Guest Column How Writing Horror Makes Me a Better Psychic Detective

Amy’s Bookshelf Reviews

by Francesca Maria

“We cannot have light without dark and we cannot have dark without light …We are no less important than the light for without us, the light would not know itself.” – Lucifer Morningstar, excerpt from THEY HIDE: Short Stories to Tell in the Dark coming April 7, 2023 from Brigids Gate Press

Writing horror has helped me become a better psychic detective. What is a psychic detective - you may ask? As a psychic medium (yes, that means I see and talk to dead people), sometimes clients present me with a mystery to solve, i.e., Uncle John went missing back in 1972 and hasn’t been seen since, or, my daughter didn’t come home last weekend, can you help us find her, or where did grandma stash the jewels before her death?

My job as a psychic detective is to use my sixth senses and mediumistic abilities to try and locate missing people, find out the circumstances around a mysterious death or help pinpoint where a body is located. I have worked and trained as a psychic detective for a number of years. I work on cases each week with a team of fellow psychic detectives. We are oftentimes contacted by family members of a missing person, looking to bring their loved ones home.

In some cases we confirm what the family already suspects: that their loved one is alive or dead, was murdered, suffered an accident, or died by their own hand. In others, we help to narrow down a specific area on a map for search and rescue teams. And when a case involves a perpetrator, we give detailed descriptions of the suspect. We’ve helped bring closure to families in a number of cases. It is a difficult job but one that can help bring healing and clarity to distraught families if traditional methods fall short.

During this process of diving into cases, I clear my mind and let the information unfold. Sometimes I will see images playing out in my head like a movie, other times I sense, in my own body, what happened to a person, sometimes I hear words or even get whiffs of smells as I’m tuning into in a particular case. Often, what I see and sense is graphic and horrific.

As a horror writer, I explore the dark places and hidden evils that lurk in the shadows. I stretch my imagination to the heinous and horrendous acts people inflict on each other. This ability for me to imagine the worst of the worst helps me in my psychic detective work because it expands the world of possibilities that I can envision. If, for instance, I knew little about sex trafficking, it would be hard for me to tap into that as a possibility on a case psychically. If I had a limited understanding of the various ways people commit murder, it would make it challenging for me to see those possibilities in my psychic vision.

Likewise, being a psychic detective and seeing real life horrors greatly influences my writing. When I am working on a case, I get glimpses of the intense emotions victims feel during the moment of their death. I take those impressions and try to translate them into tales where I get to create the ending, turning the victim into a survivor, giving them power over their abuser, shedding light and hope into the darkness. It’s a cathartic way for me to process the real-life horrors I encounter while working on cases.

Writing horror has always been a vehicle for me to process my own fears and sense of powerlessness. I wrote my first horror story when I was six years old. It was my way of expressing the legitimate fear of living in a haunted house. I never felt safe as a child and my parents never believed us kids that something was going on under their roof. Writing was my only escape.

As an example, my latest collection, THEY HIDE: Short Stories to Tell in the Dark, is a direct result of me working through my fears during Covid. In the early days of the pandemic, I was taken back to those early childhood fears of feeling unsafe combined with the unpredictable nature of something that can control you, but that you have no power over. My collection contains several stories that deal with these feelings in a way that I hope leaves the reader feeling more empowered, more hopeful.

Not every story, whether in real-life or in fiction, has a happy ending. But hopefully exploring these stories and shedding light into the dark can help us heal and make us stronger for it.

Francesca Maria writes dark fiction surrounded by cats near the Pacific Ocean. She is the creator of the Black Cat Chronicles, a true horror comic book series narrated by a mystical black cat. And her short story collection; They Hide: Short Stories to Tell in the Dark will be out in April 2023 from Brigid’s Gate Press. Her short stories and essays can be found in Crystal Lake Publishing’s Shallow Waters series and anthologies and Death’s Garden Revisited. You can find her at francescamaria.com and on Twitter @Writer_of_Weird.