unexplained and dark side of things. As you can see from my 10th birthday cutting-the-cake photo here!

One time a friend and I channeled an “evil spirit” through a Ouija board. To our shock, this spirit levitated the movable indicator. The spirit told us to find a boulder in the woods with an “X” on it as that would be where we would find hidden green treasure.

We found the boulder but the only green treasure we found was the angry, verdant icy flow of the raging creek that nearly swept us away that February day. That was my last attempt to play with a Ouija board.

The scariest spirit I encountered was at my friend’s house. She claimed a robber lived in her closet. He had been killed in her house during a bungled robbery. Her family and friends joked about it, but she was serious. She would leave the closet open for him a crack each night or he would get angry. He was dressed in black with a mask and carried a knife. I always pulled the covers over my head when I slept there.

My friend wasn’t afraid of him, she said he just watched her—but I was afraid. I only saw him once. I was in the bathroom, and he passed by me in the mirror, knife poised to stab. I ran downstairs terrified of the mysterious man in black. And he became the basis behind my own watcher character “Man in Black” in my paranormal suspense novel, A Human Element. Only I molded my creation out of bad and good.

Long ago, my previous book club read my book, A Human Element, and decided to create a psychic theme night and include a psychic reading for everyone. The psychic asked me if I lived in an old house. Yes, we do, I replied. She then asked if my young son slept with the radio on. Yes, he did. She said that this was his way of drowning out the voices of the ghosts in our house so he could sleep. Not to worry, she said, they are benevolent. Well, good thing about that! Talk about spooked!

Whether I’ve outgrown my paranormal perceptions or not, they stay with me and have colored characters I write about in my books. Characters who can move objects, make magic, read minds, and see into the future.

I’ve now added shapeshifting to these character traits with my new series out by year’s end, The Gilded Wings Legacy. It starts with book 1, The Griffin’s Queen. For fun, I’m writing under a pen name for this new paranormal romance series—Marielle Cross.

Here’s the cover!

I’d love it if you followed me on my new Substack under Marielle Cross where I will be more active than this space. I plan to indulge in my spooky love there and share paranormal things that hook my curiosity. It might be a spine-tingling novel, a movie that kept me up, a song with a ghost story behind it, or a real-life encounter that made the news and can’t quite be explained. Some will be eerie. Some will be fun. A few might make you check the locks. Follow here!

Here’s a sneak peek into what The Griffin’s Queen is about:
Architect Maren Calloway needs the renovation fee from Talon’s Reach. Her brother’s survival depends on it. So, when a snowstorm traps her at the gothic mountain estate, she stays, carrying a secret of her own: her late grandmother’s sketch of golden wings above one name. Gilcroft. For twelve years, Kael Gilcroft has lived like a man serving a sentence with the griffin king chained inside him, convinced he killed the brother he buried without a body. But Maren wakes the beast. When something dark charges her past a forbidden boundary, gold feathers and lion claws rescue her, and she reaches for the man instead of running. But the bond between them demands surrender, and every Gilcroft queen before her ended in a silent, gilded cage. Maren will love Kael on her own terms or not at all. With his own blood betraying him and a rival griffin House coming for her, Kael must unleash the beast he swore he would never set free.

More paranormal fun to come soon!

Happy Spooky Season!