Guest Post: The Ghosts Of Beatrice Bird By Louisa Morgan

It’s my absolute pleasure to welcome Louisa Morgan, the author of several historical fiction and SFF novels in the Asylum. She will talk about the inspiration behind her latest novel, The Ghosts of Beatrice Bird in celebration of its US release today, on November 21, 2023. My review will follow in a few days.

Let’s go and see what this is all about, shall we?

Louisa Morgan is the author of A Secret History of Witches, The Great Witch of Brittany, and other novels. Her newest work, The Ghosts of Beatrice Bird, will be out in late November, 2023. Writing as Louise Marley, she is an award-winning author of fantasy and science fiction. Louisa lives and writes in scenic North Idaho, where she rambles the shores of Lake Pend Oreille with her spirit familiar, Oscar the Border Terrier.Visit her at www.louisamorgan.net, or on TikTok at louisamorgan75, where she is telling real-life ghost stories!

Connect with Louisa Morgan

I’m delighted to be allowed to talk to the Queen’s fans about my novel The Ghosts of Beatrice Bird, which comes out November 21st, and to share with you what inspired it!

I’ve always wanted to write a ghost novel. Ghost stories abound in my family, and strangely enough, in my friends and fans. I seem to attract real-life ghost stories, so I suspect my energy is open to them, and the people I meet sense that. I hear stories of apparitions, of poltergeists, of visitations and presences, and of true dreams—and I’ve experienced all of those things myself! As I await the publication of this novel, I’ve been sharing some of those wonderful stories on TikTok (you can find me there at louisamorgan75.)

A few years ago, in my usual way of being a magnet for ghost stories, a friend told me her own, and it is a doozy, to use an old-fashioned word. This friend had worked as a psychic for a time, but had to stop. As she was doing that work, the spirits wouldn’t let her be. They clamored for her attention all the time, day and night, dominating her life, and the only way she could stop them was to quit being a medium.

Her real story was the perfect trigger for my fictional one. Beatrice Bird, one of the three protagonists of the book, is a Ph.D. psychologist in the 1960s who experiments, as many people were at the time, with acid. LSD. She is already empathic and sensative, and the LSD bumps that characteristic up to an unbearable level, causing her to sense the “ghosts” of her patients, then her friends, and then perfect strangers. She flees to an isolated island where she can escape contact with people, or so she thinks. She meets another woman there, one with a completely different life problem, and the two of them encounter—and are terrified by—a real ghost who is struggling to tell them something.

The book is historical fiction, set on a beautiful little island in the Pacific Northwest of the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. As always with my work, the historical facts are real, even if the story is fiction. I’m looking forward to discovering whether this novel brings me even more of people’s direct experiences of the paranormal!

Louisa Morgan, November 8, 2023