Hello, and welcome to the Hoosier Horror Blog Hop! I’ll be posting an entry here every day from October 1st through 5th.  Be sure to click on the link and explore the other fantastic Indiana bloggers, authors and other folks who are crazy about Halloween, the paranormal, and all things spooky in Indiana.

I’ll start by talking about paranormal investigations.  In 2003, my wife Amy found an organization called the Indiana Ghost Trackers, people devoted to looking in old houses, theaters, cemeteries, under rocks, etc, for ghosts.  I’ll be honest and admit it sounded a bit crazy to me.  At the time, she didn’t drive, so she asked me to take her to one of their meetings at the Indianapolis chapter. Oh yes, it seemed these nuts had whole chapters all over the state.  Wow.

I resisted the idea. I didn’t think I wanted to be involved with a roomful of mixed nuts like that. I said that if she planned to go again, she might want to try to arrange a carpool with others.  I was dragged kicking and screaming, more or less.

But then we got there, and the people seemed more or less sane, intelligent, excited and friendly.  They talked about interesting things like dowsing and past ghost hunts and techie equipment they used on a ghost hunt.  Then we all got to go out on a hunt, right then, out in the middle of nowhere in Indiana, to an old pauper’s cemetery, a supposedly haunted bridge, and to try to find an unmarked civil war cemetery. We took lots of pictures, and did recordings where we asked questions to the air, hoping for a response when played back, and had flashing, beeping EMF detectors as possible aids to our human senses.

I was hooked.  I couldn’t wait to go back the next month. And the next…  Over the next eight years, we made many of our best friends, had adventures, and had grew with the organization, learning how to lead and educate new people coming in just as we had.

Amy and I let our membership lapse at the end of 2010 for a variety of reasons, but we still both have a fascination with the paranormal and with historical places in and around Indiana.  My first three novels feature a ghost hunter protagonist, and I wrote about many of the places Amy and I visited with the Indiana Ghost Trackers. The ghost stories in those books are fictional, but many are based on real events.

Over the next few days, I plan to post some real ghost hunting stories, and where possible, include excerpts from my Road Ghosts novels that go along with them. I think it’ll be fun!

P.S. Context was fun, wonderful, and exhausting.  I KNOW I will have more news about that to post.

P.P.S. I am doing a Goodreads book giveaway of a copy of Blue Spirit… though since I just extended the deadline to the end of October, so it has to be approved by Goodreads again, hopefully will be open later today.