Ghosts and The Paranormal

From my weekly blog on my author website: www.taylorfenner.com for the week of Saturday March 7 through Friday March 13, 2015. 

Happy Friday the 13th! Is it supposed to mean something that we've had a Friday the 13th two months in a row? To keep with the eerie mood the topic of this week's blog is: Ghosts and the Paranormal; and why I write about them! 

I can’t honestly say I’ve always been into ghosts or the paranormal. When I was a child I was afraid of everything. There used to be a show on HGTV called “If Walls Could Talk” where people would talk about things they had found in their old houses that once belonged to previous occupants. Part of me thought that was cool while the other part of me thought that with an old house came ghosts of its previous occupants; and that terrified me. I can also remember watching shows like “The Most Haunted Places on Earth” with my great-uncle around Halloween when I was little. When I say I was afraid of everything I mean it; I couldn’t watch 48 Hours or Dateline, the movie Psycho terrified me to no end (along with most other horror movies), and anything that mentioned ghosts scared me.

It wasn’t until I was in middle school that I finally got over my fear and really got into everything paranormal. I credit that to a couple of books I read as well as the movies An American Haunting and The Fog (the remake). I mean who wouldn’t love a movie where vengeful ghosts return from their watery graves to seek revenge against the descendants of the four men that killed them? Throw in a girl with vivid nightmares and a secret connection to said vengeful ghosts? Even better! After that everything was fine, and by fine I mean I developed an obsession with the paranormal and a love of horror movies.

When I started writing The Haunting Love it was more of a way for me to move past and keep myself sane from a few deaths in my family; the paranormal element was just an added bonus. Regardless, I did do a lot of research on ghosts during the course of my writing. Not to the level of Iza’s brother Quinn of course, but I did learn a lot about peoples’ different beliefs when it comes to ghosts as well as the different forms of ghosts that people believe exist.

That was before I even started watching Ghost Adventures. I used to love that show; watching it religiously every Friday and/or Saturday night. Though I didn’t quite believe the “paranormal experiences” the hosts kept claiming to be experiencing I fell in love with the back stories of why people throughout history have believed certain locations were haunted. I stopped watching the show last year after it began giving me nightmares (not because it scared me but because after a while it got kind of morbid) but I still try catching it every now and then when there isn’t anything else on television on a Saturday night but the show has lost something for me after one of the 3 main investigators left. The three of them kind of had a certain way they meshed together and it wasn’t the same after one of the guys left.

I still maintain a strong interest in all aspects of the paranormal. My next novel Finding Elizabeth, a stand-alone novel, will touch upon ghosts, reincarnation, and Wicca (a Pagan nature-based religion). My other upcoming novel Out of Darkness, the first in what I’m aiming to be a duology or a trilogy will include all sorts of paranormal creatures, some of them well heard of before (ghosts, witches, werewolves, zombies to name a few) as well as a few that aren’t as well known.

I hope this shines a better light on why I choose to write about the paranormal. Whether you’re a paranormal fan, or just giving a new author a chance, I thank you for reading The Haunting Love, and I hope you’ll look forward to reading my two upcoming novels!

Have a great weekend and a safe St. Patrick’s Day on Tuesday! Don’t forget to wear green and eat some corned beef!