I always assumed he was a soldier, though he may not have been. I asked him a few times, but if he was speaking I never heard him. He did tell me he was sorry one time - he wrote it in the steam on the bathroom mirror, but that's the only actual communication I ever had with him. ETA: He loved the History Channel. Particularly war documentaries.
I remember another strange incident that happened to me and my husband. We had hiked in to Sandwood Bay, in the far north of Scotland. Sandwood bay is a very long stretch of sandy beach, with an odd pillar of rock at one end, and cliffs WAY at the other end. In between is just sand and very low heathery scrub, and the beach is very flat. There is an old broken-down house nearby, which we knew was supposed to be haunted by some guy who killed himself, but other than that, it's just a beach. My husband and I found a spot to sit down. It was some stretch from the water, but it was dry, so we spread out our lunch and started eating. While we were eating, we noticed a couple of hikers walking up the beach in our direction. It was a bit strange, because we had just come in on the only road we knew about that led to the beach, and they were coming from further up the beach. However, they might have simply hiked up there from the road and were returning, so we didn't think anything of it. As they approached, we could see they were elderly, a man and a woman, both with white hair, dressed in hiking gear and carrying hiking sticks. They passed in front of us (again, not quite within speaking distance) but they never acknowledged when we waved at them. We felt slightly rebuffed, as it's customary in that part of the country, to acknowledge strangers. My husband turned to me and said something like ...what's their problem? Seconds later we turned to look again ...and they were gone. I mean TOTALLY disappeared. The beach was empty, as was the landscape around us. It kind of creeped us out, actually. I remember we both stood up, wondering if they had sat down or something, but they were nowhere to be seen. It's a mystery we never did solve. Sandwood Bay is a strange place, though. Can't put my finger on it. Just strange.
Either that, or he was hoping something in particular would be shown that mattered to him? Very interesting.
Maybe. I have no idea. If anyone wants to go to talk to him I'll give you the address. I don't know who lives there now and last I knew no one did.
As a reader, I seek stories that defy the usual conventions. It's really hard to do that with ghost stories because ghosts are beings with (traditionally) limited abilities, and there's already a multitude of quality ghost stories out there. A lot of the best twists on ghost stories are conventions now because those have been overdone too (ex: the ghost who doesn't know he is a ghost, the protagonist is actually crazy/hallucinating, the ghost is actually good and trying to warn the protag. of some other imminent evil...). I primarily write horror stories and have never attempted a ghost story for these reasons. All that aside, if you're set on writing a story about a malevolent ghost of a murderous dead person (which is a trope), then you've got to find a way to make it spicy. Maybe that means killing a main character early in the story, maybe the afflicted family can devise some way to fight back against the ghost, maybe the ghost is actually the husband who is off at war (the family not having been informed of his death yet), or combine all three of those ideas and have the perished husband's ghost return to battle the murderous ghost. Whatever you do, find a way to stand out--as tall of an order as that is when it comes to ghosts.
Thanks for the ideas. I will go and see if I can find some "real" ghost stories (but not this late at night!) As a matter of fact, the whole reason I'm writing this is because I'm chickensh*t and after reading some "true" stories and freaking out, I thought that writing this and figuring out how ghost stories are put together might help me deconstruct ones I read and think of them as fiction. I'm starting to put a plot together. You've all given me some fabulous suggestions for what the ghost might do, which I'll incorporate. Obviously the detectives will be looking for clues as well to determine the identity/motives of the ghost. I had the idea of the murderous wife having something of a maternal streak (but just towards other ghosts) which prompts her to take the house's other supernatural resident, a little girl from the Edwardian era, under her wing, and often sends her out to do her haunting for her. The woman (who goes by "Mother" until I can find a better name for her) causes the mother of the family to fall down the stairs and break her neck, killing her. This prompts the detectives to flee with the children, rather than attempt to battle the ghost. They find them a place to live, and the eldest daughter (in her late teens) takes a job to support her siblings. The detective's assistant (the MC) also finds that the little girl ghost has escaped too, and has begun to playfully haunt her lodgings. I'm better at endings than middles, to be honest.
If you haven't read many, do a search for ghost stories written in victorian times or turn of the 20th century. They tend to be atmosphere heavy, rather than scare or gore heavy.
There is a campsite in the deep Ozarks. They say in the dead of night the air is filled with drunken laughter, and the sound of a crackling swamp-wood fire can be heard in the wee hours of the morning. And if you venture too close, it is said you can smell the baby gators sizzling on a spit. Such a sad way to go. Poor redneck walkin' the woods he was. Billy-bob Bubba O'Hurlahan, was out having some fun in the swamp marshes and getting blackout drunk on moonshine. He was sitting on a soggy log cookin' the small gators over a bog fire. Singing some back woods tune that ain't been heard in 30 years now. Then when the moon was high, Billy-bob caught a slug between his crossed drunk eyes, spilling moonshine all over himself. So if you happen to be in the deep swamp lands, and hear drunken laughter and cookin' gator on a smokey fire. You might just be in the company of ol' Billy-bob Bubba O'Hurlahan, have a gay ol' time living it up in the late night hour. Though it is a bad idear to get close if ya got a gun, cause he is waiting for the guy that shot him dead. If you ain't a carrying he might just offer ya some baby gator, and a touch of moonshine.
That's really fascinating. I love hearing about these kind of things. (Oh and i searched for pictures of Sandwood Bay and it looks beautiful). I would also agree on looking into accounts of people dealing with different ghosts/entities. The real world is pretty strange.
EDIT: Posted this before reading the other replies. Hmmm. Serial murderess from the 18th century? Seems more likely she would have been hung in chains from a gibbet on the commons, then buried at the crossroads. So horses shy when they come near, and dogs howl in its vicinity, and so on. I think the husbands are enough. Otherwise it's just multiplying bodies and ghosts and gets comedic. And why would the ghosts of her victims do her bidding? And can't any of them rest in peace? I wouldn't kill the mother. All that would happen then is that the children would be taken somewhere else for safety; ghost problem solved. And (sorry to be a nudge), why would a regular detective be investigating a haunted house? Wouldn't it be a psychic researcher? (There were plenty of them around in the day.) Seems to me there has to be a modern-day (1940s) antagonist around as well. Because if Old Molly or whatever her name is has been haunting the place since the 1700s, everyone would know about it. The British are proud of their haunted houses. It's a selling point. But if you've got a protagonist family who don't care for that sort of thing, you can make something very pretty out of a seller who swears up and down the house isn't haunted . . . or out of someone who makes it look like it's haunted for reasons of his own . . . when it actually is. If you just want the psychological scare, remember that people evacuated to the country from London and other big cities for safety's sake. This family wouldn't be "trapped" in this house, except maybe economically, and they wouldn't be in constant fear of the Blitz like the people in cities would (anyway, it's not paranoia if they're really out to get you). But if a frightened, harried mother and children come to the country expecting to feel safe and then the house that has been provided for them--- by a distant relative, maybe?--- turns out to have terrifying issues of its own, and everyone in the village insists it can't be Old Molly, because she only haunts the place where she was hung and buried . . . Well, you take it from there.
The father comes back safe from the war, expecting to greet his loving wife and children, and they're all . . . gone.
Yes, yes, yes! And then the corrupted ghosts of his family tries to get him to commit suicide, so he can join them. However, this eventually drives him insane, and at the end, he spends the rest of his days in an insane asylum.
A few hundred miles worth. Though maybe that was all those pet gators people allegedly flush down their toilets.