For me, the journey down
Chapel Street was long and arduous.
I began writing the novel in earnest, originally titled
RestingPlace.com in October of 2016. My first draft was completed in May of 2017. Eight months. Not bad. I wrote it almost entirely while working for National Geographic. I worked nights. During the days, I would wake up around noon and go downstairs and write for an hour or two. When I went to work, I would email the draft to myself. On slow nights, when my work was done, I would download it at NatGeo and continue writing.
The novel is about a man battling a demonic curse that had driven his family members to suicide for generations. As it began taking shape, I would leave a printout for my lovely wife Deborah to read while I was away. She found the story frightening. So frightening that she didn't want to stay home alone at night. She would retreat to the bright lights of the Horseshoe Casino in downtown Baltimore. I began to fear that the book would never return enough money to compensate for those losses!
One of the reasons why my wife found
Chapel Street so frightening, aside from my narrative skills, was the fact that she knew the story behind the novel. Or at least bits and pieces of it.
Chapel Street didn't really begin in October of 2016. It began in late April or early May of 1974, when my family moved into 21 St. Helens Avenue in the leafy Lauraville neighborhood of Northeast Baltimore. Our family of two parents and five children, soon to be joined by a sixth, had no idea at the time that the house was inhabited by a demonic presence.
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| 21 St. Helens Avenue |
The entity was insidious. It eschewed major shows of force in the beginning, preferring instead to concentrate on spiritual and psychological attacks on a few specific individuals. I had no direct encounters with the entity myself until nearly ten years later. After my mother and a friend had an ill-advised Ouija board session in the empty front attic bedroom, the paranormal activity in the house escalated dramatically. Now it made itself known. There was no denying what was going on. It would generally prey on one person -- or couple -- a night. You could always tell who it was: You'd find them sleeping on the sofa in the living room the next morning. However, the details of the attacks stayed private. Since we feared that talking about the entity empowered it, we never discussed it in any detail.
This was not fun and games. It was deadly serious. The house exuded a menacing sense of oppression. People lapsed into depression. Even before the Ouija board incident, I had attempted suicide in the living room. I did not attribute my actions to any paranormal activity at the time. Now I am not so sure. Because I was not alone. My sister
Laura and my brother
Mark both committed suicide. Other members of the family also attempted to do so. There were also things I call suicide events. They were supernatural interventions that, if played out as intended, would have resulted in a death that would have appeared to have been suicide.
Here's one. At the height of the haunting, for a number of consecutive nights, I awoke to find myself climbing out of my third floor bedroom window at precisely three in the morning. Always three in the morning. A fall from the roof outside of my window would have definitely been fatal. And the only explanation could have been suicide. Needless to say, I was horrified. Only a constant barrage of prayers ended these occurrences. That experience would eventually became the cornerstone of the novel.
The lethal intent of the entity -- or entities -- was obvious. However, I suspect now that it couldn't actually kill us. It had to make us kill ourselves....
My family finally left the house in 2005. We still didn't talk about it. There had been incidents where the entity appeared when people talked about it. It was best to remain quiet. However, sometime in 2016, my mother pulled me aside and asked me if I thought the entity in the house was responsible -- in part -- for the deaths of my sister and brother.
I had been wondering the same thing myself. I dealt with my attempted suicide in my memoir
The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God. While I was writing the book, I really couldn't rationally explain the mental, emotional and spiritual collapse which led to it. In retrospect, suicide seemed a wildly disproportionate response to my emotional state and utterly out of character. Did I unknowingly fall victim to the entity's psychological and spiritual manipulations? More importantly, did my siblings? Was there a spiritual or supernatural aspect to their deaths that we missed? That was a sobering thought. Whenever there are suicides, there is always survivors guilt among the loved ones left behind. My mother's questions played on that.
Chapel Street was my attempt to explore that disturbing possibility in the safety of fiction. My protagonist Rick Bakos, a young man much like myself, is emotionally crippled by a series of suicides in his family. When he finds himself waking up every night climbing over railing of his tenth story apartment balcony, he slowly uncovers the supernatural cause for the suicidal mayhem in his family.
Although the book is also a romance, the central relationship is between Rick and his late brother Lenny. I very much drew upon my relationship with my late brother Mark. In the novel, Lenny -- or a clever simulation -- appears frequently to his brother Rick.
I can't say that Mark made any post-death appearances to me in real life, but I believe I captured him in the character of Lenny. Mark, sadly, wrestled with mental illness during much of his adult life. As a result of his madness, we were sometimes estranged. However, in calmer times, he periodically confided in me about his experiences with mental illness and the conditions and the routines in the hospitals where he found himself.
I also developed
Chapel Street's villain Betty, in part. from a reference Mark made in his suicide note about an ominous, unexplained dark woman. The actual name Betty came from a now-deceased Frederick, Maryland, fortune-teller my mother and some of her friends visited. Unlike the cheery mediums one finds on reality TV shows, this Betty wasn't afraid to give bad news. She told my mother that two of her children would commit suicide. She was right. (So far.) My mother, however, assumed it would be Mark and myself. I can't blame her. That was the safe bet. My sister Laura's suicide was a stunning surprise that crushed our family. However, Laura herself had visited Betty a few short days before her death. I wonder what Betty told her....
My surviving sister Jeanne, who had never previously seen Betty, drove up to talk to her after Laura's death. Betty's first words to her were: "I did not kill your sister."
I wonder.
I must say that the only thing my mother found unfair about the book was naming the villain after Betty. She contends Betty was a nice woman.... Fortunately, she did not object to the depiction of the mother in the book. I had warned her, anytime I discussed the book, that the mother
was not based on her. She was, however, based on the late mother of a late friend of mine.
Chapel Street intersects with me, and my family and our experiences at 21 St. Helens Avenue in countless ways -- albeit in a highly exaggerated manner. My sister, upon reading the rough draft of the novel, called it a cartoon version of our experiences. She's right. I am simply not a talented enough writer to adequately convey the more subtle horrors of the actual events at 21 St. Helens Avenue. But I believed I truly captured the maddening terror of being deliberately tormented by an entity beyond the human realm.
So that's the history of the book. When I finished it, I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. I essentially sat on the manuscript for years, aside from periodically sending it out to find an agent. Eventually, I decided to send it to Sheri Williams at TouchPoint Press, who had previously published my memoir, to see what she thought of it. She liked it, so I let her have it.
I think it is a great book, and I hope it will be adapted into a film. I'm sure it'd be a home run at the box office. However, even if the book never sells a single copy, it is already a success to me because it proved to be the impetus to finally get my family talking about our experiences. That was long overdue. Although I was already working on another novel, I put it aside to start compiling an oral history of the house at 21 St. Helens Avenue and the events that took place inside of it. People ask me if that will become a book one day. I don't know. The prospect doesn't enthuse me. I like happy endings, and it's hard to turn what happened to my family into a win.
Oh well.
I would like to take this opportunity to again thank my lovely wife Deborah for her undying love and support. I am also indebted to my friend and editor
Trish Schweers, who always manages to hammer my work into shape against all odds. My beta readers, Patty Gehret and
Beth White Werrell, also contributed heavily to this book with their red ink. I would also like to thank my editor
Kimberly Coghlan, who managed to pull me across the finish line, and
Colbie Myles for the cover art. I am also grateful to my fellow authors and media professionals, including
K.A. Hitchens,
Krista Wagner,
Kenji Gallo,
Jamie A. Hope,
Sydnye White and
John Molli, for their advice and kind words.
I also want to thank
J. Bryan Barnes and
Megan Luckeroth for the author photo, which was taken at
Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery -- an important location in the book.
Finally, I must thank
Sheri Williams and the good folks at
TouchPoint Press. Sheri showed a lot of faith in me when she published my oddball memoir
The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God. She is showing equal faith with this book. I hope it is rewarded.
Here are my blogs about the actual haunting that inspired the book:
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
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