Girl Meets Ghost: The Inspiration for I Scream Man

Today's guest post is by my friend, kindred spirit, and sister-writer, Katherine Ramsland, who discusses the inspiration for her recently published crime novel, I Scream Man. Katherine has played chess with serial killers, dug up the dead, worked with profilers, and camped out in haunted crime scenes. As a professor of forensic psychology and an investigative consultant, she’s vigilant for unique angles and intriguing characters. She's as fascinating as she sounds, and when the two of us get together, our conversations roam the world and go on for hours, especially when we talk about writing and crime. Take it away, Katherine!

What do ghost hunters, crime writers, and forensic scientists have in common? They all seek to solve mysteries. This shared goal, and some overlapping tools, inspired me to approach paranormalist Mark Nesbitt to co-write Blood and Ghosts: Haunted Crime Scene Investigations. 

Scientific methods come first. Only when we run out of options do we use paranormal tools, such as mediums, dowsing rods and recorders. Even then, all leads must be corroborated. A case in point: When a medium told us that a murder had occurred in 1936 in a specific room at a haunted winery, we looked for news accounts. There were none. She “divined” that the murder was covered up. This explanation doesn’t fly. No records, no credibility. 

My investigations with Mark inspired my current fiction. I Scream Man is the first novel in the Nut Cracker series. Forensic psychologist Annie Hunter manages a PI agency that “takes on hard nuts to crack” – including some with rumors of ghosts. Her core team includes Ayden, a private eye, and Natra, a cadaver dog handler who doubles as a data-miner. Annie also has a network of forensic experts to call on, as well some skilled paranormalists. 

She’s a skeptic. She swiftly exposes phenomena that can be explained by other means. However, she’s open to the possibility of a genuine ghostly encounter. She’s heard about some that she can’t discount, such as the report about ghosts dancing on a grave near Philadelphia that inspired a search that uncovered a mass murder. (I do inject actual incidents like this into my stories.) 

I first introduced my team in a short story that I based on a case where I live. Frank Smith had a business partnership with offices in a hotel. His firm was going under when Smith suddenly killed himself. He and his partners had taken out a life insurance policy with payouts meant to cover their share should any of them die. But the plan had a suicide clause, and Smith had died before it expired. His wife and partners contested the coroner’s finding, to no avail. 

Three months passed before the first ghost report. A maid was cleaning the former office. As she wiped the bathroom mirror, she saw the reflection of a man in a brown suit staring at her. She turned. He was gone. She quit. Rumors floated of other such sightings in and near that room over the next few years. 

My real-life paranormal investigators thought we should explore this case. Maybe Smith hadn’t killed himself. Maybe he’d been murdered and his ghost was trying to get someone’s attention. There’d been rumors of a contract hit. We asked the current coroner for the death report. 

On the morning Smith’s body was discovered, his secretary had tried to enter the bathroom that served as their copy room. When she couldn’t get in, she’d called security. They’d discovered the body, bleeding from shots to the leg and stomach, propped against the door. With no other way in or out, the coroner had decided Smith was alone in the room at the time he died. The gun was there. Ergo, suicide. 

However, he’d been shot twice. Not impossible but certainly worth a closer look. When we learned that someone had shot at Smith’s home three weeks before his death, we reconsidered the contract hit. But first we had to determine that someone could have shot Smith and escaped the bathroom while leaving him propped against the door. 

We reconstructed the incident with a mannequin that was Smith’s size and weight. I included this in my Nut Crackers short story, “The Case of the Staring Man.” Renaming Frank Smith as Barry Ross, here’s how Annie Hunter tells it: 

I closed the bathroom door. With some difficulty, we placed our mannequin against it, slumped like a man who’d just been shot. From the other side, Natra pushed. The door didn’t budge. She pushed harder, moving Barry slightly, but she couldn’t get in. Ayden and I repositioned Barry and tried to get out without disturbing him, as we thought his killer would have done. But neither of us could exit and also keep him in place in a way that blocked the door. We even stood the mannequin up. We still couldn’t manage it. 

Natra had an idea. She grabbed two foam pillows off one of the double beds. Standing them between the door’s edge and frame, she made a space large enough to squeeze through. Ayden went in to place the mannequin against the door. Then he worked his way through the gap without disturbing the body and pulled the pillows free. The door closed. He pushed. The door resisted. He pushed again and finally got in. 

“Okay,” I said. “Good enough. As long as the killer took the wedge item with him – or her – our locked room mystery is solved. So, by using a removable wedge in the door, a killer could have shot Barry Ross, posed him, and squeezed out.” 

Like the Nut Crackers, my actual team used recorders to collect electronic voice phenomena (EVP), asking questions to elicit a name and a reason for the haunting. We got a word wrapped in static that we all agreed ended in “er.” Murder? Maybe. In addition, we used dowsing rods to acquire answers to “yes” or “no” questions. An infrared trail camera was set up in the room and to record anomalies that might occur overnight. (No results.) 

When a records check on the Smith case prevented us from learning more and we couldn’t locate his former wife, we had to accept the dead-end. But the Nut Crackers had more luck. That’s the beauty of fiction. They solved the murder of Barry Ross and found the culprits who’d staged it. 

I Scream Man uses a similar coordination of methods for a much more complex case. Traditional investigation comes first, but paranormal tools are always ready. Annie cites their effectiveness in other cases to justify using them. Her favorite is remote viewing. 

I hope to continue this series for a long time. Under the right conditions, forensic science, crime writing, and ghost hunting can supplement one another in a way that meets their respective objectives. 

                                                                

                                                                      I SCREAM MAN 

When a boy vanishes under strange circumstances, forensic psychologist Annie Hunter collects her team of sleuths, the Nut Crackers. They link the boy to a network of powerful people, the “I Scream Men,” who gain political favors through a juvenile sex trafficking ring. As Annie tries to hide a victim they seek to silence, head predator Alder Plattman – nicknamed “Plat-eye” – snatches her young daughter. Relying on coded clues, some quirky allies, and the mysterious method of remote viewing, Annie sets out to rescue her daughter and cripple the criminal network. Among her associates is attorney Jackson Raines, a youth advocate whose brother stole the network’s secret records before he was murdered. As a hurricane bears down and Plattman chases Annie’s team, they race to recover this vital cache before he can find and destroy it. 

                                                              Katherine Ramsland

Katherine Ramsland spent five years working with “BTK” serial killer Dennis Rader to write his autobiography, Confession of a Serial Killer, and has been featured as an expert in over 200 true crime documentaries. The author of 69 books, she’s been a forensic consultant for CSI, Bones and The Alienist, an executive producer on Murder House Flip and A&E’s Confession of a Serial Killer, and a commentator on 48 Hours, 20/20, The Today Show, Dr. Oz, Nightline, Larry King Live, Nancy Grace and other shows. She blogs regularly for Psychology Today and once wrote extensively for CourtTV’s Crime Library. She’s become the go-to expert for the most extreme, deviant and bizarre forms of criminal behavior, which offers great background for her Nut Cracker Investigations series. I Scream Man is the first novel in the series.

My Love Affair with Samba...

Baiana from Salvador

"'She came from Bahia, from centuries of dancing and sorrow…' Even that long-ago day in a darkened theater—the first time I heard samba—I knew there was no first time. My ears recognized the whispered words, my mouth tasted the sadness behind the joy, and my feet moved to the rhythm."

My love affair with samba began in that darkened theater years ago, and like all long love affairs, it sparked mysteries, surprises, and discoveries. Music of resistance, music for lovers, sensuous and hushed, it speaks in a whisper louder than a shout. It has been the soundtrack of my life: I've written, dreamed, danced to its rhythm. 

No one expressed the multitude of voices of samba more than the "Little Poet," Vinícius de Moraes. 

Vinícius de Moraes

Vinícius was my introduction to samba, and I knew that one day I'd need to travel to Brazil, and in particular, to Bahia, where samba was born-- and where he wrote some of his most influential music. The voyage itself was transcendent and transformative, as was the experience of writing an essay about it.

                                                   Baden Powell (l) and Vinícius de Moraes (r)

"A Mouthful of Sadness: Listening to Vinícius in Bahia" came out today in Off Assignment, and I'd like to share it with you. An interview follows the piece. Please follow the link:

https://mailchi.mp/offassignment/vinicius-in-bahia/

I'd love to know what you think, and if you've experienced similar voyages-- through the mind and the world-- that resulted in unexpected revelations. 

Sarava!

Dreaming for a Living

 

                                                    I dream for a living. --Steven Spielberg

Thanks to my son, director/editor Ishai Setton, I was privileged to attend the all-star lineup at the DGA's roundtable with the five directors nominated for the 2022 Director's Guild of America Award: Paul Thomas Anderson, Denis Villeneuve, Jane Campion, Steven Spielberg, and Kenneth Branagh. For nearly three hours they answered moderator Jeremy Kagan's in-depth questions about their ways of creating new worlds on screen. It was interesting to note that all five nominated films-- Licorice Pizza, Dune, Power of the Dog, West Side Story, and Belfast-- take place in the past or in another universe. How did they bring these "foreign" worlds to life? How did they rehearse their actors? How do they deal with fear? 

It was one of the most inspiring, fascinating panels I've ever attended. I was torn between taking notes and simply absorbing their words and insights. I found their observations very helpful as I'm in the process of creating a fictional world for a new novel. I've jotted down some takeaways that I hope you'll find useful in your own creations.  

Steven Spielberg: the godfather of the group. Wise, witty, humble, at 75, a father of seven and grandfather of six, he was terrified when he began West Side Story, his first musical. The storyboarding process was critical to block the scenes and find the right setting. It was filmed mostly on a set in Paterson, NJ, and in Harlem. The biggest challenge: crosswalks and stoplights. They had to block them out after filming. He rode around the set, taking pictures with his iPhone, seeing the movie before filming. 

A great example of how to think visually: The brilliance of the fire escape scene, which was modeled on the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet. For Spielberg, the key was to keep the lovers apart. Tony just got out of jail, and as he tries to get to Maria, one obstacle after another confronts him. The difficulty is reflected in the lines and bars that shadow his progress as he breaks through to freedom. Musical numbers were filmed live. No over-dubbing in the studio. 

His advice to actors: "Faster and funnier. Go faster than you think it should go." In the cutting room, the first things to go are the gaps and pauses in scenes, which you don't see until later.

Jane Campion: The process of pre-production is the key to all the directors' films, but her route to the film was particularly interesting. Her script was adapted from the novel, Power of the Dog, by Thomas Savage, about two brothers on a ranch in Montana, but when she went scouting in Montana for the actual ranch, she discovered the land was not how she'd imagined it and there was no house. Writer Annie Proulx told her: "The West doesn't exist. It's a myth."

She returned to her native New Zealand and scouted locations there. Much cheaper. She had the house and barn built with special attention to interiors and space so when characters look out the window they feel the distance is right between the barn and the house. 

She hit a block in terms of understanding her film and her story and underwent dream therapy. She described a recurrent dream she was having of herself on horseback--a horse she didn't know--riding down a path that grew narrower and narrower until she knew she'd fall of the horse at the end of the path--there was nowhere left to go--and she'd die. Through the therapy she understood that she needed to know the horse before riding it. She needed to know her characters and her story before filming. She talked to her characters and heard one of them say: "She's got to get dirty." Jane had to dive deep into her story in order to direct the characters and make this movie.

A fun tidbit: before filming the drunk scenes, Kirsten Dunst would spin in circles. Sometimes she'd have a small drink as well, Jane admitted with a laugh. Also-- Jane said that Benedict Cumberbatch is such a sweet, helpful man that he played totally against character, and Kirsten would tease him constantly on the set, insisting that he wasn't "bad enough." 

Denis Villeneuve: The key to filming Dune was in the storyboarding process. As a boy, Denis and his friend, Nicolas Kadima, mapped out storyboards for the film of Dune they hoped to make one day. During the planning for the movie, Denis and storyboard artist, Sam Hudecki, planned the visual progression of Dune. He forbade Hudecki to go on the internet or to look at previous depictions of the worlds of Dune, Denis wanted to return to the images he'd drawn as a kid. For him, "the key to the story is how you interpret it through images."

While Spielberg admits he doesn't rehearse his actors-- "The first take is the rehearsal"-- Villeneuve talks to his actors, one on one, long personal conversations before shooting, during which they privately explore the actor's thoughts and ideas about the character. "I need to understand who is in front of me," he said. He admitted that getting high on "spicy" banana bread his son baked helped him describe his vision of scenes to actor Timothée Chalamet. "Timothée got it," said Denis.

About fear: "Always. I am always afraid." He's now working on the second part of Dune, and when people ask him on set what to do next or how to solve a certain problem, he no longer pretends he knows. He admits, "I don't know." 

Kenneth Branagh: a marvelous storyteller, talked about recreating the world of his childhood in Belfast through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy. "Your imagination expands to fill the vacuum," he said, when he looked back at the small flat he'd lived in with his family and how vast with possibility it had appeared. In Belfast, he tried to recreate that sense of promise, danger, and wonder of that time. 

He also spoke about his awe of the great Judi Dench who plays the boy's grandmother. He wanted to show the love between Judi Dench and Ciarán Hind, who plays her husband in the film. Ciarán read her a short romance story in "that glorious voice." After he left the room, Judi looked at Branagh, her eyes sparkling, and said, "I'm in love with him." 

About being a director: he asked Annette Bening about the most important characteristic a director can have. She told him, "It's not sexy, but being organized is crucial." He has kept that in mind with every film. To be as precise and clear as possible. To prepare before the filming. All that work beforehand frees the director, the actors and the crew during the actual shoot. 

Paul Thomas Anderson: He described driving from his home in Tarzana to drop off his daughter at school in Studio City, and on the return trip scouting locations for Licorice Pizza. "The Valley hasn't changed that much," he said. He found the actual waterbed store he remembered though the store sells something else now. 

He recalls the experience of working "through the Covid of it all." And the extensive preproduction process. For him, it involved driving to the locations with two partners and filming scenes on his iPhone, mapping out the entire movie before shooting. He explained, "It's a mix of attack--telling the story a certain way that you have in mind, and accept--working with what's in front of you." A mix of planning and improvisation, always staying open to the moment. 

He had the whole auditorium laughing when he said, "Working with teens, you realize that the real shooting starts at 3:30 in the afternoon, when they're finally awake."

 Later that evening, during the awards ceremony held by the DGA, Denis Villeneuve admitted that as a boy in Canada, it was a tradition to wear a hockey jersey with your hero's name on the back. He put the name "Spielberg" on his jersey. He spoke to a visibly moved Spielberg:

“Mr. Spielberg, you are a giant for me. I am here tonight because of you. I thank you from the bottom of my heart of what you’ve brought and what you still bring to this day to cinema. After all these years, you are still a pure source of inspiration, so sir, I salute you.”

Jane Campion won the best director award for Power of the Dog, and in her acceptance speech, said:

"The road here has been long. I remember being the only woman in the room. I remember that outsider feeling as I fought to get my stories told from undeserved perspectives to light in a male-dominated field.” 

Campion then added to loud applause, “I think perhaps it’s time to claim a sense of victory on that front. We’ve come so far, and what’s more, we’re never going backwards. That sense of the eternal horizon invigorates me.”

That sense of the eternal horizon is evident in all five directors--seasoned, experienced, brilliant-- yet always looking for the next project, the next challenge, the next world to share with us.