The Haunted Life of Mystery Writer Juliet Blackwell_office

Author:

In truth, Oakland author Juliet Blackwell shares a lot of traits with Melanie Turner, the contractor she created who stars in her nationally bestselling Haunted Home Renovation series. Both have anthropology degrees, both work on the restoration of historic homes and both encounter ghosts on a regular basis. But there are key differences: While the fictional Turner character communes with spirits only on jobsites, the flesh-and-blood Blackwell claims to live with ghosts in her own home. As she prepares to release her latest mystery, Home for the Haunting, the author opens the doors to her private residence and clues us in to life (and death) inside the California Craftsman.

Photographer: Blackwell works in her office amid a collection of books that include a lot of non-fiction, art tomes, mysteries and novels by Sherman Alexie, Richard Russo and Barbara Kingsolver. “Like most authors, I’m an avid reader,” she says. Watch for her new book, Home for the Haunting, on December 3. 

Photographer: The author has had an affinity for the spine tingling since she was a child growing up in Cupertino. While the idea for her mystery series was still fermenting in her mind, she says she had another brush with the otherworldly. “I was working in the basement of a beautiful old house in San Francisco. There were a lot of old objects in there—a baby’s crib, old wooden boxes and antique electric equipment,” she says. “As I worked, I felt a persistent sensation of someone watching me. And then I heard something—it was if someone had spoken, but I just missed what was said. I looked around, and then I heard the voice again. I felt increasingly uneasy.” Eventually, she had to leave the basement and went into the kitchen where the homeowner was working. When he asked her what was wrong, she told him. “He didn’t say anything, but I could tell from his face he knew exactly what I was talking about,” she says. In her own home, she brings a touch of sinister to her living room with a mannequin. “I love mannequins. They're so creepy yet interesting at the same time,” she says.

Photographer: In the corner of her living room, Blackwell displays a salvaged dressmaker form, a mask she purchased in Italy and a painting she did of her son in the style of Caravaggio, her favorite painter. Although she gets good vibes from her own home (she’s the third owner), she has had unsettling experiences in other houses. “I was once asked to visit a Berkeley house where a murder had occurred,” she says. “While I was there, I saw a big, dark shadow in the doorway; and in the next room a television inexplicably turned on. There was a terrible feeling of malevolence in that house, and it bothered me because the owners had a baby.” Blackwell borrowed the concept of an infant and spirits co-existing in the same house for her novel, Dead Bolt.

Photographer: “I received a letter from the original owner’s granddaughter, and she came and toured the house,” says Blackwell. “When she got to my bedroom, the room where the footsteps seem to come from, she blurted out, ‘This is the room where my grandfather died!’” When I told her about the sounds, she said that the family used to joke that you always knew when Mr. Jeffress went to bed, because they would hear him walk slowly and deliberately across the floor.” Blackwell is sure she is hearing echoes of the original owner. “It doesn’t really bother me that he died in my bedroom,” she says. “I get a good feeling from this house, it’s as if happy people have always lived here.” That’s not how she feels about every home.

Photographer: “The house was designed by an architect named John Hudson Thomas for a family named Jeffress,” says Blackwell, who painted these words from Charles Dickens in the entryway, “Pause, you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers that would never have bound you but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.” The author found interesting remnants of the family—including old photos, dress patterns, perfume bottles and a child’s shoe—but she didn’t know much about them, or the mysterious footsteps, until a letter arrived.

Photographer: As Blackwell started to renovate the house (in the living room, shown here, she removed six layers of wallpaper to get to the original plaster and celebrate the original molding), she noticed the usual creaking and groaning that can be attributed to the settling timbers of antiquity. But there were other sounds that were harder to explain. “While in this room, I hear the sounds of methodical, very deliberate footsteps overhead,” she says. “It happens about once a month, and guests hear it too.”

Photographer: Blackwell, who has penned two other mystery series and short story anthologies in addition to the Haunted Home Renovation series, purchased her own house in 1996. “I sort of backed into it,” she says. “When it was built, it was a beautiful home. But over the years it suffered from neglect. When I bought it, it had no heat or hot water and it had suffered some unfortunate renovations in the 1970s—there was a lot of faux wood paneling.” And she says there was something else there too—the ghost of the original owner.

Photographer: The idea to write the addictive series of mysteries starring a spirit-attracting renovation specialist came to Blackwell (a decorative painter by trade before she became a full-time author) while she was high atop scaffolding working on the ceiling of a Victorian mansion in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights. “The painters are often the last people in the building, and we are always rushing to get the job done,” she says. “I was working in an old house at 3 a.m. and it was making all kinds of creaks, moans and groans, as old houses do, and the idea for the series came to me.” Here she works at her desk in her own 1911 home in Oakland. The vulture, nicknamed Harry, is a permanent fixture. “He is a great companion to a mystery writer,” she says. “He reminds me of Edgar Allen Poe, of course.”