Many of you know by now that Leanna Renee Hieber is my favorite author for spooky, specter-filled Victorian romances. But did you know that her interest in spirits isn’t limited to her fiction? As we gear up for the launch of A Summoning of Souls, the third book in her Spectral City series out next week, Leanna shares some thoughts on the roles that ghosts and ghost stories play in both her life and her writing. Keep an eye out for A Summoning of Souls in stores starting July 21, and feel free to share your own experiences with ghost stories in the comments!
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Ghosts and paranormal, psychic phenomena are in everything I do. Every single book of mine, whether historical or futuristic, has elements of body, mind and spirit that are incorporeal and 6th sensory. Each of my series was born from posing a question to myself about genre, trope, my favorite themes and what I’d like to play with this time around. The answer, in the Spectral City trilogy, was that I wanted to reframe the idea of a traditional ghost story. I wanted a slew of haunts, all haunting for different reasons, and the best way to do that was to tie in Spiritualism, séances and all the fascinating obsessions with pseudo-sciences the late 19th century got up to. Utilizing the interests of the day, my paranormal, Gothic, Gaslamp Fantasy storyline also has strong historical resonance and precedence.
I tell ghost stories for a living. As one of the senior guides for Boroughs of the Dead, NYC’s top-rated tour company focusing on ghosts and the macabre, I have spent a ton of time as a licensed tour guide determining the best ways to frame the spectral accounts of the city I love. Our company avoids aggrandizing or embellishing spectral accounts with lurid details or sensationalism. We present inexplicable happenings that are set against the history of the city; difficult, complicated, inspiring, unjust, complex and conflicted all at once.
For Boroughs of the Dead, much like in my novels, telling ghost stories is about respect. For the most part, a lot of hauntings have to do with recognition; being noticed, known and some sort of intense emotional or physical event acknowledged by the living in a space where impactful history happened. We tell the context of the site then relay the otherworldly details that have been told for decades if not centuries and continue to appear in city accounts through time. We present, you decide. But we want to be human about the paranormal. These were, after all, people. That fact never changed.
Do I believe in ghosts? Absolutely. I have had too many inexplicable things happen to me to say otherwise. I believe in a great deal of the things I write about, though I’m not here to lecture or tell anyone what to believe. To each their own. What keeps me coming back to phantasmagorical pages is the unsolved questions, the divine mystery of it all.
However, on a more visceral note, humans have a complex relationship to things that frighten us. As is directly noted in my series, “spirits are creatures of startle and shock”. Unnerving and surprising, it is the suddenness, the chill, the eeriness, the shudder, the hairs raised, the quality of breathlessness that ghostly presences produce in us that creates a primal thrill. Even friendly ghosts can still frighten. It’s the unpredictability of them that remains a delight to write about. I’ve guided thousands of tours and paranormal discussions and this theme stands out in every one: we are drawn to ghost stories because they’re the closest paranormal creature to us. We all have some kind of story, or at least know someone who has one, a ghost story is an unprovable myth and legend everyone has access to.
It is this closeness that made me think about how ghosts can be family and friends, stand-ins for guardian angels in the right circumstances, provided they’re watching out for those they’ve chosen as wards. If posited in a positive light, provided the spirit of the haunt remains in good faith, reframing the unknown and foreign not as suspect but as resource has been a rewarding exploration. I have elements of horror in all my novels but I’m not a horror novelist. I’d rather linger and haunt in hopeful tones.
Each ghost I write has a distinct mind of their own with definitive backstory. Like the backbone of New York City, many are immigrants, most are working class, upstanding citizens cut down by various industrial hazards or societal injustices that their souls may linger on to try to change or avert. For example, the spirit of little Zofia (a crowd-favorite) is a victim of child labor who died in a garment-district fire. Zofia keeps an eye out for other vulnerable people in dangerous circumstances. Other spirits remain simply out of love for the city and those living in it; their ghostly aims giving their echo of life a strange second chance.
In each case, the haunts of Spectral City have momentum, purpose and passion. As always, I’m interested in expanding what the idea of a welcoming community can be, on either side of the veil.
As Eve Whitby says, may you think of these ghosts “as a help, not a horror.”
But you may want to look behind you, just so you’re not surprised. Unless you enjoy a good shock. That’s fine too. Happy Haunting!
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Leanna’s newest ghost-filled novel, A Summoning of Souls, comes out on July 21. Check back next week for my review! If you pre-order the book now from WORD Bookstores, you can get a signed copy, all sorts of goodies, and a chance to win a custom handmade piece from Leanna’s Etsy shop, Torch & Arrow.
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Leanna Renee Hieber is an actress, playwright and the author of thirteen Gothic, Gaslamp Fantasy novels for adults and teens for Tor, Sourcebooks and Kensington Books such as the Strangely Beautiful saga, the Magic Most Foul trilogy, the Eterna Files trilogy and The Spectral City series. The Strangely Beautiful series hit Barnes & Noble and Borders Bestseller lists and garnered numerous regional genre awards, with revised editions now available from Tor. The Spectral City, Leanna’s new ghost-filled series set in 1899 NYC with Kensington Books, has been a bestseller across several genres and platforms. A four-time Prism Award winner and Daphne du Maurier Award finalist, her short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and her books have been translated into many languages. She tours the country with By the Light of Tiffany: A Meeting with Clara Driscoll, a one-woman theatrical presentation about the 19th-century designer of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s lamps. A proud member of performer unions Actors Equity and SAG-AFTRA, she lives in New York City where she is a licensed ghost tour guide for Boroughs of the Dead and has been featured in film and television on shows like Boardwalk Empire and Mysteries at the Museum. More at www.leannareneehieber.com. You can also find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.