452358530240a25e1538cf4a83d55970

Seven days have been bracketed by the supernatural – beyond my control but probably through my encouragement.
In my current novel, seven characters are telling ghost stories to wile away the Pandemic. I’m on ghost story number five.
This is a verified event, and I have been to the location. Because it is so well known I have done a lot of research on it before I started writing the story. And, about half way through my story, the following happened.
I knew two women who lived together decades ago, and both were demonstrably clairvoyant – I had absolutely no doubts. I haven’t seen either of them for years, but I thought of them as folk I’d like to talk to in my Mary Ellen  ghost/poltergeist quest. Then up popped an email from one of them, telling me the other had died, and sending her Obit. Wheels within wheels from the Otherside.  And then, immediately in the next email I received, was further information from a source I had been querying, concerning Mary Ellen. Pushing and shoving from the Otherside?
Eventually, my main research was to try and find if Mary Ellen lived out a normal life, or died in an Insane Asylum as many sources said.
Then, two days ago, I got an email with the subject heading “Mouseport Obit”. Now, I did a slow double take, as I had not heard that name for a long time. “Mouseport” was the name I chose when these two ladies got a cat. It was kinda a double pun on “Mosport ( Canada’s first permanent motor racing facility, built about 50 years ago) and  a ‘port’ for ‘mice’. One of the comments on the Obit page, was from a person who talked about Mouseport (obviously a different cat, but the name had been retained). So you never know where your puns are going to go.
At the time I got this email, I was still searching for further information, but I had started using a different search engine – Duckduckgo. I did come across sites I had not before seen, and queried a couple of them.
Late last night, I received a definitive (as much as one can get) from an author who had done deep research about the end of Mary Ellen’s life. As suggested by many other sources (which said she ended up in “Upper Canada”), this author (who had actually talked to a nephew of Mary Ellen) had found that Mary Ellen had moved to Sudbury and operated a Boarding House until her death.
So, I’m going to say I had help in my research from diverse sources.
Monday I will get back to continuing the short story.
Advertisement