218. Ghost Stories and Romance (Readers): We Discuss All Books Creepy and Good

[music]

Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 218 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today are Carrie, Elyse, and RedHeadedGirl, and we’re going to talk about creepy, scary things.  But we’re not actually going to scare you.  Most of the time we’re making each other laugh.  Some of us don’t think ghosts are real, some of us do, so we talk about reading ghost stories, ghost stories that we like, creepy romances.  We also talk about empathy, sensitivity, and reading for catharsis and vengeance.

We have a lot of book recommendations in this episode.  Like, a number of them, including horror romance, television, movies, mysteries, plus we have a discussion about the fact that mortality is a really stubborn and difficult romantic conflict.  So if you’re listening and you’re thinking, wait, I, I want to read that!  Why can’t I write that title down?  Wait, you’ve moved on to another book!  Do not worry.  All of the books and movies and television shows – seriously, there’s a lot of recommendations – they are all in the podcast entry at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.  And if you’re thinking, I would rather read the transcript, that’s totally cool!  They will be in the transcript as well.  We aim to give you listening or reading pleasure because, well, that’s how we do things.

The podcast transcript this month is being sponsored by Kensington, publishers of ‘Tis the Season by Jennifer Gracen in the new Zebra Shout imprint, which features rising stars of romance at affordable prices of $4.99.  It is never too early to get into the holiday spirit.  In the tradition of New York Times bestseller Bella Andre, Jennifer Gracen tackles the contemporary millionaire trend with the third book in her series focused on the rich and powerful Harrison brothers, ‘Tis the Season.  You can join the annual family gathering in a fun twist on the boss/secretary pairing as the eldest, Charles Harrison III, tries to resist growing romantic feelings towards his children’s nanny Lisette.  Desperate to avoid another scandal like the one his divorce caused, Charles knows that getting involved with Lisette is a risky move at the wrong time, but with the scent of holiday spices in the air, he can’t help but be drawn to her tender, caring nature, in such stark contrast to his cold ex-wife and unfeeling father.  With mistletoe hanging on practically every doorway, it’s only a matter of time before Charles and Lisette find themselves caught under their spell.  Discover the magic of love in ‘Tis the Season by Jennifer Gracen, now available on kensingtonbooks.com and wherever books are sold!

And I figured this week we should do some compliments during the intro, ‘cause it’s really fun, right?  If you’re wondering what I am talking about, head on over to Patreon.com/SmartBitches, and you can find out all the different ways you can support the show.  With monthly pledges starting at a dollar, you can help me do lots of cool things like keep the show going at its current awesome level, upgrade equipment, and most importantly, commission transcripts for all the episodes that don’t have one, which is a project I am really excited to get started because you are all so great!  At different levels of patronage, there are different rewards, and I have four compliments.  Are you ready?  This is so much fun!  Okay.

For Holly E.:  Cake, chocolate, toffee, homemade bread, fresh tea.  You are all of those things plus a bag of chips.

To Mina:  Everyone you know has a moment where they stop and they think, oh, thank goodness that she is my friend.

Leah P.:  No matter what you are planning to do, everyone you know knows with unanimous certainty that it is going to be awesome.

And to Meg D.:  Four separate people have independently written songs about you in the past week, specifically about how your laugh makes everything 265 percent better.

And if you’re thinking, what is Sarah on?  Well, if you go to Patreon.com/SmartBitches, you can figure everything out, and if you have questions you can email me at [email protected].

I will have information at the end of the podcast as to who this funky music is.  Sassy Outwater provides our music every week, and you can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater.

But in the meantime, without any further delay, let’s get started!  On with the podcast!

[music]

Sarah:  So are you guys ready to talk about ghost stories?

RedHeadedGirl:  Yes.

Sarah:  Yay!  Okay, I’m so excited about this.  I’ve been thinking a lot about ghost stories, and the thing with me is I’m fascinated by them, but I’m terrified to think too much about them because then my brain’ll be like, you know what, it’s two thirty in the morning.  How ‘bout we wake up and think about all those ghost stories again?  Sound good?  Let’s do it!  And then I lie there in bed going, oh, my God, I’m terrified.  What do I do?

RHG:  Um, yes.  I know that feel.

Sarah:  So this is – right?  This is a problem!

RHG:  You’re not, you’re not alone in this.  [Laughs]

Carrie:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Welll, that’s a relief.

Elyse:  I’m kind of in the opposite boat where I love creepy stuff, and I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts and I read a lot of scary books, but it doesn’t, the supernatural stuff doesn’t bother me.  Like, it doesn’t wake me up or scare me.  Sometimes I get freaked out if I read a lot of, like, serial killer books, but that’s kind of it.

Sarah:  See, I, I can’t.  I love it, I love ghost stories.  I was reading about different practices of mummification last night before bed, and then I had to stop and go, you know, this probably isn’t a good idea.  Maybe want to read this at, like, midday tomorrow, not right before bed.

Elyse:  Were you practicing to mummify something?  Was that –

Sarah:  No, I just – it takes a lot to freak me out, and it takes a lot to gross me out.  Like, I can watch surgery, eat spaghetti, and it’s not a problem.  I don’t get grossed out, I don’t get scared very easily, but in the middle of the night, it’s like there’s this one part of my brain that’s super awake, and it is scared shitless, so either I’m really good at compartmentalizing, or my nighttime brain is very different from my daytime brain.  Either way, I know that if I read this stuff before bed it’s just going to wake me up at two thirty, and it’s, hey, you know, what about that story about that ghost that was, like, in that person’s bedroom?  You’re totally in your bedroom right now!  Let’s think about!  No!  Let’s not!  Carrie, do you read ghost stories?

Carrie S.:  I do.  So, I have a weird relationship with horror where I say that I don’t like it, but horror and sci-fi and fantasy often kind of bore together, so I end up reading quite a bit of it, and what I have found is that the more supernatural something is, the less scary it is to me, because it’s removed from reality.

Sarah:  Oh, that’s interesting.

Carrie:  So, right, so –

Sarah:  ‘Cause I tend to think –

Carrie:  What?

Sarah:  ‘Cause see, I always, that’s when it starts getting real for me.  Like, oh, all this shit’s real.

RHG:  [Laughs] No, no, no.

Carrie:  Well, yeah, sure!  But, like, think about it.  Like, okay, this is, oh, kind of spoiler-y, but, like, in – let me see how it’s – okay, I can make this non-spoiler-y by being really vague and not mentioning the movie.  There is a movie that combines a person who is, is threatening a woman and a monster that is threatening a woman, and the monster is scary when I am actually watching the movie, because there’re jump scares and it’s, it’s very exciting, and my adrenaline’s, like, waahh!, you know.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Carrie:  But it doesn’t stick with me.  It’s scary; it’s not horrifying.

Elyse:  Yeah, I’m in, I, I –

Carrie:  – why the guy is horrifying.  He sticks in the mind.

Elyse:  I’m totally with Carrie on this one where, like, if I watch a scary movie or something or I read a scary book, in the moment that I’m in it I’m frightened or I jump or whatever, but after it’s done, if there, if it’s supernatural, I’m not worried about it at all.  Whereas if I read or watch a movie about something that I feel could actually happen, like actual violence, a serial killer, that kind of thing?  Then I start checking my doors obsessively before I go to bed.

Carrie:  Yeah.

Sarah:  RedHeadedGirl, I think you and I are in the same place.

RHG:  Yeah, we really are.

Sarah:  ‘Cause I read the supernatural stuff, and I’m like, oh, yeah, this –

RHG:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – this is, this is totally real!  Like, I shouldn’t think about this, ‘cause that makes it more real than it already is.

RHG:  Yep.  Yeah.  So –

Elyse:  But I don’t believe in ghosts or any of that either, so I don’t know if, I don’t know.

Sarah:  I do.

RHG:  I do.

Elyse:  Really?

Sarah and RHG:  Oh, yeah.

Sarah:  No question.  I’ve lived in enough old houses and seen enough weird shit where I’m like, yeah, there’re some things I can’t explain, and that’s the most logical explanation.

RHG:  Yep.  Yep.  Yep, I grew up in a house that was built in 1904, and we had, I think we had at least one who was generally benevolent and I think liked us, but there’s some weird shit that happens.

Sarah:  Such as?

RHG:  Just weird noises, lights that would turn off randomly, and just the feeling of, I’m not alone in this room.  I don’t feel like there’s a manevol-, a malevolent thing that’s here with me, but I’m not by myself.  I mean, there are other places that it’s like, I don’t want to walk into that room because, meh.  I once lived in a large Victorian house down in Dorchester where there was definitely something in the basement, and you had to walk past it to get to the laundry room?  That was not awesome.  [Laughs]

Elyse:  See, I’ve always been one of these people that, like, I want to be spiritual or have that kind of awareness, and I don’t.  At all.

RHG:  So here, here’s – it’s not a random question.  I’m not going to call it a random question, because it’s not.  Do you pick up on other people’s emotions?

Elyse:  Yes.

RHG:  At all?  Okay.  Interesting.

Elyse:  Yeah, no.  I mean, I think I’m pretty intuitive.  I mean, I usually know if –

RHG:  Well, no, not, I don’t mean intuitive, I mean, like, actually being able to feel what other people are feeling.

Elyse:  Yeah, I think so.

Carrie:  You mean, like, empathetic?  Or do you mean –

RHG:  Like, ever, like, empathy in its purist form, that you’re like, I’m getting mad, and I have nothing to be mad about.  Other people are being mad around me.

Elyse:  Oh, no, I’m not like that at all.

RHG:  Oh.  Okay.

Sarah:  But you –

Elyse:  But if there’s, if, if there is a, if there is a, a spiritual plane beyond this world or whatever, I do not connect it, to it in any way, shape, or form.  So, that’s disappointing.

Sarah:  [Laughs] ‘Cause you would like to be more scared?

RHG:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  No!  I mean, even, like, when people talk about, you know, my mom just had major surgery, and she’s like, oh, I really felt your grandmother there with me.  I’ve never had an experience like that where it felt like an otherworldly kind of presence or the presence of someone who is departed.  I just, I have no experience like that.

Carrie:  By the way, I want you all to know that I’m doing this podcast with a kitten on my lap, and she’s –

Sarah:  Oh, is that who I heard?

Carrie:  Yeah, well, she’s, she’s really pissed because I won’t let her play on the keyboard.

Elyse:  Well, I –

Sarah:  Oh, come on!

Elyse:  – I was going to say, which cat is it, Sarah, that crawls around in your sound box?

Sarah:  That would be Wilbur.  He loves to crawl in the sound box.

Elyse:  He needs, he needs billing on the podcast as our audio engineer?

RHG:  He does.

Sarah:  I will let him know that.  We, we had to order some shoes for my older son, and of course, shoeboxes are the world’s greatest boxes, so right now my sound box is not as good as the Zappos box, because the Zappos box is in the sun?  But when I –

RHG:  Ah.

Sarah:  – when I do the production and mixing, he will be all up in the sound box, so I will make sure to record him as the engineer.

RHG:  Yes.

Elyse:  I – so speaking of cats – so I don’t ever feel, like, spooky presences or stuff like that, but I swear to God, Dewey sees ghosts, like, all the fucking time.

Sarah:  Oh, that, that’s totally –

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – why I believe in them, because when we – and I, and I’m wondering if the, if the dividing line of, of whether or not, whether or not stuff really sticks with your brain and creeps you out and stays with you is that you think it might be real?  Versus, okay, that’s entirely fiction, so I know this isn’t happening, and so there’s a, sort of a break with reality that sort of protects you that I’m totally jealous about right now, because three in the morning –

RHG:  Mm.

Sarah:  – it’s hard to get back to sleep.  But I used to live in a really old house in Jersey City that was probably built around 1910, 1912?  Big, big, old Victorian, and the first floor had a bathroom that had been remodeled into a full bath with a shower and a sink in I’m going to guess the ‘60s, purely on the basis of the interior design?  So there was a lot of –

Elyse:  Was it very burnt orange?

Sarah:  It was very paneling, very paneling, and then there were these frosted, gigantic swans on the shower door?  Like, they were –

Elyse:  Nice!

Sarah:  – and they had, like, ruffles somehow?  Like, they had, like, scalloping around them, so they were ruffly swans.

RHG:  Ohhh.

Sarah:  And the floor was a very strange tile, and then the, the, the paneling wrapped around the sink.  Like, it was very ‘60s, ‘70s, but there was no room in this house that did not have paneling, and I can tell you that paneling came in baby blue, ‘cause we had some.  It was gross.

Carrie:  Hah!

Sarah:  Like, the fake wood paneling.

Carrie:  Oh, yeah.

RHG:  Ohhh.

Sarah:  Oh, it was horrible, and that stuff does not come off.  It is like –

RHG:  No.

Sarah:  – it’s like when you let instant oatmeal dry in a bowl, and you just have to throw the bowl away, ‘cause the oatmeal’s not coming off.  That same thing is, is fake wood paneling.  It’s there forever.  It’s going to outlast us all.  So, the bathroom was clearly within the last, like, forty or fifty years, and there were also signs that the dining room had been a bedroom.  There were, like, sort of divots where a bed was.  There were a lot of cable hookups for coaxial cable.  There were, there were much, much newer outlets that seemed to accommodate a higher voltage load, so I’m guessing, like, medical equipment, maybe?  But someone had clearly lived in that room, and then that was their bathroom.  And at the time I had a dog and four cats, ‘cause I had one dog and four cats ‘cause we are those people.  They would all sit in the foyer, they would all look at the back of the house where the dining room was, and they would all follow the same spot moving around.  And there was no one in the house with me, but they would sit there, and they would watch, and it wasn’t like, oh, hey, it’s a moth.  It was a very slow-moving thing, and they would very carefully watch it move around, and then, and – and they weren’t scared; they were just watching?  And then one or two of them would come and sit with me.  Like, okay, human, there’s something in the back there, so we’ll sit with you for a minute, and then we’re going to back and watch the thing.  But they all knew something was there.

Carrie:  So, I –

Sarah:  So I absolutely believe that there was something, but I also think you’re onto something, RedHeadedGirl, with the idea of empathy and energy, because I am that way.

RHG:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  If, if someone else is really upset, I start to feel upset, and this is especially true of my kids.

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  And I can think of a lot of reasons why that is, but I can tell, if I’m not even looking at their faces, if they’re facing away from me, and it’s not just body posture, I can tell very quickly what kind of mood they’re in, which is going to be –

RHG:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – utter fucking hell when they’re teenagers.  I just can’t wait.

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Yeah, it’s going to be great!

RHG:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Woo!  Going to be exhausted all the fucking time!

Carrie:  Oh, Sarah, I laugh and laugh!

RHG:  We’re, we’re going to, we’re –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

RHG:  – we’re going to practice some blocking techniques for you.

Sarah:  On a – [laughs] – just going to walk around with a shield, like an actual shield from, like, I’m going to break into medieval feast and steal their shields and walk around with them.  [Laughs]

Carrie:  But, no, seriously, I have that same kind of empathy, and that is my biggest challenge in parenting a, a, a brand-new teenager, ‘cause mine just turned thirteen, in fact.

Someone:  Woohoo!

Sarah:  I’m sorry.  Really, really sorry about that.

Carrie:  I know, right?  Is that, if she’s upset, I soak that right up –

Sarah:  Yep!

Carrie:  – and internalize it, which amplifies the problem instead of calming the problem.  It’s the biggest difficulty that I have.  ‘Cause overall she’s great, but if she’s, you know, if she’s experiencing intense moods, which kind of comes with the package, then I just soak that right up.

Sarah:  Yay, hormones!  But do you –

Carrie:  It’s fun!

Sarah:  – do you think it’s possible, then, RedHeadedGirl, that there’s a connection between your sensitivity and your belief in ghosts and spirituality in that direction and having intense levels of, of receptive empathy?

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  I’d never thought of it that way, but I can totally see that being true.

RHG:  Yeah.  Of course –

Elyse:  You guys need to move over to Elyse’s complete emotional obliviousness page.

RHG:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Wow!  You don’t know how much I would love to pick up and move there –

Carrie:  Oh, my God.

Sarah:  – but I’ve been trying all my life, and it’s, I’m just not –

Carrie:  It must be so nice.

Sarah:  It’s just, it’s just, I’m never going to get there, I’m sorry.  [Laughs]

Elyse:  No, I’m very good at, like, it, it, it drives my boss nuts, because I, I at least know when shit’s about to go down at work, even when I haven’t been involved in it, and he’ll always be like, how do you – ?  ‘Cause I can pick up on the energy of a situation –

Sarah:  Right.

RHG:  Hmm.

Elyse:  – right?  Or that, that something – I, I pick up on, like, the, the environmental, something here is different; people are acting slightly different.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Elyse:  Therefore, someone’s about to be fired.  Right?  Like, that kind of thing, but I cannot –

Sarah:  To quote Ke$ha and Pitbull, it’s about to go down.

RHG:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Right.

Carrie:  But you don’t internalize it.  You don’t soak it up.

Elyse:  But I don’t internalize it, right, which, like, I think in retrospect is probably why I’m good at my job, because I’m able to say, okay, I can see that this thing is happening; however, I am not going to get upset about it.  I’m going to approach this from a, kind of an outside place.

Carrie:  That must be useful.

Sarah:  Yes, you can compartmentalize and disassociate.

RHG:  Yeah.

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  I can do that in a crisis.  Like, if things are really, really bad, I am the most calm.

RHG:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  I, I preserve all of that for, like, two to three hours after it’s all done; then I lose my shit.  But in –

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – in a crisis?  I am completely –

RHG:  In crisis, there is no time.

Sarah:  No, I am completely cold and calm –

Elyse:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – and, like, my husband will be like, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.  I’ll be like, all right!  You!  Go over there!  You!  Do this!  This is how we’re going to handle this.  Okay, this is the order –

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  – in which things are going to happen.  Nobody question me.  We’re going to get through this.  We do the thing.  Here’s the problem.  It’s solved.  Two hours later, everyone’s fine, and I’m like, [wails] ho, my gosh!

Carrie:  Yeah.  Yeah, I have secondary crisis meltdowns, but during the crisis I’m –

Sarah:  Oh, yeah.

Carrie:  – fine.

RHG:  Mm-hmm.

Carrie:  Yeah.

Sarah:  So –

Carrie:  So I’m kind of neutral on the ghost thing, because I’m, for one thing, I’m an atheist, so, you know, logically speaking, I, I’m pretty bland on the whole ghost thing.  On the other hand, I do really strongly believe that presences linger, and the, the, the only part I’m not sure about is how much – in my experience, a lot of that is, is what we bring with us?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Carrie:  And I just don’t know how much is what we bring with us and how much exists independently of our selves.  So, and I’ve, one of my experiences, which was kind of cute and very sweet, is that when I was really little, my great-grandmother died, and I believed that Nana lived in the attic, and I would go hang out with her, and she was, like, really, like, this warm, nurturing presence.  I don’t believe for one single second that if ghosts exist, my Nana would have chosen to hang out in my attic.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Carrie:  Like she –

RHG and Sarah:  [Laughter]

Carrie:  – she loved me and all, but we weren’t so close that of all the places she could have gone, she would have haunted my attic.  But her memory stuck with me, and I put it in this place, and I felt really, really strongly that that’s where she was.  I didn’t see her, but I felt her really powerfully.  You know, and I think that’s a really valid experience to have had, even though it’s not necessarily one that is empirically supernatural, ‘cause I really don’t believe she was, like, you know, walking around up there.

Sarah:  Chilling out in the attic?  Like, like the, the malevolent whatever-the-fuck was hanging out in RedHeadedGirl’s basement?

Carrie:  Right!

Elyse or RHG:  Yes –

Carrie:  But she had left something with me that I, my mind placed in a certain physical location that I could visit, and I felt good knowing she was there.  The flip side of that is when my family moved to a really big house, I never liked that house.  I knew that house was bad from the minute I walked in the door.  If it were a movie, everyone watching the movie would have told us to get the hell out.

RHG:  [Laughs]

Carrie:  But –

Sarah:  Did you ever figure out what it was that made that house not good?  Or was it just a feeling of –

Carrie:  Well –

Sarah:  – ohhh, this is not for me.

Carrie:  – I think we brought it with us.  I think we brought it with us.  We moved because it was the last-ditch effort to try to keep the family together, and our family was miserable and went through it’s, it’s kind of, you know, last epic struggles when we were in that house.  That house was full of resentment and pain and grief and anger and frustration and sadness, and it soaked it all up and spat it back at us.  Ultimately, my dad died in that house, and –

Sarah:  Oh!  Good grief.

Carrie:  Yeah.  When I went back to clean it up, at first it kind of felt like it was okay, but then it sort of turned on me, and my friend, who’s also an atheist, stayed overnight to housesit for me and called me the next day and said, I can’t stay there overnight.  But nobody, he’s like, I’ll go visit it every day.  I’ll feed the cat, I’ll make sure everything is safe, but I’m never sleeping in that house again.

Sarah:  Yep.

Carrie:  But what people experienced with the house wasn’t something like you see in a horror movie where specific bad things are happening.  It just felt wrong.

RHG and Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Carrie:  And – so I, I ended up selling the house, and I, I didn’t get to meet the people who moved in, but apparently they have a lot of kids, and I really believe that more than any amount of saging or, or any spiritual process that could have cleansed that house, all that house needed was, like, four or five kids running up and down the stairs yelling.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Carrie:  It needed a good cleaning out of, of energy.

Sarah:  Negative energy.

Carrie:  As an atheist, I would perceive that as a non-supernatural but profoundly psychological thing, and I’m totally comfortable with somebody else saying, that was a haunted house.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Carrie:  But I really believe that we brought the ghost with us, and I’m really hoping that the next family kind of pacified it or made the house okay just by bringing happy energy into it.  It was, it had just, it had empathetically soaked up –

Sarah:  Yep.

Carrie:  – every bit of guck that we brought with us and just reflected it all back.

Elyse:  I totally get that.  Like, when my – and I wouldn’t say this to her, because I wouldn’t, I don’t want to diminish her experience, but, like, when my mom, she said, you know, she’s in the ICU, she’s between, she had two surgeries back to back, she’s in a lot of pain, and she said she felt like her mother, who had the same condition that she did, that she was having surgery for, was there, that she felt her mom’s presence, and then she’s saying that, you know, she, this, this nurse’s cart moved across the room, and they couldn’t figure out how it was moving and stuff like that.  I mean, part of me thinks that I, that’s a valid experience for her, but the other part of me wonders if what she was really feeling was – she, she, she didn’t believe she had the strength to go through with the second surgery, so it was a way of her mind convincing her that she did.  Does that make sense?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Carrie:  Yeah.

Elyse:  It was a psychological coping tool.

Sarah:  I am not an atheist, and I’ve switched major religions, and it’s, it’s, it’s really hard for me to describe my actual spiritual beliefs because so much of spirituality and culture are intermixed, especially with how we observe Judaism, but I’m definitely not an atheist.  I just couldn’t exactly explain what it is I believe, but I absolutely agree with you, Carrie, that there is, the idea of, of bringing with you energy and leaving behind energy, and I always think about that interview you did with Connie Willis a couple of years ago –

Carrie:  Oh, it was amazing.

Sarah:  – and she talked about how all of these different cultures throughout history who have never had, never had at that time a way to talk to one another and could not have connected, all had a belief that included a, an afterlife and, or reincarnation or ghosts or, there is something before, and there is something after this existence, and they had that idea in common expressed in different ways, and for her, the idea that all of these different cultures had that same belief structure completely independent of ea-, of one another needs to be recognized, even if you don’t personally believe it.  That level of concurrent belief in a time when people could not have communicated those beliefs to one another across cultures and across distances is important.  Do you know what I mean?

Carrie:  Yeah, yeah, and I, I think that – well, first of all, I should qualify that – I said that I’m an atheist, but actually I’m an atheopagan, which I just discovered is an actual thing, so for a really long time I thought I was the only atheist pagan on the planet, which –

Sarah:  Carrie!  Carrie, you –

RHG:  The Internet means that you’re never alone.

Sarah:  You, you work on the Internet!

Carrie:  I know!

Sarah:  There’s no way you’re alone!

Carrie:  I know!  I should have Googled!  Why didn’t I Google?

Sarah:  Dude!  [Laughs]

Carrie:  So, yeah, ath-, atheopagan, it’s, like, a whole big thing!  Where Glen is, like, a straight-up, Glen is, like, a straight-up atheist.  Glen thought the house was fine.  Right?  Like, he, he’s like, what?  You know, and I’m like, whaa!  But I think there’re two questions with the, are ghosts real?  And one is, is your psychological experience valid?  And I would say, well, yes.  And then the other one is, is something going on independently of you, and I would say, I don’t know.

Sarah:  Right.

Carrie:  I would say, maybe, sometimes, maybe not.  I’m, I’m undecided on that.  I will say that on one occasion the house chased me outside.

Sarah:  Aaaaah!

RHG:  Hmmm.

Carrie:  Yeah, I was in the house by myself, and I was –

RHG:  That’s rude.  That’s just rude.

Carrie:  It was, it was a rude house.  I hated it.  There were these knocking sounds, and the knocking sounds were moving all around the house, and it, and moving closer to me and spiraling around, and I fled, right?

RHG:  Wow.  Physical threat!

Carrie:  I literally fled the house.  I ran outside, and now I’m like, man, I should have just kept going.

Elyse:  We need a TV series where RedHeadedGirl and I live in a very old house and, like, supernatural shit is happening, and she’s all up in it, and I’m completely oblivious.  Like –

RHG:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – shit’s floating across the room.  I’m not paying attention.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  It’s like –

Elyse:  The poltergeist is –

Sarah:  – if Smart Bitches and The X-Files had a baby.

RHG:  Right, right.

Carrie:  That’d be awesome.

RHG:  Ghost, you’re being rude.  Knock this shit off.

Elyse:  The, a poltergeist is, like, pissed off because it can’t, like, I’m completely not validating it’s –

Elyse and RHG:  – experience.

Elyse:  Yeah.

RHG:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Speaking of the supernatural, Dewey just jumped in here to stare at things that aren’t in the room.  I think he does it just to fuck with me, though.

RHG:  Well –

Carrie:  Yeah –

RHG:  – that’s entirely possible with Dewey.

Carrie:  Hold on one second; I got Glen in the room.  I want to, like, yank him into this.  Glen, did you think that my dad’s house was creepy as shit?

Glen:  No.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Carrie: Well, so, here’s what I, here’s what I want to say about that, okay?  Glen is very much like Elyse.  Glen is empathetic, but he does not soak it up.  All right?  So if I’m upset, Glen can tell that I’m upset, and he cares.  He, it’s not like he doesn’t know, but I – Glen, when other people are upset, do you feel like you, like, soak it up, or are you like, whatever, I’m going to play video games?

Glen:  It depends on how many people are around me.  I mean, if, if it’s a stressful situation I, I, I get stressed.

Carrie:  Okay, did you guys get that?

Elyse and RHG:  Yeah.

Elyse:  Well, I mean, and, and I’m like that too, right?  Because if a whole group of, if, if, if you’re in a situation where a whole bunch of people are suddenly upset, I think that’s an instinctual shit-is-about-to-go-south feeling –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Elyse:  – right?

Carrie:  Right.

Elyse:  Whereas if you around one person who’s upset about something – I mean, I can, if, if my husband or my mom or my best friend is upset about something, I can empathize with that, but I feel almost like if I let myself get sucked into that and be upset with them, then I’m removing my ability to be useful in that situation.

Sarah:  Yep.

RHG:  Hmm.

Carrie:  Yeah, it’s, it’s not like you don’t care.  It’s not like Glen doesn’t care or –

Elyse:  No, no, it’s –

RHG:  No, and no one is, no one’s saying that.

Carrie:  – it’s just because there’s a problem that needs to be solved, and he wants to solve that problem to help you, but it’s, it’s different from the sort of barrier-free issue that Sarah and I struggle with where somebody’s walking through the room feeling sad, and suddenly we’re like – [sobs] – you know.

Sarah:  Yep.

RHG:  Right.  Well, I mean, I told you guys about RT and when I was at the book fair and in line for Tamora Pierce.  I, the story makes me look ridiculous, but I love it.  [Laughs] And I started thinking about how overwhelmed Maya would have been in that same line, and suddenly I got Maya’s emotions, and I just dumped them all over Tammy’s table.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

RHG:  Here you go.  Have some emotions.

Carrie:  [Laughs]

RHG:  They’re not even fucking mine!

Carrie:  Yeah, yeah.

Sarah:  [Laughs] But I think it’s really interesting as, because, you know, romance directly targets your empathy.  Like, romance especially is about emotion, and invoking a, an emotional response, so for a lot of readers, I don’t think all of them, but for a lot of romance readers, when you’re reading a romance, it is inviting you to feel those same emotions, and most, I think most fiction is trying to grab at your emotions in some way if not, they’re, if not trying to scare the shit out of you like the stuff that Elyse reads, which I, I couldn’t even think about reading?  The –

Elyse:  The stuff that, the stuff that scares the shit out of me at the, it triggers the same thing that romance does for me, and it’s, it’s not even about the emotion thing.  It’s almost like a level of vindication, right?  So, like, in romance, you’re vindicated because you, you find out that, you know, everyone deserves to be loved, right, so even this person who’s having the shittiest circumstances ever, they will find their one true love and be happy in the end, right, and it’s this closure, and I think with scary stuff, nine times out of ten, whether it’s like a murder mystery or it’s something supernatural, there’s a resolution at the end too, and I think I look for that more than the, I’m having feelings on behalf of the, the character’s side of the, the romance, and I think it’s why I love fairytale romance so much, because again, it’s that message.  It’s like the Cinderella story:  even if you have a shitty life, if you are a good person – and really you don’t even have to be a good person, but – good things will happen to you, and it will be okay.

Carrie:  So, can I, like, jump in on, like, that kind of theme with horror?

Elyse:  Yeah!

Carrie:  [Coughs] ‘Scuse me.  So, one of, there’s, there’s a kind of horror that’s really prevalent, particularly in movies, that is totally alien to me, I don’t understand it, and that’s the scene where, like, everybody dies, or not everybody dies, but the final survivor has gone crazy or whatever.  I, I really hate that kind of horror, and I won’t watch a scary movie until I’ve found out whether or not it’s going to end like that.  But if it’s a movie where somebody triumphs, then a lot of times I will watch it, and I will get a huge thrill from it because I feel like I’m practicing, in a way, overcoming something difficult or something scary.  You know, this is like a how-to, and partly it’s a how-to on how to, you know, escape from an alien, but partly it’s a how-to on how to, you know, a lot of horror is also metaphorical, right?  So in something like Aliens, which crosses, like, fourteen different genres, one of which is horror, Ripley is battling aliens, but she’s also battling PTSD, so – and grief – so you, you see her overcome that, and it’s incredibly cathartic for me, where I get absolutely nothing but frustration from the brand of horror that you see in, in a lot of other movies where there’s no survivor or there’s a traumatized survivor.

Elyse:  Right.  Well, I think some of the satisfaction in horror movies too is you usually have the one character who figures out what’s going on before all the other characters, and then they get – is gaslit the right term?

Carrie:  Yeah.

Elyse:  You know, you’re crazy.  But then suddenly, you know, everyone realizes, no, there is a vampire living in your basement.  You were right.

RHG:  And he doesn’t even fucking pay rent.

Elyse:  Right?

Sarah:  Can you believe that guy?  I swear.

RHG:  Just, God.

Sarah:  Now, RedHeadedGirl, you collect ghost stories, so this topic –

RHG:  I do.

Sarah:  – is kind of your jam.

RHG:  It’s kind of my jam.

Sarah:  Are you, have you been, like, sitting here listening to us talk, like, vibrating in your chair?

RHG:  Ah, I’ve been waiting patiently.

Sarah:  Ah, bring it.  Clear, I’m clearing the space.  Bring it on.

RHG:  So I collect ghost story, I collect, specifically I collect locally published ghost stories of places I travel to?  So, like, the whole, I’ll, I’ll send a picture of my shelf that you can put it in with the show notes if you want.

Sarah:  Please, yes!

RHG:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  ‘Cause, I mean, there were a ton of ghost stories about the Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil in New Jersey, and, and growing up in western Pennsylvania with all of the, you know, the history of coal and steel, there were all kinds of, like, gory, terrible, somebody had a very grisly death, and now they haunt this place kind of stories?

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  That’s kind of an international thing, right?

RHG:  Oh, definitely.  I mean, I don’t have any from Sweden because I couldn’t find any that were in English, and I can only read food words and genealogy charts in Swedish at this point?  I’m working on it.  But the book that started it was one that I acquired, borrowed from my fifth grade classroom?

Elyse:  Oh, she, you’re, shit’s getting real now.

Carrie:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Ohhh –

Elyse:  You’re going to jail for that.

Sarah:  – life of crime.

RHG:  No, no, no, the statute of limitations is long, long past, and I’m pretty sure that teacher is retired.  But it’s a book called Ghostly Animals of America, and it has, like, twelve or so stories – no, it’s more than twelve – of ghostly animals around America, including, like, you know, ghost horses that drowned because they – I, I mean, these are animal ghosts, so they did not generally die well?  That’s why they’re ghosts.  Sorry.  [Laughs] But, like, there’s a, a horse, a ghost horse that is a, on, off the coast of Nantucket that had been used as a, a mooncusser.  A mooncusser is a, a land pirate that, he hung lanterns on the horse’s mane and tail and walked it up and down the beach during storms so that ships would think that it was a ship that was at, safely at anchor, and it would crash on the beach, and then he’d, you know, kill everybody and steal all the stuff.

Elyse:  Well, that guy’s just a dick!

RHG:  That guy is a dick!

Carrie:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And speaking of bringing bad energy with you, that’s going to wash a whole lot of it up on the shore.

RHG:  Oh, yeah.

Carrie:  Yeah.

RHG:  And he was making the horse go up and down the beach in, during a huge nor’easter, and, and the –

Sarah:  Ah, dude!

RHG:  Yeah!  And the horse is like, this fucking sucks, and the tide came in, and the, the storm surge was so high it, it completely washed the beach away, and he tried to get up on the horse to ride it away, and the horse is like, nope!  Done!  And went into the ocean, and they all drowned, so now the, the ghost of the horse swims up and down trying to warn ships away from that beach.  How people know that’s exactly what happened?

Sarah:  There was nobody there?

RHG:  There was nobody there.  And that’s always a question with these, with these, like, this is a totally true ghost story, it’s like, mm, how do you know what happened to make this –

Sarah:  The absence of witnesses causes my legal brain to go, hmm.

RHG:  Uh-huh.  I’m just curious.  Just, you know, just, I, just, I have some questions.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  I think the central theme of this podcast is going to be, if you don’t want to be haunted or have ghost animals come back and, and hurt you, don’t be a dick!

RHG:  Right.

Carrie:  [Laughs]

RHG:  Right.  There’s another one where an author, Albert Payson Terhune, he had a, he had mostly collies, but he had this mixed-breed dog that he loved, and at one point the, the dog, Rex, kind of lost his shit and attacked one of his, his other dogs and then attacked him when he was trying to col-, he was trying to break up the fight, so he had to put Rex down, and Rex would keep coming back to sort of be like, I’m really sorry.  I just lost it for one minute.  I’m really, really sorry.

Sarah:  Ahhh.  So what are some of the haunted people places that you’ve collected, or have you, do you, like, go and hang out at them, or do you just sort of be like, yep, that’s there.  Not staying the night.

RHG:  I sort of scour the, the gift shops to find likely looking books.  So, like, I have one that I got in Washington, DC, in 1997, I think? – it was published in 1988 – that’s, you know, just, you know, bits of things and workers who never left the Capitol Building and a guard who keeps walking and a, a World War I doughboy who salutes any fallen soldier that’s laid in state at the rotunda.  Stuff like that.  I have a couple from England.  I mean, I, I did not stay under, overnight in the Underground looking for ghosts, ‘cause I had a, a warm comfortable dorm room to stay in.  I didn’t need to go looking for ghosts in the Underground.

Sarah:  See, I always figure that, you know, if you want to go hunting for ghosts that’s cool?  I’m ninety percent sure that if I went looking for them I’d find them, and then I wouldn’t know what to do, so I’ll just leave them alone.

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  They’re not bothering me; I’m not bothering them.

Carrie:  Yeah.

Sarah:  We can just maintain this nice, comfortable distance.  I don’t need to go looking for you.

RHG:  Yeah!  Exactly!  I don’t, I don’t need –

Sarah:  Like, I don’t, I don’t want to engage, because –

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – there’s, they know, well, if ghosts are indeed real, they know a lot more than I do, so I’m going to leave them be.

RHG:  Right.  You remember when I was in Sweden and I was going through the history museum and I texted you guys and said, okay, well, there is somebody, there is somebody in this display of grave goods that, like, had people’s skulls and –

Elyse:  Yeah.  Yeah, yeah.

RHG:  I was like, oh, somebody’s really mad about being in this display.  Somebody’s really, really mad about it.  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Some feeling.

Sarah:  See, I don’t know that I would pick that up.  I don’t know that I would pick that up, but I also don’t know that I would be like, let’s go look at some grave goods!  ‘Cause I’m not sure I could do that.  Not because it would be –

Carrie:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Not ‘cause it would be gross, but it would be ‘cause sort of, like, it would be crossing that level of engagement.  You know, like the idea that energy follows you?

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Like, I really don’t want to bring that with me.  Y’all just stay there.

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Sorry you’re there, if I were the curator we’d fix this, but I’ve got to go!

RHG:  I did that once with a sarcophagus and spent three days with it.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  Oh, my God!

RHG:  I was just like, let’s see what kind of energy I can pick up from the – oh!  Ow!

Sarah:  That was bad.

RHG:  Ow!  I’m sorry!  I’m sorry!  That was rude of me.

Sarah:  Yeah.  That’s it!  It would be rude!  That’s exactly it.

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Like, I, I’m not bother you, you’re not bothering me.  Let’s just be polite.

RHG:  Yeah, and there’s, I, I feel kind of, on some levels I feel bad for, like, mummies and bodies that ended up in museums, ‘cause, like, this is not how they intended to spend their afterlife?  But on the other hand, this is a, a weird sort of eternal life that you’re sort of getting?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

RHG:  So –

Sarah:  Mummification and, and –

RHG:  – at least you didn’t end up as kindling for somebody five hundred years ago, so you are winning in some sense?

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  I’m kind of –

Carrie:  Well, wait, wait, wait!  What, what do you think, what do you think the afterlife is like if you’re mummified?  Because I kind of thought that deal was you’re just mummified, so basically, they’d be just –

RHG:  You’re just mummified, but you’re, but, like, people –

Carrie:  I mean, that would be horrible!  So basically, you’d be buried alive for, you know –

Sarah:  And stuck.

RHG:  Well, that’s, that’s not what I mean, though.  Like, like, eternal memory of some kind.  Like, you have a memorial so that people will remember that there is some mark that you left on the world saying, I was here, and if you’re a mummy in a museum, you still, you get to have that in a more concrete sense than if you’re just sort off in a desert or, worse, if grave robbers completely obliterated your tomb and then you have no eternal memory left on the world.

Sarah:  So you’re –

RHG:  You know what I’m saying?

Sarah:  So you’re connecting the physical, physical items as a sort of connection point for the consciousness or awareness of whoever’s stuff that was.

RHG:  Yeah.

Elyse:  See, and I’m of the –

RHG:  Like, well, I guess I feel confli-, it’s a, I have complicated feelings about it.

Sarah:  Well, it is death and the afterlife.  It’s not exactly like it’s simple to figure out.

RHG:  Right.  But I, I feel comfortable in having these complicated feelings.  Like, I feel okay about it.

Sarah:  I’m, I think part of it is that I’m personally very, very comfortable saying, I have no idea, and it’s okay that I don’t know.  I got no clue.  That’s fine!  Nothing’s, nothing, nothing bad happens if I say I don’t know.

Carrie:  Yeah.

Sarah:  So I’m very comfortable with saying, you know, maybe, it’s possible, it’s very possible, it’s probable, I don’t know, but okay.

Carrie:  I think I’m pretty much exactly the same way, except I would say, eh, I don’t know.  It’s improbable, but I don’t know.  You know what I mean?  Like, I’m not –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Carrie:  – dogmatic about it, and I do really, really, really believe, if nothing else, in the psychological truth, the idea that our memories live on and become kind of their own thing, you know, and can take on various presences.  ‘Cause, I mean, that’s kind of different from believing, empirically speaking, in ghosts?  But that’s, like, my bare minimum, and then anything else, I’m like, well, you know, probably Nana was not actually living in my attic.

Elyse:  But I feel like, you know what?

Sarah:  Or maybe that would be the place where you invited her to come visit.  Like, if that –

RHG:  Right.

Carrie:  Well, I kind of hope she wasn’t living in my attic!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Carrie:  She wouldn’t have been very comfortable.

RHG:  Right.

Elyse:  This all ties back to Jane Eyre, Carrie.  All of it.

RHG:  It does.

Elyse:  Like, you had the woman in the attic thing before you even read Jane Eyre.

[Laughter]

Carrie:  Oh ho!  It’s true!  I did, I did, and then this spooky, creepy-ass house did not have an attic, but what it did have was this steep flight of stairs with a room at the top of the stairs, so if the house was dark and the door to the room at the top of the stairs was open, you were walking into this sort of black void, and –

RHG:  Nope.

Carrie:  – you couldn’t see.

RHG and Sarah:  Nope, nope, nope, nope.

Sarah:  No, I –

Carrie:  Oh, my God, the house was awful –

Sarah:  Red-, RedHeadedGirl and I would have noped the hell out of there –

RHG:  Nope.

Sarah:  – like, whoof!  We’re gone.

RHG:  Nope, definitely not.  And if I had to stay there, then there would be, like, a line of salt at the bottom of the stairs –

Carrie:  Oh, Jesus.

RHG:  – and also a line of iron nails –

Carrie:  Well, now I think maybe –

RHG:  – and maybe some butter….  [Laughs]

Carrie:  – maybe it was a benevolent house.  I guess in this case it’s not really a case of ghosts; it’s a case of genius loci, right?

RHG:  Hmm.

Carrie:  Which I probably just mispronounced.  The house itself was sentient, and I think with the knocking, maybe it was a benevolent house, and it was saying, oh, my God, girl, get the hell out!  Just leave!  Which eventually I had to do, you know.

Sarah:  I remember when I was walking through the medieval castle, the ninth-century castle on the Isle of Man outside Peel, the one that photobombs all of the pictures?

RHG:  Right.

Sarah:  That particular island, St. Patrick’s Isle had, had multiple structures and multiple uses for that particular island, so there were some building that were, like, hella old, and then there was a burial mound that had been unearthed by an archaeologist that was one of the oldest intact graves of a woman of status ever found, and there were different sections from different eras.  I mean, there was stuff that had been built for the Napoleonic Wars, but there was one section of a tomb or a crypt that was under the church, and, you know, you could – it was great, because the, the, the ground had risen, and the building had shrunk, and people back then were already short, so every doorway was perfect for me?

RHG:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  It was awesome!  I didn’t, I mean, I didn’t even have to duck my head, but I remember going into the crypt and feeling very, very much like I was intruding.  Like, you’re not –

RHG:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – this is, it is impolite for you to be here, and I’m like, whoa!  Sorry, leaving!  My bad, sorry.

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  And I think that is, the, the idea of having a, a genius loci – low-ky?  low-see?  low-ky – I’m going to have to ask the Inter- –

Elyse:  I think it’s low-ky.

RHG:  Now, Latin, the Cs are hard.

Sarah:  Right, Latin the Cs are all hard.

RHG:  Usually.

Sarah:  So the idea or the spirit or the concept of a place, that I tot-, that totally makes sense to me.  I think that’s definitely true –

RHG:  Right.

Sarah:  – but I also think that house, if you had a bad feeling about it, you were probably not wrong.

RHG:  Right.  Right.

Carrie:  That house was awful.

RHG:  Oh, this reminds me, my parents are heading to New Bern in North Carolina right now, but they also, they pick up ghost stories for me to put on my shelf, and I already have two copies of the Ghosts of New Bern book.  I should – [laughs] – text them and say, don’t get me another one, ‘cause I’ve already got two.

Sarah:  [Laughs] I’ve got this; we’re covered.  All ghosts of New Bern, totally good.  And you know, it’s funny, places that are rural or places that are at the beach, I feel like they have more ghost stories?

RHG:  Oh, yeah.  I mean, ships, ships and lighthouses –

Carrie:  Yeah.

RHG:  – and ghost ships and just the energy of the ocean.

Sarah:  Did you see the article that was posted on Atlas Obscura about the life and mysterious death of Theodosia Burr, who was Aaron Burr’s daughter?

RHG:  Yes.

Sarah:  Oh, my God, creep-tastic!  Which reminds me, which reminds me of another thing that I almost forgot to say.  Carrie –

Carrie:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – have you read any of Susanna Kearsley’s books?

Carrie:  Yes.

Sarah:  Okay, so have you read any of the ones that deal with genetic memory, the idea that you hold onto memories of your past lives inside your DNA?

Carrie:  Yes, and alas –

Sarah:  You weren’t buying that, huh?

Carrie:  – my years of living with a biologist, like, I couldn’t get over that.  I’m so –

Sarah:  You couldn’t get over that one?

RHG:  [Laughs]

Carrie:  I, sometimes I can, but everybody loved it, and I was, like, raging and going, what the –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Carrie:  – oh, my God!  Oh, my God!  So, yeah, like, I know that she is deeply beloved by so many people, and I did think her writing style was quite beautiful, but I, I – [deep breath] – that, no.  It was a bridge too far.

RHG:  Oh, see, and –

Carrie:  And she, if she hadn’t tried to make it scientific, I would have bought it.  If she had just said, we hold the capacity, you know, somewhere in our cells, I would have been like, yep, sure, absolutely, but as soon as she tried to be like, oh, yes, it’s in our DNA, I’m like, yeah, that’s not how DNA works.  But if, if she hadn’t tried to do that, if she had just said, hey, this is the premise, deal with it, I would have been like, okay!  It’s a premise; I’ll deal with it.

Sarah:  But there –

RHG:  And, and yet, and yet –

Sarah:  – there are studies that show this is possible!

RHG:  Well, I, I can’t speak to that.

Carrie:  But not exactly in the way that she described it.

RHG:  Right.

Sarah:  This is true.

Carrie:  And you know, there’s epigenetic stuff, and there’s all kinds of interesting stuff going on…

RHG:  But that’s not what I was going to say.

Sarah:  What were you going to say?

RHG:  What I was going to say is that both times I’ve been to Sweden and I’ve gotten off the plane and I’ve taken my first inhale of Swedish air, there’s a little part, I want to say of my soul or my psyche or something, that goes, oh, yes, this is right.  This is where you’re supposed to be.

Sarah:  Oh, yeah, I’ve had that.  I’ve had that, that sort of resonance, locational resonance.  There was a whole article – or article – there was a whole podcast of Rick Steves, who is a travel dude – he does a lot of travel, but anyway – he had one episode where he had an interview with Annie Leibovitz, and then at end he takes calls from people who had extraordinary traveling experiences, and this one woman from Indiana calls to tell him that she went to Scotland.  She’s descended on both sides from Robert the Bruce, and so of course she totally wanted to go check out her genealogy, and she visited two castles, and in one of them, she could remember where things were, like where the seats were –

RHG:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – where the rooms were, this is different, this is wrong.  Everything was very familiar, and she knew exactly where she was, like, spatially.  Like, if I’m in one room of my house, I know exactly where I am in reference to the kitchen and the front room and the front door.  She had that same sort of locational, spatial memory of where she was based on memories that she could not have had, and one part, on one, on one hand she was very freaked out about it, and on the other hand she’s like, well, this kind of makes sense.

RHG:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  I get it.  And I can almost hear you rolling your eyes, Carrie.

Carrie:  No, I’m not rolling my eyes.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  I’m rolling my eyes.

RHG:  No.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Is that what I heard?

RHG:  You heard the wrong person!

Elyse:  I –

Sarah:  I picked up on the emotional –

Carrie:  I would be rolling my eyes if you then went on to explain to me that it’s all because of DNA and that that’s how evolution works, and, and then I’d roll my eyes, like, you know, like –

Elyse:  I feel, I feel like you guys are telling me, like, there’s a sense that I have that you guys are like, and there’s this thing called color, and I’m like, what the fuck?

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Why didn’t anyone tell me about the – ?  I have never had that experience where I go somewhere where I’ve never been before and I’m like, oh, this just feels right.  Like, I walk into my house where I’ve lived for eleven years, and I still, I have, I can’t find shit here!  So –

[Laughter]

Elyse:  Honestly, I feel like the supernatural is trying to reach out to me, and I’m just, I’m rebuffing it horribly.  Like, it’s tragic.

Sarah:  RedHeadedGirl – RedHeadedGirl, I feel like we should tell Elyse about star people.

RHG:  No, let’s not tell her about –

Elyse:  What the fuck are –

Carrie:  No!

RHG:  Oh –

Elyse:  What are star people?

Carrie: Wait, star people?

RHG:  Okay – [sighs]

Sarah:  Okay, star people is a New Age belief introduced by a book in, in the late ‘70s that is probably, extremely likely to have been lifted from ex-, from a Native American indigenous legend, but the basic idea is that there are people who are within our gene pool and within our society who emigrated from other planets and other worlds, and that they –

Elyse:  Scientology?

Sarah:  [Laughs] No!  It’s diff-, it sounds very similar, but it’s different!

RHG:  Very similar, but less –

Sarah:  There, there’re no volcanoes.

RHG:  – less lucrative, shall we say.

Sarah:  But – [laughs] – less lucrative!  No!

Carrie:  But it is less lucrative, yes.

Sarah:  Less lucrative, probably have to pay taxes.  So the idea is that there are people from other –

Carrie:  We probably have some followers who are actually star people, and I’m sitting here going, fucking star people, and we’ll have, like, a million comments going, I can’t believe Carrie is such a bigot, and I’ll be like, I’m sorry.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

RHG:  Well, I mean –

Elyse:  Here’s the thing, like –

Carrie:  You’re totally wonderful people, and I respect your rights, absolutely, to practice the religion of your choice.

Sarah:  So the idea of being a star person is that you, you walk around feeling as if this is not your world and you don’t belong, and you’re extremely sensitive, and you, you get the sense that this is not where you belong, and you don’t belong on this planet at all, but of the people who are super into the idea of star people – [laughs] – the idea is that there are a ton of them in Norway and Sweden and Denmark.  And –

Carrie:  Really!

Sarah:  – yes, that they are all hanging out, and they are very drawn to Scandinavian countries.

Carrie:  Huh!

Sarah:  Yep.

RHG:  Yeah, I’m not one of those.  [Laughs]

Carrie:  So, my, my family is –

Sarah:  Unless star people are really sarcastic, no.  [Laughs]

Carrie:  No.

Sarah:  So, RedHeadedGirl, you said that you had been given a ghost romance where the hero is a ghost.  I’ve been looking for ghost romances, and it doesn’t seem like there are very many, because that whole mortality thing is kind of a big conflict.

RHG:  That whole mortality thing is very awkward.  Yeah, I’m only, hmm, it’s, it’s hard going because it’s not well written.

Sarah:  Ah, crap!

RHG:  It’s from 1995.  It’s called Everlastin’.  Not Everlasting; it’s called Everlastin’.

Elyse:  [Laughs] I love it.

Carrie:  So –

Elyse:  Is there an apostrophe at the end?

RHG:  It – yes, there is.

Sarah:  Oh, the ‘90s.

RHG:  And, and, and before chapter one, there’s a glossary to explain the words that are written in Scottish.  I hope you can ear the, hear the air quotes.  “Scottish.”

Sarah:  Oh, no.

RHG:  Oh, yes. 

Carrie:  Oh, no.

RHG:  I took a picture of it and sent it to Ceilidh, who – there was a very long pause before she responded, and she’s like, no, see, usually when you get the, the word hoor, H-O-O-R, it means whore, not hour.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Okay.

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Oh, no.

RHG:  So the hero has been dead for quite some time, and –

Sarah:  Oh, my God, I’m reading the cover copy.

RHG:  No.

Sarah:  Is this by, is this book one of a series?

RHG:  Is it?

Sarah:  And it takes place at Baird House?

RHG:  Yep.

Sarah:  Yeah, there’s this, there’s, it looks like there’s a series.  There’s Time Everlastin’ and Dreams Everlastin’ and Hope Everlastin’ –

RHG:   Fuck me.

Elyse:  Oh, my God.

Sarah:  – and Love Everlastin’ and –

RHG: No.

Sarah:  – Dawns Everlastin’.  There’s a lot of Everlastin’.

RHG:  No, there’s too many of them, please stop!  Please stop!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Well –

RHG:  Go back in time and stop yourself.  I’m going to steal that, the time machine from Timeless, and I’m going – oh.

Elyse:  There was a –

RHG:  Like, he’s been dead for quite some time, and somebody, some American woman who’s living in his house painted a picture of her best friend from high school, and he’s like, her!  You’re going to invite her over, and I’m going to marry her!  Somehow!  I haven’t figured out the mechanics yet, because I’m only sixty-eight pages in!

[Laughter]

Carrie:  Hey, guys, I have to cut out early.  I am so sorry.  I’m, like, multitasking today.

Sarah:  Later, dude!

Elyse and RHG:  Bye!

Carrie:  I have, like, kind of three to throw out really fast, but they’re movies?

Sarah:  Go for it!

Carrie:  And I’m not sure, I’m not sure they quite qualify.  I had more; I know I forgot them.  Ha-ha.  Topper, and then there was, like, a whole bunch of Topper movies.  The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, a classic.  Who doesn’t love that movie?  And I think you kind of sort of say Crimson Peak in –

RHG:  Uh, not sort of?  It’s a ghost story!  Well –

Carrie:  Yes, it’s a ghost story, but we’re not looking for ghost stories, right?  We’re looking for ghost story romances in which one of the characters is a ghost.  Right?  I mean, I could think of a million ghost stories.

RHG:  I think he turns into a ghost at the end, spoiler.

Carrie:  Right, well, and that, and the fact that he does that gives them a moment of reconciliation, which is the –

RHG:  Yeah.

Carrie:  – the – otherwise I would say, of course it’s a ghost story, and it’s a love story, but it’s not a romance, but I feel like that moment of reconciliation kind of lets it fit into this category, even though it doesn’t, you know, they don’t, like, go off into the sunset together.

RHG:  No.  Also, there’s no sun up there.

Carrie:  But, but, but they’re able to have a certain sense of resolution because of that, which is really sweet, I think.  So that’s like, basically, what I had off the top of my head, and if I think of more I’ll go in the comments, and then I’m super sad that I don’t get to hear more about Everlastin’, although just the fact that it’s called Everlastin’ is kind of, like, giving me a headache.

Elyse:  I have a romance ghost story HaBO.

RHG:  Okay.

Elyse:  I, I want to –

Sarah:  I’m always open for those.

Elyse:  Man, I want to say this was the ‘90s, but it might have been the early 2000s.  I know it had a neon green cover, which is helpful, and it took place in a Scottish castle, and there was the ghost of a Highlander who was, like, cursed to basically, like, through dreams, sexually gratify all the female guests ‘til the end of time, I want to say?

RHG:  What?!  That’s amazing!

Elyse:  I – because if this fucking castle existed, right, like, the wait list for that shit would be – can you imagine?  It’d be like, well, this is, we’ve, we’ve got this wonderful historical castle, and you can stay here overnight, and you’ll have erotic dreams about Jamie from Outlander.

RHG:  Mm-hmm.

Elyse:  So I don’t remember much about the book besides that, ‘cause I remember a lot of eye rolling when I read it?  But of course he finds, like, the one woman who can free him of his cunnilingus curse.

RHG:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Someone will have read it.  They’ll know.

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  No question.

Elyse:  ‘Cause that’s, that’s not one you forget.

RHG:  No!

Elyse:  So, Sarah, RedHeadedGirl, what was the book or movie that you watched or read as a kid that you weren’t supposed to that scared the shit out of you?

Sarah:  Poltergeist.

RHG:  Ughhh.

Sarah:  You know, the thing with Poltergeist that continues to scare me is how many horrible things happened to the people that were in the movie?  More than the movie itself.  Like, the story of the movie is more frightening to me than the story in the movie.  Does that make sense?

Elyse:  You mean the making of the movie?

Sarah:  Well, just about everyone who was in it has either died in a very horrible way or has had not the greatest luck in their lives?

RHG:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  Like, it, it, like – yeah.

RHG:  Yeah, there was a Canadian TV series that ran for three seasons called Poltergeist: The Legacy which, it was in the mid ‘90s.  I think it was from ’94 to ’97 or so.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

RHG:  Quite frankly, I loved that series, which is weird.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

RHG:  I, I admit that it’s very weird, but it’s the genre of ‘90s adventure TV series that was just kind of the best.  It was in the same vein –

Sarah:  Yep.

RHG:  – as Highlander –

Sarah:  Yep.

RHG:  – kind of, and it was sort of like, well, what if the priest from Poltergeist was part of a worldwide society that is supposed to defend people from the darkness and the demons that –

Sarah:  Yes, I’m listening.

RHG:  [Laughs] And so it’s about a group of people who live in this giant house in San Francisco that’s, the Legacy is the secret society, and they go around dealing with ghosts and demons and the occasional possession and stuff like that.

Sarah:  Ooohhhh.

RHG:  It’s very cheesy.  It’s so cheesy.  The special effects, even for the ‘90s, are not great.

[Laughter]

Elyse:  When I was a little kid I watched parts of a movie on TV that I was not supposed to watch, I’m sure, called The Changeling?  It was a –

Sarah:  Ohhhh!

Elyse:  – from the ‘80s?  Do you remember this?  It was like, this guy moves into a house, and there had previously been a, a child in a wheelchair that had lived in the house, and like, I think the dad drowned the kid, ‘cause he didn’t want a disabled kid or some shit like that, so now the ghost child haunts the house, and in retrospect as an adult, it was super not scary.  Like, he would be standing there, and all of a sudden, like, a ball would bounce down the stairs or something, but as a little kid it scared the absolute fucking shit out of me, and I’m pretty sure I did not sleep alone for a month.

Sarah:  I have a book for you, RedHeadedGirl.

RHG:  Oh, God.

Sarah:  The case book of a ghost hunter who ran around England and, like, documented all the ghosts?  The Ghost-Hunter’s Casebook: The Investigations of Andrew Green Revisited.

RHG:  Okay.

Sarah:  He ran all over the place documenting ghosts.  He was apparently Britain’s most famous ghost hunter.  I’m –

RHG:  All right!

Sarah:  – I’m, I’m kind of amazed that someone in a leather jacket and tight jeans hasn’t decided to, to take over that title from him with new programming, but okay, that’s fine.

Elyse:  Carrie just texted, ooh, you guys, forgot to say in the podcast, remember the creepy-ass room at the top of the stairs –

Sarah:  I have really uncomfortable chilly feelings in the back of my spine now.

RHG:  Exactly.  We have to go find that house and burn it down or something.

Sarah:  Oh, dude.

Elyse:  Well, no, no, people live there now.

Sarah:  I mean, they could have made it a very happy house!

RHG:  Me, I hope so!

Sarah:  Oh, my goodness.

RHG:  I hope so.

Sarah:  Oh.  Oh, and also Carrie has sent us pictures of her cats helping her podcast.  They are all –

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – they are all pissed that they couldn’t help.

[Laughter]

Elyse:  Cats are very, I feel like cats are in an essential part of our podcasting process.

Sarah:  Oh, they are absolutely.  They are, they are a crucial element, especially since they, mine live in my office with me, and I’m currently surrounded by all of them sacked out in the sunbeams.  So are there any other ghost stories that you want to make sure to mention or recommend?

Elyse:  I’m rec-, I’m reading a book right now I want to recommend.  It’s not really a ghost story.  It’s very Halloween-y, though.  I’m reading The Witches by Stacy Schiff, which is a, it’s a nonfiction account of the Salem witch trials –

RHG:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Ooooh.

Elyse:  – and she goes back and tries to really dig out what has over generations become fictionalized and what is, what actually happened, and I think one of the things that surprised me was, I guess, I thought it was just, like, a handful of teenage girls that were involved, but it was this huge thing.  It – they executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs –

RHG:  Yeah.

Elyse:  – witch, for witchcraft, and I forget how many people were accused.  Oh, here:  somewhere between 144 and 185 witches and wizards were named in twenty-five villages and towns before the crisis passed.  So I didn’t realize how enormous this was, and you know, she tries to take a very – well, I guess one of the frustrating things is that there’s really no documentation of the actual witch trials, which is unusual because the Puritans like –

Sarah:  Usually that stuff was written down.

Elyse:  Right.  The Puritans liked to document the fuck out of everything?

RHG:  Mm.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  But it’s, it’s, it’s definitely, it’s very, very interesting, and all of the Puritan names are phenomenal.

RHG:  Oh, yeah.  No, they were not fucking around when it came to names.  [Laughs]

Elyse:  I think Increase –

RHG:  Yep.

Elyse:  – first name, that’s a good one.

RHG:  There’s a boy that was down in Plymouth during the, the early days of the settlement down there whose name was Wrestling With the Devil.

Elyse:  Was it all –

RHG:  That was his name.

Elyse:  Was it all one word, or was it hyphenated?

RHG:  No, it was, you know, with spaces.

Elyse:  Oh, okay.

RHG:  He was called Wrestling for short.  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Well, like, you would.  I mean, obviously.

RHG:  Obviously.

Elyse:  But one of the interesting things I think you don’t think about when you, when you read about this stuff was how, she talks about how dark and how isolated it would have been, you know.

RHG:  Mm-hmm.

Elyse:  There are no street lights.  You’re in the middle of the wilderness.  It’s, you know, it’s pitch black.  You can’t see shit when you go outside at night.  It’d be very scary.

Sarah:  Most of the women who were accused were, were really being accused for other reasons –

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – that they –

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  – they, in some way they had power or advantage that needed to be taken away from them.

RHG:  Yeah.  Yeah.

Elyse:  Or even –

RHG:  The, the economics of it is fascinating.

Sarah:  Yeah, it’s –

Elyse:  They talk about, they talk about this woman, Sarah Good, who was, I think, one of the first women who was accused, and she was basically, like, an itinerant beggar and, from the sounds of it, a very unpleasant human being.  Like, if someone tried to be good and invite Sarah into their house to, you know, be Christian charity or whatever, she was just, like, the world’s shittiest houseguest and was awful to everyone, so it was like this woman was basically a community problem that had to be taken care of because nobody wanted to deal with her, but at the same time, they couldn’t in good conscience just let this woman be homeless and freeze to death, and so they, you know, there was kind of like an expediency to, oh, oh, she’s a witch.  For sure.

RHG:  Mm-hmm.

Elyse:  ‘Cause it got rid of a problem, but if you want to know who a witch is, according to this book, one of the solutions was – let me see here – at her instruction, the Parris’ Indian slave mixed the girls – these are the girls supposedly being tortured by the witch, who were acting all strange – mixed the girls’ urine into a rye flour cake, baked them at the embers of the hearth.  Sibley then fed the concoction to the family dog.  There was some fogginess about how the counter magic worked, by drawing the witch to the animal or transferring the spell to it or scalding the witch, but the old English recipe could be trusted to reveal the guilty party.  So pee and rye flour fed to a dog will tell you who the witch is.

RHG:  Oh, it checks out.

Sarah:  Why, why people got to do nasty things to dogs?  Come on now.

RHG:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  What the hell.

Elyse:  I think the – I mean, aside from eating the pee cake, I think the dog was okay.

Sarah:  Yeah.  I mean, my dog likes to lick, lick the other dog’s dick, so, you know.  Right after I walk them.  I suppose it probably wasn’t that, that bad for them.  They do eat cat poop.

RHG:  Yep.

Elyse:  My, my mom’s dogs love bunny nuggets.  Like, that’s –

Sarah:  Oh, hey!  That’s fine eatin’ right there.  

Elyse:  It’s –

Sarah:  Kitty box crunchies and bunny nuggets.  Woohoo!

Elyse:  Some good shit.  Literally.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Literally.  So, yeah, I’m reading The Witches, and that’s really good, and if you’re interested in that, there’s a really good horror movie called The Witch, and it takes place – I just watched it on demand.  It, it takes place kind of around the Salem time.  It follows this Puritan family who, because of some disagreement, are basically cast out of the community or choose to leave, and they build this farm far away from everyone and are very isolated, and shit starts to go wrong, and the teenage daughter kind of starts catching all the blame, whether or not she had anything to do with it, and so there’s this question of whether or not there is a witch or there is this supernatural malevolent entity that’s involved or whether or not it’s just this kind of family hysteria because they’re isolated and their crops are dying and things are going really bad, and it also, I think, highlights how in some of these cases the sort of budding sexuality of young women somehow gets pulled into Must Be Witch and Evil, right?

RHG:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Elyse:  So, and there are two super fucking creepy children in the, the movie who follow around –

Sarah:  This is a new movie, right?

Elyse:  This is a new movie.

Sarah:  Yeah.

RHG:  Yeah, it came out last year.

Elyse:  Yeah, there’s, her two littlest siblings are super creepy, and they follow around the family goat.  They have a black ram, and they’re like, [sings] Black Phillip, Black Phillip, [speaks normally] and they sing songs to Black Phillip the goat, and it’s super creepy, and one of my coworkers also watched the movie, so I like to leave voicemails on his phone randomly where I’m just like, [sings] Black Phillip, Black Phillip.

Sarah:  You’re mean!  Oh, my God!

Elyse:  I’m a horrible person.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  He knows it’s me being a dick.

Sarah:  Yes.

Elyse:  But the end of the movie is like, you’re like, whoa.  It’s really, it has a very powerful, creepy ending.

Sarah:  And then you, and, like, I love how I look up this movie on Amazon, and there’s The Witch and Season of the Witch and then Sabrina, the Teenage Witch –

RHG:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Well, I got you –

Sarah:  Which is like a whole other genre, which I happen to love, that show.

RHG:  Yeah.

Sarah:  I love that show a lot.

Elyse:  I thought for sure you were going to get, like, some kind of soft-core porn, like –

Sarah:  Not yet.

RHG:   [Laughs]

Elyse:  The Salem Witches Go, you know, Salem Witches Scandalous Broom Ride or some shit like that.

Sarah:  Ugh.

Elyse:  The stuff that’s on HBO at two in the morning.

RHG:  Yeah.  Oh, once you have read The Witches and watched The V-Vitch, as we around here call it, ‘cause it’s like two –

Elyse:  Wait, wait, back that up.  What is that?

Elyse and RHG:  The V-Vitch(?).

RHG:  Because it’s, it’s just got two Vs instead of the W in the title?

Elyse:  Oh, got it, yeah.

RHG:  Yeah.  Because –

Sarah:  The movie does?

RHG:  …What?

Sarah:  The movie does?

Elyse:  No.

RHG:  I mean, in the, if you look at the, the font in the title.

Sarah:  I see, I see, I see.

RHG:  Because at that point W wasn’t a letter yet?  You just, you know, threw your two Vs together?  Anyway, it’s funny to us history nerds.

Elyse:  That’s a very –

RHG:  Anyway, after you’ve watched that, you should watch the Crucible Cast Party sketch from SNL last night with Lin-Manuel Miranda, which is hilarious.  [Laughs]

Elyse:  I’m Googling it right now.

RHG:  It, it’s a rap song about what the high school cast party after they have finished their run of The Crucible is like, and everybody on Twitter was like, I was a high school theater nerd.  This is painfully accurate.

Sarah:  [Laughs] And then what’s funny is you look at –

RHG:  Painfully!

Sarah:  Yeah, there was, you know how we talk about how there’s a lack of romantic comedies?  There’s also a lack of, like, fun witchcraft movies?  Like, there was The Craft and Hocus Pocus –

RHG:  [Not quite audible]

Sarah:  Sorry?

RHG:  Oh, Hocus Pocus was the best!

Sarah:  Hocus Pocus, Beetlejuice, Practical Magic, The Witches of Eastwick, The Craft, like, we had a bunch of really cool witchcraft movies, and we don’t have them anymore!  Hocus Pocus gives me joy; I love that movie.

Elyse:  Sarah, Sarah.  There is Vin Diesel, witch hunter [The Last Witch Hunter].  What are you talking about?

Sarah:  Ah, yeah, what was I thinking?  And then wasn’t, wasn’t there a Hansel & Gretel Ghost Hunters?

RHG:  Hansel & Gretel:  Witch Hunters, don’t watch the extended edition.  Just don’t.

Elyse:  Don’t watch any of the – that’s – no.  No.  Like, fucking Matt Damon, issue an apology right now.  That movie.

RHG:  For what?

Elyse:  That was a terrible movie!

RHG:  What?

Elyse:  Hansel & Gretel.

RHG:  What are you talking about?!

Elyse:  It was awful!

RHG:  It’s amazing!

Elyse:  I can’t love you anymore.

Sarah:  I’m so confused.  What’s happening right now?

Elyse:  We’re fighting.

RHG:  Elyse is having wrong opinions about Hansel & Gretel:  Witch Hunters, which was an amazing movie.

Elyse:  No!

RHG:  It was amazing.  It was perfect.  And Matt Damon wasn’t in it.  What are you even talking about?

Elyse:  Yes, he was!

Sarah:  That’s Jeremy Renner.

RHG:  That was Renner.

Elyse:  No, I’m thinking of, I – you know what, I’d like to –

RHG:  You’re thinking of The Brothers Grimm?

Elyse:  I’m thinking of The Brothers Grimm.  I’d like to issue a formal apology at this time to RedHeadedGirl and, and Jeremy Renner and Matt Damon.  I’m thinking of The Brothers Grimm.

Sarah:  You don’t need to apologize to Jeremy Renner, ‘cause Jeremy, Jeremy Renner acts like a dick on a regular basis.

RHG:  You know, he’s a known problem.  However, (a) I accept your apology, because (b) you’re correct; The Brothers Grimm was awful.

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  So I should watch the regular edition of Hansel & Gretel:  Witch Hunters.

RHG:   Yes, the original cut of Hansel & Gretel:  Witch Hunters.

Sarah:  Now, I should watch this with, like, an alcoholic beverage with the expectation of camp?

RHG:  Oh, yes.

Sarah:  Okay, just making sure.

RHG:  Oh, yes.  Okay, one of the opening shots of the movie is somebody delivering bottles of milk in this quasi-medieval town with little ink drawings of missing children pasted onto the milk bottles.

Sarah:  Okay, I’m here!  I’m, I’m with you there.

RHG:  And that’s, like, the whole tone of the movie is encapsulated right there in that shot.

Sarah:  Does Jeremy Renner shoot a lot of arrows, or is he not allowed a bow and arrow in this one?

RHG:  I know Gemma Arterton, who plays Gretel, does have, like, a, a four-way crossbow; it’s pretty cool.

Sarah:  As you do.  I think I’ve seen The Witches of –

Elyse:  I just heard four-way –

Sarah:  Four-way?

Elyse:  – and went to another place.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Because, I think, what was, I saw a tweet, and I can’t remember who it’s by, so I apologize for not properly citing my sources, but it was from a, an erotic romance author who wrote, like, I clearly read too much ménage fiction because I look at Bridget Jones’s Baby, and I’m like, there’s a very easy solution to all of this, you guys.

RHG:  I was first exposed to the concept of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries with, when somebody I follow on Tumblr was hosting comments and GIFs from it and tagging them MFMM, and I’m just sitting there going –

Sarah:  [Laughs] Male –

RHG:  Wait, what the fuck kind of porn are you watching?  I don’t know what’s happening  right now. [Laughter]

Elyse:  Can I recommend more scary books?

Sarah:  Please do!

Elyse:  Okay, so, I also want to recommend My Best Friend’s Exorcism, which, actually, you might like, Sarah, because it is, it’s ‘80s nostalgia horror kind of all mixed in together.  It’s this woman recounting how in the ‘80s her, when she was a teenager, her friend became basic-, started exhibiting signs of possession, right?  The author on this is Grady –

Elyse and Sarah:  – Hendrix.

Elyse:  So –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Elyse:  – yeah.  So, it’s about these two girls, Abby and Gretchen, and it, it, there’s so much wonderful ‘80s, like, birthday at the roller rink with the carpeted walls that was totally a fire hazard and we all did it nostalgia wrapped up into this horror book, and, and it’s just, it’s so much fun.  It really, really, really is fun.  And it’s a book about female friendship, too, which I love and I want more of.  Roses and Rot by Kat Howard, which is, like, a Gothic – I, I’m not sure if this is YA or adult fiction or both?  And I think this one’s interesting.  it, it’s got, like, a, a haunted, a haunting aspect to it, but it’s about two sisters, and the malevolent spirit is actually that of their dead mother – I’m sorry, it’s the stepmother, not the mother.

RHG:  It’s always the stepmother.

Elyse:  It’s always the stepmother.  What else have I got on my list?  I’ve got lots of books that are scary.

Sarah:  Yeah!  It’s kind of your jam.

Elyse:  It’s totally my jam.  I like to be scared a little bit.  Ooh, there’s The Creeping.

Sarah:  God!  [Laughs]

Elyse: Okay?

Sarah:  There is The Creeping, yes, there’s The Creeping.  There is The Creeping, yes, that is, that is true.

Elyse:  There’s The Creeping by Alexandra Sirowy, which I am pronouncing wrong, which is about two girls who disappear, and only one of them comes back, and she can’t remember what happened to the girl who she, who disappeared when they were out fucking around in the woods like kids do, so –

Sarah:  Isn’t that the show that you were reviewing that was –

Elyse:  No, that was The Kettering Incident, but a similar premise.  That’s actually a very, very common premise?  Like, in mysteries and horror books, two kids go out, dick around in the woods, only one of them comes back, and the one that comes back can’t remember what happened to the other kid.

RHG:  Yep.

Sarah:  Yeah, that’s not creepy at all.

Elyse:  No, it’s not creepy in the least.

RHG:  No, definitely not.

Sarah:  Mm-mm, no.  And it’s funny, I have not read that many romances that were creepy-creepy because I don’t really go very far into the world of suspense or romantic suspense.  I do like adventure romance, but those aren’t creepy; those are just sort of like –

RHG:  Those are exciting.

Sarah:  Those are exciting.  That’s, like, adrenaline and, and there’s a certain amount of silliness sometimes.  I haven’t read that many romances that creeped me out, although there are times when I’m reading something that’s very atmospheric, like Susanna Kearsley totally works on me?  And the moments wherein the heroine, who usually has a split life or is going back and forth in time, starts to realize that something’s happening, that’s very creepy to me.  But I am sad that I don’t have better creepiness.  I do, however, miss and love all of the female-centered stories like from Hocus Pocus to Practical Magic to –

RHG:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – all of those.  I miss those, you know?  I liked those, I want more of them, but, you know, woman-centered stories, we can’t do that.  That’s horrible.

Elyse:  We can only have, like, two a year, I think, is the law.

Sarah:  Right.  You can really only have one or two.

RHG:  Hmm.

Sarah:  You know what I would watch?  I would watch an entire television show centered on Luna Lovegood?  Wouldn’t that be rad?

Elyse:  Sure!

RHG:  Mm-hmm.  That would be awesome.

Sarah:  That would be, that would be totally rad.  It’s just the idea that you see the, the spectral horses?

RHG:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  And all the other weird shit?  Like, I would totally – I think Luna would be a great television protagonist but, you know, what do I know?  We have to follow Harry around.

RHG:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Any other recommendations?

Elyse:  He was the Chosen One.

Sarah:  Eh, choose this.

Elyse:  What else do I have here?  I tried to make a stack of all my creepy books, and now I can’t read the titles.

Sarah:  [Laughs] I’m too creeped out!  I can’t focus.

Elyse:  No, I’m, like, lying sideways on the bed, and I’m too lazy to get up and adjust my microphone.

Sarah:  As you go.

Elyse:  I have a book called –

RHG:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – I have a –

RHG:  [Still laughing] That’s Elyse in a nutshell, right there.

Elyse:  This is, this – I would just like everyone to know, this is how seriously I take my job as a reviewer for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.  I could recommend books to you people, but then I would have to move my head, so fuck that.

RHG:  [Laughs some more.]

Elyse:  I have a book called The Dead House that I haven’t read yet by Dawn Kurtagich, or something like that.  It says it’s a part psychological thriller, part urban legend, an unsettling narrative made up of diary entries, interview transcripts, film footage transcripts, and medical notes –

Sarah:  Ahhh!

Elyse:  – about a house that burned down, and people were killed, or a school that burned down and people were killed, and now a diary has been found in the ruins of the school, and the diary belongs to the main character’s identical twin sister, but she says –

RHG:  Nope.

Elyse:  – she didn’t have a twin sister –

RHG:  Nope.  [Laughs]

Elyse:  I’m just, I, I feel like, I feel like I have this immunity to creepy things.

Sarah:  All right.  Any other books you want to recommend, my friends?

RHG:  Not in the creepy sense, but I just finished Joanna Shupe’s Baron, which is the next book in the Knickerbocker series?

Sarah:  Ooh!

RHG:  And it was so good, and there was a sex scene where I literally had to put it down and fan myself for a second.

Sarah:  Whoooa!

RHG:  [Laughs] So, yeah.

Sarah:  That’s awesome!

RHG:  Look, look out for that when it hits the shelves.

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this week’s episode.  Thank you very much for tuning in.  I do have a question, though:  what about you?  Do you believe in ghosts?  Do you like ghost stories?  Do you have creepy books to recommend?  Is there a romance where one of the characters is a ghost that you enjoyed, because I would like to hear about it, and, hey, do you miss cool witches in movies and books as much as I do?  Yeah.  So email us!  You can email me at [email protected], or you can call and leave us a voicemail at 1-201-371-3272.  I love hearing from you guys, ‘cause you’re awesome, and I’m curious.  Usually people who do believe in ghosts are like, well, of course ghosts are real!  And people who do not are like, that’s banana-crackers!  So, I’m curious to hear what your perspective is.

Each podcast has a transcript because accessibility is crucial for all good things, and this month the transcript is being sponsored by Kensington, publishers of ‘Tis the Season by Jennifer Gracen, part of the Zebra Shout imprint featuring rising stars of romance at affordable prices of $4.99.  It is never too early to get into the holiday spirit.  Jennifer Gracen tackles the contemporary millionaire trend in the third book in her series focused on the rich and powerful Harrison brothers.  In ‘Tis the Season you can join the annual family gathering in a fun twist on the boss/secretary pairing as the eldest, Charles Harrison III, tries to resist his growing romantic feelings towards his children’s nanny Lisette.  Desperate to avoid another scandal like the one his divorce caused, Charles knows getting involved with Lisette is a risky move at the wrong time, but with the scent of holiday spices in the air, he can’t help but be drawn to her tender, caring nature in such stark contrast to his cold ex-wife and unfeeling father.  With mistletoe hanging on practically every doorway, it’s only a matter of time before Charles and Lisette find themselves caught under their spell.  Discover the magic of love in ‘Tis the Season by Jennifer Gracen, now available on kensingtonbooks.com and wherever books are sold!

We also have an iBooks page, which is super cool in case you are an iBooks shopper, at iTunes.com/DBSA.  You can find all of the books from each episode plus links to the most recent episodes, and you can go shopping and listening in the same place, which is super handy-dandy.

The music you’re listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater.  You can find her @SassyOutwater on Twitter.  This is a band called Sketch, and this is from their album Shed Life.  This track is called “Oidhche Boogie,” which I totally had to look up how to say that, and I hope I said it right.  You can find it on Amazon, iTunes, or wherever you buy your fine and funky music.

Thank you most especially for tuning in each week.  It means an enormous amount to me to hear how much you like the podcast, how much it helps you find good books, and how much you like listening to us talk about romances.  If you would like to support the show, I love when you review things.  It’s so great when you review the podcast, so thank you for that.  And if you would like to have a look at our podcast Patreon, it’s at Patreon.com/SmartBitches.  Your tuning in every week is the greatest thing, so thank you for that.

And on behalf of everyone here, including our sound engineers, Orville and Wilbur, who are seriously wanting to climb into the sound box right now, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

[rousing music]