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I participated in a book fair in Aurora, IL a couple years ago.  There was an author on my panel who had written a book about these little people, gremlins, Gulliver’s Travel-type characters who crawl along the crevices of a ceiling.  He had seen them in his youth and wrote a book about them.  Not sure if it was a non-fiction or fictional book but I wish I could find out his name and book title because I had the same experience as a kid.  Up until probably the age of twelve, when I was in that half asleep/half awake dream state, I would see and hear these little guys hiding in the shadows.  I couldn’t make out their faces or what they were saying.  It was just whispers.

Is it any wonder my husband calls me strange?  I loved One Step Beyond and The Twilight Zone.  Shock Theatre was our Saturday night treat.  My parents, aunts and uncles would gather in the dining room to play poker and my sister and I and seven cousins would gather in the living room to watch The Mummy, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, Dracula.  We shared one bowl of popcorn and a six pack of Pepsi.

When I was four I remember Mom reading a chapter of Peter Pan each night before bedtime.  This was probably my first introduction to books that let the imagination kick into overdrive.  Sure I read Nancy Drew in my teens but I was grabbed by the throat by Stephen King.  Salem’s Lot kept me up with the lights on.  The Shining had me mesmerized by old hotels to the point where, no matter where I spend the night, if it’s a hotel that looks older than fifty years I ask if it’s haunted.  For our wedding anniversary a couple years ago, hubby and I went on a haunted hotel tour.  You can have the beaches, sun and surf.  I visited three actual haunted hotels.  Funny those ghosts get shy when visitors are around.  Ghosts Hunters on the Sci-Fi channel is on my recording list.  Here again the ghosts are always shy when people want to see them.  They prefer to sneak up during daylight, a flash in the peripheral vision, a shadow that forms for the unsuspecting eye.  But put a crew there at night with cameras and recorders and they don’t pick up anything but a disembodied voice on a recorder.

The Changling is an old movie with George C. Scott.  He’s renting an old home that he suspects is haunted.  Guess the hint was when the ball started bouncing down the stairs of its own accord.  Scott invites a medium to the house who asks a series of questions for the ghost while Scott lets the recorder run.  The ghost doesn’t respond to the medium.  It’s an uneventful night until after the guests leave and Scott plays back the tape recorder.  When the medium asks, “What’s your name?” a soft voice replies, “Michael.”  That one word was enough to send the hairs on the back of my neck scurrying up my scalp.  Rent it.

I’ve been through the phase of fortune tellers.  My sister and I used to go for fun until one time I met a Cherokee rock reader.  He told me I would be a writer and one of my characters would be a medicine woman because in a prior life I was a medicine woman.  Strange thing was, I already had one book published and the series did feature a medicine woman.  Hubby, the skeptic, figures the woman who was hosting the reader told the guy about me but I didn’t know the woman, never met her before. 

As a child growing up in a lower middle class family, all I had was my imagination.  It wasn’t an age of electronic games or computers or iPods.  We had books, softball, building blocks, and make believe.  Pretend was an occupation and it was what we excelled in. 

Carl Sagan said, “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were.  But without it we go nowhere.”