Writing a Ghost Story I: Creating A Sense of Mystery & Horror

by Ophelia
Website: http://members.aol.com/opheliamac/home.htm

What's scarier:

A) A brightly lit room

B) A pitch-dark room

Answer: B-- Because you don't know what's out there.

Now what's scarier:

A) A random pitch-dark room

B) A pitch-dark room in a maniac's house

Answer: B -- Because you know what *might* be out there.

Creating a sense of mystery or horror is the art of leaving your readers in the dark, but with a few suggestions about what they might encounter. Their subconscious minds will take over from there.

Readers, understandably, want to know what's going on. If you're going to deny them information, you'd better make sure the blank spot looks natural and not like an authorial whim. (Ever read an old mystery story where the detective opens a door and the narrator says, "And there he saw the answer to it all, as plain as day," but you don't find out what he saw for another 15 pages? That's authorial whim. You don't know what he saw because it didn't suit the author's purpose for you to know. It's annoying. Don't do it).

Point of view (POV) & scene setting give you two natural-seeming ways to control what information your readers get and how they feel about it. I'm not going to go through the whole point of view definition here. If you want that you can check out these pages:

http://members.aol.com/opheliamac/effex.htm

http://members.aol.com/MacedonPg/writing.htm

What you need to know is that first-person narrators are allowed to lie, mislead, and suffer from delusions all they want, so long as they stay in character. A lot of classic horror stories use first-person narration for precisely this reason. ("The Tell Tale Heart" is an example).

If you want your reader to wonder what "really happened," you can try nested narration, in which one person tells a story he heard from another person. For instance: "My grandpa wasn't what you'd call an imaginative man. But he used to tell one story about his days as a rail-setter for the Trans-West railroad, and what happened to a grown man in broad daylight, in full sight of onlookers . . ." In this classic "strange tale" technique, the first narrator (the person relating the story to us) usually goes to great lengths to distance himself from what he's saying. "Now I don't know if Grandpa was senile, but . . ." This gives the illusion that the narrator is a rational and fair-minded person who would *never* lie to us. That just makes the outrageous things he's saying seem even more believable.

Another way to control what your readers see and how they feel about it is through scene-setting. The simplest way to do this is to tinker with the lighting. Darkness, or rather half-light, is a very useful thing. Used correctly, it allows the reader to infer parts of the story with minimal direction from the author. What the readers imagine will almost certainly be scarier (to them) than anything you could say.

For example, imagine Hero Bob is in a darkened stairwell. He hears a rhythmic creaking up above, and he struggles to light a match. Finally the flame catches and he looks up, shielding the light with his hand. He sees feet. Bare feet with white, swollen ankles swaying in the air like a pendulum weight. He cries out and drops the match. It falls down between the cement steps and goes out.

Maybe you had a mental image of a dead guy with a noose around his neck, dangling in front of Hero Bob. I didn't say there was a noose. I didn't say there was a dead guy. All I mentioned was a pair of feet and a noise that might have been a rope creaking. I added Bob's reactions as a hint of how you should respond, and you filled in the rest yourself. I admit the whole scenario's pretty hokey, but it's still has a higher creep-factor than something like this:

Bob walked into the stairwell and saw a dead guy with a noose around his neck hanging from the railings. The dead guy's neck was broken and his eyes were bugging out and he was totally disgusting.

The difference between the first scene and the second is the use of darkness and light. Authors, especially new authors, often don't realize that they can use light and shadow the same way film and TV directors do. For instance, a candle set on a high surface looks inspirational, but one set on the floor makes everything look evil. I think this has something to do with our cultural ideas about "light from above" and "the fire below." Try it.

A dark room doesn't have to be just "dark." You can make it dark like an underground tunnel, where it makes no difference if your eyes are open or shut. Or you can make it shadowy, which implies a faint light source. Never create a "shadowy" location without knowing what the light source is! The same scene will provide different information (and create different moods) depending on whether it is lit by the moon, the flashers of a disabled car, or a guttering candle.

At one point during my misspent youth I actually shut myself in a closet with a notebook and various types of light sources. If you have a story that contains a lot of undifferentiated "dark," you might want to try something similar -- but don't actually play with candles in a closet. It's a bad idea.

When describing your ghost, you can preserve his mystery (and allow your readers to use their imaginations) by keeping back information in other ways. Because sight and hearing are the senses people feel most comfortable with, consider making your ghost invisible or silent. What if the ghost signaled its presence by a smell, say the faint odor of singed hair? Even ordinary but out-of-place sensations can signal the presence of something uncanny -- crickets chirping on a January night, the faintest of sighs from the corner of a room in which a character knows he is alone. Nor are you confined to making your ghost appear in the dark. Broad daylight can be sinister in a ruined house where the roof has fallen in.

One trick to creating a faint sense of chill in your reader is to combine things that should not go together. There should not be a garland of white roses spinning slowly at the bottom of an abandoned well. If you scream inside a locked closet you should not produce an echo. Combining things that should not go together mirrors the most terrifying juxtaposition of opposites, the meeting of the living and the dead. For the record, this technique is the hallmark of Gothic literature. The original Gothic novels were written around the beginning of the 19th century, but variations on the Gothic style still exist today. (Where did I put that "Interview With The Vampire" video . . .?)

Continued in "Writing a Ghost Story II: Who Is That Dead Guy And What Does He Want?"