If you’re like me, you love trying new things. During the last couple of years, almost everything in this world of writing has been new for someone who spent most of their undergraduate education lost in numbers and equations. So when EPIC Carteret announced a ghost story writing contest last year, and Autumn offered a class on the ins and outs of building suspense, I jumped right in.

Autumn always finds new and unique ways to give you writing tools you didn’t even know you needed. She’s the master of taking her proven middle and high school teaching techniques and updating them for an adult mind. We workshopped our ideas in a small group and delved into antique photos and postcards to find inspiration for the spooky in things that already had an otherworldly air about them.

And we wrote some pretty great ghost stories.

The best part is that that they’re haunting stories about places right here in Carteret County. So the next time you go to the beach and see folks gathered around a beach fire, maybe you’ll wonder if they are a group of pirate’s victims, on land for one night to tell their tale, similar to the ones in Willow Redd’s tale “The Fireside Chat.”

Or perhaps you’ll look at the footsteps in the sand more closely to check if only humans and birds have been leaving their mark there. You may find cloven hoof prints leading people astray like in Jessi Waugh’s story “Heaven or Hell” with its demonic twist on the inspirational footprints in the sand poster.

Willow and Jessi were two of last year’s winners, and you can read their stories on the EPIC-Carteret website to get yourself in the frame of mind for creating your own suspenseful story.

Where in Carteret County would you choose to set a haunted story?

There are plenty of places so spooky they’re practically oozing black bubbly liquid or shrouded in a perpetual mist. And there is plenty of local lore to embellish into a hair-raising tale. Or are you the type of person to take some sort of benign, everyday object and infuse it with the sinister?

Whichever method you choose to create your local ghost story, I’m sure you’ll find that the joy comes from the layering of tension, the evoking of dark images, and the building of suspense. The ghastly story that you get at the end is just the black icing on the blood-red velvet cake.