Today is the day that I put my ideas for my new novel to paper.  I am creating a collection of short stories about ghostly encounters experienced by myself.  This is a scary and exciting proposition and now that I have started the process my creative juices are flowing.    It all started when my friend said to me that I had a real talent in writing and that I should do just that write!  I am still unemployed and finding work is proving to be a daunting task  I wrote the first page today and I am coming up with titles for other short stories to include.    You would think I would have the good sense to write the stories as someone Else’s story but no I insist on telling actual experiences that I have had.  I will leave it up to the reader to believe it or not!  You will find out about the day I witnessed the ghostly cat at my friends house who scratched the sofa seat behind me without showing me his ghostly physique.  I kid you not!  Mind you I was high on decongestants namely Sinutab because on that particular day I was dying with a sinus headache.  No pun intended!  There is also the story about the night my cat Rusty raced down into the basement of our house growling and hissing at something lurking in the shadows and of what exactly I was  too afraid to find out.  My son ran and hid in his bedroom and I remained rooted to the chesterfield determined to stay upstairs.   The next story is about a pastal sketch I have of myself when I was 21 years old.  My mother took me to the artists home where I posed as she sketched my head and torsoe.  The interesting thing about that portrait is that if you stare at it for a few minutes that the picture appears to change into a kalidoscope of different faces and people.  How is that possible one might ask?  Perhaps it is a trick of the eyes?  I thought so until I mentioned to my son one day that the picture looked like it was changing.  He responded I told you about that awhile ago but you didn’t check it out.  I was shocked and immediately started questioning if such a thing could be possibly happening? Then there was my friend Divine who I met when I was 24 years old en route to a cruise ship docked in Miami.  She and I instantly connected on some cosmic level.  I learned that she had an incredible psychic ability whereby she appeared to be able to read ones thoughts.  After boarding the ship I met my new roommate who was a school principle from Western Canada.  She appeared to be a really nice lady and then something incredible happened as my friend Divine breezed into our room.  She went up to my roommate and started  hugging and talking a mile a minute.  I learned that Divine was a friend of my roommate and they hadn’t seen each other for decades.  What were the odds of these two women being on the same cruise and meeting this way after all those years?  Coincidence or not I leave that for you to decide.  The interesting thing is that Divine was able to link her mind to my troubled thoughts throughout the duration of the cruise.  Any moment I was feeling blue or homesick there was Divine coming around the corner telling me she sensed my pain and that she was there for me.  I agreed to having Divine accompany me back to my apartment in Toronto at the end of the cruise.  I introduced her to my fiance and his family.  Divine took it upon herself to tell my father-in-law what was on his mind.  Divine was never invited back after that and my father-in-law told me she was too much for him to deal with.  Over the years since Divine returned home to Vancouver I have often wondered if she was a real person or if I had been in the company of an angel.  Sadly we have not stayed in touch over the passage of time.   Another story I will write is about  a folklore of the supernatural course I took at Memorial University in Newfoundland.  As part of an assignment about ghostly encounters I proceeded to interview a select number of friends who surprisingly claimed that they had a ghostly encounter they wanted to report.   I never had imagined that such experiences were so common place.   I heard of banshees that haunted a student residence and a room that no student could stay in.  Students were reported to have been physically attacked as they slept in their beds.  When they cried out for help fellow students had tried to open the bedroom door but their appeared to be something barring their entrance from the other end.  I listened to an elderly neighbor of mine recount walking down a country road in rural Newfoundland only to have some unknown and unseen entity pursue him until he eventually climbed in through his bedroom window collapsing on his bed with his heart pounding.  He reported that this was a common occurrence on this country road.   The book would not be complete if I didn’t talk about the day that my Mom and Dad went grocery shopping in Toronto leaving me at home to nap in my room.  I awakened to what sounded like mom and dad returning bringing groceries in through the garage door into the basement.  I bounded out of bed and down the stairway to help them.  When I got there I was shocked to find that the basement was empty and the noises I had heard were not the product of my parents returning.  They came home about an hour later and when I told them what had happened they convinced me that I had been dreaming.  In retrospect I realize that was not the case because I was sitting up in bed with my eyes opened when I first heard them arriving.  That house held a secret of some kind in that there were many future occurrences that could not be easily explained.  What I still don’t know is what was in that house that duplicated the noises of the people living within?  As the reader it is up to you to decide possible explanations.  I am open to any explanations that you can provide.