Viola Rivard, Author Interview
Viola Rivard, Author Spotlight
By Michelle M. Pillow, www.MichellePillow.com
Paranormal Romance Author, Viola Rivard, is a fan of all things paranormal. She grew up in a very rural part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where fact and superstition is often indiscernible. She spent hours fantasizing about running away into the forest and living among wolves and has now incorporated that into her fiction writing.
Her newest shifter romance release, Running With Alphas: Choices, can be purchased exclusively at Amazon.com in ebook.
Q: When world building the Running With Alphas series, did you base your story off of known myths?
Rivard: In my books, I have the modern United States as we know them, but take the mountain ranges and turn them into a haven for werewolves and shifters, where they live in their own, unique societies. It’s just cool to imagine that there could be an alternate world secretly existing right alongside the world you know.
Q: Do you believe in the supernatural? Or are you a skeptic?
Rivard: I’m a bit of a skeptic, but I try to keep an open mind. I’ve never flat-out seen anything I couldn’t rationalize logically, but I have seen some pretty weird things and gotten a lot of bad vibes over my years of snooping around in places I shouldn’t go.
Q: What kind of paranormal creatures do you never want to meet?
Rivard: I never want to meet a ghost. Being a skeptic is the luxury of those who have never had a ghostly encounter. I’d hate to come face to face with one. I’d have to sleep with the lights on for the rest of my life!
Q: Are you a paranormal investigator?
Rivard: YES! My husband and I live in Rhode Island, which was (at least 10 years ago) considered the vampire capitol of America. We love sneaking around in Exeter after dark.
Q: What myths and legends have you investigated?
Rivard: We’ve investigated a few, but my favorite (hands down) is the Ladd Center.
The Ladd Center is essentially an abandoned mental asylum. Its official name was the Rhode Island School for the Feeble Minded, and thousands of mentally handicapped citizens of the state spent the majority of their lives confined behind its walls. Unfortunately, many of the people sent there over its 86 years of operation, were sentenced under false pretenses as well. The living conditions were abhorrent and some residents were even forced to undergo sterilizations. Basically, it was a horrible, horrible place.
I’ve only been there once (Note to Readers: trespassing there is illegal) and I never want to go back. I don’t spook easily, but man, that place gave me the chills. A lot of the equipment is still there, you can even lie down on the morgue trays (yes, we did). The creepiest things of all are the patient rooms. In some rooms, you will just find things stacked on top of one another in improbable ways. In one room, we saw a table with a bed frame on it. On top of the bed frame was a chair, and on top of that was a fork. Weirrrrrrd!
Q: Do you have any paranormal theories?
Rivard: Sort of! I have some thoughts on the legend of Mercy Brown. For those who don’t know, the story of Mercy Brown is one of the most well-documented vampire legends. Back in the seventeenth century, Rhode Islanders used to believe that the deceased could come back as vampires to feed on the blood of their family members.
Mercy Brown was a nineteen-year-old girl who, like her mother and sister before her, died of consumption (aka tuberculosis). The townspeople didn’t really understand TB in those days, and many thought the disease was caused by vampires. When Mercy Brown’s brother Edwin contracted TB, the townspeople believed that one of the dead Brown women had caused his illness. They exhumed the bodies of Mercy’s mother and sister, finding them decomposed, but when they exhumed Mercy’s body, they found it to be almost perfectly preserved. Assuming she was the vampire, they cut out her heart and burned it, mixing the ashes in a drink, which they gave to Edwin in hopes of curing him. He died a few months later.
It’s a very creepy story, though mostly creepy because the townspeople were so crazy. Mercy’s body was preserved so well because she was kept in a crypt during winter and the cold weather prevented her body from decomposing. I believe that Mercy Brown was just an unfortunate victim of old-time superstition. That said, I challenge you to go in the graveyard that has her body after dark. I’m not sure what’s there, but good God, that old graveyard place is SCARY.
Thank you for joining us!
To learn more about Viola Rivard and her books, visit www.violarivard.com
The post Viola Rivard, Author Interview appeared first on Pillow Talk Blog.
