Today's Halloween guest-post is brought to you by Eileen Wiedbrauk, Editor-in-Chief of World Weaver Press as well as a writer, collegiate
English instructor, blogger, coffee addict, cat herder, MFA graduate, fantasist-turned-fabalist-turned-urban-fantasy-junkie,
Odyssey Workshop alumna, photographer, designer, tech geek, entrepreneur, avid
reader, and a somewhat decent cook. She wears many hats, as the saying goes.
Which is an odd saying in this case, as she rarely looks good in hats. Find her
at eileenwiedbrauk.com.
I have to admit, I’m the kind of
person who hates scary stories until I love them. I swore I’d never see The Exorcist or Silence of the Lambs or The
Omen, but as soon as I did, I was enthralled.
I can’t stomach the thought of reading a truly scary tale until I’m there on
the page, sucked in and captive, and by then my stomach has nothing to do with
my decision making: I need to finish
the story. I need to know what
happens next. The pleasure of knowing overwhelms the pleasure of feeling
unruffled and composed. These thrilling, fear-filled stories provide one of the
greatest pleasures fiction can: transporting you to a place that scares you
senseless while you remain in your perfectly safe, unscary reading chair.
And yet my favorite ghost story of all time isn’t terribly
scary. But what can I say? I’m fascinated by the ghosts of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Although the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is
pretty damn creepy, if I do say so myself.
I’ve rarely seen an adaptation of A Christmas Carol that I didn’t like, from Patrick Stewart to the
Muppets, from Scrooged to that
musical version where they sing something like, “Thank ya very much, that’s the
nicest thing anyone’s every done for me” when Scrooge dies. I’ll watch as many
of them as I can every Christmas season. But the ghosts—now that’s what’s fascinating.
We generally think of ghosts as the spirits of the dead.
That is, they were once human. But the ghosts of A Christmas Carol never were human. Their precise origins aren’t
terribly important but we understand that the Ghost of Christmas Present is
born the morning of Christmas Day and dies that night, that each year there is
a new one. This is the idea that
intrigues me. The notion that there are spirits out there frolicking about (or
at least frolicking in fiction) such as boggarts and wil-o’-the-wisps, who’ve
never been human but are always, always
ghosts.
Perhaps this fascination started as a child when I read
Susan Cooper’s The Boggart, whose
titular character is a grumpy if loveable spirit who spends some decades
accidentally trapped inside a roll top desk.
While editing Specter
Spectacular: 13 Ghostly Tales (available now), I searched for a range of
ghost stories. Many are tales of humans who’ve crossed the grave, but not all
of them are. Some are funny, some even have musical elements, and some scared
the pants right off me.
