Sometimes I’m asked why I wrote THE GLOAMING VEIL. There’s the dry answer, and there’s the fun one. The fun one is that I actually lived in a haunted house. Here’s a thread. 1/13

Like my main character Eliza, I fell in love with a house. It didn’t come with a sad, green-eyed viscount, but it did come with a ghost. It was a 1916 Carpenter Gothic farmhouse with a wide front porch, pitched eaves, and yes—a hidden room.
2/13

On a whim, I’d taken my daughter trick-or-treating in our town’s historic district. We passed by the house, and...it called to me. It was for sale. I was grieving the death of my first husband, and my kid and I needed a fresh start.
3/13

I called the realtor the next day, and she showed us the house. It was warm. Inviting. Full of light and possibility. I looked at a few others to be sure, but none of them seemed right. This house was meant to be mine. So I made an offer. We closed within the month.
4/13

Shortly after moving in, I started noticing things would go missing. (Easily excused—I’m the girl who lost her phone in the hamper the other day, after all) But. I couldn’t explain the noises. The knocking. The whispers. I thought I was imagining it. Until...
5/13

My mom started talking about it, too. Strange Whisperswhen she was alone in the living room...or perhaps a thread of music. Occasional footsteps, up and down the stairs. Creaking from the attic floor above.
6/13

One day, while I was mopping, I saw a partial apparition, just for a moment. A flash of white, at the corner of my eye. Could have been anything, right? Wishful, soft goth thinking. How silly of me.
7/13

But then my daughter started talking about Robin—who I *thought* was an imaginary friend. She told me he was a little boy who was always following her around. It mostly annoyed her. To this day (she’s now 16) when I bring up Robin, she gets a little weirded out.
8/13

But the activity *really* ramped up when she got the H1N1 flu (we do vaccinate—it didn’t work that year) She was so sick I thought I’d have to have her hospitalized. The footsteps got louder. More urgent. One day, a door slammed. Her sickness had set off a frenzy.
9/13

This got my historically-inclined self to thinking: the house was built in 1916. The Spanish Flu happened in 1918/19. Did a little boy named Robin, who saw my daughter as his friend, die in this house? Of the flu? Could that be why the activity kicked up when she got sick?
10/13

I tried to find property ownership records and I came up empty-handed going back that far. But I had a feeling Robin couldn’t move on (whatever that means) until he was acknowledged. So I had a loving, motherly talk with him, burned some sage, and that was...it?
11/13

The house grew quiet. I met someone special, got engaged, and moved away. But the house I fell in love with on Halloween night will ever have a place in my heart. Our haunting wasn’t evil, or malicious. The spirits, if there truly were any, were just a bit stuck.
12/13

I took those paranormal experiences (which I’ve never had prior or since) as inspiration for TGV, which is also an exploration of grief.
Old houses do hold secrets. But they mostly hold memories, happy and sad. They are people in their own right, whether haunted...or not.
13/13