I had the honor this past week of speaking at the historic City Library in Provo, Utah. Of course, I love sharing my stories anywhere, but I especially love events in historic places, because I love old buildings. They carry such a sense of the history that has happened in them. You can almost feel it in the old bricks, the old stones, the old beams. I can’t help but wonder about the people who have been there but are gone now. Funny how fast the people come and go through life, and how long the buildings that housed them last.Continue reading
Doc
Holliday
Stories
Holliday
Stories
An Irish Blessing
By
There’s a bit of Ireland running through the Southern Son saga, a little Claddaugh ring that Mattie Holliday inherits from her Grandmother Anne O’Carew Fitzgerald, and that she gives to John Henry as a symbol of their affection. It first appears in Book One, Southern Son, and comes back again and again through the three books and into the Postscript at the end. Can’t tell you how or why or where without ruining the story for you, but it’s more than a plot device: it’s a physical symbol of spiritual things and of the emotional story that winds through the adventure of Doc Holliday’s life. You’ll see it as part of the logo on the cover of all three books.
That little Claddaugh ring has become an important symbol in my writing life as well, as my husband gave me my own Irish ring after it first appeared in the book, and then my mother continued the tradition over the years by sending me gifts that featured the gold Irish ring. I have necklaces and earrings, a shiny door knocker, wall plaques and kitchen linens and birthday cards. The image of the Irish ring became an ongoing reminder that she believed in me and the story I had to tell.Continue reading
Doc
Holliday
Stories
Holliday
Stories
Haunting the Holliday House
By
I love ghost stories, the spookier the better – like spectral figures that stalk the grounds of ancient estates, faces that appear in old windows and mirrors, doors that lock themselves when no one is in a room, things that go bump in the night…
Doc Holliday grew up in a world of such things, in a land where Indian legends still echoed in strange names like Etowah and Ocmulgee, where Irish ancestors left tales of wood sprites and banshees, where black slaves told stories of haints and bogymen and “boo hags” that hid in the dark piney woods. When a beloved family member passed, even good Christian folk covered all the reflective glass in the house lest the dearly departed should peer back at them from beyond the veil. So one would expect that the Holliday’s house, built in the 1850’s and a place where generations of family members lived and loved and died, should be filled to overflowing with spirits. How could such a classic Southern mansion not have a few classically Southern ghosts to go with it?
So one of my first questions, on one of my first visits to the Holliday House, was whether or not it was haunted. Or, as I put it to the nice girl who worked nights at the answering service that had an office there, back when the house was still an unrestored old home with an interesting past and an uncertain future: “Have you seen any ghosts?”Continue reading
