Off the Beaten Track: Alison Naomi Holt - Stories, Stories Everywhere

Our guest this week is crime writer Alison Naomi Holt, the author of the psychological crime thriller, The Door at the Top of the Stairs, and two Alex Wolfe mysteries, Credo’s Hope and Credo’s Legacy. To check out her books, visit her website at http://www.alisonholtbooks.com.

Hello. Let me introduce myself. My name is Alison Naomi Holt and I'm a writer who happens to have twenty years of law enforcement under her belt. I retired several years ago and have turned to a passion that I've carried with me since I was a child. I love to write and have written four books in three different genres. I also love to teach other writers how to write realistic police scenes and how to create fictional cops who could actually patrol a beat in downtown USA.

That being said, when I’m teaching my seminars, one of the questions I'm most asked is, "Where do you come up with story ideas?" My answer? Everywhere! Judging by the frequency of this question, finding plots seems to be a real stumbling block for aspiring writers. I thought it would be fun today to give you an example of a seemingly innocuous family story that has provided me with several characters and several different story ideas.

Fifty some years ago, my father was driving his 1958 Jeep from Roanoke to Floyd, Virginia, when he passed an ancient farmhouse off to his left. It wasn't the peeling paint or the rickety banisters on the front porch that caught his eye. What interested him most was the motley collection of old furniture littering the front lawn. Old bedposts were propped against the porch stairs, glassware sat atop a metal kitchen table. Four metal chairs—at one time a bright red but now white with patches of red showing through—surrounded the table. A hat rack stood sentinel next to a chest of drawers made of pine and stained to a light brown hickory color.

Out of curiosity, my dad pulled into the yard where he discovered a For Sale sign taped to the upright post of the hat rack. The big block letters had been scrawled by a shaky hand in what he thought was some type of thick leaded pencil. No one came out of the house to greet him when he arrived, so he climbed up the steps to the porch and knocked on the door. An elderly woman in her late seventies pushed open the screen and stepped out to meet him. She explained that her ninety-eight year old father had just passed away, and neither she nor her siblings wanted any of his things. On his way in, my dad had spotted an antique barrister bookcase with glass front doors that used the "up and over" mechanism instead of the normal sideways opening ones.

He asked about the bookcase, and the only history she could tell him was that the piece had been in her father's home since she'd been a child and she couldn't remember a time it hadn't stood in the corner of his office holding his books. Neither she nor anyone in her family wanted anything to do with the bookcase and she sold it to my dad for $5.00. He happily brought it home with him to Roanoke.

Now, even had that been the whole story, it already gave me two interesting characters, other than my father, people whose lives could provide me several fictional stories. Was the father an abusive man whose children hated him? Why? Why did the children seem to be giving away everything the old man had owned? What was it about the bookcase that made the woman practically hand it over to my father for pennies?

Fortunately for me as a writer, that wasn't the end of the tale of the barrister's bookcase (which by the way is a great title for a book). Over the course of the next several years, the bookcase was moved to several locations in our house, finally ending up in my older brother's bedroom. Now my brother was your typical teenager. He did fine in school, wrestled on the wrestling team and hung out with his buddies. He wasn't given to flights of fancy or to an overactive imagination.

Well, one dark and stormy night—okay, it wasn’t dark and stormy, but it could have been—he awoke to the sensation that someone else was in the room. He opened his eyes to see a woman standing at the foot of his bed. She wore a white Victorian dress and had long flowing hair. When she realized he'd seen her, she flew at him, sailed through his chest, dove up and around and disappeared into the bookcase. Scared witless, my big, bad brother ran into my parent's room. My father said he'd never seen him looking so pale. My sixteen-year-old brother refused to return to his bedroom that night and ended up curled up in my parent’s overstuffed armchair to sleep.

The bookcase went with my brother when he got married, and over the years he guesses he's seen the woman a total of fifty or sixty more times. After the first few incidents, she no longer frightened him, and he came to miss her during the times she was absent. Now there's the real meat of this old family lore. Who was the woman? Where did she come from? Was she related to the ninety-eight year old man or had she haunted him too? Why did she relate to my brother, who just happened to have been born in Radford, Virginia?

Can you see the possibilities for any number of books coming out of this story that's been told around my family's dinner table for years? Now think back to stories that your family has told you. Do you have any ghosts in your family closets—or bookcases? How about black sheep? Bankruptcies, prison terms? The possibilities are endless, and if you’ve ever wanted to write, or if you’re a writer who finds it difficult to find ideas for new books, take a look at those stories told around your family’s dinner table. Really look at them, dissect them, listen to them again and hear the voices and lives of the characters in your next book clamoring to be heard.

How Spirits Live On

With Halloween behind us, I’d rather not cover anything too scary for this week’s topic if I can help it. (Yes, I call myself a crime writer, but I’m really a wimp.)
 

Instead, I’ve been thinking about a wondrous little happening from close to a decade ago.

After my first daughter was born, my in-laws made the long journey from India to see her and spend time with all of us. When they arrived, my mother in-law fretted a bit about her older sister who’d recently lost her husband, so on the spur of the moment, she called to invite her to join us. Happily, her sister said yes, and after her arrival, what struck us all was the immediate, electric bond my six-month-old struck with her great aunt, like old soulmates.

Right from the get-go, my baby’s eyes would light up whenever she saw her great aunt, whom we affectionately call Ayee (which means “mother”). No matter how preoccupied Uma was with whatever bright, shiny object lay in front of her, she could acutely sense when Ayee was anywhere nearby.

After jumping into her arms, my girl would knowingly proceed to locate an old rosary Ayee wore around her neck. She didn’t seem to register anyone else’s necklaces, not even the gold chain Ayee also wore – only that rosary. For fun, or so we thought, our aunt would tuck the rosary into her blouse and tightly wrap her sari around her neck and chest to make it hard for Uma to find. But no matter how hidden away, Uma would find the piece and touch it delicately as though it held some special significance.

In some parts of India, it’s believed that when a newborn comes into the world, he or she inhabits the spirit of the last person who’d passed away in the family. As it happened, Ayee’s husband was the last person we’d lost before Uma’s birth. It’s just a superstition, of course. But as Ayee informed us, her husband had worn that rosary all of their married life. When he passed away, she’d removed it from his body and has worn it ever since.

Is it coincidence or proof of the supernatural, you think?

The House Built For Spirits

If you’ve ever lived in an old house, you may know the feeling of being trapped in an endless cycle of repairs – paint jobs, leaky roofs, and ancient plumbing. But what if you built a house with no intention of ever finishing it? And what if the reason for your construction frenzy was rooted in a fear of ghosts? If so, you’d have something in common with Sarah Winchester, heiress to an empire based on the “gun that won the West,” the Winchester repeating rifle.

Born in 1840, Sarah was 22 when she married William Wirt Winchester, whose father perfected the Winchester rifle and amassed a fortune in producing and marketing the gun. But tragedy plagued Sarah’s marriage. Her infant daughter died of a mysterious illness, and William succumbed to tuberculosis fifteen years later. As a result of her losses, the widow fell into a deep depression from which she never fully recovered. In her despair, she turned to the occult for help.

A spiritualist told Sarah that the spirits of the Native Americans, Civil War soldiers, and others who had been killed by the Winchester rifle were responsible for the untimely deaths of her husband and daughter – and Sarah might be next on the ghostly hit list. The spiritualist advised the distraught woman to construct a house with architectural features designed to foil these evil spirits – and to never stop building it.

Left with plenty of time on her hands and even more money to burn, Sarah set to work. (She’d inherited several million dollars plus shares in the Winchester Repeating Rifle Company on her husband’s death and eventually ended up with more than 20 million dollars.) In 1884, Sarah bought an unfinished farmhouse near San Jose, California, and hired carpenters to work in shifts round the clock, paying them twice the customary wages of the time. The frenzied pace of construction continued for the next 38 years, right up until the day Sarah died. At that point, the work stopped so abruptly that the carpenters didn’t even bother to finish pounding in their nails.

Switchback Staircase

Mrs. Winchester designed the house herself, or rather, she told the carpenters what to build and where to build it. She never worked from a plan and created a seven-story mansion that sprawled across six acres of land. By the time the work ended, the complex had 160 rooms; 2,000 doors; 10,000 windows; 47 staircases; an equal number of fireplaces; 13 bathrooms; and 6 kitchens. All to accommodate a single resident.

In addition to her never-ending construction work, Sarah Winchester also heeded the spiritualist’s other piece of advice: to incorporate architectural features designed to foil the angry spirits. Sarah built stairs that led nowhere, installed windows that opened into walls or were set in the floor, and constructed chimneys that stopped short of the roof. The house had twisting hallways with secret passages accessible through doors hidden in the paneling so Sarah could move quickly through the vast house and escape a ghost who might be in hot pursuit. She kept only two or three mirrors in the mansion, believing that they provided gateways to the spirit world.

But not all of Mrs. Winchester’s ideas were eccentric. In an era when electricity was a new invention, she had gas lights that were operated by pushing an electric button. She designed a one-piece porcelain laundry tub with a molded-in soap tray and washboard. It’s been rumored that she patented this invention, though no patent has ever been found. Sarah patterned a widow catch after a Winchester rifle trigger and trip hammer (though you’d think such a design might be tempting fate in a house filled with the ghosts of the people the rifle had dispatched). She installed brass corner plates on the stairs to make them easier to clean. (Imagine a male architect of the day coming up with that particular idea.)

So was Sarah Winchester really a crazy lady with too much money to burn or just a really bad architect? Her interest in the occult and reclusive habits certainly fueled the gossip mill and helped create her legend.

Yet some of the house’s features had plausible explanations. The Switchback Staircase, for instance, has seven flights and 44 steps. But because each step is only two inches high, the entire staircase rises only nine feet. Maybe that construction was intended to frustrate the spirits so they’d leave Sarah alone, but the design could also have been aimed at accommodating the widow’s arthritis, which she suffered in later years.

Window in the floor

Sarah never explained her eccentricities or left behind a diary, so we will probably never know the real reason behind her building fervor. But she was superstitious and believed that the number thirteen, while unlucky, also warded off bad luck. The house is filled with thirteens: some windows have thirteen panes, the house contains thirteen bathrooms, and the thirteenth one has thirteen windows. What’s more, Sarah’s will is divided into thirteen parts, and she signed it thirteen times. Maybe she hoped this auspicious number of signatures would prevent her money from falling into evil hands.

The mansion today goes by the name of The Winchester Mystery House and is open to the public. Guided tours run daily and include a nighttime flashlight tour every Friday the 13^th and on Halloween. But visitors are not allowed to roam freely through the house. The official explanation is that they will likely get lost and never find their way out again. But who knows? Maybe some of Sarah Winchester’s evil ghosts remain trapped in the mansion’s labyrinth of rooms, corridors, and staircases, lying in wait to spook an unsuspecting tourist.