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| | | An Interivew with Annie Wilder, Author of Spirits Out of Time |
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Annie Wilder is the author of House of Spirits and Whispers and Spirits Out of Time (Llewellyn Publications). Raised in a family with Irish-German roots and strong intuitive abilities, the unseen world of angels, spirits, and lost souls has always been a familiar part of Annie Wilder's everyday life. A writer and mother of grown children, she lives in a spirit-filled Victorian house nestled in a sleepy Mississippi River town in Minnesota. Her haunted house has been featured in several television and print news stories, investigated by teams of ghost hunters, and visited by a number of prominent psychics including Linda Drake and Echo Bodine.
Annie, your book SPIRITS OUT OF TIME is a fascinating and chilling look at your family's own experiences with the ghostly realm. Would you give our readers a short synopsis of the book?
Thank you for inviting me to share some of my ghost stories with your readers. My book is a collection of true ghost stories, transcendent mystical experiences, and just plain weird stuff that has happened to my family and me. It features family lore and remembrances that go all the way back to the nineteenth century and my Irish and German great-great grandparents’ lives as immigrants and homesteaders in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Montana. It explores some modern-day ghostly happenings as well, such as accounts of my visits to a haunted hotel and a magic bookstore, and includes a couple of chapters on animal spirits, visions, and messages.
Why did you feel you had to write this book?
That itself is a story!
I actually had a contract (and a deadline) to write a different book, a follow-up to my first book, House of Spirits and Whispers, which is a true account of living in a haunted house. Since House of Spirits and Whispers came out, I had done a lot of research on the history of my house, had gotten new information on the ghosts in my house from several psychics and a paranormal investigation team, and had some new ghost experiences to report. I worked on the follow- up book for nine months, but even though I had great material and know how to tell a story, the book was hopelessly bogged down. While writing it, I had an unusual nightmare that mimicked a silent movie—that is to say, the dream was in black and white, with a scratchy, flickering visual quality. A crowd of people in old-fashioned costumes—all with ghostly white faces, darkened brows and eyes, and exaggerated painted lips—clamored around a chalkboard as they watched me with interest. I recognized Leon, the main spirit from my house, and realized that all the actors in the silent movie dream were the spirits of people who had lived in my house before me. I leaned in closer to see what was written on the chalkboard, and read the words: Why do you want to write this book? I was so unnerved that I woke up. The dream was vivid enough that I wondered if it was a message from the spirits in my house. I knew that it might also simply be a reaction to the stress I was feeling about the book.
Shortly after having this dream, a member of the paranormal investigation team that had been to my house the previous year sent a batch of EVPs (electronic voice phenomena) that had been temporarily lost when someone’s computer crashed. One of the EVP ghost voices, sounding disturbed and unstable, clearly said Don’t turn me into a book! (Listen to the EVP and other EVPs captured at my house here: http://www.anniewilder.com/evps.php .)That, along with the dream and the difficulty I was having, made me decide to set the second house book aside, at least for the time being. I had a bunch of family ghost stories that I had wanted to use in my first book, but didn’t, since the focus was really my house’s ghosts and secrets. So I proposed a family ghost story book to Llewellyn in place of the follow-up to House of Spirits and Whispers, and that is how Spirits Out of Time came to be. That said, the timing seemed right to gather up and record our family stories and photographs. Two of my great aunts who contributed wonderful stories to this book are in their nineties now, my young cousin Alexandra died last year, and three much-loved family members are battling serious health issues. . . in our family, it’s a time of taking stock, remembering, and preserving. I felt our family spirits around me lending support to the project as I sat at the kitchen table, night after night, working to meet my deadline.
What is your favourite story in the book?
One of my favorite stories is the story that my great aunt Clara told about her grandma, my Great-Great Grandma Wieland. Great-Great-Grandma Wieland was a hardworking German woman, strong and practical, outrageously outspoken, and not really given to whimsy of any kind. Grandma Wieland had thirteen children, five of whom died in a five-year period from whooping cough and diphtheria. All five children were under two years old when they died. Grandma Wieland said that each time she lost a baby, a star fell over the house that night. As a mother, it’s hard to imagine the feelings of loss and grief that Great-Great-Grandma Wieland must have experienced. I think the falling star story is transcendent and moving, and this powerful sign from the heavens must have provided some measure of solace to her. At the end of her own life, when she was eighty-seven, the ever practical Great-Great-Grandma Wieland came down with pneumonia and seemed “resolved to die.” After a good meal of pork and sauerkraut, she took to her bed, told her daughter what dress she wanted to be buried in, and died two days later.
What do you feel is the most chilling story in the book?
I think one of the most chilling is the experience my sister Maggie and her husband Rob had while living in India. The house they shared with other Americans working in India suddenly developed a ghost problem. The local people who worked as house staff said it was “witches,” i.e., the spirits of young Indian women who had committed suicide that were causing the trouble. One of the staff said he had seen the witches floating in the backyard trees late at night. Another staff dreamt he was being carried through the air, and when he shook himself awake, he was in the backyard, being stared at by four young women—who then disappeared. There is a picture in my book of a ghostly face from the India house. Maggie and Rob’s housemates took a photograph of themselves all dressed up for a party, standing in front of a mirror. The odd face is behind them, and although we only have one picture in the book, he (or it) appeared in three photographs, his image becoming more distinct with each shot.
Have you ever given thought to what exactly a ghost is?
I think all ghosts are essentially a form of energy. But I believe there are many sources for “ghost” energy. Ghosts can be the spirit of someone who once lived in a physical body on Earth (or perhaps inhabited a physical body someplace other than Earth), angelic or divine beings or spirit guides, astral beings or entities that never lived in a physical body, elemental or nature spirits, animal spirits, thought forms or tulpas, energetic imprints or energetic residue, “lost” parts of our own spirit, our past selves, our future selves, our higher selves. . . it’s really mind-boggling! I do have many accounts of these kinds of weird or unusual ghost experiences in my book.
Why do some people (or in this case a family) seem to have so much more experience with the realm of the paranormal than others do?
I think the Catholic religion may have given us an advantage by providing a framework for believing in a complex and dynamic spirit world, one that had its own hierarchies, rules, and courtesies. We may have some ancestral predisposition to intuitiveness, although my German relatives seemed to have at least as many psychic experiences as my Irish relatives. I do believe that the strongest factor in my family having interesting paranormal experiences is that, when something strange happens, we pay attention to it. We talk about the weird things that happen to us and love to tell the stories over and over. When you pay attention to something, you give it energy, which makes it stronger. We also (generally speaking) appreciate having paranormal experiences and appreciation, being a form of positive, creative energy, leads to more experiences as well.
What is it that fascinates you most about the paranormal?
To quote from my book: “I have always been fascinated by secrets. And I’ve always been drawn to stories with elements of magic and death and drama. Maybe it’s my Irish blood, or my twelfth- house moon, or the intuitive awareness, even as a child, that there was much more going on around us than was acknowledged in school or on TV.”
Spirits and strange beings, lost or hidden realms, forbidden knowledge, and the idea of something that is real yet invisible captures my imagination and motivates me to try to discover the real story. I believe that the spirit world is constantly interacting with our world, and that we can learn to decipher its signs and messages. I hope the stories in my book help illuminate the mysteries of the spirit world—one of the best compliments I received about Spirits Out of Time was from a reporter who said it made her look at some of her family’s and her own experiences in a new way.
What is your favourite book on ghostly phenomena?
That’s difficult to answer, there are so many good ones. One of the first paranormal books I ever read was Phone Calls from the Dead by D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless. I devoured all of Ruth Montgomery’s books, and any book I could find on Edgar Cayce. More recently, I just finished Colin Wilson’s Poltergeist, and it is very, very scary. In fiction books, the first couple of chapters in Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour scared me so much that I put the book away until one of my kids moved back home a few years later. I couldn’t read it while living alone in a haunted house.
Are you working on any new projects or books that you would like our readers to know about?
My next book is going to be a little different than the first two books, but I think it’ll be a lot of fun. The working title is True Trucker Ghost Stories, and it’s going to be a collection of true ghost stories, strange paranormal experiences, plus ghost lore and legends of the highways. I’m going to invite truck drivers and the people who work closely with them, like truck stop waitresses and diesel mechanics, to share their ghostly or weird unexplained encounters. We’re talking about doing a True Trucker Ghost Stories audio book, and possibly filming the stories too, so I’m pretty excited. I’m always interested in new experiences, and I feel both fortunate and grateful. | |
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