My guest today is author Kimberly Baer. Her YA paranormal The Haunted Purse is great reading for this time of year, and I will let her tell you about that story and some experiences with the other-worldly.
Welcome, Kimberly!
The Other Kind of
Ghosting
By Kimberly Baer
How likely is it that a purse could be haunted? My guess: not very. What self-respecting ghost
would choose to be squished amongst a scratchy
hairbrush, a lumpy wallet, that leaky bottle of hand sanitizer, and the dozens
of other items crammed into the typical modern-day handbag? Assuming that ghosts
get to choose their locale, most would probably opt for the roomy
accommodations of a house or the wide open spaces of a graveyard.
Still, you never know. Tiny houses are increasing in
popularity among the living. Maybe ghosts like tight spaces, too.
My YA paranormal novel The
Haunted Purse is pure fiction, but that doesn’t mean ghosts don’t exist. Ghostly
encounters have been reported all over the world, probably for as long as
humans have been living and dying. Haunted sites include castles, cabins, houses,
apartments, hotels, battlefields, graveyards, caves, mines, ships, schools, tunnels,
and probably a bunch of other places.
Many of us know somebody who’s had an encounter with a ghost,
and some of us have even had our own encounters. I can’t say for certain
whether I’ve ever met up with a ghost, but if I did, it happened like this:
- In 2014 I visited my son in Long Beach, California, and we
toured the Queen Mary, which has been named one of the Top 10 Haunted
Places by Time magazine. At one point,
the tour guide announced that we were standing in one of the most haunted rooms
on the ship. Just as I snapped a picture, a strange white blob streaked across
the screen of my camera. It didn’t show up on the photo, and nobody noticed
anything unusual in the room at the time. I like to think it was a ghost caught
in the glare of my camera, like a deer in the headlights.
Okay, okay; that might not be the most enthralling ghost
story you’ve ever heard. I have some better ones from people near and dear to
me, people whose integrity I can vouch for:
- A few years ago when my sister was out driving, she
suddenly felt the presence of a child in her car. The feeling persisted when
she returned home, and odd things started happening. For instance, she’d get up
in the morning and find the kitchen trash can in the middle of the floor. She
did some research and learned that the spot where she’d first sensed that strange
presence was the site of a recent car accident in which a three-year-old boy
had died. She started talking to the child’s spirit, urging him to move on, and
eventually he did.
- A dear and trusted colleague of mine lived in a centuries-old
townhouse in Alexandria, Virginia. She often talked about her resident ghost, a
benign and playful spirit who liked to move things around. The spirit’s coolest
trick: lighting candles.
Have YOU ever had a ghostly encounter? Would you like to? If
so, you could try buying an old purse at a thrift store, as my protagonist Libby
does in The Haunted Purse. If that
doesn’t work, consider visiting some well-known haunted places, such as El Campo
Santo Cemetery in San Diego, California; King’s Tavern in Natchez, Mississippi;
or various sites in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Visitors to those locations have
reported everything from seeing apparitions and hearing strange noises to being
pushed, scratched, or pinched by an unknown force.
Now wouldn’t that make for a memorable trip!
Back-cover blurb for
The Haunted Purse:
That old denim purse Libby Dawson bought
at the thrift store isn’t your run-of-the-mill teenage tote. It’s a bag of
secrets, imbued with supernatural powers. Strange items keep turning up inside,
clues to a decades-old mystery only Libby can solve.
Filled with apprehension and yet
intrigued by the mounting pile of evidence, Libby digs for the truth. And
eventually finds it. But the story of the purse is darker than she imagined—and
its next horrific chapter is going to be all about her.
Excerpt from The
Haunted Purse
Toni asked,
“Do you think we should tell my mom about the purse?”
“No,” I
said. I wasn’t ready to trust an adult. Not even Toni’s mom, nice as she was.
“Your mom is like you,” I added. “Practical. It would take a long time to
convince her there’s something supernatural going on.”
We went
back to watching the purse. There was a moment when I thought I saw it twitch,
but that might have been my imagination.
“You could
always get rid of it,” Toni said. “You know, donate it back to the thrift
store.”
I considered
that. “I could. But I don’t want to. Not yet, anyway. This purse is the coolest
thing I’ve ever owned. I want to find out more about it. I want to see what it
does next.”
She took
her eyes from the purse long enough to glance at me. “Aren’t you afraid it’ll
crawl into your bed some night and strangle you with its straps?”
“No. I
think it’s trying to get my attention. It’s trying to tell me something.”
“Like
what?”
I didn’t
have a clue.
About the Author
Kimberly Baer is an author and
professional editor who was born and raised in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a town
marginally famous for having endured three major floods—and she lived there
during one of them. She currently lives in Virginia. Kim has had her nose in a
book practically since birth, and she decided early on that she wanted to be on
the giving end of the reading experience as well as the receiving end. Her
first story, written at age six, was about a baby chick that hatched out of a
little girl’s Easter egg after somehow surviving the hard-boiling process. Her
recent focus has been on writing middle-grade and young adult fiction.
Author Links
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trailer for The Haunted Purse
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