Kalamazoo Gazette
D10
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Author says she teamed up with ghost
to write 'Aaron's Crossing'
by: James Sanford
jsanford@kalamazoogazette.com
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Ghostwriting a book isn't uncommon. Writing the memoir of a ghost? That's slightly more unusual.
But that's what Linda Alice Dewey has done in her book "Aaron's Crossing: A True Ghost Story," which she says was dictated to her by a spirit. Dewey will discuss her work at Barnes & Noble in Portage from 2 to 4p.m. Sunday.
"I was brought up to believe there's no such thing as quote-unquote ghosts," Dewey said in a phone interview Monday from her home in Glen Arbor. "And guess what? There are. I think we have to take a look at some of these things we dismissed as superstitious and reconsider them."
Dewey was raised in the Detroit suburb of Redford and attended the University of Michigan. In 1982, after graduating, she moved to Phoenix, a city she calls "kind of the center of the whole New Age / Spirituality thing." During her time in Phoenix, Dewey became interested in parapsychology and the reading of auras, the colors that some psychics say surround individuals.
But it wasn't until Dewey, her brother and a friend, [Lisbeth], visited an isolated cemetery deep in the Leelanau County woods that she realized it was possible to make a personal connection with the spirit world. Dewey said she knew something strange was going on when [Lisbeth], who is Jewish, felt compelled to genuflect in front of a marker.
"Why did you do that?" Dewey said she asked [Lisbeth]. "I had to," [Lisbeth] replied.
[Lisbeth], Dewey said, "is much more sensitive than I am. She was the first to say, 'There's someone here.' She said the hair was standing up on the back of her neck. (In the cemetery) it was so heavy, so heavy and sad."
Yet it was also a place Dewey said she was drawn to. She returned several times in the year that
"I felt so sad for whomever this was, to be stuck there in the middle of the woods, all by yourself," she said. "If I was to write a book for kids, I'd call it 'Ghosts are People, Too.' They're stuck, just like a lot of us are stuck in lives we don't know how to move through. They're just stuck in a different way." Dewey says she encountered the spirit of Aaron Burke, and Irish immigrant who came to America in the late 19th century, married, started and later abandoned a family, and died in 1922, alone. Now, more than 70 years later, Aaron found himself trapped, unable to move forward to a more peaceful place. Determined to help him, Dewey allowed Aaron into her home.
She had questions: "What was it like to be a ghost?" What happened in his life? What happened to him when he came here with me? Was there culture shock?"
Aaron, she says, had answers, and he began relaying his entire history to her.
"Aaron's Crossing," she said, is "all from his point of view. Only the very beginning and the end of the book are from me, and those were the hardest parts to write. ...The neat thing is that when he's telling about his life, he sees it from a perspective we don't get. He's crossed over and he's seeing it from a wider point of view. The message is that sometime either her or in the hereafter, you'll see it all makes sense, everything that happens to us."
