Author Nicole M. Wolverton: A Haunting By Candlelight

In this month’s instalment of “Author(ized) Accounts of the Paranormal and Unexplained,” Nicole M. Wolverton, author of A Misfortune of Lake Monsters will tell us the story of her paranormal encounter while touring an old penitentiary in Philadelphia…

Take a tour of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia anytime around Halloween, and you’ll be running the gauntlet of their fun-house haunted attraction, with actors jumping out at you from dark corners. Decades ago, though, somber tour guides led visitors through this abandoned prison by candlelight—and I was one such visitor.

The penitentiary is considered the mother of solitary confinement for the incarcerated, the idea of the prison hatched in Ben Franklin’s house back in 1787. The night that I entered the prison for the first time, the gray granite walls surrounding the place felt foreboding, let alone the tiny cells. My husband and I were stopped at the hulking front gates and given hard-hats: it was too dangerous to enter without them, as the prison was still being rehabbed from its long abandonment. It was the first clue that this candlelight ghost tour was a bad idea. But it was Halloween, and we were in the mood to be scared. Other people had gone on the tour before us, and there were around ten other people in our tour group. What could possibly go wrong… right?

As we passed through the main doors, a guide lit our white candles and led us down a crumbling hall into the central rotunda. The prison was dark and gloomy. It was cold, almost bitterly so—a mirror to the early freeze Philadelphia was experiencing that night. There was no light in the rotunda save for our candles and a few security lights affixed to the floor. The glow only reached a few feet into each cellblock that spun off from the space, leave me with the feeling that something angry and frozen stared at our group from the dark.

The tour guide began her spiel. “There is one ghost story that most people have heard—that of locksmith Gary Johnson. He’d been working in Cellblock 4.” Yes, I had heard the story before. And maybe it was only the suggestion of the locksmith feeling a presence during his restoration work that made the cold fingers sliding over my ankle seem so real.

“That’s when he saw a shadowy figure,” the tour guide said. “It jumped from one side of the cellblock to another. That’s when he decided he was done with work for the night.” She laughed.

The cold fingers tightened around my ankle.

There was no one standing anywhere near me. “Do you feel that?” I whispered to my husband.

He shook his head.

We moved down the corridor toward cellblock 3, passed by the operating room. The fingers on my ankle slipped away. I shivered and laughed it off. All in my head, that’s all it could be. Just ghost stories.

After the tour of the cellblocks and more than a few spooky stories of the penitentiary ghosts, our candles were snuffed. We ducked into a lit room with display cases full of weapons discovered in cells over the years. Shanks made of toothbrushes and combs. A sharpened butter knife. It was entirely enclosed, no windows, underground—nearly claustrophobic.

The cold fingers on my ankle all but forgotten, I crossed through a doorway into a different section of the room—and a frigid wind hit me in the chest hard enough to knock me backward. The wind was a physical feeling that pushed through me: I could feel it exit my back. I stumbled into my husband, who righted me.

“Did you feel that?”

Again, maybe it was all just my imagination, the suggestion of hauntings. Or maybe it was something else: later that night when we got back home, I was changing for bed—and there, exactly where the wind had hit me, was a hand-shaped bruise.

Author Interview

The Night Librarian: I’ve got chills! But I think (hope) it’s from your story and not a supernatural presence. That sounds like an amazing tour. Can you tell us about how you do research for your writing?

Nicole:  I’m a fan of experiential research whenever possible. Sure, some things you really can’t do that with—when I was outlining my first book, The Trajectory of Dreams (an adult psychological thriller), I needed to burn down an apartment building on the page… but it’s not like I could actually torch a building. That said, it’s clear folks thought I was trying to: the number of firefighters who straight up refused to answer my questions about the most efficient way to commit arson is, well, it’s a lot! But for my young adult horror novel, A Misfortune of Lake Monsters, that’s out on July 2, 2024, I was able to do quite a bit of hands-on research. It maybe sounds a bit odd to say that about a horror novel involving cryptids, but it’s true: I was able to visit Loch Ness in Scotland and engage in a bit of Loch Ness Monster hunting myself. There’s something to be said for getting an up-close look at what a lake big enough to potentially contain a lake monster of Nessie’s reputed size. Being able to get the feel of a ferry engine beneath your feet as it squires you around the loch is something you just can’t get from a book.

Neither is the feeling of being in a reputedly haunted space like Eastern State Penitentiary—or having an experience like mine. I’ve called on that sensation on more than a few occasions while I’m writing. One day I’d really love write a short horror story or novel set at the penitentiary because there are an incredible array of primary sources available in Philadelphia. A project I worked on as an undergraduate was a short story that was more of a thriller involving an investigation of prisoner abuse under warden Samuel Wood, back when the penitentiary was called the Prison at Cherry Hill. It’s a fascinating trial, and I was able to look at transcripts, diaries, etc., among other documents.

The Night Librarian: Your visit to the penitentiary sounds like it will inspire a spooky horror short story! Tell us the wildest source of inspiration for your latest project.

Nicole: My current work-in-progress is a locked-door young adult horror novel that is set in a closed-for-the-night organic grocery store. To tell you much more would be to spoil a lot, but I can tell you that it involves the relics of a Catholic saint, a very specific body part relic, to be exact. The inspiration for the story came, in part, from a weird habit I picked up some years back. My husband and I travel fairly often—about 24 countries and counting—and something I always work in to the itinerary is visiting Catholic churches to see the bodies of incorruptible saints and/or religious relics. I’m an atheist but grew up in the Methodist church. I’ve never been Catholic. Yet I’m absolutely fascinated by saints, their often very weird origin stories, and the idea of publicly displaying “incorrupt” corpses and random bones for veneration. I think my first incorruptible body was Saint Christina the Great Martyr, who died in the 1200s—she’s been moved around a lot, but she’s currently in a glass casket inside the Church of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice, Italy—it took two separate trips to Venice to find the church, and on the day I did find it, I got lost three times trying to get there. All I can say is that it was worth the effort.

The strangest incorrupt body I’ve seen has to be Saint Catherine of Bologna, an abbess who died in 1463. She is displayed in the Chiesa della Santa in Bologna, Italy—and when I say displayed, I mean displayed: she is sitting upright on a gold chair, wearing a pristine brown and white habit, and she is encased in glass. In the room where she resides, dozens of bone relics from other saints and holy folk are laid out in reliquaries. It’s the wildest thing I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. It even inspired a non-horror short story that was published a few years back in Aji magazine. In the case of my work-in-progress, the relics involved are items I have not seen in person, although I hope to one day. I just have to make it to Cairo, Egypt. Gee, twist my arm.

The Night Librarian: How do you prioritize self care and wellness into your routine?

Nicole: Travel is one way! A few months ago when the cover reveal for A Misfortune of Lake Monsters was about to drop, a fellow author DM’d me on Instagram to warn me that I might feel weirdly let down afterward, like this big thing happened, and now there’s a depressing slump. Who wants to go through that, right? So the day after my reveal, I hopped a plane to Barcelona to hang out in Christmas markets and eat tapas. It’s impossible to even think about a cover reveal when you’re laughing at caganer shops or groaningly full of patatas bravas. Sadly, it was the wrong time of year to visit the incorruptible body of Saint Olegarius at the Cathedral of Barcelona (only in March!). I’m also more than willing to be slothful when I feel like my writing isn’t going very well or going slowly, which I absolutely feel is self-care. There’s this attitude that writers have to work, work, work every day. Write or die. Produce or perish. My brain needs rest occasionally, so I don’t feel even a lick of guilt if I take a week or a month off, whatever it takes to get back into the right headspace for creativity. If I have to binge-watch the very awesome three seasons of The Santa Clarita Diet with which we were gifted in order to return to writing form, I’m doing it. Beyond that, I’m an avid dragon boater in the warmer months (I’m an assistant coach and steersperson for a team of cancer survivors and their caregivers, although I used to race competitively) and a knitter, both of which are excellent for achieving a zen state of mind. And honestly, writing horror is a form of self-care. My masters thesis revolved around research findings that people who regularly consumer horror media proved more resilient during the earliest parts of the pandemic—reading a horror novel or writing a new one is incredibly relaxing most of the time.

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When a very real, and very hungry monster is discovered in the lake, secrets must fall by the wayside. Determined to stop the monster, Lemon and her best friends are the only thing standing between Devil’s Elbow and the monster out for blood.