As I have written in other blog posts, I am fortunate in that I have access to a great deal of my family history, thanks mostly to my father, the family genealogist. I am lucky that relatives collected stories, wrote them down, and then passed them down. And because of long life spans and long generations, I can reach back to the 1860s via only a few people on multiple lines in my family tree.
This brings me to a show I enjoy, Finding Your Roots on PBS. In the show, various celebrity guests sit down with the host to learn about their genealogy and family history.
If I sat down in front of the host of the show, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., he’d have to dig deep into my family tree to surprise me. After telling some crazy family story, Gates always asks his guests, “Have you ever heard that story?” In most of the episodes of the show, the answer is “no.” Stories from family history get lost and forgotten all the time. People fail to pass them down.
This brings me to my story entitled “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse.”
The main character in “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” is a homicide detective named Tina Jones, who didn’t know her father’s family history because her father never discussed it. Tina never heard anything about the small Texas town where her great-grandparents lived. Until a series of events drew her father back to that town, Tina didn’t know that her great-grandparents’ house was considered to be cursed by a ghost because so many family members died suddenly over the decades. Like most of the people interviewed by Henry Louis Gates on PBS, Tina is surprised by the stories that no one bothered to tell her.
“The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” is set in a fictional Hill Country Texas town somewhere near Enchanted Rock State Natural Area. The Hill Country in central Texas is a beautiful, but sometimes forbidding area of the state. At Enchanted Rock Natural Area, an uprising of igneous rock from the earth’s crust forms a pink granite batholith that has been smoothed into domes, weathered by the elements over time. Like my character Tina Jones, I’ve enjoyed many hikes at Enchanted Rock over the years. It’s a beautiful and popular park for hiking and camping, especially in the spring and fall when the temperature isn’t dangerously hot.
“The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” is coming out in 2024 in an anthology from Inkd Publishing edited by A. Balsamo called Detectives, Sleuths, and Nosy Neighbors.