Remembering Ebony Simpson
“Here she is. A little girl spun from gold, from her hair to her heart-shaped face to her skin and smiling eyes. She grins, happy and beloved, a precious girl, forever nine. This is where she belongs, in a unique space forged from pain and tears and a mother’s ferocious love.
Here she is, Ebony Simpson, although you can’t see her.”
These are the opening lines of a story that features in my second book, Where Spirits Dwell (2011). It is one of the last stories I wrote for that book, because whenever I’d sit down to write it, my heart would shatter.
Almost a year earlier, I’d gone with my husband to visit Christine Simpson at her home in Captain’s Flat, near Canberra. We spent an unforgettable day with Christine and her partner, the artist Günther Deix, basking in the warmth of their fireplace and arms-open hospitality. I was so grateful Christine had agreed to my request for an interview. Though how much better it would have been if I’d never heard of her at all.
The art-covered walls of the Outsider Cafe.
On August 19, 1992, Christine’s daughter, Ebony, 9, was raped and murdered on her way home from school. The appalling crime and the smiling, innocent face of the little girl taken, lodged in the national consciousness.
A box of mementos to remember Ebony Simpson in the Outsider Cafe.
Researching a book about places where spirits dwell, I came across an article about where Christine had moved in an attempt to rebuild her life. Somehow, mainly with her bare hands, she’d created a welcoming home/art gallery/cafe of breathtaking colour and beauty. I marvelled at her courage and ingenuity. And while Christine’s story was by no means a ghost story, it was a story about being haunted by love in a space she specifically created for that purpose, and that intrigued me.
Christine Simpson at her home and cafe/gallery, The Outsider Cafe.
I didn’t know that day that meeting Christine would change my life forever.
I think of her often, especially every August 19, when the chill winter wind calls to mind a mother’s pain that will never thaw. Today marks 25 years since Ebony Simpson died. In honour of Ebony, who rests beneath a rainbow of daisies, my mother had a lovely idea—plant some daisies today, to herald the coming spring and remember an angel whose spirit dwells in a toasty little cafe in Captain’s Flat. To that sweet plan, I add my own offering: a story.
EBONY IS HOME is the story I wrote about Christine and Ebony and a love that never dies, in Where Spirits Dwell. For a golden-haired girl, forever 9.
A weekend in Melbourne
Hello again, and welcome to my revamped website! For this wonderful transformation, I must thank the lovely and multi-talented Allison Langton, from Big Print Little. Allison did an amazing job of somehow intuiting exactly what I wanted for my website, and making it come true. I can’t thank her enough.
Speaking of Allison, though she’s based in Melbourne, I had the good fortune of meeting her at one of three library talks I gave there this past weekend. Allison dropped by Mill Park, but I also spoke about Spirit Sisters and Where Spirits Dwell at Eltham and Watsonia libraries (both attended by my supportive friend and fellow author, Wendy Dunn). Thanks to my kind friend Suzanne, Queen of Non-Procrastination and marketing and media coordinator at Yarra Plenty Regional Library, for organising this, for driving me around and for the endless laughs … it was so much fun!
Thanks to Lyn, the lovely librarian at Watsonia for promoting my appearance, and for the beautiful gifts!
Here I am alongside a bronze statue of I Can Jump Puddles author Alan Marshall, at Eltham Library.
It had been a while since I’d gotten out “in the field,” so to speak, to discuss my work and meet readers. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy this. One of my favourite aspects of this is how me talking about my interviewees’ experiences often opens up the floor for people in the audience to reveal their own stories. I love sitting back, listening, as others unspool a personal story that, up until then, they have usually kept close to their hearts. It’s a privilege to know they feel comfortable enough in that forum to share it with us.
On the topic of sharing stories, it’s time for me to go, as it’s Halloween eve and I have to prepare to tell a yarn of my own tomorrow night, at a live storytelling event at Cronulla’s The Brass Monkey. Despite the date, there is no spooky theme to the evening, but when I noticed that it was Oct. 31, it seemed I was fated to take the stage (gulp). Wish me luck!
On the publicity trail
It’s been a week since Where Spirits Dwell landed in bookstores, and I’ve spent a productive few days doing radio and print interviews. As well as that, I’ve had the good fortune to have had extracts featured in several publications, and online. Here’s a little round-up of Where Spirits Dwell in the media:
Megan McAuliffe’s story of decades enduring paranormal activity, before eventually coming to terms with her abilities, is in marie claire‘s September issue. Nell Jones’s spooky account of being haunted by the past in her historic home, a former general store, in Newcastle, NSW, was in last week’s issue of Who (with Kim Kardashian’s wedding on the cover) and the segment about Tudor travelling with my sister, Natalie, is featured on her excellent website, On the Tudor Trail. Thanks to all of those publications for their support.
I’ve also become something of a regular at the ABC Radio’s Tardis Booth at their Ultimo HQ in Sydney, doing interviews with presenters from Western Australia to Launceston. Click here to listen to my interview with Caroline Davey from ABC Radio Australia… So far, so good, especially when I see my book in shops. Was at Big W today, en famile, when we spotted WSD in the mind/body/spirit section. It’s always a thrill (and a tad surreal) to spot that familiar cover on the shelves.
Something for Halloween.
Halloween night. It’s a tad chilly in Sydney (which I don’t mind) so I’m tucked up under the blankets thinking that this is as good a time as any to update my blog, after a bit of a self-imposed break from my work. (Apologies to anyone who’s contacted me via this page, it was lovely to read your messages and I’ll be getting back to each of you shortly.)
I’ve been thinking all day about which extract to post, but have decided not to go with one of the scariest stories in Where Spirits Dwell, rather I’ve chosen one that encompasses—and celebrates—the idea that a lot of the stories my interviewees have shared are neat little mysteries (which may never be solved.)
So if you’re not all “Halloweened out,” sit back and enjoy this extract from Where Spirits Dwell. It’s called “Dropping in.” Oh, and while it’s not the scariest story in the book, I don’t want you to get the idea it isn’t the least bit spooky. I wouldn’t want you to get that idea at all …
DROPPING IN
“There was an old man in my room this morning”
“I wouldn’t say it was a haunting, it was just an experience.” So Daniel Lightman prefaces his ghost story. He was only 14 when it happened, but the “experience” hangs in a corridor of his mind like a life-size portrait, its edges and contours frozen in time. For 13 years, Daniel thought he knew everything there was to know about that distant moment, but today, he’s prepared to examine it with fresh eyes, to face anew the man in the frame.
In the late 1990s, Daniel and his father were living in a relatively modern ground floor apartment in a Northern Sydney suburb. “It was very dark, it never really caught much natural sunlight, it just had a dark sort of feel about it,” recalls Daniel, adding that it was common to walk into a room and have the sense that something or someone in there was scurrying away into the shadows. That is the only unusual thing Daniel recalls about his former home. Certainly, there was nothing to prepare him for what took place one weekday morning at about 6:30 am.
It was a school morning and Daniel was savouring the last hour of sleep before the alarm sounded. To his surprise, he was suddenly awake, as alert as if he’d splashed his face with icy water, and he was no longer alone. Says Daniel: “He was standing at the entrance of my room.”
His bed faced the doorway. The visitor, who seemed to be in his sixties, stood barely three metres away. “He had a hat on, a small-brimmed hat, and he was reading something, I don’t know what it was exactly, it could have been a newspaper,” says the 28-year-old sales executive. “I was freaking out, it just made all the hairs on my arms stand up on end, and I was looking, rubbing my eyes, thinking, ‘What the hell is this?’ and he was there for, I don’t know, maybe a couple of seconds?”
The man wore “an older-style suit in a dark khaki colour,” he says. “And I just remember his little hat. It wasn’t rigid like the hats businessmen wore in the 1960s, it was more an old man style of hat; crease in the middle, with a really small brim.” These details were branded onto Daniel’s memory through some process that had nothing to do with him—uppermost in his mind was the sheer shock. Ghost? The word never entered his mind. The man looked utterly lifelike. “I thought there was someone standing in my room, I almost jolted back in my bed.”
Daniel didn’t scream for his father, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid. He heard someone gasping, trying to retract and melt into the wall, snatching even the breath back, back in and away from the man—and realised he was responsible for the raggedy sound. As he stared, trying to process the incongruous scene, the man registered the boy’s presence. “He stopped reading and then looked up and smiled.”
“That was it,” says Daniel quietly. “It was almost like he was there one moment, then gone the next. It wasn’t a fade away.” For the next few minutes, Daniel didn’t move. “I was trying to get my marbles together, I didn’t know what was going on. I definitely didn’t spring out of bed, I was just sitting there thinking, ‘What just happened?’ ”
Later that day, he told his father. “I said, ‘There was an old man in my room this morning. It freaked me out.’ He was pretty open to that sort of thing. He wasn’t horrified and he wasn’t disbelieving in any way.” Daniel’s dad suggested that the visitor was the ghost of their recently deceased neighbour, Mr Mumford—“Mrs Mumford used to always say he was still around and would visit her”—coming to say hello. Though this explanation has suited him just fine for over a decade, today Daniel concedes that he and Mr. Mumford were not really that close, in fact, he’d never exchanged words with the older couple, and that there were physical discrepancies too. “Now that I think about it, I don’t know that it was him, what I remember seeing versus what I remember him to be. It could have been somebody else.”
Who?
Daniel casts his mind back to what his life was like then, back in year nine of high school. “I had been through a pretty strange patch actually,” he offers, after a pause. “I was kind of misbehaving a bit. I didn’t do anything really naughty, but I was getting into a bit of trouble at school and just being a bit of a rat, I guess. I wasn’t a criminal, but I wasn’t the best boy, so to speak.”
The eloquent young man keeps to himself the details of his mother’s absence from the home, and I don’t pry, but I wonder about the role of grandparents … grandfathers, in particular. “Now that we’re talking about it, what I described does sound similar to my grandfather on my dad’s side, Pop, who I was pretty close to when I was younger, between the ages of three and five,” he says, sounding intrigued. “We used to spend quite a bit of time together.”
Though he’s since passed away, Pop was definitely alive when the ghost appeared, but had been estranged from his son and grandson: “He’d had a bit of a falling out with my dad and they hadn’t spoken in years.” When Daniel mentions this, something else occurs to me. “Have you heard of apparitions of the living?” I ask him. Paranormal literature is bursting with stories of people who’ve seen and interacted with apparitions of people who are living, but often geographically distant. Sometimes, the apparition is of a person on their deathbed who comes to say farewell, but in other cases, the phantom is of a person who is alive and well and unwittingly projects his or her image to a loved one, usually because they’ve been thinking of that person. The process is essentially telepathic and involuntary, according to the late paranormal researcher Hans Holzer.
It’s possible that Pop had heard about his grandson’s minor trouble at school and that one day, sitting in his favourite chair at home, the newspaper on his lap, he dozed off as his thoughts drifted to the boy he hadn’t seen in years. That is potentially all it took—a grandfather missing his grandson. It’s also likely that both the patriarch and the boy had more psychic ability than average folks.
The puzzle of his identity aside, Ben is certain the man meant him no harm. When he looked up and smiled, “it came across as a peaceful gesture, not threatening or uncomfortable,” he reflects. “He was wanting to let me know that he was okay.” And perhaps, that he would be, too.
From Where Spirits Dwell, by Karina Machado.
Meet the Authors Night
Meet the Authors Night – Thurs., Nov. 10
Come and meet me—and some other fabulous authors: Nikki Gemmell (With My Body, The Bride Stripped Bare), Packed to the Rafters actress Merridy Eastman (There’s a Bear in There, How Now Brown Frau) and blogger Kerri Sackville (When My Husband Does the Dishes …)—in a fundraiser for Vaucluse Public School’s Stephanie Alexander program. The plan is for a fun night out with refreshments, lucky door prizes and I’ll be signing books, so feel free to rope in friends, workmates and family. Tickets $10 prepaid, $15 at the door. For more info click here or contact Deb Grunfeld: 9371 5276 or [email protected]
Where Spirits Dwell … a sneak peek.
Only ten days left until Where Spirits Dwell is in the bookshops! To celebrate, here’s the first of a series of sneak peeks I’m going to be posting over the coming week. This excerpt is from a story about an exquisite period home in Melbourne, where a gentle ghostly resident felt herself to be very much a part of the family. Hope you enjoy it.
BABYSITTER
The sky had poured its wet fury over the city all day, but inside Elizabeth Clifford’s home, it was as serene and dark as a cathedral at midnight. Her living room was a den of shadow and torchlight since a blackout snuffed out the neighbourhood lights and hushed its televisions, but it was so soothing to sit there, cut off from the world and its constant chatter and glare, that Liz almost wished it would happen more often.
When lights glowed again in their neighbours’ windows, Liz and her husband, David, looked at each other, a bit disappointed that their retreat was coming to an end. They waited, but the room stayed in darkness. Frowning, David went into the hallway to call the electricity company, but Liz just sighed and got comfortable. Curled up on the couch, she sipped wine and gazed out the window, where embers of the day still brightened a corner of the sky.
“What’s wrong with the kids?” asked David, stepping back into the living room. He’d been on the phone for about thirty minutes.
Liz stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“You were in there talking to them.”
“No,” said Liz, with the sense of an insect beginning to crawl slowly up her spine. “I’ve been sitting on the couch the whole time. What did you hear?”
“I heard a woman,” said David, his mouth
A storm over Melbourne. Source Alex Coppel, Herald Sun
opening just enough to let the words out. “I heard a woman saying, ‘It’s okay, everything is going to be okay, relax, turn over and go to sleep.’ All the things a mother would say.”
For three years, Liz had suspected that her family was sharing their home with somebody else, somebody who adored the house as much as they did. Now she knew it.
—Edited extract from Where Spirits Dwell, by Karina Machado. Available August 30.
Where Spirits Dwell, coming soon!
Where Spirits Dwell, Australian cover
Hello, am so excited to announce that my second book, Where Spirits Dwell, is on its way to the printer. Writing it has a been a trying and thrilling experience, in equal measure, but I hope the end result will make it all worthwhile.
Here is the link to more information on my publisher’s website:
http://www.hachette.com.au/books/9780733624988/
Am looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
“A lot of the scares were taken from real life”
In that dreamy post-delivery-of-manuscript phase (yes, Where Spirits Dwell is with my eternally patient publisher, on its way to a September release!) I found time to enjoy an interview, from The Los Angeles Times, with Australian film-maker James Wan and actor-screenwriter, Leigh Whannell. The pair, whose debut feature Saw was a massive hit seven years ago (not that I’ve seen it, I’m way too much of a wimp), are back with a haunted house film, Insidious, starring Rose Byrne. Now this one I am keen to see (though feeling no less wimpy about it) when it opens here on May 12.
Whannell reveals that one key scene featuring Rose Byrne seeing “an unwanted guest” in her bedroom was taken from a real-life story a friend told him. Another scene is inspired by an experience Wan’s grandmother had. “We think those kind of “real life stories” are so much more scary than anything we could cook up,” said Whannell. “And so we took that as the inspiration and that became our springboard into other scenarios.”
I so agree with them: true stories are infinitely scarier. Actually, I think my exact words (in my head) were: “Boys, have I got some stories for you.” It’s timely that I stumbled upon this interview as I’ve been preoccupied with thoughts of how extraordinary my Where Spirits Dwell interviewees’ experiences are, and how a few of them—one in particular, I wonder if you’ll agree with me—would make amazing movies, in the hands of the right film-makers.
As Whannell and Wan hint, truth is stranger than fiction. I know that much is true. You can read the full interview here: http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2011/03/30/insidious-filmmakers-on-their-haunted-house-update-a-lot-of-the-scares-were-taken-from-real-life/
It’s been a while …
Ravello, Italy, the setting for a story in WHERE SPIRITS DWELL
But I have a good excuse for neglecting my blog, I think … I’ve been finishing the sequel to Spirit Sisters and yes, I confess, there have been a few less than productive moments in there too, though I like to think it all contributes to the general melting pot of, um, creativity … Googling the music on the Corona TV ads (“A Journey,” by Taylor Steele and “Run River” by Jon Swift); fantasising about million dollar haciendas on the Uruguayan coast; watching Modern Family and The Biggest Loser and reading non-paranormal literature. I loved loved loved Mr Rosenblum’s List, by Natasha Solomon and Dark Matter by Michelle Paver—actually, that is paranormal, but fiction, which is still an indulgence in these last stages of writing.
Aside from that, I waded through seventy thousand freecycle messages and procrastinated about putting my own clutter up for collection (I’ll get there). And then there were the endless stream of offers from “deal of the day” websites, few of which I can resist. My latest acquisition is a brilliant bed-sanitising deal. Who knew that there existed people with special UV-machines who’ll come and zap our beds clean? All they had to do was bang on a bit about bed bugs and their revolting emissions and I was sold.
Somehow, despite all of the above, Where Spirits Dwell is now in the very final stages of submission to my publishers. I’ve been haunted by stories set in my hometown of Sydney to far flung places, like Normanton in Far North Queensland, to Ravello, on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, where a scandalous literary personage made a surprise post-mortem appearance in an interviewee’s tale. To know more, you’ll have to wait for Where Spirits Dwell, out in Australia in September. I hope you’ll love it.
Of distractions and deadlines
I’ve been distracted. Last post was Halloween and here we are, on the last day of November … it floors me how fast this year has zipped by. Christmas is around the corner and the deadline for Where Spirits Dwell is looming in a couple of months. That may mean fewer posts for a while.
I’m very happy to say that my lovely friend, author Wendy J. Dunn, has organised a writers retreat in January, and I can’t wait to carve out the time and head space I need to complete this task. Wish me luck!
