@natalunasans / natalunasans.tumblr.com
I still think that my favorite urban legend/folklore fact is that there are certain areas in New Orleans where you cannot get a taxi late at night not because it isn’t safe, but because taxi companies have had recurring problems of picking up ghosts in those areas who are not aware that they are dead and disappearing from the cab before reaching the destination and therefore stiffing the driver on the fare causing a loss for the company.
Hi there! I'm in the beginning of writing a supernatural/thriller story that has a blind character. I wanna avoid the whole "blind clairvoyant" thing so I'm putting a lot of thinking on how they interact with the scary stuff - think Supernatural season 1: how will they know it's a ghost, for example - without relying on the cliches: just "knows" everything, "sees" the future, etc. Do you think it works? Any tips? xD
Hey there! That totally works and there’s no reason a blind person can’t work with supernatural stuff.
So admittedly I don’t watch or read a ton of supernatural stuff and have never really seen much of the show Supernatural, but I know my basics of course as anyone does.
But like, ghosts. It isn’t just the visual that tips you off, is it? Lots of times ghosts also have a particular sound, or maybe some of their behaviors are coming off as suspicious, or the blind person is really close to them and can totally tell that there’s no physical body next to them because you can hear that it’s totally open over there with nothing blocking the sound. Ghosts can have lots of tells.
Other creatures would too, certainly. Again I don’t know much about this stuff and what your story specifically involves to give better examples, but there are lots of things that tip you off that someone isn’t human.
How about (this would only work if the blind person is standing on a wooden floor with floor joists, but): Hearing footsteps approaching, but not feeling the floor give way a little bit, underfoot, or not hearing the floorboards creak (because a ghost has no weight).
Maybe the ghost has “body odor” that smells like moldy earth.
There’s the old cliche of repeated/stereotypical noises, like “rattling chains,” or repeated phrases of music.
Or maybe the ghost’s “body” (the volume of space their physical body took up in life) is a markedly different temperature than the ambient air (either warmer or hotter).
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It’s not that blind people have “super senses” other than sight, but that sighted people rely on sight so much that we tend to ignore other information. …Also, the ghost stories we tell through TV and movies tend to rely on visual effects, for obvious reasons.
But if you check out old ghost stories from folklore – or better yet, regional legends linked to actual places / history, you might get some cool ideas.
What we want:
Short stories of up to 7,000 words by women writers, responding to the theme of ‘ghosts.’
