Author Megaera Lorenz: A Ghost in Guam

In this month’s instalment of “Author(ized) Accounts of the Paranormal and Unexplained,” Megaera Lorenz, author of The Shabti, will tell us the story of a mysterious spectre who visited her childhood home when she lived in Guam…

I wish I had an Egyptological ghost story for you. Alas, aside from some very eerie-sounding radiators in the ISAC Research Archives where I spent many hours in grad school, my Egyptology adventures haven’t involved even a whiff of the supernatural. Most of my possible ghost encounters have been of the classic haunted house variety.

My best stories come from Guam, where I spent my formative childhood years. I lived there from ages 7 to 16—my parents were faculty at the university. The island has a rich tradition of ghost stories, many of which are scary as hell. The ancestral spirits of the indigenous people are called taotaomon’a in the CHamoru language, and they are said to inhabit the nunu (banyan/strangler fig) trees that grow on the island.

Local legend has it that the taotaomon’a can be extremely dangerous to anyone who doesn’t treat them with respect. As a kid, I was never sure what to think about ghosts. But after hearing a few taotaomon’a tales, you can be damn sure I always paid my respects to those nunu trees before approaching one. 

I never ran afoul of a taotaomon’a, but I might have seen one. During our last few years on Guam, my family lived in a duplex in the beautiful village of Ipan, Talo’fo’fo, on the southern end of the island. I shared a room, and a bunk bed, with my little brother. I slept in the top bunk, he slept on the bottom. I had several cages full of pet finches at the time, which stood against the wall that faced the foot of our bed, next to the bathroom door.

One night, I woke to see a woman standing next to the bed, staring at me. My first groggy thought was that she was my mother, but I quickly realized she wasn’t. She was a faint, ghostly figure with long, silver hair and a long, white dress. I don’t have a clear impression of what her face looked like, but I got the sense she was an older woman. We looked at each other for a moment, and then she turned and walked away. As she approached the area where the bird cages stood, she raised her arms up over her head like she was stretching, then vanished.

I would have dismissed the experience as a waking dream or some kind of sleep paralysis hallucination, and I guess that’s still the most likely explanation. But I wasn’t the only one to see her. Some time later—I can’t remember if it was weeks or months—my brother said that he, too, woke up to see a strange woman standing by our bed. She walked over to the bird cages, bent down and reached toward one of them, then disappeared.

The final encounter in the Ipan house, and perhaps the most striking one, happened during one of the island’s routine blackouts. My mother, my brother, and I were all sitting in the bedroom, facing the door, when the lights went out. The three of us were all wide awake, and we all saw a shadowy figure in the doorway. It stood there swaying slightly. When we shone a flashlight on it, nothing was there. We couldn’t find any obvious source for the shadow, but it reappeared any time we turned off the flashlight.

Whatever (or whoever) was in our house, none of us ever felt frightened by her presence. She seemed curious, but not hostile. Maybe, after most of the island’s native bird population was decimated by the invasive brown tree snake that was introduced in the 1940s-50s, she just liked seeing birds again.

If you’re interested in learning more about Guam’s taotaomon’a, there’s an interesting article about them here.

Author Interview

The Night Librarian: What a haunting story. You mentioned you’re an Egyptologist. How has your profession influenced your writing? 

Megaera:  I’m an Egyptologist, and ancient Egypt has been a major theme in many of my writing projects since childhood. This is certainly true of my debut novel, The Shabti, which features an Egyptologist as one of the two lead characters and is centered around a haunted ancient Egyptian artifact.

The ancient Egyptians produced plenty of excellent ghost stories, which are a fabulous source of inspiration when I’m writing about the supernatural. I was also able to draw on my knowledge of their complex funerary beliefs and customs.

My profession has also humanized my view of the past. When you study an ancient culture in depth, you spend a lot of time looking at the less glamorous aspects of that culture, which are often overlooked in popular representations. You end up reading laundry lists, letters, scribal homework assignments, and the ancient equivalent of complaints to HR. You marvel over a thumbprint impressed on an ancient clay potsherd or the chisel marks left behind on an unfinished statue. The monuments of kings and gods are breathtaking, but it’s the oddly relatable traces left behind by ordinary people that really fascinate me.

Without getting too spoilery, that’s an important theme in The Shabti, too. For good or ill, humanity really hasn’t changed all that much over the past several millennia.

The Night Librarian: Tell us the wildest source of inspiration for your latest project.

Megaera: One of the weirdest inspirations for The Shabti was a story I read about 10 years ago, about a supposedly haunted Egyptian statuette in the Manchester Museum. The statue would slowly rotate in its display cabinet throughout the day, baffling the curators. One of the Egyptologists at the museum, Campbell Price, was the first person to broach the idea that the object might be haunted or cursed. After all, he was the only person with the key to the case, so nobody was moving it without his knowledge!

The alleged haunting caused quite a stir on the internet, with speculations ranging from genuine supernatural causes to a prank by Dr. Price himself. Eventually, the museum staff settled on the explanation that the statue, which has a slightly convex base, was turning due to vibrations caused (at least in part) by traffic on the road outside. The statue has since had a non-slip material added to its base to keep it at rest.  

I believe this is the very same article I read back in 2013.

The Night Librarian: Who is your writing idol?

Megaera: My favorite author is P. G. Wodehouse, and there’s a fair bit of his DNA in my writing. His prose is delicious (and of course, utterly hilarious), but I think it’s his unmatched ability to create distinctive, eccentric character voices that really speaks to me.

Follow Megaera: Website | Instagram | BlueSky | Twitter/X

Faced with a real ghost Dashiel is terrified, but when the haunting takes a dangerous turn, he must use the tools of the shady trade he left behind to communicate with this otherworldly spirit before his past closes in.