New Story, Old Tale Again

Today, I’m presenting another edited repost from my old blog Vree Erickson. This one delves deeper into the “behind the scenes” of Ridgewood, Lenny Avery, and Vree. Enjoy.

* * *

Before there was Ridgewood, there was Ravenwood, a fictional town that I named after Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem. In the center of the town was Myers Lake, named after Alice Myers, an incredibly old woman who lived alone in an ancient Victorian mansion at the lake. She was frail and stooped, walked with a cane, and never left her property. She lived with several cats to keep her company and had no living relatives. The local pastor mowed her lawn and trimmed her hedges in the summer, raked her yard in the fall, shoveled her walk in the winter, and delivered groceries every Saturday. Only he, the mail carrier, newspaper boy, and meter readers ever visited. No one else. And so, rumors and stories sprang up among the kids in the neighborhood that the reclusive “Old Lady Myers” was a witch, that her house was haunted, and that she caught and ate runaway children and stray pets who trespassed on her property.

One day, 9-year-old Owen Burkhart and his parents moved across the street from the “witch’s house.” He heard plenty of tales about Old Lady Myers’s special meals, so he was cautious not to go near the house or let Max, his Toy Fox Terrier, off its leash. Every day he had to deal with the suspicion that his neighbor was evil and to trespass on her property would bring certain doom, which is why he played in the backyard behind his house out of sight of the old woman and her evil house.

Then one day when he was eleven and it was the last day of school, he came running home, excited to start summer vacation. The coroner’s hearse had just left the driveway at the witch’s house, which excited him more when he learned that Old Lady Myers had died. The neighborhood threat was gone, but the bad omen he felt about the property never left him. That summer, someone threw a rock and broke a front window at the old house. The lawn grew into brambles and weeds. By October, the place looked spookier than ever before, and rumors had started that Old Lady Myers’s ghost now haunted the place.

Owen wanted to move far away from that creepy house. But a pretty girl changed his mind when she and her family moved into the place and fixed it up. By the following summer, Old Lady Myers was a foggy, faraway memory, and her name only came up in spooky tales during Halloween.

My stories about Owen and the girl across the street grew along with my imagination. Myers Lake became Alice Lake. Ravenwood became Ridgewood. The pretty girl became Vree Erickson and ended up living in nearby New Cambridge. She stayed with her paternal grandparents on Myers Ridge when her college-professor parents went on archeology digs. Owen Burkhart died (and came back as a ghost), and then became Tommy Sorenson (who died and came back as a ghost). Lenny Stevens took his place until I named him Lenny Avery and moved him and his family across the road from Vree’s paternal grandparents.

When he was Lenny Stevens, his best friend was Dave Evans. I was 13 when I wrote my first story about Lenny and Dave. I was a teenager writing stories about teenagers. When I published my first book, the publisher listed it as a Young Adult story. Young Adult—or YA—is a big deal in the book industry. Other than Romance, it floods the market. It’s a category of fiction written for readers from 12 to 18 years of age. However, I don’t aim my stories at young readers when I write them but write for myself and my current age. Interestingly, while the genre is targeted to teenagers, some publishers report that roughly half of their YA readers are adults. And I’m one of those adult readers if the stories are plotted well, written well, and entertaining.

From my first Lenny and Dave story came a story about ghost dogs. From that story came one about hell hounds. And from that story came a vehicle for Vree. As a writer, I’m always building onto my plots. For “Night of the Hell Hounds,” I centered the story on Vree and put her in the middle of a spooky and mysterious Halloween night. It was a joy writing the story—which is often true for all the stories I write. Researching things like ghosts and spirits, hell hounds, witches, and magic are always delightful. The supernatural continues to spark my imagination. As I’ve said before, I love exploring supernatural themes, childhood friendships, and the conflicting sides of good and evil.

You can find “Night of the Hell Hounds” short story ebook at Amazon. Click Here to get your copy. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it.

That’s all for now.

Steve, 6/28/2022; revised and reposted 6/28/2023

This post “New Story, Old Tale Again” copyright © 2022/2023 Steven Leo Campbell at stevecampbellcreations.com – All rights reserved.