13: Stone Corners and Other Stories is a collection of ghost stories rooted in memory, family, guilt, faith, and the strange comfort of being scared on purpose. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I used to split my time between writing lyrics, and songs, and stories. My songs were well-received (the other bandmates liked them, and a few got on the St. Louis radio). So, I wondered what the difference was between my songwriting and my failed fiction writing. There were a few reasons: the lyrics were concise, had a good rhythm, and hit with emotion, whereas my fiction meandered and often didn’t connect. The goal was to make my fiction more like my songwriting: to the point, playful with the rhythm, and to pack an emotional punch.

Adding to that goal would be what to write or which genre to explore. As a teen and a young adult, I had tried fantasy (which was derivative and boring) and science fiction (which wasn’t very plausible). In college, I tried creative writing and realized I had a lot of maturing to do in order to write convincing fiction, so I gravitated to alternative rock and roll music, which gave me immediate satisfaction and feedback. However, that lifestyle wasn’t too healthy to maintain without serious deliberating habits.

In my first try at sobriety at age thirty-five, I decided to write a ghost story and use the lessons learned in my songwriting. I made a Ghost Emotion list, which would be the kind of things that might linger after death and feed a ghost: lust, murder, betrayal, despair, coveting, guarding someone or guarding against something, etc.

“Night At the Black Orpheum” was my first ghost story and the first story I wrote that I thought was publishable. From there, it was finding the seeds for a ghost story and mixing the reality with something weird.

At some point, I decided to name the collection under the umbrella title of 13 and all the connotations that number brings, though, for me, the number thirteen has some personal connections.

Are any of the locations featured in your book inspired by places you’ve known in real life?

Several, as it turns out. Some are first-hand experiences, such as ghost tours in the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. That is the weirdest and most haunted place that I have been to. At the Meridian Coffee House in Alton, Illinois, I experienced orbs (quite a lot of that activity) and saw second-hand evidence of other manifestations. A nightmare about my grandparents’ huge basement inspired “A Sort of Homecoming.” In this dream, there were secret doors in closets that led to secret rooms that I had never explored. Taking the house as a metaphor for the mind, I used it to make a story of hidden secrets. “Blue Harvest” was a second-hand story told to me by my band-mates who all went to a haunted barn where there had been a mass killing by a deranged father (I had to leave early that night and was not present). Two of my bandmates gave me some details, but the third refused to talk and quit the band soon afterwards. A little later, I went to his house, and he told me his version of the events, which provided the climax for the story. He had been so upset by what he had seen that he eventually became a Christian preacher.

Faith is woven naturally into many of these stories. How important was it to treat spiritual belief as an active part of the supernatural rather than simply a background detail?

My upbringing in a Christian home instilled a belief in an afterlife with two destinations. As a history student, I read a lot about the Egyptian and Greek beliefs and depictions of the afterlife. As a reader, I discovered that the best ghost literature hinged on one important fact: the people in the stories believed in the phenomena happening to them in order to understand it, combat it, or resolve it. At some point, after watching ghost documentaries, reading nonfiction accounts of hauntings, and watching debunkers, I came to the conclusions that there could be four assumptions: one, it’s just in our imaginations (but if I can project ghosts, I wish I could learn how to project so many other things like money and gold); two, it’s all real like people say they’ve experienced (which tends to make people very uncomfortable); three, it’s not real, but seems real due to magnetic fields or some kind of local force in the environment that acts upon our brain and causes the projection to manifest; or four, this phenomena is real and can only interact in our section of reality by using certain electrical wavelengths or light spectrums and has other attributes beyond our knowing.

I am open-minded to the phenomenon. I can’t explain away everything I’ve seen, or heard, or felt other than it’s beyond me. Even as a believing Christian, can a spirit be seen, or is it actually the spirit of the deceased or something nastier? There are such stories in the Bible. Jesus was a demon hunter. They sure didn’t like it when He came to town.

Are there other haunted places or family stories waiting to be explored?

Yes, I am working on a companion collection of tales for a future 13 collection. One other tale that I posted on Substack involves a visit to the St. Augustine Lighthouse. My wife wanted to visit; I’ve never been to a lighthouse, and I love historical places. But I had no idea of the ghost activity there and only learned about it when two workers told me about it. A third worker knew their stories but was a skeptic. He said, “I’m only a skeptic because I have never seen a ghost. I would love to see a ghost and be proven wrong.” Well, there you are: that became the seed for a story.

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