Guest Post: A Ghost Story by Kathryn Meyer Griffith

Seasoned author Kathryn Meyer Griffith is visiting Lizzy’s Dark Fiction today with a true life ghost story.  Stay tuned for another guest post from her next week.  I’ll be reviewing two of her books, Dinosaur Lake (Sci-Fi/Horror) and Evil Stalks the Night (Horror), in December or so, so keep an eye out for them.  When I was first contacted by Kathryn Meyer Griffith, I thought her name looked familiar.  Turns out that I read one of her novels Witches, many years ago.  I’m so excited to check out more of her work.

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A Ghost Story

Guest Post by Kathryn Meyer Griffith

Because most of us are terrified of dying and death, of losing all we know so well in this mortal plane, we want to know: is there life after death? Do ghosts walk the earth? Vengeful or benevolent spirits? Immortals such as vampires and werewolves? Does good always win against evil? As human beings we’d love the answers to these questions and if we can’t find them, prove them, well, then we’ll invent, create, worlds where we can.

Now I must say that I can’t be considered a true skeptic when it comes to the supernatural because at the tender age of sixteen I saw a ghost, or what I believed was a ghost. My great Aunt Mary had died two days before. Not unexpectedly. She was old, had been in a nursing home for months, and we knew it was coming. Before the nursing home, though, she’d lived ten years with my maternal grandmother, whose name was also Mary, and had been happy there. The night before the funeral I’d been sleeping in my bed and something – to this day I don’t know what it was – woke me and I wandered down the dim hallway to use the bathroom.

Copyright © 2011, Shain Erin

And there was my dead Great Aunt Mary standing at the end of the hall in an eerie pulsating ball of light. She looked so real, as if I could reach out and touch her and my fingers would feel flesh. She was gesturing excitedly to me and rattling off a string of words that had to be German because I couldn’t understand a word of it. The old woman had been an immigrant who’d never learned our language, which is one of the reasons she’d been so content living with my grandmother; they’d both spoken German. The only word I could understand was Mary as she kept repeating the word over and over. I assumed my aunt was calling for my grandmother, as if my aunt were lost, and looking for her favorite niece. It’s the only explanation I have for the visitation.

Why she appeared to me, I’ll never know, but she did. I remember thinking: It’s Aunt Mary. Oh my God! But she’s dead. Dead. When it finally hit me, I was so frightened I turned and scurried back to my bedroom and dived beneath my bed covers. To this day, my mind swears I didn’t see what I thought I saw…Aunt Mary’s spirit…but my heart and my senses chide me and say, yes, you did. You saw a ghost. A real ghost. So there.

Since that day I’ve never been able to laugh at the possibility of the paranormal existing. The thing is, because I consider myself a down-to-earth realistic person (even though I’m considered basically a horror writer even with the other genres I write) , if someone asks me if I believe in ghosts and such I often as not hesitate before I admit that I might have seen one. Might. No one wants to be thought of as unbalanced. Seeing spirits is only one step above seeing little green men or pink elephants.

I want to be taken seriously. I mean, I’m a writer, not a nutcase.

All toll I’ve been a writer of paranormal fiction for forty years and proud of it. I’ve written about spirits, benevolent and malevolent; ghosts; angels; demons and all manner of vampires and unexplained creatures; and even, once, a possessed gun, and a woods haunted by an entity that was an eternal killer. Can’t get more spooky than that, can you?

Happy Halloween!

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Check out these 4 short stories on sale for $.99.

Ghost Brother  |  The Banshee and the Witch  |  Too Close to the Edge  |  Running with the Train

All Kathryn Meyer Griffith’s Books available at Amazon.com.

Novels and short stories from Kathryn Meyer Griffith:

• Evil Stalks the Night (Leisure, 1984; Damnation Books, 2012)
• The Heart of the Rose (Leisure, 1985; Eternal Press Author’s Revised Edition 2010) Buy
• Blood Forge (Leisure, 1989; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2012)
• Vampire Blood (Zebra, 1991; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2011)  Buy
• Damnation Books Buy Link:
• The Last Vampire (Zebra, 1992; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition 2010) Buy  |  Book Trailer
• Witches (Zebra, 1993; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition 2011)  Buy
• The Nameless One (short story in 1993 Zebra Anthology Dark Seductions; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2011) Buy
• The Calling (Zebra, 1994; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2011)  Buy
• Scraps of Paper (Avalon Books Murder Mystery, 2003…soon to be an Amazon Kindle Direct ebook)
• All Things Slip Away (Avalon Books Murder Mystery, 2006…soon an Amazon Kindle Direct ebook)
• Egyptian Heart (The Wild Rose Press, 2007; Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011)  Buy  |  Book Trailer
• Winter’s Journey (The Wild Rose Press, 2008; Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011) Buy  |  Book Trailer
• The Ice Bridge (The Wild Rose Press, 2008; Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011)  Buy  |  Book Trailer
• Don’t Look Back, Agnes novella & bonus short story: In This House (2008; ghostly romantic short story out; Eternal Press 2012)  Buy  |  Book Trailer
• BEFORE THE END: A Time of Demons (Damnation Books 2010)  Buy  |  Book Trailer
• The Woman in Crimson (Damnation Books 2010)  :  Buy  |  Book Trailer
• The Complete Guide to Writing Paranormal Fiction: Volume 1 (I did the Introduction)
• Dinosaur Lake (from Amazon Kindle Direct 2012)

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