Poltergeist

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The Wah Mee massacre really did happen. I discovered it through the HistoryLink.org project online (www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_ id=382) and did some additional research before incorporating the site of the then-forgotten crime into my story. By an unsettling coincidence, I was a week away from submitting the first draft when the story returned to the front page of the local papers due to the parole hearing of one of the men involved. It felt pretty weird to walk down the streets of Chinatown and hear people discuss it, when they had said nothing of it for years.

In doing the research, I found that Seattle's International District is a font of intriguing tales, many of them tragic, bizarre, or touching. The fertile soil of history offers great material for a series like this, and I hope to continue bringing forgotten bits into the light.

I also dug into the history of the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps and the women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, from which eventually came the WASPs (WASP, to be more correct) to generate Celia's backstory. Celia's story is intentionally flawed, but the actual evolution of the WASP and the tales of the women who flew military planes are fascinating and worth a look, and I regret having had to warp them. If you care to look into them, I suggest starting with the US Centennial of Flight Commission's website about women in the military in World War II (www.centennialofflight.gov/ essay/Air_Power/Women/AP31.htm) and the Texas Woman's University WASP History website (www.twu.edu/wasp/history.htm).

In concocting this story, I did, of course, spend quite a bit of time looking into the real Philip project, and had a lot of difficulty finding a copy of Owen and Sparrows book Conjuring Up Philip—it's been out of print for quite a while and even used copies can be hard to find. Ben's statements about the experiments are true—amateurs continue to attempt to re-create the experiments, and there is evidence of broadcast and film documentaries being aired in Canada in the 1970s, but the actual recordings seem to have vanished. After reading the book and being in fact rather skeptical myself, I'm not convinced that the experiments were more than hopeful self-delusion, but it makes a wonderful premise and I'm not the only one to think so. Since the book was first published, many other authors and scriptwriters have mined the Philip experiments and their copycats for supernatural thrills.

Being skeptical, I felt it was only reasonable to look at the other side of the issue and include some of the faking techniques. I got some excellent help on this score from Richard Kaufman, professional magician and owner of the Genii forums for magicians, and from James Randi's Web site at randi.org. I also read Randi's book Flim-Flam and parts of Harry Houdini's book A Magician Among the Spirits, as well as the biographical work The Secrets of Houdini by J. C. Cannell.

Further interesting ideas on death came from Spook by Mary Roach. I also picked up a ton of interesting info that I wasn't able to include here from Sandra Haarsager's excellent biography of Seattle's lady mayor, Bertha Knight-Landes of Seattle.

Not long ago, a reader sent me a note asking why Harper didn't have a cell phone in Greywalker—it seemed anachronistic to him, and it is. This got me thinking that there are some odd things about the first book and this current one that I should probably explain.

Greywalker was written (and therefore happens) in 2000, and when it was ready for publication, I chose to leave it as it was rather than update the locations, since so many were important to the way the plot unfolded. Many of the businesses I mentioned went out of business in the years between writing and publication—the original Fenix Underground building that housed the fictional Dominic's fell down in the Mardi Gras earthquake of 2001; the Wizards of the Coast Game Center closed and the building now houses a Tower Records, also on the verge of closure as I write this. Several of the restaurants are no more, and several others had to be fictionalized a little or moved to avoid upsetting owners—most notably the former rumrunner's house on Magnolia bluff. There is no restaurant in the location given in the book, but a similar restaurant does exist on the other side of the canal.

Carlos's shop also exists under a different name, but I figured the owners wouldn't be too pleased to know Id turned their manager into a vampire necromancer and made their staff totally weird, so small changes had to be made. There is, however, no Radio Freeform, although there are radio towers on top of Queen Anne Hill.

In this book I was able to use existing places most of the time. The parks, monuments, restaurants, and businesses do exist where I said they do, except for the restaurant owned by Phoebe Mason's family—that's based on an actual place called Ida's Jamaican Kitchen that went under in 2002—and Phoebe's bookstore, which is an amalgam of three great used-book stores in the Seattle area. Yes, there really is a troll under the bridge, and Lenin does, indeed, stride into the future of fast food. Pacific Northwest University is entirely fictional.

And because of a question about cell phones, I ended up with the scenes in the downtown Barnes & Noble bookstore—which truly is the cell phone death zone.

So, having warped and twisted and willfully ignored bits of intervening time, I've brought Harper's world back in sync with our own timeline, but the past will continue to play a big part in these books—not just because it's part of the structure, but because I always seem to find something interesting there.

— KR