gemmamawdsley

In most of my writings I combine history with horror. Not a hard thing to do as history provides us with more gore than our fragile senses can handle, but something struck me as really odd and a little bit scary last week. When I was researching my novel Whispers, I travelled to a few of those dreadful industrial schools that the catholic church were wardens over. I went to these long-abandoned places for the atmosphere and to get a sense of what the tiny prisoners must have felt when walking through the echoing hallways. All traces of the children have disappeared, except for the markers on the numerous graves. The saddest thing of all was the read the inscriptions, some proclaiming that the child lying beneath the earth, “Died as a boy.” That was all, no date of birth or death, but I digress. I do so, because the horror of that time has been bleached in to my soul and its memories make me angry. Anyway, to get back to what happened. I was reading the Sunday papers and there was an interview with one of those invisible children. He’s a man now and still bears the scars of what happened to him. His story is like so many other that I’ve heard, but there was one thing that made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. He mentioned that twice a year, every year, a child disappeared. I wrote about this very same thing. I am now left to wonder at how much I wrote was fiction?