Ghostly Tales

FireChristina here and I’m continuing with the paranormal theme, even though Halloween is over. I love this time of year when the nights are getting longer and darker, and we (in the northern hemisphere) begin to light log fires and candles at night to dispel the gloom. It’s easy to imagine that the shadows around us are moving and there’s something, or someone, lurking in the corners, especially if you live in an old house. In other words – it’s the perfect time for ghostly tales!

Do you believe in ghosts? Spirits or lost souls who remain on earth because of unfinished business? I do, but I’ve never been fortunate (or unfortunate?) enough to encounter one myself. To tell the truth, I’m a bit of a scaredy-cat and would probably have had hysterics if I did come across anything paranormal, so perhaps hearing about it second-hand is the better option for me.

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Do You Believe in the Supernatural?

Moonlit thatchNicola here. Halloween and the long dark nights of winter may seem a more appropriate time to be talking about ghosts and the paranormal, in this part of the world at least, but in other places such a Japan the summer twilight is the time for sitting around a campfire and telling chilling tales. So today, whilst the sun shines and all seems quiet in my ancient village, I’m talking about the paranormal elements in my latest book, The Forgotten Sister, and asking “do you believe in the supernatural?”

The Forgotten Sister is probably my spookiest book yet. At the centre of this paranormal web is Lizzie Kingdom, a young woman who possesses the gift of psychometry, the ability to read objects and connect to their history or to the people who owned them. Lizzie has always kept this ability secret because she grew up as an outsider and didn’t want anything else to mark her out as different. Her gift for reading objects is a deeply personal thing that she uses to connect to the lost maternal side of her family. As she has never truly explored her gift, Lizzie doesn’t realise that it is greater than she imagines. Then she meets Arthur Robsart and is rather intrigued to discover that she can read him too. Arthur, unsurprisingly, finds this an invasion of privacy!

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