Spirits & Spells True Paranormal Anthology

By Heather Marie Adkins, Alex Owens, Rick Gualtieri and 19 more

Spirits & Spells is a podcast by USA Today bestselling authors Heather Marie Adkins & Alex Owens, both of whom are obsessed with things they can't explain - especially the weird, the witchy, and the woefully spectral.

Step beyond the veil with twenty-one spooky tales of TRUE supernatural encounters by some of today's hottest paranormal authors. Between these pages, you'll witness a pair of disembodied legs cross the street and wake up beside ghostly felines; you'll experience visits from deceased family members and be haunted by terrifying shadow people.

But be forewarned: these strange tales will send shivers down your spine and make you certain you're not alone, even when you are.

The old saying is true: real life is stranger (and scarier!) than fiction.

Stories included:

Heather Marie Adkins - Residual Darkness
Alex Owens - Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner
Rick Gualtieri - A Ghost Cat, Broken Crystal, and No Body in Sight
Karin Cox - Paws For Thought
Jennifer Rainey - Up Close and Personal: A Visit to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum
Candace Osmond - Nightmares
Lily Luchesi - The Man in the Black Hat
Alyssa Breck - Wicked Game
Michelle Hughes - A Haunting on North Street
Kim Cleary - Uplifting Real Life Paranormal
Lindsey R. Loucks - Just Curious
Ann Gimpel - The Benson Hut Ghost
Shannon McRoberts - Precognition
Caia Daniels - We See Dead People
Tanya Dawson - My Paranormal Experiences
Brea Viragh - Poppy's Coming
Debra Kristi - A Ghostly Research Trip
LA Kirk - Gravity in Reverse
Selene Kallan - The Chase
Bria Lexor - Encounter with the Devil in Mexico
S K Gregory - A Ghostly Encounter

And a bonus novella from Caroline Peckham - A Game of Vampires (A Vampire Games Prequel Novella)

• Language: English
• Publisher: CyberWitch Press LLC
• Release date: Oct 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386901747

Book preview

Spirits & Spells

Spirits & Spells

True Paranormal Anthology

Heather Marie Adkins

Alex Owens

CyberWitch Press

A Paranormal Anthology

With TRUE stories by

Heather Marie Adkins

Alex Owens

Rick Gualtieri

Karin Cox

Jennifer Rainey

Candace Osmond

Lily Luchesi

Alyssa Breck

Michelle Hughes

Kim Cleary

Lindsey R. Loucks

Ann Gimpel

Shannon McRoberts

Caia Daniels

Tanya Dawson

Brea Viragh

Debra Kristi

LA Kirk

Selene Kallan

Bria Lexor

S K Gregory

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and a bonus fictional novella by

Caroline Peckham

Contents

A Paranormal Anthology

Introduction

1. Residual Darkness

About Heather Marie Adkins

2. Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner

About Alex Owens

Also by Alex Owens

3. A Ghost Cat, Broken Crystal, And No Body In Sight

About Rick Gualtieri

Also By Rick Gualtieri

4. Paws For Thought

About Karin Cox

Also by Karin Cox

5. Up Close And Personal: A Visit to The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

About Jennifer Rainey

Also by Jennifer Rainey

6. Nightmares

About Candace Osmond

Also by Candace Osmond

7. The Man In The Black Hat

About Lily Luchesi

Also by Lily Luchesi

8. Wicked Game

About Alyssa Breck

Also by Alyssa Breck

9. A Haunting on North Street

About Michelle Hughes

Also by Michelle Hughes

10. Uplifting Real Life Paranormal

About Kim Cleary

Also by Kim Cleary

11. Just Curious

About Lindsey R. Loucks

Also by Lindsey R. Loucks

12. The Benson Hut Ghost

About Ann Gimpel

Also by Ann Gimpel

13. Precognition

About Shannon McRoberts

Also by Shannon McRoberts

14. We See Dead People

About Caia Daniels

Also By Caia Daniels

15. My Paranormal Experiences

About Tanya Dawson

Also by Tanya Dawson

16. Poppy’s Coming

About Brea Viragh

Also by Brea Viragh

17. A Ghostly Research Trip

About Debra Kristi

Also by Debra Kristi

18. Gravity in Reverse: A Fictionalized True Story

About LA Kirk

Also by LA Kirk

19. THE CHASE

About Selene Kallan

Also by Selene Kallan

20. Encounter with the Devil in Mexico

About Bria Lexor

Also by Bria Lexor

21. A Ghostly Encounter

About S.K. Gregory

Also by S.K. Gregory

22. A Game of Vampires: A Vampire Games Prequel Novella

Prologue

Jonah

Evangeline

Jonah

Jonah

Jonah

Evangeline

Jonah

Evangeline

About Caroline Peckham

Also by Caroline Peckham

Afterword From the Editors

SPIRITS & SPELLS TRUE PARANORMAL ANTHOLOGY

Anthology Copyright © 2018 by Heather Marie Adkins|CyberWitch Press LLC

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Published by CyberWitch Press LLC

Paoli, IN

cyberwitchpress.com

[e-mail]

First edition, published October 2018

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Individual copyrights retained by original authors.

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This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork is prohibited.

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Disclaimer: The persons, places, things, and otherwise animate or inanimate objects mentioned in these stories are figments of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to anything or anyone living (or dead) is unintentional.

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Cover Art by CyberWitch Press LLC

Interior book design by Alex Owens

Spirits and Spells Logo

Introduction

When Life is Stranger than Fiction

We recently polled readers on Facebook to find out what books had scared them most. The books that sent shivers down their spines and made them leave the lights on as they lay down to sleep; the books they couldn’t stop thinking about long after they closed the binding.

The answers were great, and of course many of the books were entirely expected (like the entire oeuvre of Stephen King, King of Horror.) But a surprising number of books weren’t King, nor were they even great works of literary or contemporary horror.

No, nearly half the books were true crime and true haunting stories. Crazy, right?

In a 2009 poll by Pew Research Center, a whopping 65% of Americans said they believe in the supernatural, a broad definition of which included ghosts, psychics, reincarnation, magic, and other supernatural phenomena. A Huffington Post poll in December 2012 indicated that 45% of Americans believe in ghosts. I would venture to guess those percentages have risen in the nearly ten years that has passed since those polls with the rising popularity of paranormal and supernatural entertainment.

Our informal Facebook poll seems to follow that same trend, indicating a higher belief in the supernatural by default, because those true life stories are scarier than fiction. Readers are haunted by the things that happen IRL, more so than they are by the imaginings of fiction’s greatest horror writers. Real people are monsters. Real hauntings are terrifying. Look at the rising popularity in true crime and supernatural podcasts, and you can see where real fear lives.

That’s where Spirits & Spells comes in. As avid podcast lovers, we wanted to join the movement and bring together the things we love most: writing books and talking about the paranormal. Spirits & Spells Podcast launches alongside this anthology: a fun, casual, and probably semi-bawdy romp through ghosties, ghoulies, and witches with two multi-published paranormal authors who have very little clue what they’re doing (but we’re funny.)

We’ve gathered real paranormal experiences from published authors around the world and brought them together here to blur the line between truth and fiction. Some stories have been written in a fictionalized format; some are anecdotes, as if the author tells her story over the crackle of a campfire. But all (except the bonus novella!) are based on TRUE experiences.

So as the weather turns chill and the nights grow darker, fire up your ereader, grab some warm spiked cider, and enjoy this eerie compendium of tales. Then sidle on over to spiritsandspellspodcast.com and check us out.

And remember… don’t turn out the lights.

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Heather Marie Adkins & Alex Owens

Founders & Co-hosts, Spirits & Spells Podcast

October 19th, 2018

1

Residual Darkness

By Heather Marie Adkins

Iwrite paranormal books, but I don’t typically write horror - not in the Stephen King, skin-crawling, sleep-with-the-lights-on kind of way. To be honest, I'm a bit of a scaredy cat. I don't actually like being scared on purpose. I'm not a fan of horror movies, not a fan of Halloween-style haunted houses, and while I don't dislike scary books, they aren't what I pick up on a normal basis, either.

But there was an exception to that rule a few years ago. I wanted to write a ghost story. Not just any ghost story, however. This book would be based on stories I'd devoured over and over as a child, begging my grandmother to tell me one more time, fifty more times, a hundred more times.

True stories of her childhood home. A place so haunted, I’m sure as hell happy I didn’t grow up there.

Ilove ghosts. For someone who doesn't like to be scared, I sure am obsessed with true hauntings and haunted places. I usually credit that lifelong obsession to two people: my maternal grandmother Patricia, and my dad, Richard. (Funny enough, they DO NOT like each other, despite their combined efforts at breeding me to love ghosts.)

Both had a deep impact on how I would view the supernatural as I grew up. For my grandmother, ghosts were as real as you and me, a sentiment which came from her childhood - her formative years, when disembodied footsteps and strange sightings in her bedroom were the norm. She didn't know these things weren't normal. They were for her family, so surely that meant floating objects and seeping bloodstains on the hardwood happened to everyone.

My dad fits into this story, too, in a roundabout way. You see, my dad believes we have something special in our blood. Something in our family lineage that allows us to sense spirits. Now I could get down a rabbit hole on how much I agree with him, but I won't - I'll save those tales for the podcast! Suffice it to say, things have happened to me in my life that proved his theory tenfold. The things I could - and will - tell you will shock you.

So I'm blood-bound to sense spirits on my dad's side, and my grandmother grew up thinking an empty dress that floated and talked was her best friend. And then we have me, writing a book to tell her chilling tales in a fictionalized format.

You've got the background. Now we set the stage.

I was working third shift as a law enforcement dispatcher, which meant nights had become my days. I'd recently fallen in love with a co-worker - a man who would one day become my supportive and long-suffering husband. He’d recently bought a small, non-descript ranch-style house in a cookie-cutter neighborhood across town from where I grew up. It was a thirty to forty minute drive just to reach his house from where I lived with my mom and stepdad, so more often than not, I stayed with him.

His house had a feeling of heaviness and overwhelming darkness. Even on the brightest, sunniest days, the shadows never cleared completely. I never felt right in that place, in a manner I couldn't pinpoint. Every time I stared into a mirror, I had the uncanny feeling someone was staring back. Lights flickered for no reason; the cats and dogs interacted with things that weren't there

Something was just wrong in that house. It’s common for me to be sensitive to the presence of something otherworldly, but even my husband (who I think is a little bit psychic) felt the darkness there.

On the night in question, my then-boyfriend-now-husband was sound asleep in the bedroom while I sat at the dining room table working on my book. The house was quiet but for the clack of my keyboard. Midnight had come and gone, and I was edging up on one am, lit only by the dim chandelier above my head while my dog slept at my feet.

I’d gotten used to the oppressive nature of the place, as if it were a monster wrapped around me, breathing down my neck, unconcerned if I could sense him or not. Between my usual sense of unease and the late hour, I was on edge as I worked through a creepy scene in my book.

And then a gunshot tore through the silence.

Now, I was born and raised in Kentucky. Everyone has guns and everyone uses them. I was raised by cops who taught me to shoot as a teen. You can't go a week in this state without a neighbor shooting a raccoon or doing a little target practice on the old pickup in their backyard, the staccato crack of their gun as common as birdsong. I know guns, and I especially knew what it sounded like when our neighbors got bullet-happy.

This wasn't a neighbor. This shot was right outside the window behind where I sat.

I rocketed away from the window, my heart in my throat as I scrambled into the hallway. A number of insane thoughts ran through my mind, not the least of which was a terrified certainty some maniac had been watching me through the window and the gunshot was a warning.

My dog didn't leap into her shrill barking routine - the one she reserved for illicit joggers, unwanted squirrels, and the faint thunder of cannon-fire at Fort Knox. But she did react. She sat up, her nose pointed to the window and her ears perked as if she, too, were trying to figure out what she had just heard.

In the bedroom, my boyfriend slept on. The other dogs stirred when I walked in, and he followed suit, blinking groggily at me in the half-light from the hallway. What's wrong?

He hadn't heard a thing.

Weeks passed, but the incident remained fresh in my mind. I stopped writing at night at the table, too afraid to sit so close to the window. But that didn't keep me from hearing the gunshot again on two separate occasions - both right before one am, both so loud it could have been coming from our back patio, both completely unheard by my husband, even when he was awake.

It's easy for us to explain away the things we don't understand. It’s easier to grasp on to a mundane explanation, because a supernatural one strikes an ungodly amount of fear in human beings. We have a primal instinct that understands evil lurks in the dark, and we should be more afraid of the unseen than the seen. The seen can be vanquished; the unseen can vanquish us.

So, I don't know why a neighbor would be in our backyard shooting at one in the morning, but that sure as shit is what I convinced myself. And for a time, it worked.

Asweet old lady lived in the house next door. She'd lived there for ages; moved there as a young bride and raised her family in that house, slid into old age, lost her husband, etc. She'd been around the block a time or two, and knew everything and anything that happened in our quiet neighborhood. Not because she was a busybody, but because people talk.

One day while out cutting the grass, my husband got caught up in conversation with her, which happened sometimes. I think us ladies reach a certain age when our kids are gone and our friends are dying, and we just want someone to listen to us and remind us that we're real. He was out there a while with her, and when he finally came inside, he looked uneasy.

Turns out, our neighbor knew the family who'd lived in our house before my husband bought it. They were a troubled bunch. The mother got cancer and medical bills were bleeding them dry. She ended up choosing to end her own life by overdosing her medications and died in our house.

But that wasn't the crazy part. The son died by suicide, too. A gunshot wound. On the back patio.

Right outside the dining room window.

Late at night.

This wasn’t the first time I’d experienced or sensed something that would prove to have its roots in fact, and it wasn’t the last either.

Maybe it’s that I’m open to the other side, to the idea of portals and dimensions and the afterlife, thanks to my grandmother’s stories. Or maybe it’s because spirits really are drawn to me, whether because they want assurance, assistance, or just for someone to recognize that they are real and they are there - a trait passed down to me through my daddy’s bloodline, from my great-grandmother, the Appalachian witch.

Did I witness a residual haunting? The traumatic moment when a man took his own life, repeating over and over like a CD on repeat?

I'm not sure. You be the judge.

We left that house not long after and never looked back.

About Heather Marie Adkins

HEATHER MARIE ADKINS writes too much but still too little. She also has too many cats, not enough tequila, and a torrid love affair with procrastination.

Heather resides in southern Indiana with a sarcastic cop who is entirely too dependent on puns. When she’s not plotting her next story or herding felines, she works at the center for World Domination. Find out more about her at heathermarieadkins.com.

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If you enjoyed this story, don’t miss the

Spirits & Spells Podcast!

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2

Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner

By Alex Owens

As a writer who’s been around the block a few times, I know the value of playing on basic human fears to craft a good story, and as a mother my biggest fears revolve around my children. In hindsight, the story I’m about to share seems like something I would have penned late at night, during a thunderstorm, after one too many glasses of Moscato. But I assure you, every bit of it happened— every last spine-tingling moment— and it involved one of my kids.

When my children were small, my son a little over two and my daughter about to turn one, we bought a hundred-year-old Victorian home in a quaint little town a few miles away from where I grew up. The same family we bought it from had built the place, and it was only after the matriarch passed away (in the home, which didn’t bother me at all) that her scattered children decided to sell.

Here would be a good place to say that before we bought the house, my son was a dream to put to bed each night. No crying, no fuss. He slept all the night through, even as an infant. Which was a very good thing considering my daughter was such a demon baby, bless her projectile-puking heart.

When we moved, everything changed.

From the very first night we spent in that house, my son would wake up screaming several times a night. It was usually a quick cry, but terrifying nonetheless. Either my husband or myself would run to comfort him and that’s where things took a left turn into Creepy Town.

My son would be sitting up, babbling incoherently, staring off into the distance.

Every. Single. Time.

He wasn’t awake, you see. Not by a long shot. His doctor called them night terrors, but I wasn’t convinced. Not with the instant change in his sleeping patterns from the moment we moved in. And not by the way he was mumbling to himself, at only two years old, like he was having a grown-up conversation.

This continued on for months, until one night I heard him cry out while I was downstairs watching an episode of Supernatural. (Yes, the irony is not lost on me.) I made it up to his room in record time (because Goddess forbid he wake his sister!) and pushed the door open wide, allowing more light to spill in from the hallway.

But my son was not in his toddler bed.

I scanned the room while my heart crept into my throat. In slow motion, while my brain was trying to catch up to the panic coursing through my body, I looked for him. He wasn’t on the floor, he wasn’t under the bed, he wasn’t anywhere that I could see. I turned to call out to my husband, and that’s when I heard it.

A tiny squawk, coming from my son’s closet.

I stepped carefully towards the sound and into the darkened corner of the room. The closet was barely a closet; just an oversized, doorless opening in the wall that sat in the dead space behind the hall closet, roughly four foot wide by