Seems to me that, at the most basic level, there are three types of supernatural tale. The first is a kind of cheat. The author weaves a dark web of words, building up atmosphere and dread, and in the end it turns out there’s a mundane explanation for the scary goings on. These stories can be a delight if the writer loves words and can conjure up ambiguous dread: the reason the lights always flicker at midnight is because… I don’t know, problems at a hydro substation? 

The point is, there are no ghosts or goblins here. I think of the real Winchester House in California. It was built by a widow who believed that the people killed by Winchester rifles were out to get her. She had the money to build a weirdly distorted mansion full of strange  architectural features: inaccessible balconies, staircases to nowhere, and doors opening onto sheer drops. For all that, there are no credible supernatural events associated with the house. In the movie, Helen Mirren does a nice job of trying to convince you otherwise, but…no.

Of course, it’s important that there is at least one character in the building who is receptive to eerie suggestion. Plus the reader, of course. You really shouldn’t read this kind of story if you’re a grumpy skeptic. Read a spy story. They’re good for cynics.

The second type of story involves abnormal psychology. This kind of story can be pleasantly disturbing. It usually involves a character who is troubled and at least a little unbalanced. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is a classic example. The character Nell is coming apart at the seams, and it is mostly she who experiences the disembodied voices and banging on doors.

Jackson’s story is mostly about Nell’s needs and fears, but in this twilight sort of tale the author can be forgiven for crossing the line into supernatural manifestations. After all, the conventional explanation for a poltergeist is that some living person is projecting the strange happenings consciously or unconsciously: jars shooting off shelves, frost forming on walls… To borrow an example from myself, the lights might flicker from the sheer projected power of the subject’s psychosis. I don’t want to get too technical about it, because in the end these stories are cobbled together out of dreams and the imagination, but a wraith fits this category. A wraith is an apparition of a living person. I used this concept in Requiem for Noah. It gave me one of my most terrifying ghosts, and scared the bejeezus out of detectives Weiss and Joshi.

The third type of story is the unashamedly supernatural. This is nicely liberating for the author because she can pull out all the stops and go Hollywood, blasting you with the verbal equivalent of CGI. Forget flickering lights; why not have a blinding float of spirits passing through your living room like a Saint Patrick’s Day parade? Why dream to the min when you can dream to the max? Of course you’re liable to wind up with a Ghost Busters comedy if you do that. When you’re given a delightful toy like the supernatural to play with, it’s best to be subtle. If you want to evoke vicarious terror you should try to keep one foot in reality, building your effects through suspense and anticipation. If in the end you decide to provide the reader with a goldarn card-carrying spook, try to make it a little out of the ordinary. Transparent wisps of ectoplasm are old hat.

In Requiem for Parish which will be out soon, I wanted to keep my supernatural event rooted in the everyday business of a woman’s home. Do ghosts throw shadows and  trigger motion sensor lights? Why not? This is a tough one for Carly Rhoul to figure out, but she’s a smart business woman and a journalist. The thing is—and I would love to explore this further—the kind of people who have the dubious gift of sensitivity often suffer for it, doubting their own emotional stability. We like to use the term ‘mental health’ these days. Well, I’ve often thought that the heroine who sees what others cannot see would be very unhappy.