Ghosts | Author, Jane Lark's stories

Researching a stalker was actually really fun although, you may think it was a little creepy. A lot of authors will tell you that police officers would find their Google search history very interesting, and mine would definitely be amusing if you looked back through the months when I wrote this story.

My first psychological thriller, written under the pen name J.S. Lark, has topped the Ghost Thrillers and Vigilante Justice Thrillers charts in the USA today and is in the Psychological Fiction top 20. I think therefore it is about time I got around to writing this post. I planned to do it a couple of weeks ago but then COVID-19 caught me. I am lucky to be well on the way to recovery now, though.

Of course, in real life I have never stalked someone so to understand what was possible in this story and to get into a stalker’s mind, I had to explore what can be found about someone on the internet. Without giving away any of the plot, which has a lot of twists I would hate to spoil, I can tell you I researched all of these things:

How the press report accidents?
Whether or not you can get up to the top of a car park in Swindon? The car park in the book is fictional, though, it’s a merged version of several multi storey car parks.
Facts about Bipolar, and videos recorded by those who have the condition.
Videos by clairvoyants.
I followed famous people on Instagram to see what their pictures could give away.
Then someone on a radio show talked about older family members checking into everywhere on Facebook, and giving away their location at every moment, so I explored that.
I looked up companies on the Companies House website to see what it tells you about the owners.
I looked at company websites to get ideas about how much they gave away
I also looked up actual obituaries – which is a bit creepy.

I did not only play stalker on the internet, though. As you know, for my historical books I do a lot of physical research, travelling to places to learn the reality in the setting, which is the whole premise for this blog. So, I did also spend a day in Bath where a large part of the book is set and walked around the areas my character does. I lived in Swindon for 16 years, and I lived in the centre of Swindon of several years, so the scenes set in Swindon are in areas I know really well. But I only recently discovered the Green Park area of Bath, and so I went there to try and get my mind into what it would feel like to sit on a park bench for hours and watch a house.

I didn’t sit on the park bench for hours, but I did sit there for one hour on a cold grey day, with a cup of take-away coffee in hand and just took in the atmosphere, and in my mind imagined what it would be like to be 100% focused on someone in the house on the other side of the road.

The outcomes of all this research can be discovered in the book…

You can buy the book from any bookseller but here is the Amazon link

We went to Hastings the other week to discover some 1066 facts just for fun, but when we were there, look what I discovered… These ancient cave carvings under the cliffs above the town of Hastings in the UK.

No one knows when this carving was cut, but it’s in an area called the chapel. The natural cave has been especially sculpted to become a wider, arched area, and at the other end is this carving of a vessel; also undated.

In the 1700s the caves the chapel is in were used by violent gangs of smugglers, who owned the coast of Britain in the same way the mafia operated. They would kill any man, or woman, who crossed them, without fear of being caught. One smuggling gang whipped a man to death in an inn for giving their names to the customs officers. Another man was buried alive, and a third thrown down a well, for telling tales on the smugglers. They ruled by fear.

People who work in the caves in Hastings today hear in-explicable sounds, like things being dragged across the chapel floor, and the props used in the caves to dress them for their visitors experience are moved from one cave to another, for no reason, and no one admits they have moved them.

I have written before about the 18th and early 19th century love of gothic tales, and scary places. Well the caves at Hastings were no different. They were dug out further for the use of visitors in the late 1700s, when smuggling died out.

Look at this amazing walk way…

That was the entrance carved into the caves, and a ballroom was carved out too. Can you imagine spending your Halloween dancing in a cold, damp, dark cave?

I don’t have any Halloween stories in my historical books, but if you fancy trying one of my contemporaries, Jason’s and Rachel’s Halloween party scene is FREE. Click on the I Still Love You cover on the righthand side further down to download.