About Ghosts

Summer (along with the heat) has arrived, and it's time for a fun beach read. I have one: Ghost Writer.  It is a virtual trip to Laguna Beach, California--complete with a charming and annoying ghost. Here's a little bit about it--and ghosts.

From ghoulies and ghosties

And long-leggedy beasties

And things that go bump in the night,

Good Lord, deliver us!

~ Old Cornish Prayer ~

“I don’t believe in ghosts.” This is how Ghost Writer begins. My character, Nan Burton, adamantly insists she doesn’t believe. That is, until she's confronted with the noisy one living in her house.

I, on the other hand, do believe in ghosts. We had one living in our first house. Not a person, however. Ours was a cat.

Shortly after we moved in, I woke up on occasion with the sense of something walking across the foot of our bed. It felt like a small animal. I’d never owned a cat, but this didn’t feel like a dog, so I suspected a beastie of the feline persuasion.

After a couple of months, Larry and I both woke at the same time.

“It’s the strangest thing,” I started. “It felt like a cat has been walking across the bed during the night.”

“I’ve felt it, too,” was his matter-of-fact reply.

“Thank God! I thought I was going crazy.”

We speculated for some time about the cat, but he (or she) continued the nightly rounds.

Several months later, the woman who had grown up in the house stopped by. We showed her what we’d done to the house. She was very complimentary and told us stories about growing up there.

Just before she left, she asked, “Have you seen a cat around?” She went on to describe the cat, including what he like to do and where he liked to hide in the house. She mentioned that he’d patrol the house at night, his route taking him across each of their beds. Unfortunately we had to tell her that we hadn’t seen any animals resembling hers in the neighborhood.

“He disappeared the day my folks were moving. We came back and left food and left our contact information with all the neighbors, but we never found him.”

Her parents were the original owners and had lived there for seventeen years. The house had been on the market nearly a year before we bought it. So, any chance of locating the cat seemed pretty remote by that time.

We assured her that we’d keep an eye out, and she left.

A few weeks later, we realized that we no longer felt the cat walking across the bed.

“I wonder if it was the former owners’ pet. Maybe he was just waiting for them to come back before he could move on,” I told Larry.

“Hmm, maybe.”

A couple of years later, we adopted a stray kitten who appeared on our front porch. Like our ghost, our cat was nocturnal and roamed the house at night. We always kept our bedroom door closed, but in the morning when our daughter opened it, he’d take a stroll across the bed. And it felt just like the ghost cat.

How about you? Do you believe in ghosts? Have you seen any? Felt any? Sensed their presence? I’d like to hear your experiences.

Writing Animal Characters

Today,, Larry K. Collins, my husband and sometime collaborator, is my guest blogger. He tells about writing animal characters. His latest sci-fi venture, The McGregor Chronicles, features a cat, and he shares the issues he had writing this feline. 

When I was growing up, my family ran the gamut of pets. There were dogs, cats, hamsters, turtles, ducklings, chameleons, and goldfish. The latter three were acquired from various contest booths at grammar school carnivals. Remember “toss a ping-pong ball into the top of the bowl and win a fish?” The tiny goldfish came home in a water-filled plastic bag. Unfortunately, for my brother and me, none of the carnival animals lived long.

Dogs and cats were another story. The first, a cat, arrived when my mother found three-year-old me sitting on the back porch, petting a full-grown tabby. “Can we keep her?”

I named her Jezebel, not knowing she was a he. We got a clue when every kitten in the neighborhood began to resemble my cat. He would butt his head against my hand when he wished to be petted, a trait I wrote into The McGregor Chronicles series as a cat called Knucklehead. Jezebel lived with us for fifteen years.

The dog, a blonde cocker spaniel named Candy, arrived when a neighbor family moved out of state and could not take her with them. The four-footed refugee immediately bonded with my family. The dog had been quite yappy when in the neighbors’ care, often waking us at night. But when she arrived, my dad pointed to her and said, “I’ll have no barking dog living here.” Her eyes grew wide. She must have understood, because after that, the only time she ever barked was when the mailman or first-time strangers came to the door. She became guard and protector for the family.

In high school, my first job was working nights in a gas station. By then Candy was old, deaf, and nearly blind. She would abandon her bed to sleep with her back against the front door so she knew when I got home. If I was late, she would go to my parents’ bedroom to tattle, bumping the mattress as if to say, “He’s not home yet.”

After Lorna and I married, new pets entered our family.

There’s a saying, “Dogs have masters. Cats have staff.” It was certainly true of the cat we inherited from a relative, an obnoxious Siamese.

Foxy demanded attention but only on her terms. She sat just beyond arm’s length and yelled for us to pet her. Which meant we had to get up to comply. Foxy shared a fragile truce with our gray, mini poodle, Shadow. It lasted only as long as neither acknowledged the other’s existence. They passed in the hallway, each looking in opposite directions. But the cat ruled the house.

When I decided to include an animal in my Sci-Fi series, The McGregor Chronicles, I opted for a cat. The physical description of my fictitious feline, Knucklehead, came from the tabby of my own youth.

The temperament, however, was from another cat. Not just any cat. I based it on my favorite all-white feline, Pippin. He fit none of the usual cat clichés.

He was regal. He sat on a shelf or the back of the couch, head held high, front paws together, and tail wrapped neatly around his paws. Unmoving, he looked like a statue. Strangers often jumped in surprise when, after five minutes, the statue next to them looked their direction. He never demanded attention, but was friendly and loving. If one of us was sad or depressed, he sensed it, and wanted to be near, preferably on a lap. His steady purr soothed my young daughter’s tears. He allowed her to dress him in doll clothes, toss him over her shoulder, and carry him around. He never complained, but I remember a pleading look entered his gold eyes as he stared back at me from Kim’s shoulder as she carted him away. I knew I’d soon have to rescue him.

Most cats don’t like riding in the car. Pippin loved it. Sitting motionless in the back window package tray, he often got surprised looks from people in nearby cars. If it was cold, he sometimes wrapped himself around my neck and shoulders, like a fur collar. From there, he could watch out the side window, startling those who drove by.

I introduced my cat character in the second book of the series, Escape From Eden, and plotted a larger role for him in the third book.

However, as I began writing the third story, Alien Invasion, I got a serious pushback from the animal. Just like a real cat, he refused to do what I wanted.

Knucklehead complained. “First, I’m not a he. I’m female. And I don’t like my name.”

This cat acted more like the obnoxious Foxy than my compliant Pippin, or even Jezebel, but “she” put a paw down, and would go no further.

Since book two had already been published, I had to modify my story to account for the new name and sex change. Knucklehead became Qittah.

Further into the story we hit another impasse. I had thought to have Qittah interact directly with the aliens. She refused. “Your stories are more science than fantasy. Keep it that way. I don’t want to talk to aliens, and I’m in no way magical. I’m just a cat.“

Again, she was right. As a normal cat, she could provide comfort to a character during a dark time in the story and bring out the softer side of other characters. Plus, her adventures with weightlessness and the other aspects of space travel added realism to the final work.

This wasn’t what I intended when I placed a cat in the story. But, I think it made the tale better, and Qittah seemed to like it.

Do you use animals in your stories? And if so, how?