Non-Ghost Believer

GhostSome people don’t believe, others do, I’m somewhere in the middle but leaning heavily much more to the “no” side. Not a full-time denier but someone who believes he has reality on his side. And I can roll my eyes and yawn with the best of them.

Yes, I may watch the occasional special on a cable channel (I’m not recording them on my DVR or anything), but I would probably turn the channel after getting the gist of the ghost.

“Beheaded… yada yada… tragic lover. Got it. What else is on?”

Consider: If there were ghosts, the south would be filled to the brim with the ghosts of slaves; Germany would be unlivable because of the ghosts from the Holocaust; and every battle field (from Gettysburg to Iwo Jima) would need barriers to keep us living people out. And it would completely change the funeral home business.

I live in a house where someone died. They died in the same room I sleep in each night! Who knows, I might even sleep on the very spot that he took his fated last breath. Yet… I got nothing.

So why is it I can still be scared or hypnotized by the idea of a ghost? Heck, when I saw Paranormal Activity I was up for days, every bump was enough to wake me up fully.

“This is ridiculous, Scott,” I mumbled to myself again and again. “This is absolutely ridiculous. There is no such thing as ghosts. No such thing… What was that noise?!” Continue reading

Episode Four of The Dante Experience

Here is the link to Episode 4 of The Dante Experience.

The three previous episodes, of course, can be found via the links on the The Dante 3 page above.

Writing The Dante Experience

It was 1997 and I was in the MA program in English Literature at Michigan State University. My dream, at the time, was to become a professor in literature, getting my MA and then moving on to my Ph.D. Really, I wanted to teach back at my alma mater, Aquinas College (a dream I would succeed at for one semester a decade later), and I saw this as the straightest path to that goal.

Honestly, while I would be spending my days reading the work of other authors and writing reports, the creative side of my brain was starving…. So that brings us up to winter break and I am still living in my dormitory. I had a job working at a bank during the day and I really couldn’t leave Lansing. Which means I was living in something equivalent to a haunted house. I would walk down the hallways of the dorm and hear strange noises in the distance, not sure if it was another soul (living or not), or something more dire. Continue reading