MOON CHILD by Em Peters

Famous Hauntings

By Em Peters

My favorite holiday, Halloween, is coming up, and with the focus on costumes, decorations and all things spooky, I started wondering about paranormal activity. As an author of paranormal romance, this is also one of my preferred topics. So I thought I’d dig around to see what new stories I could come up with.

The Tower of London

One of the best known hauntings of this scene of murders, executions and poisonings is that of Anne Boleyn. She lost her head on Tower Green after a very stormy interlude with the King. Why wouldn’t she be seen carrying her head tucked beneath her arm? During WWI, a sergeant serving with the Artist’s Rifles was on duty the night before several spies were to be executed. Before Carl Lody was executed, the sergeant claimed to see the ghost of Anne Boleyn wearing a filmy white dress with a ruff.

The Tulip Staircase

In the Queen’s House at the Naval College of London, footfalls were often heard traversing the staircase at night. In 1966, the Reverend Hardy and his wife used time-lapse photography in hopes of capturing this figure. This is what they got…

Is that the glimmer of a ring we see on the ghost’s hand?

Dudleytown, CT

An abandoned 18^th century village in Connecticut, Dudleytown is one of America’s most intriguing scenes of haunting. The first settler in Dudleytown was thought to be cursed. His family was reputed to be descendents of a Lord in England who was executed with Lady Jane Grey, and also said to be the carriers of Bubonic Plague. Insanity, murder and suicide were staples of life in Dudleytown (and I thought my small town was filled with crazies!).

In the 19^th century, ghosts and apparitions began to appear to the inhabitants of this village. One family who moved away was wiped out by Indians. A woman was struck by lightning and killed, and her husband went crazy shortly afterward. Corpse mutilations were reported, and soon the villagers began to give up on the town.

During the 1920’s, a prominent doctor set up a summer home in the abandoned town. One day, upon coming home, he found his wife laughing hysterically. She said while he was gone, the ghosts and demons had visited her. When they returned to their original New York residence, his wife took her life.

Edgar Allen Poe House

Poe’s house, which was rented from his aunt during the 1830’s, was located on Amity Street in Baltimore. The attic room where he lived is said to be so small, an adult has difficulty standing upright in it. During a “slum clearance” in 1939, the house was nearly demolished. But the Edgar Allen Poe Society saved it. One of the most interesting things to be seen there today is a portrait of Poe’s wife that was painted from her corpse!

In the 1970’s, the doors and windows reportedly opened on their own. A neighbor called the police after he saw strange lights in the upper floors of the house. In 1835, Poe’s wife did die in the house, and visitors to her room were tapped on the shoulder. A heavy-set woman with grey hair has been seen wandering the rooms.

And as early as 1999, local residents of the neighborhood have looked up at the house, only to see a figure of a man seated at a writing desk in the window.

Have you ever experienced a strange sighting? I’ll tell you mine. As a child of about four, I stayed the night with my grandmother. In the very tall window of her bedroom where I slept, I saw the figure of a woman dressed in long blue, fluttering robes. She drifted across the windowsill and extended a hand to me. To this day the image is very vivid in my mind. Later when I told my grandmother, she just nodded and looked toward the window. Later I learned several of my aunts had seen the same woman in the same window during their teen years!

I’d love to hear from you. Tell me about a haunting!

Em Peters

www.empeters.com

MOON CHILD available now from Whiskey Creek Press

When eight-year-old orphan Jack spies an otherworldly girl seated in the crook of a cherry tree, he’s instantly smitten with the dark waif known as the “Moon Child.” Over time they become inseparable and the steel tendrils of tenderness take hold of Jack, especially on nights of the full moon, when she seeks sanctuary in his bunk, begging him to silence the voices she hears.

Frantic to find a way to help, he is thwarted by family at every turn. By the time he’s an adult, his determination to uncover the secret drives him to defy the family’s strict orders and he learns his childhood love has transformed into the bonedriven need to be part of her life in a brand new way.

To free her from the life she fears, he first must trust himself. Only then can he break the pact naming the woman he loves as Guardian of the Indian Six Nations, which forces her to wander the night protecting their peoples and ensuring the Montgomery family’s prosperity, but to her, means certain death.

Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmJ_Pqk0A9Q

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