If you’ve taken one of the many ghost tours in Charleston, South Carolina, you have surely heard about Lavina Fisher, a woman who lived two hundred years ago. And when you get through reading this, you will thank your lucky stars that she lived back then and not now.

Lavina, along with her husband John, ran an inn known as the Six Mile House, appropriately named because it was six miles north of Charleston. This was back in the day when your main form of transportation consumed oats instead of gasoline. So Lavina and John had a lot of folks stop by for refreshments (think of it as the convenience store of the 1800’s) or to spend the night.

Lavina was a real looker, and she definitely had a way of charming the men folk who visited Six Mile House. This is all very well and good, except for the fact that she had another trait that wasn’t quite as pleasant – she liked to kill the men and steal all their possessions. She did this by serving them poison in their tea. Once the poison began taking effect, John would get into the act by escorting the poor victim to a bedroom, where he begged them to lie down and rest. Once they did, John left the room and pulled a lever which opened a trap door in the floor, spilling the bed and its occupant into a pit below the house. If the poison and fall didn’t finish the victim off, John would do the honors and dispose of the body.

This all worked well for our lovely couple until the evening a man by the name of John Peoples stopped by. Lavina did her normal thing and offered Peoples her ‘special’ tea. But Peoples wasn’t a fan of tea and poured the contents into a potted plant (wonder if the plant shriveled up and died?). Peoples also had enough smarts to realize that something wasn’t quite right with our beautiful but evil Lavina, so he politely excused himself and made his way to the guest bedroom for the evening.

Since he was just faking being tired, Peoples decided to sit in a chair in the room for a while and do whatever people back in those days did without TV, radio, and the internet to entertain them. While he sat there something really weird happened. You guessed right if you thought. “Oh, I bet the bed fell through the trap door!’

Can you imagine the look on People’s face? Bewildered, he threw open the door to his room and demanded that he receive 30,000 bonus points on his frequent visitor card for a less than satisfactory stay. Just kidding, of course. He hollered for someone to please explain to him what had just happened to his bed.

John came running to him and looked just as bewildered. After all, he thought Peoples should have been well on his way to meet his maker by now. And apparently Lavina couldn’t hide her disappointment that he wasn’t dead when she arrived on the scene, so People’s did what any of us would do – he got the hell out of Dodge, FAST! In fact, he was so scared that he ran all the way back to Charleston (wonder if he set a new world record for the fastest six-mile sprint?).

Once in the Holy City, Peoples went straight to the police and reported what had happened. The police went to Six Mile House, began snooping around, and found lots of bodies buried on the grounds, making Lavina Fisher the first female serial killer in U.S. history.

Now for the rest of the story …

Lavina and John were arrested and sentenced to hang. Lavina laughed at the sentence, knowing that married women were protected against execution in the Palmetto State ( a law that was in effect back then). The judge was shrewd though, and laughed right back at her and said, “Well, I’ll just hang your husband first, then you’ll be a widow. And it's perfectly legal to hang a widow in South Carolina."

So John was the first to meet his fate. He went peacefully to the gallows, but not our Lavina. No, she went kicking and screaming. Oh, and she wore a wedding dress, too, in the hopes that some dude in the crowd that had gathered to watch the spectacle would fall madly in love with her and marry her on the spot, thus getting around that pesky widow clause.

Fat chance, Lavina. Men can be dumb sometimes around a beautiful woman, but not that dumb!

Resigned to her fate, Lavina spat and cursed at the crowd. Her last words were: “If you have a message you’d like me to carry to hell, give it to me—I’ll carry it.”

Maybe she did make it to hell. But there sure are a lot of people who say they have seen the ghost of Lavina in the Unitarian Church graveyard in Charleston. And in the jail cell she once occupied.

So if you see poor old Lavina on some spooky moonlit night, be sure to say hello to her and ask her how that trap door thing worked out for her. And next time you check into a hotel, be sure to look underneath your bed. You never know what Lavina’s descendents may be up to these days.
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NOT ALL THE IRISH ARE LUCKY!

Okay, it's time to celebrate St. Patty's Day with a ghost story that comes to us all the way from Ireland. In fact, it is considered to be the most famous Irish ghost tale of all.

According to the tale, a brother and a sister made a pact with each other. They decided that the first one to die would reappear to the other one to confirm that there is indeed life after death. The brother was the first to go (not sure how old he was at the time), and appeared to his sister shorlty afterward. Now this was no ordinary ghost, because to prove to his sister that he was real, he gripped her wrist so hard that it deformed it (ouch!). He also had a few things to tell her about the future. First, he predicted that her husband would die and that she would re-marry. Second, he predicted that she would die on her 47th birthday (he was just full of good news, wasn't he?).

Well, lo and behold, everything the brother predicted came true. Except for that little thing he had to say about his sister dying on her 47th birthday. She made it through the whole day and the rest of the year breathing just fine. So to celebrate her apparent victory over death, she had a big wing-ding for her 48th birthday. One of the guests was a clergyman. When she saw him she said something like, "Hey, look at me, I'm forty-eight and my heart is still ticking. So much for my dead brother's lousy prediction abilities."

This is when the clergyman gave her a curious look and said, "Forty-eight? Why, my dear, you're only forty-seven."

I can only imagine the look on the woman's face at this point. If she were in today's age, she would probably say something like, "What have you been smoking?"

The clergyman hadn't been smoking anything. What he had done was look at the registry of her birth before he had come to the wing-ding.

Witnesses say the woman proclaimed that the clergyman had signed her death warrant, went to her chamber (yes, they called rooms chambers back then), made out her will, had a heart attack, and died on the spot.

So was the brother's prediction true ... or did the woman get so scared that she gave herself a fatal coronary? Guess we'll never know.

Either way, I wish you a happy St. Patrick's Day and hope your luck runs a lot deeper than the poor woman's in our story!

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A Writer's Confession

The other day someone asked me which one of my novels I liked the best.  Good grief, that’s like asking a parent which one of their children they like the most. The politically correct answer, of course, is that I like them all equally. But I’d be lying if I said that. And since my novels aren’t really children and don’t have emotions, I can give you an honest answer: my favorite is A Lone Palm Stands.

Maybe it’s because I lived with that book for three years, creating the story, refining the story, refining the refining, and tweaking it. Then I tweaked it some more. Many people don’t realize this, but the original A Lone Palm Stands was twice the length of the published version. Twice. Nearly 1000 pages long! One of the hardest things I had to do was eliminating all those pages. But it was also the best thing I could do for the story.

But I have to admit that it was a labor of love. Giving A.J. her voice allowed me to go back in time to 1989 and remember what it was like in the days before and after Hurricane Hugo. The world seemed more innocent then, and in many ways it was. 9-11 had not happened yet. Cell phones were still a novelty and not all that reliable. A 19” TV was considered to be a wide-screen television. And music—Lord, how different that was! Madonna and Milli Vanilli were topping the charts. The world just seemed more fun and carefree.

That is, until Hugo came along.

For Charlestonians and others that call the South Carolina coast their home, Hugo changed everything. In the blink of its powerful eye, the storm turned our world upside down and left us with a devastated landscape. Homes were destroyed. People were killed. All seemed lost.

But then we remembered who we were—the descendents of a proud, independent breed of people who had seen it all:  a war that had pitted brother against brother, earthquakes , fires, and storms that were even more ferocious than Hugo. With our heritage in mind, we pulled together and proudly declared, “Come hell or high water, we will survive.” And by golly, survive we did.

We rebuilt our city by the sea, determined to make the Lowcountry a better place than it was before. And we succeeded. Today Charleston and her sea islands stand proud and beautiful, a testament to the resiliency and determination of those who faced the morning after Hugo with tears in their eyes, wondering why their little slice of heaven had become the scene of an unimaginable nightmare.

I say all this because I hope that A Lone Palm Stands captures the way our innocence was abruptly ended by Hugo, and the way that experiencing the storm and its aftermath made us all stronger than we were before. I hope that it also demonstrates, through the symbolic use of Sara, that good things can from the bad, and that we should never lose hope.

That’s why I love A Lone Palm Stands the most. But please don’t let Saving Sara and Savannah Grace find out. They might get jealous and plan evil things against their big sister :)