Jessica Freeburg. Photo: Chris Emeott
A Lakeville author uses her paranormal encounters to inspire others.
Lakeville author Jessica Freeburg has always been drawn to creepy tales: She still has a battered copy of her favorite childhood book, Trick or Treat by Richie Tankersley Cusick, and as an adult, she even survived her own haunting, which was documented in 2019 in an episode of the Travel Channel’s My Horror Story (season 1, episode 6: Heirloom of Doom).
Not surprisingly, her writing life has followed suit, from her first published book, The Homecoming, to the popular Monsters and Ghosts series she co-writes with Natalie Fowler for Adventure Publications. The pair recently published four books in their series: Monsters of the South, Monsters of the Pacific Northwest, Ghosts of the Wild West and Ghostly Tales of Ohio.
Yet Freeburg uses her gift for telling stories to uplift and inspire. She got her start as a high school teacher, and she still loves to visit schools to talk to kids about writing. She also hosts creative retreats for adults with Ghost Stories Ink, a group of writers and illustrators who share her passion for the paranormal. In December, the group is planning a Winter Creative Retreat in Stillwater.
Freeburg has loved writing since she was a child, but she didn’t start working on a book until she left teaching to stay home with her children. When she set out to write her first novel (which was initially released as Living in the Shadows and rereleased as Homecoming), Freeburg wanted to write a paranormal tale that she would have enjoyed reading as a child.
She also happened to be dealing with her own haunting, and she was looking for a way to explain it to her children and to help them discern between good and bad spirits. “This was like one of the most profound hauntings I’ve ever personally experienced, and it wasn’t scary, but it was frustrating because it did scare the kids,” she says.
Freeburg wasn’t frightened because she’d had experiences like that from time to time her whole life. “It’s just really an awareness of spiritual energy around people and spaces,” she says. “I don’t really know the best way to describe that without sounding super weird … I kind of tell people it’s sort of like tuning a radio into the right frequency … You can tune it up a little bit more, so that you can have a better, stronger awareness. And if you don’t want to have awareness, I think you can do things to kind of turn it down.”
Her paranormal experiences inform her monster and ghost books, but Freeburg and co-author Fowler aren’t trying to scare readers. “[The stories] could be creepy. They’re startling,” she says. “A lot of the monster stories are rooted in legends that have been carried forward hundreds of years. [And] you can’t have a ghost story without history. As much as I love ghosts and spirits… I think my deeper passion is just carrying history forward and telling the stories of the people that lived and breathed and loved before we were here.”
Happy, Not Haunted
In addition to Jessica Freeburg’s writing, her interest in the paranormal has led her to co-host the podcast Darkness Radio with Tim Dennis and to tour haunted places throughout the United States with her Ghost Stories Ink crew. Given all this knowledge, experience and research, it begs the question: How does she sleep at night?
When we do our events, we kind of teach people that you can have an experience, but you don’t have to let the experience have you,” she says. “You can tell them to go away. As the person with the physical body, you have dominance over these spiritual energies that are around you.”
Whether she’s talking to kids or adults, Freeburg stresses the importance of connecting to your inner guidance and being yourself. “Embrace your passions and be who you were created to be,” she says. “Embrace your weirdness, and feel good and comfortable in your own skin to be who you are. And for me, that means I’m talking about ghosts a lot.”
Monsters and Ghosts Book Signing
11 a.m.–1 p.m. October 4
Jessica Freeburg and Natalie Fowler will read from their newly released books, answer questions and sign books at Niche Books in downtown Lakeville.
