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One of my earliest memories is not of colorful play blocks, or a mobile circling over my head in my crib. Long before I could understand the world around me, much less the concept of ghosts, I found myself face to face with the inexplicable.
I was at my grandmother’s home riding my “Popples” brand plastic tricycle up and down the long hallway that connected the bedrooms. A usual occurrence as I had received the trike only months earlier when I turned three. The warm hallway light buzzed above my head as I passed. At the end of the hallway, I picked my trike up and waddled in a circle to continue my journey back to the living room where my dad was sitting comfortably on the couch watching his favorite program.
Then, I felt it.
An undeniable pull calling my attention to the open door to my left, which led to the empty back bedroom where my parents had just moved out the last of their things. There should be nothing there to garner the attention of a three-year-old, much less one involved in a pleasant trike ride. Maybe it was one of my grandmother’s cats enjoying the empty room and I caught a swish of their tail in the darkness. The hallway light only reached so far inside the room, and I dared not breach the darkness myself. The cat could have its fun. I huffed and turned to pedal back down the hallway.
Another feeling caressed along the back of my neck, a voice heard not by my ears, but in my mind. “See us.”
I stared into the dark room, and in the middle stood the outlines of three people. As a three-year-old, I only saw them from tallest to shortest—a family of ghosts standing in the middle of the room. No outstanding features, just outlines of the people they once were. I don’t recall how long I sat there on my trike staring at the three silhouettes. But there was an understanding hum in the air. They knew I saw them. I acknowledged them.
They drew closer to the door, just out of reach of the light. I screamed for my dad. He raced back to me, probably expecting me to be upended at the end of the hallway under my trike. Instead, he saw me pointing into the dark room, eyes wide. I told him there was a family of ghosts in the room. I saw his shoulders droop in exasperation as he walked into the room without turning on the light and waved his arms to “scare” the ghosts away. He walked right through all three of the specters without knowing anything different. He walked back out of the room and told me they were gone. He scared them off.
My head poked around his legs and there they stood, now closer to the door. I tried to tell him they were still there, but he turned down the hallway, repeating they were gone. After he left my side, I took one last look at the spooky group and pedaled myself to the relative safety of the living room where there was light, and I would be surrounded by the living.
Since that night, I have spent many evenings and days experiencing things that I can’t explain. Hearing voices only I heard. Seeing things and people only I saw. These experiences shaped who I was as I tried to understand and discover the side of me that no one else could explain.
It also shaped the foundation for the series I would one day write. The Lost Souls Series follows Anastacia Geist, a medium learning to control her sight, and Mel Coster, a man recently murdered and on the hunt for his killer, as they discover the paranormal sides of New Orleans.
When I began to write my series, I went through a few different versions of my story. What was the time and place? What was happening in Anastacia’s life? How did Mel’s life end? I wanted to write what I knew. I took what I learned from my criminology degree and merged my experiences of the paranormal with true crime. What’s a ghost story without a little bit of murder to go with it?
True crime has always been straightforward to me: procedural. There was a murder, there was a motive, now . . . solve. Of course, there are more nuances to develop, red herrings to push at the readers, but it always seemed like a straight line to me. Even going through my Criminology undergraduate degree, there was a path to follow. Follow the breadcrumbs and you will find the answer. I loved the mystery of it, but there was always an answer to find. It was time to mix things up and marry my passion for true crime murder cases and my fascination with the paranormal world that I have lived alongside for years.
There’s no straightforward and direct path with the supernatural. You may have names, maybe even faces, but there is no trail of clues to follow other than what the spirits want to give you and no procedure to adhere to. In my experience, I usually don’t even have a name as, for some reason, the spirits I communicate with never want to tell me their names directly. I would usually welcome the challenge, but not if the said spirit is wanting help and I don’t know where to start, so they watch me sleep from the foot of my bed. I wanted all this translated into characters and interactions; thus, Lost Souls began.
When writing the Lost Souls Series, I wanted to bring a sprinkling of my experiences in with the world I was creating. Bring a little of the unknown and spooky to light. You can say I wanted to shine more of the hall light into the empty, dark, back bedroom of my childhood. The experiences Anastacia has gone through in the series are fantastical and a bit more than I had gone through, but they all have basis in my life.
For example, in my novels, the Gatekeepers are dark shadow beings that drag the souls who have overstayed their welcome to their next step in the afterlife process. These stemmed from experiences with shadow people I would see quite often in the home of an ex-boyfriend. They would be these dark entities that would zoom from room to room when you weren’t supposed to be looking. They didn’t feel evil or oppressive, but they were a mystery, an unknown. It always felt like they were looking for something. Maybe someone. Most of the time I just hoped they weren’t looking for me. I wanted to take that same feeling of cautious curiosity and apply it to entities in my stories where you don’t quite know if they are good or evil. If they are ultimately there to help or to hunt.
Another example would be what I call my soul group. This small group has followed me my whole life and I started to discover them one at a time in high school. The most prominent of them being a soul named Melakai, or Mel for short. He is my ‘spiritual bouncer’. If there are too many spirits that could overwhelm me, he keeps them back. His kind and funny nature was too good to pass up on for building a solid main leading man. And he couldn’t be more enthused about the positive comments about the character based on him. I like to think of it as giving him a second shot at life.
Speaking of leading men, there is the romance. This is a completely fictional aspect of the series, but it was where my imagination could really take off. I played with the ideas of touch, sight, and sounds. In the physical realm, it is easy enough to reach out and hold someone’s hand, give them a hug or a kiss. This doesn’t always translate to the spiritual side of things. I have had phantom touches and physical sensations I couldn’t explain, but I haven’t been able to reach out and touch any ghost or spirit I’ve seen. How can I take that element and tell it from Mel’s point of view where he wants to touch someone, but his hands fall through her every time? Or explain how she may be able to see him, but Anastacia can’t touch the hand he reaches out to her? Another level to the romance to build on and research on. We’re all souls made from energy; is there a way to manipulate that energy with emotions to create sensations?
You’ll have to read Lost Souls to find how they overcome this hurdle.
Please stop on by and grab your copy of the Lost Souls Series; all three books are available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Walmart.com.
And thank you to all readers and to Book Cave for hosting my guest blog post. It was a pleasure to introduce you to my characters and how they came to be.
In light of spooky season, I thank you all for joining me as I shared a few of my experiences and how they translated to my series. I would love to hear your stories and brushes with the other side.
Until next time, happy reading!
Anabell Caudillo
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