When I was younger, my mother would drop me off at the local library so I could do some last-minute research for my history fair projects. I loved spending hours searching through the special collections and the old-school card catalogue at the university’s reference center.
It was during that time period that I became a voracious reader. I consumed at least three books a week and fell in love with the words of many of the authors featured in Ghost Writers. My first obsession was Edgar Allan Poe. I remember memorizing “The Raven” and then reading most of his famous works like “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of the Amontillado.” In addition to loving Poe, I was a Stephen King fanatic and I strongly believe that The Shining led me into the paranormal field. King’s words continue to haunt me.
If you asked me about my favorite books back then, I probably would’ve rattled off the classics like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. As my tastes matured, I became enamored with many of the female authors featured in this book, including Sylvia Plath, Shirley Jackson, and Edith Wharton. I read Wharton’s The Age of Innocence over and over. I was genuinely smitten with the Countess Ellen Olenska and wanted to walk the streets that she and Newland Archer visited. After several decades, my fascination with her books slowly faded.
However, when I recently visited Wharton’s The Mount in the Berkshires, my passion for her writing rekindled. There’s something awe-inspiring about visiting the locations where some of my favorite authors actually penned the words I devoured in high school and college. Doing the research for this book was a dream come true.
My chance to walk in the footsteps of the authors featured in Ghost Writers was a true gift. I’m grateful for all of the people I met along the way, including John Zaffis, Tabitha King, J.W. Ocker, Christopher Rondina, Susan Wilson, Robert Oakes, Gare Allen, Richard Estep, Peter Muise, Jack Kenna, Thomas D’Agostino, and Joseph Citro. Special thanks to Joni Mayhan for penning the book’s foreword and directing me to Shaman Michael Robishaw when I needed help.
Photographers Jason Baker and Frank C. Grace deserve a supernatural slap on the back for capturing the eerie aesthetic of the main haunts featured in this book. I would also like to thank Amy Lyons from Globe Pequot for her support during the process of putting Ghost Writers together.
Thanks to my mother, Deborah Hughes Dutcher, for being there when I need her most and my family and friends—including Andrew Warburton who traveled with me to many of the haunted locations featured in the book—for their continued support. My high-school journalism teacher, Beverly Reinschmidt, also deserves kudos for inspiring me to keep writing.
Ghost Writers is dedicated to my stepfather, Paul Dutcher. His adventurous spirit lives on.
Each chapter of Ghost Writers begins with a quote from a featured author. If I had to choose my favorite line pulled from the pages of the book that terrified me the most, it would be King’s The Shining. “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too,” King wrote. “They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”