The Howe Caverns Motel as it appeared on a postcard in probably the 1950s.

Looking for a ghost story to kick off your Halloween season? “The Lace in the Window” is now appearing in Rose Red Review’s Autumn 2014 Issue!

“The Lace in the Window” was written, originally, for our wedding. It’s set at Howe Caverns, a tourist attraction in upstate New York, in the 1970s, which made it loads of fun to research (who remembers Brim? Sanka? A Pink Squirrel? When AfterBite first came out? When 1973’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark terrified on the ABC Movie of the Week?)

Also fun: researching wedding gowns from the 1960s and 1970s. My mom was big into making dresses from patterns. I’m sure she probably had this one in that ratty cardboard box she kept them all in.

I’d heard a few ghost stories about the caverns being haunted, one of which had to do with a flood, which seemed like the best choice for the story I wanted to tell. If you want to hear all the ghost stories surrounding the caverns, Howe offers a brand new Haunted Lantern Tour every Saturday night in October—which makes for a nice getaway (Nathan and I are looking forward to ours on October 25!). You can find out more about the Haunted Lantern Tour and packages if you wish to say overnight (yes, at the motel where my story’s set) here.

Howe Caverns Haunted Lantern Tour is brand new for October 2014! I can’t wait to get there later this month!

Want to read “The Lace in the Window”? You can do that here: http://roseredreview.org/2014-autumn-kristi-petersen-schoonover/ –and don’t miss the other awesome stories in this issue. One of my faves is “Thousand Eyes” by Kelly Weber.

If you’d like to learn more about what inspired “The Lace in the Window” and how the chapbooks were put together for the wedding, you can check that out here on our official wedding blog.

Photo by Pam DePaoli.

Imagine our surprise when our friend Pam, who was cleaning out her mother’s house, found this placemat her mother had saved; Pam noted her parents went there often. We were thrilled when she offered it to us! I wrote to Howe Caverns to see if I could get a specific date on it. They responded: “Ok, so we did some investigation…. The restaurant was built around 1953. The Coffee shop was located in the area where our public restrooms are currently. That being said, it was obviously somewhere between 1929 & 1953. Rich Nethaway, our longest employee here at Howe (46 years), says that he thinks that it is closer to 1953 from looking at the design of the placemat. Great find! :)).”[1]

[1] Howe Caverns, personal communication through Facebook private messenger, 8 September 2014.