Hi, everyone! So, if you follow me on Twitter, you know that I am a crazy Martha Stewart fan. Maybe it’s because I’m not really crafty or because I can’t really cook…but when holidays roll around, I have to watch my Martha. She gives me tips and makes me believe I *can* be crafty (and I am going to try one of her recent tips later today). So, today, I’m turning over my site to Martha (okay, not really, but wouldn’t it be crazy awesome if she were guest blogging?).

First up…let’s take a quiz.  Courtesy of the Martha Stewart site, find out just how well you know America’s Most Haunted Sites.

Not sure what you should be for Halloween? Martha knows. Take her quiz and find out.

Want some scary make-up for Halloween? Again, Martha has you covered with how-to tips.

Want some graveyard ghosts to turn your yard into a full-on scarefest?    Want the kiddies to decorate pumpkins–without a carving mess?

And, dude, having a party? Then here are some free online invitations for you.

It’s Martha madness, and I love it!

Thanks for having me, Cynthia!  And during such a fun month!  Just to make it a little more fun…2 lucky commentors will win a prize!  Your choice of any of Cynthia’s currently available paranormal novels or anthologies. 

Now, on to the fun stuff…ghosts!

One of my patient’s clued me into UCSF’s haunted history.  I’ve been a sonographer at the medical center for many years and have taken call there for more than I care to remember, which means I’ve spent time in the long, lonely hallways at every hour of the day and night. 

If you think about it, hospitals are prime locations for haunting when you consider the monumental suffering and death that occur there on a daily basis.  And anyone who has worked at a hospital can attest, they can be rather cold, eerie places when they quiet down.

I can’t remember how the conversation with my patient veered into the subject of ghosts (you’d be surprised what my patient’s and I talk about. I must have one of those tell-me-your-darkest-life-stories faces), but he was quite knowledgeable and adamant. 

He was a kidney transplant patient, and what we call a “frequent flier”, someone who has stayed at the medical center off and on for years over the course of treatment. 

Here’s what he told me.

The ninth floor and the thirteenth floor are the common places to see ghosts.  But he most often saw them on the ninth floor, and always late at night, when the nurses were clustered at the nurse’s station and not wandering the floor or in and out of patient rooms.

The ghosts were dressed like patients, in patient gowns and pants, walking the halls and wheeling an IV pole, looking just like every other patient…until they disappeared by walking right into walls where they vanished into nothing.

Other rumors:

It is rumored that women who have died in childbirth haunt the Intensive Care Nursery.  (Both Labor and Delivery and the ICN are on the fifteenth floor of the hospital.)

It is rumored that so many children haunted the then-eighth floor pediatric unit  it had to be exorcised.  (Pediatric ICUs are on sixth and seventh floors now.)

My experiences:

One night while on call in the wee hours of the morning, I was waiting for an UP service elevator in the empty, silent halls of the hospital.  The elevator stopped on my floor going DOWN.  The doors opened to reveal an empty wheelchair.  No one else.  Creepy.  I let the elevator go.  It went to the basement and returned to my floor without stopping.  Doors opened.  The wheelchair was gone.  Really creepy.

Another night at about eight o’clock, my coworker and I were waiting to leave for the night.  The light switch in our work area has a very distinctive and loud ‘click’ when the switch is flipped to turn the lights out.  She and I were both sitting there when the sound echoed and the lights went out.  The lights in the hall stayed on.  The lights in the closet stayed on.  The lights in the exam room stayed on.  I looked at her. She looked at me.  At the same time we said, “Did you do that?”  

When we checked the light switch, we found it had not been flipped.  There was no one else in the department.

Can’t say that’s much in the way of ghost stories for someone who’s spent as many hours in that hospital as I have during all those crazy hours.  Then again, I also thought those patients who were talking to other people who weren’t there were experiencing drug side effects, and those patients who were seeing auras or dogs or clowns or dead loved ones that weren’t there were hallucinating.

Now…I’m not so sure.

Which makes me wonder…in that altered state between the conscious and unconscious, do the medicated patients connect with or touch an alternate/parallel realm?  And if they do, do they reach it via the medication or in spite of the medication?  Do they forget (as is common with ICU patients) because of the effects of the medication?  If they retain scattered memories, are they simply drug induced psychosis or real and dismissed as side effects because they are unexplainable?

Do you have ghost, other-worldly or even medically induced experiences to share? 

Remember…2 lucky commentors will win their choice of any of Cynthia’s currently available paranormal novels or anthologies!

A triple RWA® Golden Heart finalist, Joan Swan writes sexy romantic suspense with a paranormal twist.  Her first novel, FEVER, debuts with Kensington Brava in April, 2012.  Joan works as a sonographer at a top University Medical Center and lives in magnificent wine country on the central coast of California with her husband and two daughters.  When she’s not writing you can find Joan on her website at www.joanswan.com, blog www.joanswan.blogspot.com or haunting the Twitterverse www.twitter.com/ultraswan.

Hi, everyone! Today it is my pleasure to have my Brava Writing With the Stars mentee, Dale Mayer, as my blog party guest!  Dale has written a fabulous (dark, sexy, and exciting!) story for the Brava contest.  Welcome to the party, Dale!!  Hope you enjoy your stay.

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Thanks to Cynthia for putting me on her guest list for the Halloween party. What a great place to hang out!

My most recent romantic suspense titles all have a form of psychic ability in them as I continue to feed my fascination with all things paranormal. But what starts this kind of interest? In my case, it was a very strange spooky occurrence that happened a long time ago. What better place to share this spooky take than on a Halloween blog!

At eighteen I was sharing a house with a roommate while I worked at saving enough money to go to college and taking requisite courses for entrance.

This one evening I was working on my homework at the kitchen table on the second floor of this large empty house. There was a large kitchen window overlooking the empty field and the table sat in front of it. I sat so I was staring out the window. It was close to eleven at night. Because it was late at night and I had a light on in the kitchen, the window was a dark black space which showed nothing of the outside world.

I glanced up from my work to see a man walking inside the door. He was in his late twenties, with a lock of brown hair falling across his forehead. Dressed in jeans and a green plaid shirt, he was rolling back the cuff of the sleeve on his left arm. See the details are still so clear, even though it happened decades ago.

My reaction? I freaked. I bounced back from the chair and spun around. The same kitchen stove and cupboards were there. I spun around to look out the window but the man had gone. The things to remember here are:

• I was on the second floor.
• The front door was downstairs and was locked.
• I was staring into a window out at nothing – there were no other houses in front of me.
• The other side of the kitchen is what should have been in the reflection – there’s no door that can be seen from anywhere close to that window.
• The house was empty except for me at the time.

Alone, I was terrified because I thought someone had come inside my house. Rationally, I knew it couldn’t be possible, but I couldn’t convince myself. I searched the house, shaking and panicked, forcing myself to check closets, under beds etc.

Still shaking I called my mother and told her. She went really quiet by the time I was done. She said I should go and visit her next the day. At least she calmed me down and I could get back to work – in my own bedroom with the door locked until my roommate came home.

The next day, I went to my mother’s house after work. She waited for a few minutes, then pulled a picture out of the book she was reading and handed it over to me. I stared at it in shock. “This is him. This is the man that I saw in the window last night.” And it was – right down to the green plaid shirt and the man in the picture rolling the cuff back on his arm – left arm no less. I dropped the picture and asked her, “Who is he?”

The sad smile she gave me almost broke my heart, but it’s what she said that stunned me. “He’s your father.”

The same father who’d died over sixteen years earlier.

True story I swear. The overwrought imagination of young woman? Maybe. A visit from a father, long dead? Who knows? But I’ve been fascinated ever since!

What about you? Anyone else have a weird experience like that? What drives you to write about the paranormal?  Share your stories with me, and one commenter will win an early copy of Cynthia’s ETERNAL FLAME.

Dale Mayer is multipubbed in non-fiction, and writes both adult and young adult fiction focusing on taut psychological suspense with romance and paranormal elements. She’s currently a finalist in Brava’s Writing for the Stars contest! Voting opened yesterday on October 11th and goes to the 24th.  Come out and join the fun!

It’s that time…the spookiest time of the year, so some friends and I wanted to send you all a special Halloween greeting.

Featured in this lovely video you have: Jess Granger (Dracula), Juliana Stone (DJ of the Dead), Cynthia Eden–me! (Wicked Witch), Rebecca Zanetti (Frankenstein), and Shelli Stevens (The Mummy You Were Warned About!).

And guess what else?  Guess!  Okay, never mind…all of these ladies have joined me and we’ve written a Halloween round robin story for your reading fun.  The first part of the story will be revealed on October 27th–and a new segment will appear on this blog each day until October 31st. So don’t miss the story action!

In book news…Voting has now opened for the Brava Writing With the Stars Contest!  You can view all of the entries (yes, that means including my mentee Dale Mayer‘s opening and last line) on the Romantic Times site. I want to congratulate all of the finalists–I enjoyed reading all the entries and I think they are a very talented group!

First of all, thanks to Cynthia for having me today. I’m still half-asleep, but the coffee is hot and slowly doing its job. There will be more though, I’m afraid. It’s a multiple coffee day. But, that isn’t my little blog topic today (however, on days like this when I don’t get the coffee soon enough, I make the Exorcist look like a fun little flick).

So…

When I was a kid, of course I went trick or treating. I dressed up, but it wasn’t in the costumes you could buy at the time. I look at costumes now and they’re upwards of $75+ for kids. For cheap materials that are ill-fitting and less creative than we think.

My mom was an excellent seamstress as was my grandmother. I had awesome costumes. There are three I remember vividly and I must say, I know there are pictures somewhere, but not in my possession. Thank. God. (Yes. Even as a kid I was camera shy and hated having my picture taken.)

One year in elementary school, I was a witch. All black. Floor length dress. Pointy hat. Very basic.

A few years later, I was Wonder Woman. This was the costume to beat all costumes. Red and blue satin. I mean the whole damn thing from top to…bottom looked exactly like Linda Carter’s outfit in the television show. I had boots and I even had a cape with two big W’s on the back. My mom spent hours and days and weeks making that for me.

I remember we had Fall Festival at school going on and it was back when you could still wear your costumes to school for one day. There were ooh’s and ahh’s and compliments and ‘wow, I wish my mom had made mine’ comments. I was on top of the world. Loved that outfit. I think I still have it too, packed away in a box somewhere. It was special.

Not long after that, my sister came along and for her second or third Halloween, we were clowns. Again, my mom made the costumes. Mine was light purple baggy clown pants with the ruffle at the bottom and a dark purple big shirt with white pom-poms down the front. My sister’s was in orange and yellow. We both had hats that matched and I did our face make-up.

I was around 10-11 years old during that Halloween and it’s the last one I remember where my mom made my costume. She still made my sister’s costumes for a while, but I can still see my sister as a toddler in that little clown outfit with her face all painted.

We didn’t trick or treat as teenagers. We were ‘too old’ and I was fine with that.

I have two kids now and they don’t put thought into costumes. Not like we did. Of course, I don’t sew like my mom, but I am crafty so… My daughter hasn’t ever been big on Halloween. She has preferred to stay in, watch Ghosthunters, decorate her face in black eyeliner and be done with it. My son waits until the last minute. And I mean, LAST MINUTE. He has no idea and he’s not into a lot of things boys his age are… he doesn’t dress up as Iron Man or characters from Star Wars or any of the characters on the Nickelodeon shows he watches. But, since he waits until usually the afternoon of, and just a few hours before trick or treating, we’ve had to come up with things spur of the moment. He’s been a baseball player, a football player, a miniature Jimmie Johnson, an all-around sports fan, and… one year, he went as himself (I think that was the year he came back with a truck-load of candy).

Halloween isn’t very big in our house. DH doesn’t care for anything to do with the holiday. My kids and I do little things, but I admit, I’m a scrooge too.

We’ve made our own bags to gather candy and one year we made T-shirts to match. We got fabric paints and large Halloween rubber stamps, plain T-shirts and plain tote bags, turned on Harry Potter, and spent the afternoon decorating the shirts and bags. That was the last Halloween we spent in Florida and had gone to Sea World for trick or treating. That was amazing fun.

This year, my son still has not told me what he wants to be. I’ve asked. I’ve tossed out suggestions, and all he says is ‘I’m still thinking about it.’ My 16 year old daughter is dressing up as Prancing Cera. (If you haven’t seen the pictures of actor Michael Cera in a red beanie cap, carrying a book, and prancing all over the Internet, well count yourself lucky. There was even a Prancing Cera twitter account at one point, might still be…) She was going to go trick or treating, but has decided instead to go to a concert with friends. But, they will all be in costume.

And what is it with teenagers trick or treating? I’m talking 16, 17, even 18 year olds. I’m sorry, I’m not giving you candy if you’re that age. I might not even be opening the door for you.

What is your favorite costume memory from childhood? Do you still dress up now? What are you going to be for Halloween this year? Me, well, maybe I’ll be crazy writer lady… wacked out hair with a pencil lost in the midst, in pajamas and slippers, carrying a coffee mug. Oh right, that wouldn’t be too far from the truth of who I am… Scary.

Thanks again to Cynthia for having me. Have a Happy and Safe Halloween, y’all.

~lissa

Where you can find me:

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