Don't Go Into The Woods

On Saturday March 13 I'm going to be participating in a live virtual storytelling event with the folks from The Haunted Walks.

Eerie & unexplainable tales from Northern Ontario, isolated spots, and haunted locales! Beyond the safety of our city streetlights, and the flickering of our warm and comforting campfire, the darkness is always waiting.

Join paranormal author and raconteur Mark Leslie as he shares a combination of hair-raising true tales of ghosts, spectres, and other unexplainable phenomenon alongside a pair of tales written specifically to be shared around a campfire. If you go into the woods with us, you’re sure of a big surprise.

Coast to Coast AM with George Noory - Haunted Hospitals

I'm pretty pumped to be returning as a guest to Coast to Coast AM with George Noory.

Coast to Coast AM airs on more than 600 stations in the U.S., as well as Canada, Mexico and Guam, and is heard by nearly three million weekly listeners. With hosts George Noory, George Knapp (weekend), and guest weekend hosts, it is the most listened to overnight radio program in North America.

A media phenomenon, Coast to Coast AM deals with UFOs, strange occurrences, life after death, and other unexplained (and often inexplicable) phenomena. Coast to Coast AM is overnight talk radio with daytime ratings.

The show I'll be on runs three hours and airs from midnight to 3 AM Eastern on Friday June 5, 2020.

Haunted Canada Road Trip (Virtual)

If you have young ones in the home looking for something fun (and a little creepy) to do, why not check out this great series of videos from my friend and fellow horror author, Joel A. Sutherland.

(In all honesty, you don't have to be a kid to enjoy them - you can be, like me, a kid at heart. Because I've been loving this series)

Click here to see the Playlist of YouTube Videos

Joel is the Silver Birch Award-winning author of the Haunted Canada series and has been called Canada's answer to R. L. Stine by Quill & Quire.

To top it off, he's a great guy, and a librarian. C'mon, how COULDN'T you love the guy?

Joel, who was born in Ottawa, kindly wrote the introduction to my adult non-fiction book Creepy Capital: Ghost Stories of Ottawa and the National Capital Region.

As of today (March 26, 2020), there are 9 segments of Joel's daily Haunted Canada Road Trip.

Definitely worth checking out.

Here's the first one in the series about a haunted hospital in BC.

 Enjoy!!!

Don't Judge My Love of Sharing Ghost Tales

In my weekly Free Friday Frights adventures I have enjoyed the combination of sharing live videos of reading my fiction or just sharing a ghostly tale from the research I have done for many of my non-fiction books on the paranormal.

 

And last Friday (Friday April 13th), while I was enjoying a couple of pints at The Winking Judge in Hamilton, as part of a quick teaser video that I had originally posted live to Facebook, I walked about the 2nd floor of this haunted bar and shared a few of the ghostly tales I had heard over the years.

I re-edited the original live video to add in a few fitting visuals as well as some haunting background music.

Here is the revised and enhanced video:

You can read more about this in a post on my Spirits Untapped blog entitled "Ghostly Tales From A Hamilton Bar," which also focuses more on the "beer" and "beer culture" aspects. (IE, if, after seeing the beer I'm holding and wanting to know what it was)

A Haunted 5K Run in Hamilton

Almost by accident this morning, I discovered a neat way to turn a run into a historic haunted run.

It started when I left my apartment, wanting to go on a relatively short run that had a bit of a challenge to it. So I decided to head south on James St S. towards the Hamilton Mountain where there's a path and set of stairs (part of the Bruce Trail).

Once I got to the top of the stairs, I thought it might be fun to keep moving along the upper edge of the escarpment and run out towards Century Manor. A week earlier, I took a short hike up there to do a Facebook Live video to help promote a new book (Haunted Hospitals) that includes a chapter on the beautiful old abandoned and boarded up building that used to be an insane asylum.

One of the spectacular views looking down on the city from Hamilton Mountain (ie, Niagara escarpment) on this run

When I reached Century Manor and lifted my iPhone to do a selfie (because apparently I'm a teenaged girl), I noticed that it was approximately 2.6 KM from my place to that spot.

While I'm not a math whiz, I knew that the full route would end up being approximately 5K, which is a decent short run.

Century Manor

So, considering the beautiful and picturesque landscape I'd gone through (not to mention the fun challenge of the hill and the stairs), I wondered it if might make a thematic run. A Haunted Run, I imagined.


So I mapped it out and created a "Haunted Runs in Hamilton: Winking Judge to Century Manor" route.

The Winking Judge to Century Manor & Back Route

I figured one haunted location might not be enough, and so, since I live near my favourite bar to haunt, The Winking Judge, I figured I'd add that into the route and have a fun haunted destination at both ends of the run.

Of course, after I finished, I realized that the route is pretty close to a few other haunted locations (Augusta Mansion on the mountain and Whitehern House down in the city). But I figured incorporating them into a slightly longer route might be more fun.

A Recipe for Author Collaboration

Because I do so much writing for the Kobo Writing Life blog as well as Spirits Untapped, I haven't been updating this blog as often. (I know, I know, there's always SOME excuse, isn't there?)

But I wanted to share an excerpt from a recent guest blog post that I wrote for Dundurn, the publisher of the newly released Haunted Hospitals, a book that I co-authored with Rhonda Parrish.

The article is entitled A Recipe for Author Collaboration and talks about the origin of this book project and how the proper "ingredients" need to all be lined up for a collaboration to happen.

In much the same way that fire is created from the combination of the three elements of oxygen, a fuel source and heat, the ingredients necessary for a writing project are Inspiration and Commitment and Timing.  - From "A Recipe for Author Collaboration" on Dundurn's Blog

At When Words Collide, the Calgary conference where we met and decided to collaborate, we recorded a quick Facebook Live video that was originally posted to the Haunted Hospitals Facebook page.

If you're a fan of video over text, there are a few other videos on the Facebook page as well that I recorded at two of the locations from our book (The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia and Century Manor in Hamilton, Ontario)