Six Tips on Writing True Paranormal Experiences

by A.E. Santana

For those of us that have had a supernatural or strange experience, there may be conflicting emotions of wanting to tell someone versus keeping it to yourself. Sharing your story can be cathartic, and many people have written their supernatural experiences to the awe and fascination of readers who enjoy the paranormal.   

But explaining a supernatural occurrence is more than just swearing that the doll moved on its own. You’ll need to craft your account as a story with a beginning, middle, and end, so your audience can follow along and be captivated. If these events truly took place, the best way to approach the project is like a memoir, which includes creative craft. To that end, here are six tips on writing true paranormal experiences. 

1. Stay focused

A classic memoir technique, staying focused on one event, moment in time, etc. is essential in keeping your audience engaged. Avoid writing your life story. Even if the paranormal event spanned a large portion of your life, the story should focus on the supernatural and not anything that doesn’t lend itself to the occurrence. This story should have an end, whether the ending is learning to live with the strange hauntings, selling away the creepy doll in a garage sale, or wondering if you’ll ever find out what really happened—end it. 

1. Ground your readers with setting

Grounding your readers in place is crucial to any storytelling but is particularly important when writing true paranormal accounts. Not only do you want to set the place, but it’s also a good idea to set a status quo. What was it like before things started to get weird? Grounding your readers with a well-written setting is helpful in establishing the authenticity of the piece. The more detailed setting you have, the more you will be able to put your audience in that space with you. People always laugh at the haunted house…before they go inside.

1. Tone and mood

Scary stories are big on atmosphere. Although some paranormal stories may have funny or silly moments incorporated, overall—for spookiest effect—the tone should be serious and the mood eerie. Your story should teem with a strange, weird, and frightening atmosphere without being so dramatic that the events come off as laughable, disruptive, or confusing. There is a fine line between campy and spooky. Reading your story aloud can help you figure out where your writing is landing. An effective account is strange but believable. 

1. Show and tell

One of the most common poorly worded advice to writers is “show don’t tell.” Better advice would be “mostly show but tell sometimes.” This is especially true when writing supernatural encounters. So, when do you tell and when do you show? Tell us what happened. Use detailed facts when describing the actual supernatural event. No need to get metaphorical or fancy with your words here. Be straight and to the point. These sections of you story should not be confusing. Show us how you felt. While your facts should never be confusing, it’s okay if you were confused. Not all your readers may have had supernatural experiences, but we have all felt fear, anger, loneliness, sadness, etc. That’s why it’s important to have the human element. Perhaps the reader will never believe in what scared you, but if you can get them to believe that you were scared—that’s a win.

1. Use all five senses

You know them: touch, smell, sound, taste, and sight. The four above elements can’t work without these senses and the more you use them, the more authentic and engaging your piece will be. The senses are especially helpful when depicting a place, setting the mood, telling your reader what happened, or showing the audience how you felt. So, describe the cold spot you walked into, the bizarre noises you heard at night, the shadow you saw creeping along the hallway, the gross smell that won’t leave the backroom, or that weird taste you get whenever you visit your hometown cemetery. 

1. Slow down where it’s spooky

Author Steve Almond advises in his book of essays, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey, to “slow down where it hurts.” When there is a big emotional moment, slow down and write it out. When writing true paranormal experiences, run with that advice and apply it to the creepy parts of your account. Don’t just say how the doll’s head moved on its own. Slow down and describe it. Use all five senses. Were there any sounds, perhaps porcelain scraping against porcelain as the doll moved its neck? Or did you see the soulless blue aggie eyes blink at you? Remember tip four and don’t get too fancy. Tell us what happened, just slow down when you do it.

“FEAR minus DEATH equals FUN.”

I didn’t write that. I saw it on Disney+, in fact, on a show called “The Imagineering Story.” It’s a documentary about how Walt Disney and his employees designed the Disney parks, including the thrill rides.  “FEAR minus DEATH equals FUN” was their approach to creating many of the rides, including roller coasters like Space Mountain.

My name is Michael Clark, and I subscribe to that theory. I love a good ghost story as long as it’s not gratuitously morbid–I want to feel the hair rise on the back of my neck. Do horror stories scare you away? I don’t want to do that. I want to give you a thrill like the adrenalin rush of a good roller coaster—don’t worry, when it’s over, you’ll be safe and sound.

I like eerie, and I like chilling. I love ghosts as opposed to monsters or demons. Do bad things happen in my books? Sure, but no more than you might read in a crime novel, and it’s never for the sake of vulgarity. Did you like the movie The Sixth Sense, or maybe Silence of the Lambs? That’s what I’m going for—a top-notch thriller that could stand with these great stories. Did I achieve my goal? That’s for you to decide. Just know that you’re not getting a slasher or teen horror, you’re getting psychological horror wrapped into a ghost story-mystery with a twist or two. Thanks for your time!

The Patience of a Deadman

Publication Date: April 15, 2019

Genre: Horror/ Paranormal *Author has described it as more “chilling than gory”.

He just spent everything on a house in disrepair, but he didn’t know someone was waiting inside.

Tim Russell just put his last dollar on a handyman’s dream; a quaint but dilapidated farmhouse in New Hampshire. Newly single after a messy divorce, his plan is to live in the house as he restores it for resale. To his horror, as soon as the papers are signed and his work starts, ghosts begin to appear. A bone-white little boy. A woman covered in flies. Tim can’t afford to leave and lose it all, so he turns to his real estate agent Holly Burns to help him decide whether he has any shot at solving his haunted problem. Can they solve the mystery before he loses his investment…or maybe his life?

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52786022-the-patience-of-a-dead-man

Available on Amazon!

A few months into the writing process on The Wrack, I started hearing rumors of some new virus in China. Four days after I sent The Wrack’s manuscript to my editor, the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

It’s been pretty surreal, to say the least.

I was absolutely fascinated with the Black Death as a child, and over the years, that grew into an interest with epidemiology in general. One of the constant refrains I heard from epidemiologists was that we were by no means safe from pandemics in the modern day- that the interconnected nature of our society put us at even greater risk. That’s obvious now, but even a year ago, most people simply wouldn’t have believed it.

So when I started writing The Wrack, it was, in part, intended to open people’s minds to the dangers that plagues still pose to us. 

Needless to say, my warning came a bit late.

I wish I could say that I predicted how bad COVID-19 would get, but I really didn’t. I genuinely assumed that the the various public health agencies involved in the early days of COVID-19 would manage to get control of the situation before it got this bad. I never thought it would turn into a full-blown pandemic.

While I got that part badly wrong, so much else has turned out as I expected it to. We might be more technologically advanced than our ancestors, but the mix of panic and community solidarity we’ve shown in the face of COVID-19 is remarkably familiar from historical accounts. Conspiracy theories and acts of selfless aid were just as intermingled in past plagues as they are today.

And, probably least surprising, the wealthy have proven just as liable to abandon their communities and flee to the hills today as they were during past plagues. 

There have been countless words written about how the true nature of humanity is only revealed during times of crisis. That’s something I absolutely wanted to explore with The Wrack, but I never expected my predictions to be put to such an immediate test.

And, by and large? I feel as though I passed that test. I’ve been convinced for a long time that the fundamental nature of humanity, is, well, inconsistency and interconnectedness. We’re all hypocritical, inconsistent, messy beings, who are more the contextual products of our social and physical environments than we are discrete individuals. I think that human nature is fundamentally good, though the bad actors are more common than I would like.

COVID-19 has been a test of that idea like nothing else. I’ll leave my readers to decide how close I was to the mark.

More than a few of my fans, friends, and family have jokingly blamed me for the pandemic. It’s all been in good humor, but… 

“Art is suffering” is generally supposed to apply to the artist, not, you know, other people. I have to admit, I’m now a bit nervous about writing some of the other “natural disaster in a fantasy world” novels I’ve been wanting to write. 

Just in case I do decide to move forwards with them, though, uh… maybe avoid Tacoma, Washington in the future? Just saying.

John Bierce

The tour schedule can be found here: https://storytellersontour.online/2020/07/01/tour-schedule-the-wrack-by-john-bierce/

Book Information

The Wrack by John Bierce

Published: April 23, 2020

Genre: Epidemiological Fantasy

Age Group: Adult

Pages: 232

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Book Blurb

Plague has come to the continent of Teringia.

As the Wrack makes its slow, relentless march southwards, it will humble kings and healers, seers and merchants, priests and warriors. Behind, it leaves only screams and suffering, and before it, spreads only fear.

Lothain, the birthplace of the Wrack, desperately tries to hold itself together as the plague burns across it and its neighbors circle like vultures. The Moonsworn healers would fight the Wrack, but must navigate distrust and violence from the peoples of Teringia. Proud Galicanta readies itself for war, as the Sunsworn Empire watches and waits for the Wrack to bring its rival low.

And the Wrack advances, utterly unconcerned with the plans of men.

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Book Links

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52185936-the-wrack

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Wrack-John-Bierce-ebook/dp/B086WLH8TW/

Giveaway Details!

For US residents, From August 2, 2020, 12:00am EDT – August 9, 2020, 11:59pm EDT there are five physical copies of The Wrack also up for grabs and you can enter to win one below!

The Wrack Giveaway

Horror is a feminist genre

by: Piper Mejia

You can’t discuss horror without talking about Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, her life and the influence of her feminist-author mother, Mary Wollenstonecraft. It is a point of ego to know that Shelley’s Frankenstein was not the monster, but rather the creator, and, by extension, the symbol of the monstrous things men do. Sure, it doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test, a result of the time in which it was written, but the book has remained a touchstone of horror and, in its own way, a lasting accolade for feminism. Yet, many women authors reject any association of their work with horror or the implication that horror reflects feminist ideals.

Horror tropes play on our fear of the unknown, of pain (torture), betrayal (sometimes by our own bodies and minds), and entrapment. How does this list differ from the issues feminists expose in order to create a more inclusive world? Google a list of feminist authors or feminist writing and the suggestions will repeat themselves: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margret Attwood, The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin, and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman. Though not one of these authors claim their work as horror many of their audience do, as what could be more horrifying than being an enslaved breeder, dying of fear after believing you have escaped, or being held captive while you slowly lose your grasp on reality.

In fact, each wave of feminism is clearly duplicated by the literature of the horror genre. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson was published in 1948 during the Second Wave of feminism, a wave defined by the sexism and sexuality backlash to the idea that women were happy in our domestic role in society; coined by the phrase “personal is political”. In Jackson’s iconic story, a husband is selected through a lottery to be stoned. The reason for the stoning is not given, just like the roles and expectations placed on women are never justified, and the way these roles are used to control and limit women is never acknowledged. The symbolism of the lottery in choosing a ‘winner’ for stoning is extended to the women’s inability to choose their own ticket if they have a husband or a son over 16 years of age. This is the author’s nod at the suffragette movement—The First Wave of feminism—and women’s inability to make or influence the laws that control them. The story ends with the wife coming to her husband’s defense at being chosen, claiming that he wasn’t ‘given enough time’. The wife’s reaction to her husband’s imminent death reflects our own complacency in the face of inequality, that is, until it affects our own lives. If the reverse had been true, one wonders if the husband would have rushed to his wife’s defense? Though written 70 years ago the story resonates as a metaphor for the current #METOO movement, where trolls on the internet attack women for speaking up, claiming that it is ‘not all men’ and that men are also ‘victims of sexual harassment’ in an attempt at false equivalency. 

I question women authors who claim they do not write horror. How can they say their writing is not influenced by their own the restrictive upbringing; one which has been shaped by culture and society simply because they were born a girl. Yes, authors can say they are neither feminist nor horror authors, but it is the audience’s response to their stories that define their genre. Horror is fiction, and feminist fiction addresses women’s inequality, so whether it was the author’s intent or not, fiction that explores the fears caused by inequality can only be acknowledged as both. No one argues that Misery by Stephen King is a horror (the story of a man abused and held captive for less than a year), yet Room by Emma Donoghue, (the story of a woman abused while being held captive for almost a decade) is categorized under the generic genre of ‘novel’. It is dishonest to dismiss the horror of a story simply because Misery is fiction that is unlikely to happen, but Room is all too real as it has happened to too many women.

So, what is modern horror literature illuminating? The Third Wave of feminism is defined as Intersectional Feminism, where race, ethnicity, class, religion and nationality come under scrutiny and diversity becomes a rallying cry of equity. Modern horror New Zealand author Lee Murray, draws on her Chinese heritage and the way tradition has shaped her upbringing and the person she has become. “Writing horror has always been a transgressive, subversive act. Whether we are writing from a sense of unease or from full on nerve-shredding panic, horror offers women a place to explore our basest fears, to address those subjects which must remain unspoken in acceptable society. And yet, even while writing horror, I wish I were braver. With fiction, we can claim the safety of distance, telling our horrors through character and metaphor. Setting our stories in distant worlds. Giving our heroine a fighting chance. In this way, writing horror fiction serves as both a sword and a shield. But when our fiction is also speculative, there is a hope for a real-world solution…” It is not a matter of Murray choosing to write horror but rather that horror is the one honest genre that can reveal the struggles in the lives of women.

In writing The Better Sister<, a collection exploring the complexity of the sister relationship, no other genre, other than horror, can completely reflect what my characters face in trying to forgive, forget, flee, or destroy what they fear. The sisters in each story are unable to tear apart the world that has shaped them, despite wanting to make amends or find absolution. Like the stages of grief, they stumble from naïvety, denial, anger, until they finally reach acceptance. But even in the end they are twisted versions of the people they might have been, if they had not been women.