Who Is Alice Myers?

I previously posted about the history of Ridgewood, a fictional town that appears in my stories and books featured here and at several online book markets. In that post, I mentioned a woman named Alice Myers, and in my haste to keep the post shorter than one of my short stories, I glossed over her life. My text read: 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.

That’s all I remembered about Alice Myers in that snapshot of her. I’d created her fifty-odd years ago at a wooden desk in a high school classroom that no longer exists except in yearbook photographs and vague memories. As an author of fiction, I create characters with lots of history, so I wondered if Alice had any living children or siblings, was ever married, and why she lived alone in a mansion with a lake behind it that bore her name. This led me on a search to find my old high school Creative Writing notebooks that held any history of her.

After a thorough search of my basement storeroom, voila! Inside a box of high school mementos, I found a page in a notebook that had Alice Myers scrawled in pencil and the words “self-sustaining—comes from a wealthy family that founded the town; self-sufficient—inherited northwest Pennsylvania oil money; unmarried; lives alone and likes her independence; the neighborhood kids call her a witch because she resembles the stereotype seen in movies and TV shows. She has white hair and wears it in a bun; wears a long black dress and black stockings and shoes; has a bicycle with a front basket that resembles the one the mean woman in the Wizard of Oz movie rode (she was also the wicked witch in Dorothy’s dream).”

From that single page, independent and wealthy Alice Myers came alive again. Though I listed no reasons why she became a recluse, I surmise that her advanced age kept her from leaving her house. She was a shut-in, remembered occasionally by anyone her age or older, and ignored by practically everyone else—Out of sight, out of mind, the saying goes. Only a few people were aware of her existence, and the neighborhood children were at the top of the list, even if they did let their imaginations run wild.

The changes I made to Ridgewood over the years shifted her mansion away from the center of town where a body of water called Myers Lake once sat. That lake is Alice Lake now and it sits at the western end of town at the foot of Myers Ridge. Her mansion sits atop the ridge and was turned into a creation built by my character Vree Erickson’s ancestor, Benjamin Myers, in my book Night of the Hell Hounds. The exact passage reads: Vree returned her gaze to the mansion built ninety years ago by her great-great-grandfather, a once-famous Broadway playwright named Benjamin Myers who became even more popular writing blockbuster screenplays for Hollywood before he and his wife mysteriously disappeared. This is followed with She reasoned they fell from the cliffs behind their house and drowned in Alice Lake, but local legend said a witch had killed Ben after a hunting accident, and then killed his wife before she too vanished without a trace. And then with The only bodies ever found were his frozen dogs inside the house.

My creative mind percolates now with the idea of adding to those early notes about Alice Myers—of building her character and breathing new life into her. Is it possible that she was Ben’s wife? Yes, but that destroys the scenario of a reclusive elderly woman living in the mansion. Perhaps she was Ben’s daughter who became reclusive after her parents “vanished without a trace” and she found his frozen dogs.

The possibilities are endless, as the saying goes, but when writing stories that become novels and series, characters and events must fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. That’s when character bibles become important. Mine contain genealogy. Adding Alice to Vree’s family tree is doable, but how does Alice’s past affect Vree’s present?

I’m eagerly working on it.

Is Alice the elderly woman in my watercolor sketch above? I don’t know yet. I need to modify it, give her more wrinkles, I suppose. But it’s something to add to my character sketches as I experiment turning her into a three-dimensional character.

Thanks for reading.

Until next time, peace and love.

Steve, 6/30/2023

This post “Who Is Alice Myers?” copyright © 2023 Steven Leo Campbell at stevecampbellcreations.com – All rights reserved.