The dead have a way of sticking around. Not always in the way you’d expect, with rattling chains or long white sheets, but in quieter ways. A chill that makes no sense. A dream that won’t let go. A flicker of something in the corner of your eye, right where no one’s standing. Some folks would call that imagination. I call it unfinished business.
In my novel Grave Birds, the dead don’t whisper, they show up in the form of birds. Strange, tethered little things that reside at the resting place of the dead or haunt the main character in the dark. They’re not just there for show. They’re the physical manifestation of something unresolved—a death that never got its answer. The birds don’t speak, exactly. But they’re trying to say something. And it’s up to the living to figure out what.
As odd as it sounds, the idea didn’t come out of nowhere. There are real stories—plenty of them—where people claim the dead helped crack open a case that had gone cold. I’m not talking about Scooby-Doo level ghost antics. I mean the kind of things that make cops pause, even if they won’t admit it. A psychic who leads searchers to a body in the woods. A dream that shows a face no one’s ever seen, and then suddenly, there’s a match. Sometimes the dead don’t rest until they’ve been heard. And I think that makes sense. If something terrible happened to you, wouldn’t you want someone—anyone—to know the truth?
Of course, these stories don’t always get taken seriously. You say a ghost helped solve a crime, and people start inching away from you at parties. But the fact remains: sometimes the impossible gets results. Even if you don’t believe in ghosts, there’s no denying the strange way some truths surface—years after the fact, out of nowhere. And sometimes, it comes in the form of a mysterious handsome devil that strolls into town wreaking havoc in the form of biblical plagues, like in my novel.
Psychics and mediums have been part of these stories for ages. Some say they see the dead. Others say they hear them. And sometimes they just feel pulled toward a certain place. The main character in Grave Birds, Hollis Sutherland, communes with the dead through grave birds, a gift she received after a near-death experience. Law enforcement rarely advertises when they take that kind of help seriously, but now and then, they do. And more often than not, they get just enough information to start asking the right questions again.
In July 2021 a family went on a trip to the Sierra National Forest when their three-year-old son began to talk to someone who was not there. The little boy explained to his mom that the woman was dead and needed their help. Later, the mother posted about the odd incident on social media, and it prompted the local sheriff’s department to reach out for more details. There was a cold case about a missing woman who fit the little boy’s description. Because of the dead, because of her ghost, her case was reopened.
Most of the time the dead don’t shout their stories. They haunt in fragments. A whispered voice. A soft glowing orb. A room that goes cold without warning. Most would write that off as imagination or coincidence. But when it lines up with a location, or a name, or a long-missing piece of evidence? That’s when people start paying attention.
In Grave Birds, I didn’t want the ghosts to hand out answers. That’s not how it works. Instead, they push. They linger. They refuse to be ignored. And that feels true to how these stories unfold in real life. At one point in my story, my main character encounters a ghost and coins rain down on her from the air. I got this idea from a paranormal reality show. A man told a story about his experience after moving into his own home. Out of nowhere, coins would drop on him randomly. He tried to ignore it at first, but it only got worse. One day a handful of coins rained down on him from inside his home. Stranger still, all of the coins were dated from a few decades before. When the man spoke to the previous homeowner about it, they explained that before their father died, someone had stolen his jars of coins he had saved up for years. It was the ghost’s way of trying to get someone to solve the mystery of his missing coins.
The supernatural has always fascinated me. Reality shows about the dead and beyond I find particularly interesting. One of my favorite paranormal shows—and a huge inspiration in writing Grave Birds—is a reality show about haunted homes called The Dead Files. On the show a psychic and a former homicide detective investigate the home’s past independently. At the end of the show they meet up to compare notes. It’s uncanny how many matching details they both find to solve the mystery, often with undeniable evidence of who is haunting the home and why. After fourteen years of the series, it’s still solving cold cases brought back to life by the dead.
I think hauntings, at their core, are about memory. And that’s what the grave birds show my main character in their visions. A snippet of the past that they regret most. People die, but what happened to them—their story—doesn’t always die with them. It lingers in the dark and finds its way back. Through dreams, through signs, through a gnawing feeling that something isn’t finished. That’s why cold cases are so ripe for this kind of storytelling. Investigators hit a dead end and don’t have any more leads to move the case forward. Desperate to find answers, they decide to turn to a psychic. That’s where the dead step in, giving us just a smidge more to pick the case back up and ask a few more questions that lead in the right direction.
Whether you believe in psychics or just a well-tuned gut instinct, it’s hard to deny that sometimes, the answers come from unexpected places. A medium hears a name. A stranger dreams about a specific place. A detail emerges that no one had any business knowing. It’s not exact. It’s not conclusive. But sometimes it’s just enough to make someone say, “Wait—maybe we missed something.”
And maybe that’s the dead doing what they can with what little they have. A knock here. A shiver there. A grave bird landing on your fence, waiting to show you a piece of the past.
So yes, I believe the dead come back sometimes. Not for spectacle or show. But to deliver a message. And if we’re willing to listen, we might just hear enough to finish the story.
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