#guestpost ~ Old Bones and New Ghosts by Kay Charles @dollycas #blogtour

Old Bones and New Ghosts
(The Marti Mickkleson Mysteries)
by Kay Charles

About Old Bones New Ghosts

Old Bones and New Ghosts (The Marti Mickkleson Mysteries)
Cozy Mystery
2nd in Series
One Ghost Another Ghost (January 25, 2024)
Print length ‏ : ‎ 252 pages
Digital ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CPCF4S3Z

Marti Mickkleson and her ghostly Grandma Bertie are back!

With only one month to go until Marti meets the conditions of her late father’s will and gains control of her trust fund, she’s determined to be on her best behavior. No admitting that she can see ghosts and certainly no talking to the dead.

But her mother’s roped her into a new family project, her new office has a mysterious haunt, Grandma Bertie’s digging up mysteries from the past, her friend Dmitri’s barely speaking to her, and her sister’s life is falling apart. It’s enough to make a girl miss her days of flipping sort-of-beef patties on a Burger Buster grill.

Then things get really bad.

With both a cold case and a new murder on her hands, her “best behavior” won’t cut it. Protecting her family may cost her more than a trust fund. It may cost Marti her life—or the life of someone she loves.

Join Marti and Grandma Bertie in the follow-up to Ghosts in Glass Houses!

About Kay Charles

Kay Charles is the much nicer, mystery-writing alter ego of dark fiction writer Patricia Lillie (author of The Cuckoo Girls, a 2020 Bram Stoker Award® finalist.) Like her evil twin, Kay grew up in a haunted house in a small town in Northeast Ohio, earned her MFA from Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction program, teaches in Southern New Hampshire University’s MFA in Creative Writing program, and is addicted to coffee, chocolate, and cake. She also knits and sometimes purls. Both their lives would be much easier if one of them enjoyed housework.

Author Links

Webpage: https://kaycharles.com/ (includes blog)

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17086036.Kay_Charles

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KayCharlesMysteries/

Purchase Links
Amazon Amazon Series Page

Guest Post

Why Ghosts? Funny You Should Ask

I grew up in a haunted house. To make it even better, it was located at the corner of Erie and Elm Streets! Of course, this was well before Elm Street earned its horrifying reputation, and “Erie” is missing an “e,” but still—what better location for a haunted house?

The thing is, our house was never scary. Neither were our ghosts. At least not to us. They were simply part of the family. Unlike Marti Mickkleson, none of us could communicate with our ghosts. My parents neither confirmed nor denied their belief in our household spirits. However, it wasn’t unusual to walk into the kitchen, find the cupboard doors all standing open and my mother with her hands on her hips semi-shouting, “Would you stop that? I don’t have time for this nonsense.”

My siblings and I took that for confirmation.

Other than annoying my mom, the general feeling was our haunts were protective. The one in my bedroom watched out for me at night.

As the oldest child, I had the best bedroom. Long and narrow, with ceilings that slanted with the house roof and dormer windows, I loved it. The room was narrow enough that I had to put my bed against the north or south walls to be able to get from one end to the other. In the middle of the west wall, I had a huge closet with double doors that opened outwards.

Every night, before I went to bed, I closed those doors. Every morning, one door stood open about six inches, as if someone inside had cracked it to watch me sleep. It didn’t matter which end of the room I put the bed on, every morning the door was open and the opening faced the bed.

Now, as a kid and teenager, I was afraid of everything. The dark. Basements. The ankle grabbers under the bed. Red Riding Hood’s wolf. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Liver and onions. (Okay. That one’s justifiable.) You name it and it terrified me. In truth, it probably still does.

The ghost in my closet? No fear at all. I knew their job was to keep me safe from all the other scary things. How did I know this? I have no idea. I just knew. The same went for the ghost in my sister’s room, the “Pink Room.” When we first moved into the house, she and I shared the Pink Room, and the man in the bowler hat made his first appearance. (He was the only ghost we ever actually saw, and even he was hazy.) When I asked my mother who he was, she told me I was dreaming. Because that’s what moms do.

After I’d moved into my own room, when my sister talked about him, Mom thought I’d been telling her stories. I hadn’t. He didn’t scare my sister either. He was just another resident of the house at the corner of Erie and Elm.

As for the ghost in my closet, you had to give them props. As a teen, I cleaned my room by opening the closet doors and tossing anything I didn’t know what to do with inside. The piles were mighty high.  Even a spirit gets points for staying around under those circumstances.

We never knew who our ghosts were. My mother grew up in the house across the road. (Never got an answer out of her as to whether or not that house was haunted.) My parents bought the house from the family who owned it when she was growing up. By the time we moved into it, the house was “in town,” but a hundred and fifty or so years before, when it was built, it was a big farmhouse. There was plenty of time for it to acquire a haunt or two. When I was a teen, I tried to do some research, but in those pre-internet and pre-digitized records days, I didn’t get very far.

It didn’t matter. Whoever they were, our ghosts were family.

Long after my parents sold the house, my sister met the people who lived there at the time. They hemmed and hawed a bit, then said they needed to ask her something. They described some of the same odd events we’d experienced. My sister said, “That’s the ghosts! Don’t worry, they’re cool.” I don’t know if they believed her, but we were relieved our friends were still around.

I’m a little (okay, more than a little) jealous of Marti Mickkleson’s ability to see and talk to her ghosts, to find out who they were (and still are), and to learn their stories. Even the annoying ones. Even the ones who ask her for favors. Well, maybe not the last.

But is it any wonder I’m still fascinated with ghosts and ghost stories of all sorts?

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