Coming soon: A preview of my latest book!

I'm excited to share that I'm working on a new novel, "O Grandpa, Where Art Thou."

Enjoy this preview and drop a comment below with any thoughts you have!

I ain’t afraid of no ghosts!

Somewhere in the Bible it says When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. Well, at a rather early age, questioned whether there really was a Santa Claus, and I don’t recall ever really believing in the tooth fairy and I especially didn’t believe in ghosts. After I became a fully grown-up man, however, I now believe in ghosts.

Like I said, I wasn’t scared of ghosts as a child. No right-thinking four-year-old Republican did. Give me a break! Then I saw that movie The Sixth Sense where the little boy said “I see ghosts. They’re everywhere!” I realized at that moment that I, too, had often felt the presence of someone or something near me looking over my shoulder, yet when I turned around no one was ever there. Or were they? Perhaps it was just an overactive imagination. Or was it? After I moved to the Old Dominion, I seemed to feel it even more. I now reside in Reston, Virginia, close to where George Washington and Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson and John Wilkes Booth and Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison and Pocahontas used to all hang out. I felt them. But I had put away childish things, I dismissed my foolish misgivings because, like I said, I must put such nonsense away.

Eric BloodAxe, Credit to: ProudVikings

Then I took a genealogy course at George Mason’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute

(OLLI) continuing education program for old folks. Family legend had it that at least one part of my family was descended from the famous Pocahontas. I wanted proof since she used to live in this neck of the woods and I could almost maybe perhaps feel her presence. Unfortunately, I discovered it to be all humbug. Pocahontas wasn’t my gramma after all. But I did find out that one of Pocahontas’s descendants had married one of my descendants making Pocahontas and me kind of, sort of, almost related. Then I found out that one of my Jamestown ancestors had sure enough married an aristocratic Scottish relatives who sold some property to a Randolph whose descendant turned out to be President of the United States and that…

Yes, like millions of others, I became hooked on and addicted to genealogy determined to find my roots. And to explain that sixth sense that was bugging me. That’s when I came across Grampa Hugh Giffard. Grampa Hugh was the infamous Scottish necromancer and wizard who conjured up and talked to unseen visitors, mostly dead people. Many in his day confirmed that he actually did talk to those ghosts and when he built his castle, Yester Castle, that he had an army of little goblins that helped him build it. And that those goblins protected him from his enemies. The still standing croft of Yester Castle is called Goblin Hal and is still there for all to see which I did a long time ago to make sure. There are those today who continue to claim that the goblin part may not be real and is just made up but the ones who say that don’t have our necromancer DNA.