Today's Salad Bowl Saturday Guest is Nancy Lynn Jarvis. When I started reading her post I was brought back to my high school creative writing class where I wrote a satire on the Vietnam war comparing it to the Britains fighting against Rome--which has nothing to do with Nancy's post, except we both use the phrase "Great Caesar's Ghost"--Nancy much more effectively than I.
So please welcome Nancy and her ghosts.
~ Jim
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Today is the Ides of
March. Great Caesar’s Ghost is afoot and he’s not alone. Literature and drama
have long been rife with tales of hauntings. You may believe in ghosts
yourself. I don’t, even if I’ve seen one, which really plays havoc with my
nay-saying. And if I’m willing to go to just one degree of separation and
listen to people tell of their first-hand experiences with ghosts, oh boy. It
was from this ambivalent perspective that I wrote The Murder House, the fifth installment in my Regan McHenry Real
Estate Mysteries series.
Regan is a Realtor
who, like me (a twenty-five year veteran of the real estate business) and many
Realtors I know, has had the experience of walking into a house and having the
hair stand up on the back of her neck . She knows what it’s like to be hit by a
wave of cold and experience an overwhelming sensation of evil when previewing a
house.
Even so, like me,
she clearly states that she doesn’t believe in ghosts, not when there might be
a rational explanation for what seems like a spectral presence. Initially Regan
is convinced the only thing that might cause a house to be haunted is its past reputation;
by the end of the book she discovers the truth is more complicated.
Every community
seems to have a real Murder House, a property with a history of murder and
mayhem rumored to be home to ghosts. There are real estate professionals who
deal exclusively in stigmatized properties, websites where such properties are
listed for sale, and a contingent of buyers eager to own properties that come
with eerie houseguests.
While writing The Murder House, I started asking
people if they believed in ghosts. The replies I heard were fascinating.
Believer or skeptic, almost everyone reported having had some sort of
interaction with what they called a ghost or a presence.
I’ve had my own experiences
with “something.” The first was seeing a blue ball of light moving rapidly
through the woods outside The Wayside Inn in Massachusetts. It wasn’t until I
read the pamphlet they distributed describing ghost sightings at the Inn that I
discovered my blue glowing globe was one of the alleged ghosts spotted by many
visitors.
Years ago when I was
the fourth owner of a house where deceased husbands and fathers had left widows
and orphans, my then six-year-old son and his friend talked about Georgie, the
ghost in their play space in the attic. I assumed they were influenced by Robert
Bright’s children’s book Georgie the
Ghost, which I had recently read to them. I thought no more of Georgie until
I was selling the house and the home inspector warned me that he discovered some
frayed and sparking electrical wires touching flammable material in the attic.
He said by rights the
wires should have started a fire and credited the mustachioed man he had seen
there out of the corner of his eye — who he dubbed our
fire-preventing guardian spirit — with keeping my children and me safe. I was
intrigued and couldn’t resist asking my then grown son if he remembered Georgie.
“You mean the guy with the big mustache who lives in the attic?” he asked.
I used the blue ball
of light in The Murder House and used
my favorite ghost story in the book’s dedication. You can read it if you like by
going to Amazon and using the “look inside” tool on the book’s page.
If you happen to buy
the book after that, the book’s ghosts thank you…that is if you believe in
them.
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Nancy Lynn Jarvis thinks you should try something new every few years.
Writing is her newest adventure and she’s been having so much fun doing it that
she’s finally acknowledged she’ll never sell another house. She let her license
lapse in May of 2013, after her twenty-fifth anniversary in real estate.
After earning a BA in behavioral science from San Jose State University,
she worked in the advertising department of the San Jose Mercury News. A move
to Santa Cruz meant a new job as a librarian and later a stint as the business
manager for Shakespeare Santa Cruz at UCSC.
She invites you to take a peek into the real estate world through the
stories that form the backdrop of her Regan McHenry mysteries. Real estate
details and ideas come from Nancy’s own experiences.
