What is it about old houses that leads to the assumption they are haunted? Here’s an old adobe that was built in 1875. Is it haunted? I’ve been told that there are strange sounds inside. I’ve never heard them. Why would such a house be haunted? Because it’s old? Because someone died there a long time ago? One story that I have heard is that the man who built it died of pneumonia after he washed his hair in mid-winter. Would that be sufficient to make him a lost soul? Hmmm, people die in hospitals fairly frequently – does that suggest that hospitals should be haunted – maybe! How about the ones that die on the operating table – eh? Do they become lost souls?

As long as we are talking about why haunts might occur, I’d like to ask why so many haunts are women? Seems like, at least in our area, most of the haunts are women that have been wronged in some way – or brutally murdered. Don’t men get wronged – or murdered. I guess female ghosts just make for a better story. Like the story of La Llorona, the crying woman, that haunts the Rio Grande searching for her drowned child. I don’t know of any El Llorono – I guess men don’t go in search of their lost child.

What a fertile area to write about. No wonder there are so many books devoted to ghosts and rumors of ghosts. And there are just so many old, old houses and buildings in my area. I need to develop a protagonist that solves mysterious deaths in old buildings. Someone to discover the real reason for the strange sounds in the old courthouse, for instance.