A chance listener to Danielle Matar’s Geist podcast led Margo MacDonald to A Curious Presence: An Exploration of Ghosts and the People Who Haunt Them.
She had been invited onto the show because she helped create and host Haunted Walks’ Alone in the Dark at the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres in Toronto. ECW Press acquiring editor Pia Singhal just happened to be listening.
“Out of the blue, she reached out to me to ask if I had ever considered writing a book,” MacDonald recalled during an early October Zoom call. “I was like, ‘Have I ever considered writing a book? Yes.’”
A Curious Presence is her debut book, forged from that spontaneous connection between Singhal and MacDonald. Developing the thrust of a non-fiction book was a challenge for a playwright, but a little brainstorming based on what Singhal heard on Geist gave MacDonald a plan.
“I knew I wanted to write something about ghosts at some point, but I wasn’t fully sure what I wanted to say,” she said. “I set out to interview a handful of people, some of whom I knew and some I didn’t — but all people who had some sort of influence on my thinking about the paranormal.”
Split between interviews and investigations, MacDonald interweaves the ethereal and the corporeal. She speaks with Haunted Walks colleagues Glen Shackleton and Jim Dean, as well as skeptic Ciarán O’Keeffe and former Girly Ghosthunter Dana Newkirk and her husband Greg.
O’Keefe is known as one of the most renowned but open-minded critics of supernatural phenomena. MacDonald met the psychologist while investigating Oxford Castle and Prison and spoke with him before he gave a presentation.
“He’s wonderful; very easy to talk to,” the Ottawa-born playwright admitted. “As soon as I reached out to him, he immediately said yes and was happy to talk with me.
“I lucked out because … I really like his style,” she said. “He’s never dismissive or cruel to people in his evaluation of people’s experiences and so on.”
The investigations mix Canadian and British haunts. She even uses bait, including Haunted Walks Kingston colleague Jax Harrispersad and her friend Kelly Burke, who helped her explore Oxford Castle and Prison in Oxford, England.
“The other half of the book, interspersed, is of me going to haunted places, trying to experience some activity and being there in the haunted place, trying to go through what I’ve just learned from whoever I interviewed or bringing someone with me who I call my ghost bait,” MacDonald said with a laugh.
There are also moments when she offers herself up to the veil, just to see what comes of it.
“I’ve noticed that the greatest number of experiences that I’ve had have been in the company of other people,” she admitted. “I don’t know if maybe I’m more blocked off when I’m by myself or whatever, but I thought this is the way to do [investigations].”
The draw of the paranormal has always been there. She grew up as one of seven kids during the glut of paranormal pop culture many Gen Xers experienced. Her brother Glenn shared the interest, leaning more toward UFO phenomena.
“There’s something about the combination of the frisson of fear, but the fun of it as well,” MacDonald said. “My brain has remained very much divided like that: it’s really fun that ghosts exist or that we can believe in ghosts, or go out and investigate them.
“But my other side remains outside of that, looking at it skeptically,” she added. “From childhood, I was just fascinated by those mysterious things that we couldn’t explain and loved the little frisson of fear.”
A Curious Presence: An Exploration of Ghosts and the People Who Haunt Them is available wherever books are sold and through ECW Press. It hits shelves October 6.
Photo courtesy of Julie Riemersma