The French call it Le Mystère — the quality of being impossible to explain, a secret, an enigma, hidden motives. I love the phrase chargé de mystère which means shrouded in mystery. I have been learning French and on the trail of le mystère since I was tiny, it all took hold when I was four, thanks to a babysitter with a powder blue French dictionary. Also– our little ranch house in Atlanta, Georgia was haunted by a little girl just my age. She never left the kitchen, and hung out there when I was alone, and she was covered in burn scars, and I didn’t like her, but she was lonely. My family considered her my imaginary enemy, which they thought was funny because most kids have imaginary friends. When I was a bit older — five or six, I heard the story of a little neighbour girl, whose babysitter sat her on the gas stove. At that time gas stoves had a constant flame, and her dress caught fire. The ran with her outside where the wind was blowing and it was an absolute horror show. After that my mother always loathed gas stoves. And that is who I think was in our kitchen. One of those annoying neighbours who won’t go away.

What I find, over and over, and it’s a constant shock, is that there is scientific basis for most of this, maybe all of this. My youngest daughter’s favourite subject is physics, and she is very good at explaining the science of quantum physics, giving the nightmare hauntings an academic grounding. So when Carl Jung writes about synchronicity, and M. Scott Peck, who wrote People Of The Lie: The Hope For Healing Human Evil goes from total. non believer to doing exorcisms it’s shocking. When you read studies from sociologists who do a survey of the kind of people who are considered legitimately possessed, and you find out they are male, forties, affluent — these studies are eye opening particularly when they are done by academic types with no experience in the world of woo woo. When people being haunted call the police and there are actual videos — how can you not give that some thought? My latest shocking science discovery is that people don’t die when their hearts stop. In fact, there is intense brain activity and cell regeneration. That had me off and running with my latest novel MIRROR TWIN, which comes out this March.

I do. Unimaginable evil is so often human based, so it’s hard to ignore that one. Our brains like to view the world in algorithms, so your brain is only going to let you see what your brain makes sense of and it’s going to interpret based on that. If we saw without our brains screening things out like a pearl clutching kindergarten teacher . . . I think we’d be terrified. Daily. And haunted houses are a joke unless you live in one. I try really hard not to live in haunted houses, that said, to date I have lived in three for absolute sure. And may I just say that when you find a jar of holy water in the basement, don’t buy the house.

I want to be the character who tracks it down and fights it off. I don’t want to be the nonbeliever who dies, the sweet innocent victim, who dies. And I think it would be great fun to be the gothic heroine in a mysterious house on the moors, that comes with a sexy man who maybe you can . . . or cannot trust. I can’t think of anything better except the governess part where I have to look after the children.

I think you have to be smart about these things and walk in the light, and be confident that nothing can take you in unless you let it. But. Since I am fascinated by these things, and the obvious cool factor, I am going to be looking, thinking, researching, and making stories in my head. Which I try to be very careful about, because it makes me do things over and over that I wouldn’t go near except it’s for a book. That’s what makes me brave. And that’s what gets me in trouble.