I wrote this essay for the Horror Writers Association website as part of their Halloween series. It’s based on my experience collecting ghost stories in a modern voice for What Are You Afraid Of? Horror & Paranormal Show. Those ghost stories with audio version will be made available through this website.
Writing the Modern Ghost Story
Based on a True Story!
–T. Fox Dunham
Reader expectations change as genres and tropes evolve, and as authors, we must be in touch with current expectations. Over the last three years, producing episodes of What Are You Afraid Of? Horror & Paranormal Show, I’ve studied the modern true ghost story. People from around the world send in their paranormal experiences, and our voice actors record them into segments. Through my study, I’ve gained an insight into what modern audiences expect from ghost stories. I describe these elements to aid authors in understanding the preferred concepts when they create their own narratives. This is not an all-inclusive article, covering every aspect of the ghost story. I focus on the ‘based on a true story’ version, but I can confidently say that modern audiences will no longer be satisfied with a retelling of a classic Poe story.
Humans frighten and comfort themselves by telling ghost stories. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus journeys to the underworld in a spiritual adventure that brings the living and the dead into forbidden contact. Another early ghost story from around 50 AD comes to us from Pliny the Younger. Pliny describes a ghost bound in chains that haunts a house in Athens, which of course becomes an archetype in literature. Jinn, ghouls and corpses frequent the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, known as Arabian Nights, and the 11th century Japanese work, The Tale of Genji tells several ghost stories, including some early tales of spirit possession. Hamlet is essentially a ghost story as Hamlet’s father drives him to seek justice against his uncle. As a boy, Irving’s classic tale of the headless Hessian soldier kept me awake many nights. And of course, we all know Poe essentially founded the modern American ghost narrative. The ghost story continued to be told through history, finding a golden age during the Victorian period, which petered out at the start of World War I. It then found renewal in the era of cinema and modern literature. I could go on writing about the myriad examples of the manifestations of ghostlore, but this article focuses on the modern ghost story and how it has changed.
Ghost stories aren’t just happening on paper. The ghost story exists in every small town with a creepy abandoned house. Families tell stories of dark figures walking through walls and footsteps in the dead of night. The ghost story is an essential part of our modern mythology, and to be able to write a good ghost story, we must recognize the part these pieces of folk culture have played in our cultural consciousness and how it has evolved.
Ghost stories excite us in a different way than other mediums, especially the stories we believe are true. They give us a hint into the greatest mystery of humankind: what comes after? Ghost stories reassure us and offer an insight into our own futures. They promise immortality.
Storytellers have woven many myriad themes into ghostlore, though one common element resonates in every story: the transgression of the barrier between the world of the living and world of the dead. The forbidden contact—the spill of one disparate world into the other—generating an imbalance that creates disturbances in the living world. A barrier has been established, a wall, the silver veil in Celtic mythology, and natural law forbids us to breach this wall. Consequences follow that upset both life and the afterlife, and these ripples form the essence of a ghost story. We aren’t meant to see beyond death, and when we intrude upon it, we upset both our lives and the fabric of the current world. In a modern context, we find these stories even more disturbing and exhilarating. The best example is the story of the Lutz family.
The Amityville Horror changed the ghost story, defining the modern version. The majority of modern ghost stories in the west draw elements from this supposed account, founding a new element to the market. Before the story, audiences were content to enjoy stories drawn from hazy history or pure fiction. Now they get an extra thrill when a story is said to be true; though, much license is often taken in that process from the authentic story to the bookstore or theater. I know the story well. It compelled me to write horror. Sometime before dawn on November 13 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr, the eldest of a good Catholic family in Amityville, New York, went from room to room in their reproduced colonial home and killed his parents and siblings with a shotgun. After being arrested for this brutal crime, Ronnie claimed that voices in the house compelled him to murder his family. Illogical details supported his story. For example, all the family members were killed while lying prone in their beds, even though Ronnie had to climb two floors to finish his work. No one reacted to the blast of the shotgun and seemed to wait for their fate. The murders disturbed the peaceful community, but no one attributed the crime to supernatural sponsors. One year later, the Lutz family buys the home at a reduced price and moves into the property. They form the core of the typical American unit, good quiet religious folk seeking a good life. Within the first week, unexplainable events disturbed the rhythm of their daily lives. Toilets flushed black ooze. An imaginary friend, a pig, caused havoc. Dark visions haunted the family. Over the next 28 days, the dark disturbances built, terrorizing the family and changing their dynamic until finally forcing them to flee the home, leaving all their possessions. To move on with their lives and heal from these traumatic events, George and Kathy Lutz with the help of author Jay Anson, penned a book that created a major media storm—something you’d want to do if you desire to move on from a traumatic period in your lives.
The Amityville Horror set the tone for the western industry and created the concept of the ‘demonic’ infestation. Before these oddly dramatic events, ghost lore mainly featured the dead, souls of the living who had died and remained with us. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the Exorcist, which was also ‘based’ on a true story. The Amityville model, as I’ll call it, revolves around a demon or supreme and powerful dark entity—a demon being the most common, drawn from Christian religion. You can see versions of this theme in movies like A Conjuring, which was based on the travels of famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, who also pretty much created this sub-genre. Of course, money is to be made. The paranormal is popular and generates revenue. Cable television has jumped on this trend, and we now have channels devoted to the ‘true’ paranormal.
As cable diversified, channels like A&E and Discovery found a market in the supernatural. Shows like A Ghost Story or My Ghost Story indulged niches as paranormal documentaries, feeding off the majority of shared ghost encounters in the western world. The show, A Haunting, followed the model of the classic dark ghost story, telling Amityville-like stories under an hour. As producer and one of the hosts of What Are You Afraid Of? Horror & Paranormal Show, I have interviewed many guests from these shows, especially A Haunting, and I’ve gained an insight into this growing television genre. Shows like Sci-fi’s Ghosthunters and all the follow-ups take us one step further, showing us haunted disturbances in real time. These documentaries take us one step closer to ‘based on a true story’, though keep in mind these shows are still edited and filled with suggestion, defining our expectations. They all follow a certain model or dramatic pattern. Don’t let the promise of a true account fool you. These elements have been edited, sifted, ordered and embellished to tell you a story. Most real ghost stories don’t follow classic sine waves of plot, starting as a disturbance and then rising to a climax. It’s usually a series of events of varying intensity that end when the occupants move. Audiences don’t find that very entertaining, and trust me, marketing and profit drive this genre as it does fantasy, action or science-fiction, often at the expense of the original author who demands the veracity of their experience.
There’s a difference between stories of true hauntings and ghost stories. Ghost stories, such as the accounts of paranormal story collector, Mark Nesbitt of Gettysburg, tell a shorter story of witnessed events that happen randomly and without a plot climax. Visitors of the Gettysburg Historic Site witness brief scenes of grey and blue soldiers fighting on Cemetery Ridge or even of freakish creatures like the bearded man of Devil’s Den. Many haunted house accounts talk about random phenomena that doesn’t really tell a story. Footsteps are heard. Plates are moved. Voices whisper over amplifiers. Sometimes ghosts are seen. It never climaxes or turns malevolent. Then you have the long story of the demonic haunting, which takes place as I described above.
Most stories of demonic hauntings are exaggerated or completely fictional. I’ve come to believe this after personally interviewing many authors of paranormal books who were the subject of a ‘demonic’ attack. I find many of the details sensational, usually not backed up by the account of events and without verification. That’s fine. I tell people we’re not here to verify the stories. We just share them, whether true or not. And, it’s not only the authors who deceive. Sometimes, they believe their stories, and perhaps they are true, and it’s the publisher or media company that edits their story to create a frightening episode. I’ve spoken to many authors who have had their stories dramatized for television who feel duped. Their stories were edited, changed to make good television. Real ghost stories don’t follow a classic plot buildup. There’s no final battle. No rising climax. No great battle of good and evil. The afterlife such as in life doesn’t perform like a play. Stuff happens. It doesn’t happen. Then it does. Many sincere paranormal investigators lament this. I can’t find one investigator, who isn’t serving financial motives or fame that can claim encountering a demonic force. The stories start out with lighter paranormal events and just exaggerate. As Bill Reap of Reap Investigation said on a recent episode:
“Oh that’s the ghost of Uncle Jimmy. He was a bad-ass in life. Always causing trouble . . . (a couple of ghost hunters and editors later) Oh Uncle Jimmy is a demon now!” This is from episode 85 REAPER of What Are You Afraid Of? Horror and Paranormal Show I did with Bill Reap. Bill is the founder of the Pennsylvania paranormal investigation group, R.E.A.P. and has been investigating ghosts for many years. In a recent interview for the show website, Bill shares his insight into how the ghost story has changed. “The classic ghost story has evolved into something more frightening. It has become very dark in nature, not to say ghost stories haven’t always been dark. There is more of a scare at their core or foundational scare.”
When I approach someone who worked with one of these television shows, I am often treated with suspicion and apprehension. Many victims of hauntings see their involvement as financial windfalls, and they go off to write a book about their story, cashing in on a growing market. Their dreams come true when a cable channel asks them to tell their story, and they recklessly trust the producers with their reputations. They sit in some studio, narrate their experiences, giving credibility to the show, but they’re not shown the final version of the episode. Producers take liberties to dramatize their stories. They create events on the visual version that follow up the testimony of the authors, and the audience infers that these events are being told by the author. For example, the author can talk about a cleansing ritual being done—another common element in the pattern of story. They’ll end that particular narrative by saying something along the lines of ‘and you could feel the energy in the house fighting us.’ This close-up of the narrator then changes to the filmed scene of the actors. Doors slam. People are thrown about. Demonic faces gnash at the family. We assume the narrator confirms that these things happened. The authors have no idea this was added, and their credibility is wounded as skeptics rip into the exaggerated narrative. This is the blending of the ‘true story’ into the fictional narrative. True ghost stories aren’t entertaining and fall short of the complex narrative form that we’ve evolved, so to tell a good story, elements are changed to follow a specific pattern.
After interviewing many guests and reviewing television shows and books based on true hauntings, I’ve learned the common paradigms in each account. For the authors reading this article, these elements should form the basis of your narrative, though you should know where to vary in order to create a unique story. It always starts with a family of unsuspecting people moving in to some old house in a small town, either starting out a life or recovering from some destabilizing event such as divorce or flood. The family is usually innocent, casually religious and neither believes or disbelieves in the supernatural; though, by the end of the story, their emotional journey makes them into believers and opens their minds to a greater universe. Sometimes the spirits are triggered by the use of some ‘occult’ device such as a séance or dabbling into ‘black’ magic. That’s another classic trigger and usually operated by children or misguided adults. A series of small and unexplainable events begin to occur such as phantom footsteps, doors closing, strange voices that is shrugged off by the family. These then begin to escalate to reveal an evil presence seeking to harm the family. They present classic demonic elements such as shadow figures, claw marks, foul smells, threats of death, strange creatures, usually focusing on some young and vulnerable member of the family. At some point, a curious family member seeks answers and somehow finds specific evidence of tragedy about the property. Tragedy always gets the blame for haunted sites. Finally, driven by desperation, the family seeks the help of a paranormal investigation group that then comes in with their gadgets, gathers evidence and then announces the presence of a demon. The family is then referred to some religious group or element that comes in, does some sort of blessing or exorcism triggering a violent war. At the end of this cleansing, either the house is free of its possessing elements or the family is driven out. These stories thrive on discovery a clandestine logic that drives the haunting. That’s the mystery element of the ‘true’ haunting. Why is the spirit doing these things?
Nearly every dramatized ghost story follows this pattern. This is what the audience prefers: the classic battle of good and evil, fighting Satan’s soldiers! It’s all quite dramatic and compelling, but it is fiction. Cable peddles it as ‘true’, even though it can cause harm to families subject to real phenomenon. I keep hearing from serious ghost hunters how it has changed what they do, even endangering people who believe they are the subjects of a haunting. I talked to Bill about how cable television has changed the nature of paranormal investigation.
“The paranormal genre of television has really opened the belief in the paranormal. Life interprets art and influences the way that investigation is done. Television is sometimes mimicked. Sometimes it’s good sometimes not so good. I believe the media influences families responses because they have main-streamed the events and made it more acceptable. Some TV shows will pay to have those stories so we’re not always getting the full truth from some people, which is why the investigation side is so important. Does it make the situation more dangerous? That’s a two-sided question. The family itself can make things worse or an inexperienced team can make things worse and the family itself can also worsen the situation.”
As professional authors, we must be tuned into changes in the market. Ghostlore remains a popular and vibrant genre, and as such, it’s always evolving based on what’s popular with audiences. The genre has changed as the cinema and cable popularize the concept of the true ghost story, though often the final versions of these stories have been dramatized near to the point of fiction. If authors hope to contribute successful narratives to this field, they must be aware of the current trend of story elements audiences expect in the modern ghost story. Writing fiction inspired by Poe isn’t going to cut it anymore for the refined modern taste. Only stories based on narratives that possess specific elements and a verisimilitude will prove successful. Audiences don’t just want to enjoy a good ‘Boo’. They want to believe it too.
BIOGRAPHY
T. Fox Dunham lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Allison. He’s a lymphoma survivor, cancer patient, modern bard and historian. His first book, The Street Martyr, was published by Gutter Books. A major motion picture based on the book is being produced by Throughline Films. Destroying the Tangible Illusion of Reality or Searching for Andy Kaufman, a book about what it’s like to be dying of cancer, was recently released from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing and Fox has a story in the Stargate Anthology Points of Origin from MGM and Fandemonium Books. Fox is an active member of the Horror Writers Association, and he’s had published hundreds of short stories and articles. He’s host and creator of What Are You Afraid Of? Horror & Paranormal Show, a popular horror program on PARA-X RADIO. His motto is wrecking civilization one story at a time. http://www.facebook.com/tfoxdunham & Twitter: @TFoxDunham
