The Black Beacon Book of Ghosts will send shivers up your spine this Halloween. The Kindle version is already available for pre-order at just $1.99 instead of $3.99 and you can add the anthology to your Goodreads "want to read" list today. The anthology will be officially released on the 11th of October 2024. To get you in the mood and give you a little insight into the workings of their minds, our contributing authors are sharing their own haunting experiences with you. Read on, if you're not fainthearted!
I was living in Lakewood, Colorado when I had my first encounter with the paranormal. Not a ghost, per se, but ghost adjacent, I suppose.
I had just turned thirty when I encountered one of the “shadow people” (albeit, referring to them as “people” seems a bit of a stretch). They are better characterized as “specters” — dark, shadow-ridden creatures, grotesquely deformed with only vaguely human characteristics.
The years have done little to scour the memory away. The overwhelming and paralyzing fear still seems uncomfortably close-at-hand — even now, some twenty-five years later. This particular “visitation” occurred on a frigid and stormy February night, when the sleet-coated aspens pawed and scratched ceaselessly at my bedroom window.
I recall being stirred from a restless sleep by an odd sort of static discharge — some kind of peculiar crackling sound. Half asleep, my mind registered it vaguely, but what woke me completely was the odd odor that accompanied it. The scent is difficult to describe. The room stank of burnt ozone, and something not unlike rusted metal, left to scorch and radiate in the summer sun. It’s had a strange, almost palpable pall to it, like the air itself was corroding. Not wanting to disturb my wife, I peeled open one eye to survey the room. There, hovering at the foot of our bed was a specter — a shadow person — an entity I would later refer to in Scenes From The Carnival Lounge as "The Sceadu.”
The apparition was at least eight feet tall and impossibly thin, possessing a vaguely humanoid shape, but completely bereft of any discernible features — that is, beyond two amorphous and ever-shifting reddish-purple orbs where its eyes should have been. These peered malevolently from beneath the brim of an oddly-shaped hat (like a belled top hat, but oddly disproportionate). The apparition was blacker than black — a shadow of darkness so deep and that the light around it seemed to bend and dim. A sickly purple glow outlined it against the darkness of our bedroom. I watched, utterly paralyzed, as a sickly elongated limb protracted out from its body — a dreadful and stilted sort of gesture, reminiscent of the stutter of a film spool gone off track.
A misty skeletal hand reached out for me… and I found out then that even a hardened horror writer can know terror.
www.amazon.com/author/michaelpicco
https://denverhorror.com/michael-picco/
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