Supernatural Friday: Winter Haunt (Original Poem)

Enjoy my original ghostly poem and please share the link and not the poem, so that others can read it too. 

Winter Haunt

By

Pamela K. Kinney

Winter’s chill deepens when night hits

A sky full of brilliant stars and a hovering moon

Draws you outside to view nature’s glowing glories

Peace fills you at the sights,

when suddenly something nearby catches your eye,

nearby the old oak tree a few feet away.

Not an owl or some other nightly predator,

No, it has a--no it is a shadow,

darker than the darkness itself.

Then it changes, becomes like mist

Except you know the night is clear,

and there’s no mist or fog anywhere.

“What is this strange thing,” you think,

drawing closer and you reach out,

and you see it too, reaches out

A chill much worse than the winter night offers

envelopes you, digs beneath your skin.

Eyes, a nose, a face appears within the glow!

The cold burrows deeper within you

until it finds your heart,

The steady beat of a drum grows louder, harder,

And you understand it’s fear pounding your heart like a hammer.

The need to bolt, to return to the warmth and solace of your home

Fills you like a meme:

Run. Run! RUN! Or it will get you! Go now!

But your feet remained as if glued to the ground,

The ghost moves and covers you completely.

Blind terror fills you, and yet, still, you cannot move.

When suddenly, the haunt vanishes, and the stillness that

held you, is gone.

Later, inside your house, safe and sound, still shaking,

a blanket wrapped around you for warmth and comfort,

You know that winter nights have more than you bargained for;

That the supernatural haunt them, too.

Fear and Halloween

Fear is an emotional response to a perceived threat. It's a basic reaction to a stimulus, such as pain or dangerous threat. Fear is separate from anxiety, which occurs without external threat. It means to terrify, or to frighten.

 

The fear response arises from the perception of danger leading to confrontation with or escape from/avoiding the threat (also known as the fight-or-flight response), which in extreme cases of fear (horror and terror) can be a freeze response or paralysis.

In humans and animals, fear is modulated by the process of cognition and learning. Thus fear is judged as rational or appropriate and irrational or inappropriate. An irrational fear is called a phobia.

People develop specific fears as a result of learning or experiencing. Psychology calls this fear conditioning. John B. Watson's Little Albert experiment in 1920 might be the beginning of this. After observing a child with an irrational fear of dogs, the  study of an 11-month-old boy had him conditioned to fear a white rat in the laboratory. The fear became generalized to include other white, furry objects, such as a rabbit, dog, and even a ball of cotton.

Fear can be learned by experiencing or watching a frightening traumatic accident. For example, if a child falls from a swing or falls off a boat into a lake and almost drowns and he or she may develop a fear of heights (acrophobia), enclosed spaces (claustrophobia), or water (aquaphobia). I myself had the near drowning experience at age four to keep me from learning to swim.
Studies of the areas of the brain that are affected in relation to fear have been done. When looking at these areas (such as the amygdala), it was proposed that a person learns to fear regardless of whether they themselves have experienced trauma, or if they have observed the fear in others. The amygdala affected two subjects when one observed someone else being submitted to an aversive event, knowing that the same treatment awaited themselves, and when subjects were subsequently placed in a fear-provoking situation. This suggests that fear can develop in both conditions, not just simply from personal history.
 
 

Physical reactions from fear are:

Rapid heart rate

Increased blood pressure

Tightening of muscles

Sharpened or redirected senses

Dilation of the pupils

Increased sweating

Guess that could partly what Halloween is all about. The need to scare ourselves silly. And yet once the masks are off and the decorations put away, we laugh and say it was all for fun. That we weren't really frightened. But what if the monsters and ghosts are real (Doing paranormal investigating, I believe ghosts to be real--demons too.)? Serial killers are real. Spiders are. Some are poisonous, some like the brown recluse can kill you with its bite. Bats can give you rabies with a bite.

It all began with a Celtic festival called Samhain ( pronounced sow in or sow an), and even a Christian one called All Soul's Day (November 1st). Though some folklorists claim that it goes farther back to a Roman feast of Pomona, goddess of seeds and fruits, or even to a festival of the dead, Parentalia. The Celts on Samhain built bonfires on All Hallow's Eve, where they burned animals and crops as sacrifices to Celtic deities.

The Celts believed that the veil between the mortal world and the spirit world was thinnest on this one day of the year. That spirits, demons, monsters, and other frightful beings, could enter more easily. Harmless ghosts of ancestors were made welcome by family, while those who meant harm to mortals were warded off.

No doubt this was how the wearing of masks and costumes came about. Someone wanted to get home, or go to a friend's or relative's. They wore a costume and mask, looking like a dark spirit, so that they would be safe from any supernatural threat. 

Today, scary movies and stories in novels and short stories, even the haunts set up in October, most likely don't help. They have become our own self induced fear conditioning. Even once November 1st rolls around and we look forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas, that fear conditioning remains, coming out at unexpected times. 

Halloween has much to answer for.  But you know what, I do not care. I love it. And as a writer of dark fantasy, if my readers want feel the safe thrill of the monsters that inhabit my novels, short stories, poetry and nonfiction ghost books, well that is fine with me. None of it is real. 

Neither is that lit Jack-O-Lantern on the porch, the ghost drifting down the street is just a trick-or-treater in a sheet , and the haunt you just entered with your buddies nothing more than people made up and animatronics.

Maybe.... 

Just beware of when you go out that night. After all, the worlds of the living and the dead are blurred this very day. And that partner you're dancing with just might not be human....or alive!

 

 

Supernatural Friday: A Ghost By Any Other Name is a GHOST!

A Ghost By Any Other Name is a GHOST!

By

Pamela K. Kinney

(this poem is copyrighted, so just share the link please if want people to read it).

Slithering through the ether

A breath of cool breeze,

Or something else.

It haunts corners of deserted buildings

A lost soul, or demonic thing.

Sometimes, they are like radio,

Repeating endlessly over and over.

Other times, they communicate.

Move objects and appear to us.

Ghosts, specters, phantoms,

Orbs, apparitions, reverent,

Haunt, shade, shadow person,

So many descriptions, so many names.

Doesn’t matter;

Haunting is what they do!

Supernatural Friday: Who Haunts the Heights of South Mountain?

Welcome author Kathryn Hohmann, as she blogs about who haunts the Heights of South Mountain for today’s Supernatural Friday.

Remember that box-office smash, The Blair Witch Project? 

It’s the story of three students who set out in the darkened woods of central Maryland to investigate an old legend called the Blair Witch.  In the 1700s, a woman named Blair -- accused of witchcraft and cast out of a village -exacted her revenge by ritually murdering the village inhabitants.  In the movie, the hapless students go in search of the witch and after a night of paralyzing fear, they disappear, never to be heard from again.  Because the movie was portrayed as a documentary, fans were so determined to find the “real” Blair Witch that they swarmed to the town of Burkittsville, Maryland from as far away as London. 

 It’s no coincidence that the film makers picked the location around South Mountain, a region steeped in history and spooky legend.  Although the Piscataway Indians traditionally lay claim to these rich hunting grounds, the first white settlements date to the early to mid-18th century.  In those days, belief in the supernatural was common.  The area was likely considered a threshold between this world and the next, a “power spot” or “thin place,” where the barriers between past and present are permeable.   Ghost tales shared by settlers describe strange winged creatures that swooped down from the ridge of South Mountain to carry off inhabitants.  

 Then came the war between the states.   Being a border state, Maryland was divided so sharply between Union and Confederate that some families broke apart, brother fighting brother.  The conflict culminated on September 14, 1862, when armies faced off on the ridge of South Mountain in a clash that foreshadowed the battle at Antietam -- the single bloodiest day on American soil in the nation’s history. 

That was 150 years ago.  Yet even today, some visitors to South Mountain are frightened by hazy shapes in Confederate dress or claim to see misty lights and ghostly campfires burning on the old battleground, especially during the damp and dark September evenings.  During this year’s re-enactment, a few adventurous souls made the trek to the top of South Mountain, gathered at twilight,  lit candles and honored the dead.  There’s a marker that commemorates a regiment of Rebel soldiers who vanished in the aftermath of the battle.  There’s documentation about a Union burial duty that might have disposed of bodies, but no definite explanation for the soldiers’ disappearance.  Questions only lead deeper into the mystery.

Then there’s another phenomenon that defies explanation,  an eerie place called Spook Hill.  Local legend holds that -- at a certain juncture in the road--- vehicles can be stopped, put into neutral and simply drive themselves uphill.  Skeptics are quick to dismiss the phenomenon by explaining that the roadway is nothing more than an optical illusion and merely appears to slope uphill, but history says something else entirely.  On September 14, 1862, at the base of South Mountain, Union fire forced the Confederates to abandon their cannons and make a run for safety.   The giant weapons went rolling downhill, out of control and crushed the Rebels who had been fortunate enough to survive the sharpshooters’ bullets.  Legend says that Rebels killed during the retreat haunt this stretch of road, their souls forever tasked with the duty of pushing their cannons back up the mountain. 

Those drawn to South Mountain sense the imprint of the past on the present.  There aren’t definite answers, not about the Rebels who vanished without a trace on the mountain top or about the slant of the road below.  But one thing is certain:  It’s not a witch named Blair that haunts the hills of central Maryland, not even close.  It’s something, or someone, in blue or grey.
Kathryn
http://www.soldiers-rest.com  
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kathryn-Hohmann

About Kathryn Hohmann:
Kathryn Hohmann is a writer from southwestern Montana.  Her newest book, Soldiers Rest, is a novel inspired by the true tale about Rebels who vanished in the aftermath of a Civil War battle. She is co-author of Why We Ride, about women and horses and a textbook on emergency response.  Kathryn can be reached at http://www.soldiers-rest.com.

Buy the ebook at AMAZON