People occasionally ask me why I became a paranormal investigator.  I’ve done some thinking about it, and I blame my nana. My father’s mother raised me (no easy task I’m sure), but it was my mother’s mother, Nana Marshall, who delighted me. She spoiled me rotten–not with toys or money, but with laughter and imagination, so unlike my hardworking but reserved grandma MacLeod.

From Nana Marshall I got my love of books, which has never left me. I also got my love of all kinds of gambling from her. All the women on my mother’s side liked the slots or a good game of cards. In fact, we’d hold reunions at Foxwoods for as long as anybody could still get around without a wheelchair (and even after).   And through Nana Marshall, I came to love the idea of ghosts.

Some of my earliest memories of nana are of sittling on her lap while she told me stories. Not just any stories, either. She had a purpose: to scare me witless. She took her material from stories of haunted houses, the undead rising from their graves in the local cemetery, and from those nasty creatures who lived in closets and liked to eat little girls. The more she tried to scare me, the more I loved it. Unspoken between us was the knowledge that what frightens us is also a catalyst for what fires our imagination and keeps us wanting to know more: why was that creature in the closet? Who was he? What did he want (besides the obvious kiddie meal). And what would I do if he ever left that closet and came for me?

Ghost stories were my favorite, and nana kept me well-supplied. As I grew older, and nana could no longer get around very well, our visits became rarer. I was an avid reader by that time, so I started reading about ghosts. What I read didn’t frighten me. Nana had long since banished any fears I might have about things that go bump in the night. But reading about the paranormal made me more and more curious, until at some point I left off reading about others’ theories and started trying to gather answers on my own.

Nana’s now in the perfect place to give me the answers I’ve been seeking, having passed on years ago, but it doesn’t work that way, does it? So I keep asking questions. Every investigation gives me new information because every investigation is in its own way unique. But for every question that gets answered, more questions emerge. The paranormal is like that: tantalizing, mysterious, unknowable, forever just beyond our reach.

From time to time I feel my nana’s presence. She’ll stay with me for a day or two or three, then off again. She has a lot of grandchildren and great-grandchildren now to watch over, so I guess she’s stays busy. I know she’s there, and she knows I know, and she’s probably having a good laugh at my attempts to figure things out. But the connection is real, and comforting, and nana is still there, firing my imagination and, I hope, approving my attempts to understand her reality.