Pamela K. Kinney is an award winning
published author of horror, science fiction, fantasy, poetry, and a ghost
wrangler of nonfiction ghost books published by Schiffer Publishing. Her horror
short story, “Bottled Spirits” published by Buzzymag.com was runner up for the
2013 Small Press Award. Two of her
nonfiction ghost books were nominated for Library of Virginia Petersburg , Virginia
Under the pseudonym, Sapphire Phelan, she has
published erotic and sweet paranormal/fantasy/science fiction romance along
with a couple of erotic horror stories. Her erotic urban fantasy, Being Familiar With a Witch is a Prism
2010 Awards winner and a Epic Awards 2010 finalist. The sequel to Being
Familiar With a Witch, A Familiar TangleWith Hell was released June 2011 from Phaze Books. Both eBooks were combined into one print
book, The Witch and the Familiar, released April 24, 2012.
She also has done acting on stage and in films,
is a Master Costumer--costuming since 1972— and she even does paranormal
investigating, including for DVDs for Paranormal World Seekers, filmed by AVA
Productions. She was casting director for High Mountain
She admits she can always be found at her desk
and on her computer, writing. And yes, the house, husband, and even the cat
sometimes suffer for it!
Find out more about Pamela K.
Kinney at http://www.PamelaKKinney.com
and about Sapphire Phelan at http://www.SapphirePhelan.com.
MJN: You have won the Prism Awards in 2010 and made it to the finals of Epic Awards. Those are impressive accolades. Do they raise you to the next plane within the specific genre and/or circle of readers or universally?
PK:
Winning or finaling an award gives the writer affirmation that they are good. It
makes the writer work harder to keep up that level of work. That maybe they are
on the right track.
Besides
these (both the 2010 Prism and Epic Awards were for Being Familiar With a Witch
, written by me under the pseudonym, Sapphire Phelan), I also was runner up
for the Washington Science Fiction Association’s
Small Press Award in 2013 for “Bottled Spirits,” a short horror story written
by me as Pamela K. Kinney, that was published by Buzzymag.com. There were only
about seven stories that made the cut out of a lot of science fiction, fantasy
and horror stories submitted (in the hundreds). Many of those stories sent in
were by award winning, NYC published writers, so for my story (first time I
ever entered) to make it to runner up, is considered to be an accolade. People
can see who else besides me made up the seven at http://www.locusmag.com/News/2013/08/wsfa-small-press-award-finalists-2/
(I did a fan girl squeal when I saw my story and name in Locus Magazine online, as I used to get issues of the print version
in the Seventies to my home.)
MJN: I see you have a penchant for Southern Gothic. Indeed, a historic mansion in the South is a popular setting for a horror story. Where do you believe the southerners derive their folklore? It is rooted in Scots Irish mythology, as many of the Southerners trace their roots to Ulster?
PK: Though born and
bred out West, but living here since 1985, I got to know Virginians and
Southerners. I believed much of their folklore came from their roots. Not just
Scots and Irish, but African, Native American, German, English, Czech and
Slovakians, Polish and others who settled in the South. But in my opinion, it comes
from deep within themselves and how their way of life as Southerners has been
lived years after their ancestors settled the land.
There
was the War Between the States fought on their soil, where brother was pitted against
brother. The Revolutionary War was fought here and Williamsburg was not only
where our founding fathers met and walked the streets, but was the capitol of
the Colonies, and later became the first capitol of Virginia before the capitol
was moved to Richmond. You had those who owned slaves and land they grew cotton
and tobacco on. These were the nobility, just without titles. The Civil War
took away that lifestyle made on the backs of slaves, and they stiffened their backbones
and learned to tend their own lands or lose it.
Today,
the South is where you find ladies in wide brimmed hats and dressed to the
nines, wearing gloves (or not) to go shopping in a supermarket (yes, I’ve seen
this when I first moved here). The gothic flavored stories told here is due not
only to their ancestors and where they came, but the darkness of their history.
It’s written in the blood of the South. It’s the gentlewoman in her
deteriorating plantation home who goes to town dressed up in finery she had for
twenty years to take tea at her favorite tea room. It’s the African Americans
and their soul food. The native people who traveled this land. The blood-soaked
battlefields where ghosts still haunt. I could go on and on, but the South,
even today in modern times, still has monsters hidden in the attic, ghosts
haunting dilapidated plantation homes or modern suburbia, and odd legends
stalking its woods and mountains.
MJN: Have you personally brushed with any of the paranormal experiences you described in your books? Do you sometimes have trouble drawing the line between reality and fantasy, the way events really happened versus how they are recorded in our memory once they pass through the prism of our imagination?
PK: Yes, I have. For
when I am on an investigation (myself or with a group), I have equipment that I
use, so I can document what happens (if anything happens), unlike a normal
person who sees a ghost. Not that I haven’t seen a ghost in normal
circumstances.
I
record it all with my digital recorder (even my ghost box sessions), so I can
check what I thought I heard or not later. I also write things down in an
investigation. Personal experiences like seeing a shadow person or a solid
ghost in color with one’s own eyes has to be documented on paper. When I do an
EVP (electronic voice phenomena) session, if something sounds like a living
person (someone coughs, as an example), you mention that out loud during the
recording, or call out to get verification if it is a living person not with
you at the time. I’ve gotten images in my photos I did not see at the time. I had
double-checked the five images in the upcoming Paranormal Petersburg, Virginia,and the Tri-Cities Area with my new Samsung Tab 2
tablet. It has high def, so no matter how you enlarge the photo to see if the
image is real or not, the photo is clear. This way, if something I see in a
photo, is just a bush or an outside tree in the glass of the window, or an
actual image.
When
I write fiction based off an experience or a legend that is made up. I am
trying to scare the bejesus out of you. The ghost books, not so much. Though I
try to be clinical, I admit to writing them as creative nonfiction to hopefully
make it and read. I don’t want to bore the reader out of his/her mind. Still,
everything in the books are documented by recorder and written down at the
time.
MJN: Do you make on-site visits to every mansion, every monument you describe in your books? Do you think it's important to visit those places alone or with a like-minded companion?
PK: I visited most of
the places—about 97%. The photographs in the books are mine. Schiffer
Publishing wants the photos to be the authors’ that are in our books.
As
the author, I’ve gone to these places mostly alone for interviews with owners
or workers (if a place of business), and to also do a paranormal investigation
of the place to see if I get anything. Sometimes, my husband was with me.
Sometimes, I was with a group, investigating the place. Except the first book, as
I only had a camera then. But if I had
an experience, I do put it in the book. Same will go for Paranormal Petersburg, Virginia,
and the Tri-Cities Area, which is
available for preorder and releases in August.
MJN: Most myths seem to echo back to the past. Do you think that new myths emerge as time goes on? Are there contemporary hauntings?
PK:
Many urban legends started as plain old legends from 1700s/1800s (elsewhere in
the world, earlier). As for new tales, our modern urban legends, like the
Bunnyman in Northern Virginia. That is a chapter in Haunted Virginia: Legends, Mythsand True Tales. The story of the Bunnymans and his
bridge sounds like it began in 1890s, but a librarian who lived in Fairfax County
and worked at a library there, investigated and found two police reports of a
guy in a bunny suit with an axe in the 1970s, same time the Bunnyman urban
legend came to life. Someone obviously with potential to be a horror author, started
this story. The place has been proven to have paranormal activity by paranormal
groups, but none of that has anything to do with the Bunnyman. I think it is
easy for people to make up stories about a place and over time, others pass on the
tales, embellishing them, and turning them into urban legends. Not to say there
may not be a grain of truth to the story—the difference between legends and
myths.
A
myth is a sacred or traditional story that concerns the origins of the world or
how the world and the creatures in it came to be in their present form. Myths serve to unfold a part of
the world view of a people, or explain a practice, belief, or natural
phenomenon. Parables
and allegories are myths. Nothing is supposed to be real about it
at all, even if someone mentioned in the story is a real person, like some
famous Virginians in this book. There are stories told about their habits or
life that are not true.
While
a legend is a narrative of human actions told about someone that existed in
reality, once upon a time, but the true events have been twisted, making them
more fascinating. Legend includes no happenings that are outside the realm of
"possibility,” defined by a highly flexible set of parameters. These may
include miracles that are perceived as actually having happened. There is the
specific tradition of indoctrination where the legend arose, and in which the
tale may be transformed over time, in order to keep it fresh, vital, and
realistic. It is kinda like that game you played with your classmates in
school, where you whisper to the next person a story, and by the time it comes
full circle, that story has changed drastically from what it began as.
Then
there is folklore. Folklore is the traditional beliefs, myths, tales, and
practices of a people, transmitted orally. It is popular, but unfounded
beliefs. Or, as Merriam-Webster says: “traditional customs, tales, sayings, dances,
or art forms preserved among a people.”
And
yes, there are contemporary hauntings. People die all the time. Some phantoms think they are stuck in a place
they died at, like the two modern ghosts at Fort Magruder Hotel and Conference
Center. I also believe others can come back and forth,
visiting their old homes where they lived alive, relatives and places they
worked, played, etc... I finally got proof of this last part when we filmed “Return
to Fort Magruder” for Paranormal World Seekers (I co-produced this with Mark
Layne through AVA Productions) for the third time in January, the night before
the science fiction convention, Marscon, happened at the
hotel. Besides the Cicil War soldiers who haunt the hotel and land it sits on,
we got a contemporary spirit of someone—Veronica—who attended Marscon when she
was alive, was there due to the convention! She answered our questions through
my EMF meter (electromagnetic fields). It was nice to have a sort of
verification to my theory. Just shows that not all ghosts are here because they
are tied to the spot they died at, attached to a house or object they owned in
life, have unfinished business, fear of the other side, or is a residual
haunting (a playback of a past
event-recording of something done at a certain date or time.)
Thank you for the interview.
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