One day, Mrs. Lafe entered the kitchen and as she closed the door behind her, she spotted the apparition of a man in a black frock coat standing across the room. She screamed in terror and the figure vanished.
- The Haunted Museum

I’ve been doing research on spiritualism and the supernatural for a historical novella called “The Dark Farewell.” It’s for inclusion in The Mysterious, an anthology of historical ghost stories I’m doing with Alex Beecroft and Laura Baumbach for MLR Press. And as I read through early accounts of mediums and séances and hauntings, I’ve discovered two things: 1) Subtle is scarier, and 2) I am a big fraidy cat.

That little paragraph at the top of this article about Mrs. Lafe and the man in the black frock coat? I got prickles on the back of my head as I read that the first time. Sure, it’s just a prosaic accounting of a supposedly factual event, but my imagination supplied the details and made it very real. I saw the pale outline of that man in the gloomy kitchen. Saw his old-fashioned clothing, down to the buckles on his shoes; saw his pallid features which seemed to waver just enough to make them unrecognizable.

Had the man in a frock coat suddenly whipped out an ax and started chasing Mrs. Lafe around the kitchen table, that scene would have been significantly less scary. For me, I mean. Mrs. Lafe’s mileage might have varied. Considerably. But from the standpoint of the reader or viewer, it’s the suspense, the tension of not knowing what is going to happen that is the most gripping part of any scary story. It’s the slow but steady build, the escalation of the Creep Factor that has the reader on the edge of his seat, knees knocking.

What next?

It’s the What Next that gets us every time, isn’t it? So I’m trying to figure out the best way to tell my story about a calculating fraud of a medium who suddenly begins to get real and horrific visions. I don’t do a lot of spec fiction. Horror, paranormal -- I enjoy that stuff when it’s done right, but I don’t tend to write it myself, so it doesn’t come…er…nachurally, as they say. I have to think about it. I want this story to be scary -- it’s a Halloween story -- and I need to find the most effective way to achieve that end. My goal is to scare the bejesus out of the reader, and on the surface it seems obvious that the best way to do that it is to start lobbing ectoplasm as soon as possible. But as I think about that concept of “surface,” I find myself remembering the film Jaws.

Now, granted, Jaws didn’t start slowly, but what it did do was build. It also withheld the identity of the villain for quite some time which caused considerable anxiety on the part of the viewer. We saw the horrific results of the villain: the bite marks in boats, the maimed body parts, the smaller sharks that were still plenty big…but there was a great and satisfying build up before the real star of the show surfaced. Okay, I admit that when he did surface he looked a wee bit, er, mechanical compared to what they do these days, but at the time? Pretty damned effective.

Had we seen Mr. Jaws in that first scene when he yanks on that yummy skinny dipper, we would definitely have lost a good deal of the effectiveness of that story. Not that straight and simple horror isn’t…horrible, but it’s the suspense, the tension of wondering what is out there and what is it going to do next that truly terrifies us. Once the evil or the danger is known, the story becomes something else. It can still be frightening and exciting, but the most terrifying thing, the most difficult thing to deal with, is the unknown.

We are all frightened of the unknown. Whether it’s someone’s “other” sexuality or the monster under the bed. (Hmmm. Maybe both of those qualify as the Monster Under the Bed?)

Once the unknown is known, there’s almost always a little frisson of disappointment. Oh, that’s all it is? Another maniac with an ax? Another evil ghost? Another gay guy in too tight jeans?

The truth is the imagination of the reader or viewer is ten times more powerful than anything we can describe for them. So the longer we can drag out the unknown -- and let the reader or viewer do much of the work -- the better. I’m talking horror here, not m/m romance, but I suppose for some readers it’s about the same thing.

But I digress. Did you ever see that movie The Blair Witch Project? I still have no idea what was supposed to be going on there, but that was why it worked so well. It played on our fear of the unknown. Weird sounds in the middle of the night, weird symbols that no one understood, half-remembered legends, disappearances…it was all about these bits of alarming information, but no real, definitive answers. Even that last shocking image of…well, what was that? Someone facing a wall? Other people running and screaming?

In fact, further analyzing my favorite ghost stories, my favorite scary movies, I think the best ones, the most effective ones, are the ones that don’t try to explain everything, that leave some questions. Is that an odd observation for a mystery writer? But mysteries embrace reason and deduction. That’s pretty much the opposite of the impulse to sit around the campfire listening to ghost stories.

For example, an excellent film that unravels as it begins to escalate and explain is The Changeling. Once the security gates start crunching cars and ghostly hands start grabbing people, it just loses something. It’s that old Too Much Information. Some things aren’t meant to be understood, some mysteries are more interesting when left unsolved. As we begin to explain and analyze and make sense of…a lot of the fun goes out of the equation.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…

I suspect the best way to do this story of mine is to ground most of it in a recognizable historical reality (1920s Herron, Illinois), build slowly, and then leave a few loose ends. Because the best ghost stories leave the reader wondering. Could it have happened for real? Was it a ghost or was it just a man in a sheet? Sometimes it’s best not to pry too closely at what lies beneath the sheet.

Josh Lanyon is the author of the Adrien English mystery novels, including The Hell You Say, winner of the 2006 USABookNews awards for GLBT fiction and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Death of a Pirate King, which has just come out. He's also responsible for the ground-breaking just-released M/M writing guide Man, Oh Man!: Writing M/M Fiction for Kinks & Cash.

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