Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Jenny of Oldstones Video



Here's a cool bit of fan fiction set in the Games of Thrones universe called Jenny of Oldstones created by and starring some of my cousins in Italy. The film, which is essentially a music video, is built around the song Podrik sings in Episode  2, Season 8 of the HBO series. The film was directed by my cousin Stefano Silvestri and features my cousins Fabiana Protani, as Jenny, and Maria Carmen Falstaffi as Dama.  Maria Carmen, a trained opera singer who has performed around the world, also sings this version of the song.

The film was shot in my ancestral home of Arnara, which is located in the Frosinone province of Italy about fifty miles south of Rome. Arnara is a beautiful little village filled with warm and welcoming people. The majority of this film was shot at the medieval castle, dating back to 900AD, located atop the hill in the center of the town. During a visit to the town, I told my family and I would return one day in triumph and buy the castle. I haven't pulled that off yet, but my partner Jennifer Healy Gloeb and I used Arnara as a setting for our script Runaway Heart, which is currently being read by production companies. This film shows we should be able to find some local talent if that film goes into production.

Be sure to check out the video on Youtube and subscribe to their channel.

Here's a photo of the director, Stefano Silvestri, taken during a visit to Baltimore:

Denisa Protani, Stefano, Sean & Debbie
Here's a photo of Maria Carmen Falstaffi taken during a visit to Baltimore:

Emily, Marion, Maria Carmen and Natalie in
the dining room of 21 St. Helens Avenue
To learn more about my family, check out my memoir The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God. It is my true story of first faith and first love and how the two became almost fatally intertwined.



Here are some sample chapters of The Promise:
Chapter 7 - Mission Accomplished
Chapter 15 - Quarter To Midnight

Follow me on Twitter: SeanPaulMurphy
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Subscribe on YouTube: Sean Paul Murphy

Monday, October 14, 2019

The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 5, Methodology

The Murphy Family, Christmas 1986*
My upcoming novel Chapel Street was inspired by my experiences growing up in a "haunted" house at 21 St. Helens Avenue** in the Northeast Baltimore neighborhood of Lauraville. This series of blogs will examine the actual haunting that inspired the book. My previous blogs dealt with the house and its occupants up to the time of our arrival. Now it is time to deal with our actual paranormal experiences within the house.

It was a hopeful gesture on my part to start writing these blogs. To realistically tell this story, I needed the cooperation of my mother, my siblings and my nieces. Considering our long reticence to talk about the haunting, there was no guarantee they would cooperate. Fortunately, my sister Jeanne broke the ice. After reading the rough draft of my book, she requested a meeting of the siblings to discuss the haunting. In that meeting we all learned things we never knew before. We all had our secrets, and we haven't revealed them all yet.

Over the next of couple of weeks and/or months, I will be interviewing people with first hand experience of the paranormal activity within the house. The question that plagued me was how to arrange the material.

I am a professional writer. If I had my choice, I would tell this story narratively in a chronological manner. Unfortunately, I really don't have that option here. As I have said repeatedly, this wasn't one haunting, it was a number of separate hauntings going on more or less concurrently. Aside from one brief period when the poltergeist activity was at its peak in the mid-1980s, we never discussed the phenomenon with each other in any detail. Also, no one took any contemporaneous notes. Not even me. Therefore, we are relying almost entirely on memory -- and forty-five years have passed since we first moved into that house. It would be a fool's errand to try to reconcile our individual memories in a single narrative timeline.

As a result, I plan to let my family members tell their stories separately. I will interview them, or let them write up their own experiences. This approach will also allow the reader to gauge the credibility of each individual separately. As I said earlier, the members of my family all came into this experience with wildly varying viewpoints regarding religion and the supernatural. When you're finished with all of the accounts, you will probably find someone with a similar worldview to your own. And that will probably be the person you find most credible. Considering the fact that I wrote a memoir called The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God, where I say I believe I have heard the voice of God, I doubt skeptics will find my story very credible. Hopefully, you will find someone else more to your liking.

Clara, 1974
I plan to interview my mother Clara first. She's the obvious person to start with. She was the owner of the house. So, technically speaking, it was her entity. She also had the most paranormal experience prior to our arrival at the house. Next I hope to interview my sister Jeanne. In the last blog, I credited my late sister Laura with the first paranormal experience at the house. However, I think Jeanne may have had her beat by a day or two. Jeanne had a rather harrowing experience that I didn't learn about until quite recently.

I'll tell my story next. You might find it surprising, but I was the skeptic of the group. I was completely dismissive of any talk of ghosts until things blew up in the mid-80s. Some rather harrowing events, that inspired a major plot point in my upcoming novel Chapel Street, made me a believer very quickly. I hope my brother John will be next. He is a unique case in the family. He grew up entirely at 21 St. Helens Avenue, and we pointedly never discussed the entity around him. Sadly, our desire not to frighten him left him alone and unprepared for some of the worst physical phenomenon that any of us experienced in the house.

The House auctioned in 2012
I am also attempting to locate the family that bought the house from my mother. I am very curious about their experiences. Sadly, they do not seem readily accessible online but I will keep looking. I will not reach out to the current residents. (They would, obviously, be easier to find!) As I said in an earlier blog, I suspect a "haunting" like this one is often partially transactional. Certain people seem more attuned to paranormal activity than others. Therefore, if the current residents are not experiencing anything, I have no desire to discuss the haunting with them and possibly trigger activity.

I will not be interviewing my older brother Doug for the blog. Doug left and moved in with my paternal grandparents after only a few short years at 21 St. Helens Avenue. He has absolutely no memory whatsoever of any paranormal activity. I am not surprised. I lived in the house for ten years before I experienced anything myself. If I left when he did, I'm sure my skepticism would remain intact today. (My father was also a skeptic, and I was very surprised to hear the effect the entity had on him -- but we'll get to that later. I consider him to be the third suicide.)

The question that remains, for me, is what to do next. I originally intended to deal with the suicides of my siblings next, and then go to the testimonies of my nieces, one of whom lived in the house for an extended period of time. That would make the most sense chronologically. However, now I am leaning toward telling all of our individual stories first before we deal with the deaths.

I teach writing at Towson University. I often warn students when I read an early draft of their work if I fear that their arguments don't justify their conclusions. I might be guilty of that sin too. I suspect I will never be able to prove to a skeptic that the entity was responsible, in part, for the suicide deaths of my siblings. However, I hope, after you read our stories, you'll understand why some of us suspect it.

Jeanne and Natalie, circa 2012.
Natalia is about to give birth to her first daughter.
That said, I am not writing these blogs to convince anyone about anything. These blogs represent a journey within our family to finally deal with the lingering legacy of our experiences at 21 St. Helens Avenue. In a sense, we all still live in its shadow. Yesterday, I interviewed my niece Natalie about her experiences at the house. She was glad to do it. She felt it was finally time to reveal all of our secrets.

I agree.

Give me a little time to do some research. Until then, enjoy a little glimpse of the Murphy family at 21 St. Helens Avenue. If our home movies are any indication, it seemed like it was always Christmas there....

Most of the footage was shot in the living room. Of course, after learning that the funeral of John Clayton Mayfort was held in there, now I like to call it The Coffin Room.




Notes:

*This photo was taken on Christmas day 1986 on the front porch of my grandmother's house on Evergreen Avenue. I believe this could be the last photo taken of all my siblings and my parents together. There might be another one, but I don't seem to have it....

**21 St. Helens Avenue was the original address of the house when it was built. The street name and number changed over time, but I use the original address to protect the privacy of the current owners.

Additional blogs about the haunting:
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 1, An Introduction
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 2, The House
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 3, This Is Us
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 4, Arrival
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 5, Methodology
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 6, Clara's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 7, Clara's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 8, My Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 9, My Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 10, My Tale, Pt. 3
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 11, Natalia's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 12, Natalia's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 13, John's Tale, Pt. 1 
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 14, John's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 15, Come Inside!
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 16, Marion's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 17, Marion's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 18, Jeanne's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 19, Jeanne's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 20, Lisa's Tale
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 21, Recap, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 22, Recap, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 23, Recap, Pt. 3

My novel Chapel Street was inspired by the haunting. You can currently buy the Kindle and paperback at Amazon and the Nook, paperback and hardcover at Barnes & Noble.


Learn more about the book, click Here.

Follow me on Twitter: SeanPaulMurphy
Follow me on Facebook: Sean Paul Murphy
Follow me on Instagram: Sean Paul Murphy
Subscribe on YouTube: Sean Paul Murphy

Sunday, October 6, 2019

The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 4, Arrival

The Baltimore Sun, 16 March 1974
My upcoming novel Chapel Street was inspired by my experiences growing up in a "haunted" house at 21 St. Helens Avenue* in the Northeast Baltimore neighborhood of Lauraville. This series of blogs will examine the actual haunting that inspired the book. My previous blogs dealt with the history of the house and its previous occupants and the history of my immediate family. Now, it's finally time for us to move in.

Things were definitely getting crowded at home at 5507 Hamlet Avenue. The house had three bedrooms -- well, more like two and a half. My parents occupied the big bedroom in the front of the house. My brother Dougie and I shared the adjacent bedroom. When my sister Laura was born, she was given the small bedroom at the back of the house. My brother Mark was the next born. He moved in with Dougie and me. Dougie and I shared bunk beds. Mark slept on a small single. Then my sister Jeanne was born. She was relegated to a bunk bed in the back room with Laura.

The girls' bedroom was tiny. More like a closet than a bedroom. In fact, the last time the house was on the market, I attended the open house. I was not surprised to see that the girls' room was being used as a closet. Needless to say, something had to change. Our growing family needed a bigger home. And my mother found it, via the advertisement in the Baltimore Sun shown above, in 1974.**

Despite the obvious need for change, I personally looked at the prospect of moving with dread. Not out of any fear of the supernatural. I just didn't want to move. I really liked the neighborhood. I knew everybody. I liked everybody. I also liked my school. I was currently in the seventh grade at St. Dominic Elementary School, and I didn't want to switch.

Find me, if you dare.
I didn't have to worry about it. I was relieved to hear that the new house was only about seven blocks away from our current home. I would remain at St. D., which was actually closer to our new house than our old one. Also, my friends in the old neighborhood were only a quick walk or bike ride away. I actually got excited about the move. I was soon quizzing my friends in school who lived by the new house about the street. I also found myself biking by it on occasion.

The sale of the house was conducted by Mariam Mayfort's cousin Gordon H. Witherspoon, Sr., a prominent lawyer and politician. My father Douglas had previously met him at the University of Baltimore Law School. I believe I am the first of the kids to actually step inside the new house. I went there with my mother one afternoon prior to the estate sale. Mr. Witherspoon was offering my mother first choice of any item that interested her. I only remember being on the first floor, and it left a strong impression. The Mayfort furniture seemed old and oversized and the house itself was very dark. Not in a spiritual sense. In a strictly physical manner. Although it was bright outside, thick curtains held back the light. However, I wasn't afraid. Nor was I overly excited. Looking back, you would have thought I would have taken that opportunity to stake out my bedroom, but I didn't. I don't even remember going upstairs.

Before we go any further I want to give you the physical layout of the house. The geography of the house is important to understand the haunting.***

On the first floor, the front door opened into an entrance hall. We would eventually put an upright piano in that room against the outer wall under one of the many stained glass windows. A stairs from the entrance hall led to the landing between the first and second floors where Miss Miriam was said to have tumbled to her death. (She may have indeed tumbled, but she ultimately died in the hospital.****) A set of stairs in the middle of the landing led to the second floor. Another set of stairs at the end of the landing led back down into the dining room.

Our piano teacher, who was also a talented expressionist
painter and WWI veteran, Alfred A Kirk with my late sister Laura.

Heading back from entrance hall, you walked past the door to the basement into the large dining room. I won't bother with the basement since I don't recall hearing of any phenomenon down there. (So much for radon, skeptics.)***** A tiny little kitchen extended from the southwest corner of the dining room. To the left of the dining room was the family room, which was diminished by the addition of the first floor half bath. Really cool pocket doors separated the living room from the family room on one side and the entrance hall on the other. Originally, my parents intended the living room for formal use only. However, that plan only survived a few months before we moved the television in from the smaller family room. Before long, my mother purchased an antique church pump organ and put it in the family room, first up against the wall of bathroom and later the inner wall that separated it from the dining room. (Hint: The organ would loom large in the haunting.)

My mother remembers hearing that Miss Mariam used the family room as her bedroom near the end of her life to avoid always walking up and down the stairs. (In retrospect, a very wise idea.) My mother also remembers a day bed in the room when she took her first tour.

My surviving sister Jeanne playing the organ
when it was located against the bathroom wall

When you walked up the stairs to the second floor, the first door on the left led to Bedroom A, Front West. (I will identify the bedrooms by letters since the occupants of the various rooms would shift over the long decades our family lived at the house.) This bedroom, which looked out onto St. Helens Avenue, was the smallest of the three on the second floor. However, it featured a nice bay window on the front and one side window and a closet. Directly across from the top of the stairs was Bedroom B, Front East. It was large and square, and had three windows but no closet. Bedroom C was adjacent to Bedroom B. It was the largest bedroom in the house. I'm sure it would be considered the master bedroom today. It had a bay window overlooking Harford Road. It also had the only door leading to the large, enclosed sunporch, which was added sometime after the original construction of the house. The room also featured a large closet. That closet would prove to be the most interesting feature on the second floor.

The full bathroom sat across the hall from Bedroom C. They shared adjacent closets, separated by a thin interior wall. There was also a connected linen closet between the two rooms that opened onto the second floor hallway. Strangely, however, there was a window at the end of the closet between the bedroom and the bathroom. The window was still functional, but now opened onto the sunporch. It was obvious that these three closets were once a single room prior to the addition of the sunporch. But what kind of room? It seemed too small to be an adult bedroom.

We speculate that it was once a nursery. If so, it was probably never used as intended. To our knowledge, my youngest brother John was the first infant to live in the house. The main reason I went to visit the Mayfort graves in Loudon Park Cemetery before I started writing these blogs was to make sure there were no infants in the family plot. The purpose of that discarded room, and who might have lived in it, grew in importance to us. Over the years, we came to believe that those closets were the cold, dark heart of the house. Whatever lived there with us, lived in those closets.******

There were also two bedrooms on the third floor. The back one, with a wonderful view of the city stretching from the Inner Harbor to Sparrow's Point, was the largest of the two. I'll just call that one my room, since I was the only member of my family who ever lived in it. The front room, which overlooked St. Helens Avenue, had many occupants over the years. We'll call that one The Hell Room. Although the entity seemed attached to the closets on the second floor, for a period during the mid-to-late-1980s, it made its presence felt very strongly in that room. Trust me, you don't earn the moniker of The Hell Room for nothing!

My lovely wife Deborah in the Hell Room
during the auction of the house in 2013.

I might have been the first one of the kids to step inside the house, but I missed the move entirely. I had always been very allergic to poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac, and I was suffering from the worst case ever in my life at the time. I had poison sumac all over my face. If I slept on my right side, the liquid under my skin would pool on the right and puff up that side of my face. The reverse was true if I slept on my left. I was pretty gross to look at. So, during the move, I was sent to stay at my grandmother's house on Evergreen Avenue, where I slept upright in a chair in the living room. I was disappointed to have missed out on the move, but, in retrospect, I can console myself that I managed to avoid a great deal of physical labor!

My sister Jeanne often said moving to the house at St. Helens Avenue was like moving to a castle. Not only was it larger than the old house on Hamlet Avenue, there were many nooks and crannies and cubby holes to explore. It was an adventure. My older brother Dougie and I thought, since the old owner had died without an heir, that there was probably money hidden somewhere around the house. We searched for it in vain. Fun.

Despite the fact that the house had five bedrooms, my parents maintained their old three bedroom mindset.******* They took bedroom A for themselves. They assigned us boys bedroom B where we had the same arrangement as we did on Hamlet Avenue. Dougie and I slept in bunk beds and Mark had his own bed. Dougie, however, did not tolerate the situation long. On his own initiative he claimed the front room in the attic -- The Hell Room. Not be outdone, I claimed the back bedroom in the attic. Now, Mark had bedroom B to himself until the arrival of our baby brother John.

Still, despite the fact that I had my own cool bedroom in the attic, I must admit I was a little envious of my sisters. Perhaps because they had been relegated so long to that crappy little room on Hamlet Avenue, my parents gave them the largest bedroom. I didn't necessarily envy them the bedroom. I envied them the sunporch, which I considered the coolest part of the house. It was essentially theirs. You could only access it through their bedroom.

But it was just as well.

A day or two after our family moved into house, my sister Laura was out in the backyard. She looked up at the sunporch to see a woman looking down at her.

So it began.

The sunporch
Notes:

*21 St. Helens Avenue was the original address of the house when it was built. The street name and number changed over time, but I use the original address to protect the privacy of the current owners.

**My mother actually heard about the house from a friend: Amelia Darrah.  I will not be correcting the text itself.

***My niece Marion is working on getting the original blueprints. I will include them when she finds them.

****Conversations with older neighbors after the posting of this blog confirmed that Miriam Mayfort died on the landing in the house. She must have only been "officially" declared dead at the hospital.

*****Since publishing this blog, I have learned there were incidents in the basement. I am not correcting the text because this is good example about how little we discussed the haunting among ourselves.

******After my family left, the next owner of 21 St. Helens Avenue started remodeled the house. However, right before he moved out, he tore out the walls in the master bedroom -- and the closets -- with a hammer.

******My father apparently had plans for the third floor. He originally wanted to turn my room into a library and turn the Hell Room into his study. Near the end of his life, he would walk up to the Hell Room late at night to talk to someone or something.....

Additional blogs about the haunting:
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 1, An Introduction
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 2, The House
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 3, This Is Us
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 4, Arrival
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 5, Methodology
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 6, Clara's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 7, Clara's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 8, My Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 9, My Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 10, My Tale, Pt. 3
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 11, Natalia's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 12, Natalia's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 13, John's Tale, Pt. 1 
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 14, John's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 15, Come Inside!
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 16, Marion's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 17, Marion's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 18, Jeanne's Tale, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 19, Jeanne's Tale, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 20, Lisa's Tale
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 21, Recap, Pt. 1
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 22, Recap, Pt. 2
The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue, Part 23, Recap, Pt. 3

My novel Chapel Street was inspired by the haunting. You can currently buy the Kindle and paperback at Amazon and the Nook, paperback and hardcover at Barnes & Noble.


Learn more about the book, click Here.

Follow me on Twitter: SeanPaulMurphy
Follow me on Facebook: Sean Paul Murphy
Follow me on Instagram: Sean Paul Murphy
Subscribe on YouTube: Sean Paul Murphy

Thursday, October 3, 2019

Churches Making Movies FIlm Festival -- October 11 - 13, 2019



The seventh annual Churches Making Movies Film Festival will be held on the weekend of October 11-13th at Fellowship Deaconry Christian Retreat Center in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. I have attended the festival nearly every year since its inception and I have always had a wonderful time.

This year I hope to provide a little inspiration myself. Co-founder LaVonne McIver James asked me to conduct a Screenwriter's Bootcamp on Saturday between 10am and 2pm. That's four hours, folks! My students at Towson University only have to tolerate me for three hours at a time!

The website says I will unlock your inner screenwriter and help turn your script dreams in reality. Seems like a laudable goal. During the bootcamp, I will discuss the basic structure and philosophy of screenwriting and the specific challenges and rewards of the faith-based marketplace. However, I intend to spend most of the time dealing with questions from the attendees, and advising them how to achieve their goals.

Yours truly at the festival with comedienne G.L, Douglas

I hope to see you there!

Check out the website:  Churches Making Movies

And also check out my memoir, The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God. It is my true story of first faith and first love and how the two became almost fatally intertwined. (I have a feeling you might be able to get a signed copy at the Festival.)




Here are some sample chapters:
Chapter 7 - Mission Accomplished
Chapter 15 - Quarter To Midnight

Follow me on Twitter: SeanPaulMurphy
Follow me on Facebook: Sean Paul Murphy
Follow me on Instagram: Sean Paul Murphy
Subscribe on YouTube: Sean Paul Murphy