In late August of 2015 a ‘suggestion’ came up on my Facebook feed – a story about a haunted treehouse. It turned out to be nothing of the sort, just worthless click bait, but the notion rocked my muse’s world. A haunted treehouse!
I thought about the ‘treehouse’ I played in during my childhood. Back in the 1960s, it had belonged to my mother (the black paint proclaiming it as ‘Melita’s cabin’ had almost faded away by the time I took up residence in the 1980s) and between our tenancies my grandfather had requisitioned it as a wood shed. That didn’t deter my friends and me; we simply sat on the roof instead, which was about five feet off the ground. A tree grew either side of it, too, so it was near as makes no difference a treehouse.
With ‘haunted treehouse’ as a starting point and those memories to draw on, I began to turn over a few plot possibilities. Within ten minutes I had a story I liked. I was perhaps receptive to the idea of a ghost story, since at the time I was reading New Ghost Stories II and disappointed that several were ghost stories only in the most oblique sense.
The cupmoth caterpillar and ghost spider incidents are more or less autobiographical. To this day, I have no idea what the ghost spider was. Reconsidering it as an adult, I thought perhaps a spider nymph, but some research suggested it was much too large for that. Who knows, maybe it really was a ghost…
Kris Ashton 