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The Strange but True Inspiration Behind

Infinity’s Gateway

Guest Post

by Author James S. Parker

I’ve always had a strong interest in the fact that so many people actually disappear every year.  There are some areas where this kind of thing occurs in abnormally high numbers.  That interest, combined with an incident that happened to me in my senior year of high school, were the impetus for this novel, Infinity’s Gateway.

My family and I lived in northern Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati.  Both my parents worked.  My mom was a nurse and at the time had gone to work at a nursing home in Covington.  They told her when they hired her that sometimes, both patients and staff, would report hearing and even seeing strange things.  They said that they were not trying to tell her that the place was haunted but wanted her to be aware of this. Mom came home, told the family about what they’d said, and we laughed it off.

Many weeks later, on a Friday night, mom was working the night shift, 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.  Not long into her shift she called home and asked me what I was doing.  I told her that a friend and I were watching Carson. She said that they were hearing footsteps coming from the third floor, a floor that was not in use. The footsteps would go from one end of the floor to the other, then come down an enclosed stairwell. She said that they were just waiting for the door to open.

Clearly, they had someone in there messing with them and I told her to call the Covington police.  She told me that they had, that the police had already been there twice, but couldn’t find anything wrong.  So my friend and I agreed to go over and spend the night with them.

We were hanging out at the second-floor nurses’ station and had not been there long when we too heard the footsteps.  If it was a mouse, it was wearing boots. So once again the police were called. This time they brought a K-9 unit.  It was one of the largest German Shepherds I’d ever seen. They waited around for quite a while and of course, nothing happened.  Just as they were getting ready to leave the footsteps returned.

They quickly moved down the hall to the door leading to the third-floor stairwell.  One officer placed his hand on the doorknob and held his gun in the other. His partner held the dog by the collar, prepared to release it. We were all standing roughly fifteen feet away from them.  Just as the footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs, the one cop flung open the door and the other released the dog.

There was absolutely nothing standing there.

The K-9 unit put its tail between and backed into the wall whining. They never could get that dog up those stairs. They searched the place again and once again didn’t find anything. That’s the night I learned that cops carry business cards because they gave them to us.  They said if we heard anything else to call and ask for them.  The footsteps reoccurred several more times, but there was no point in calling them.

That night taught me several things. It opened my mind and allowed me to realize that as smart as we may think we are, we do not know all that goes on around us. I experienced a level of fear that I’d never felt before. It was an incident that to this day gives me chills.  This incident has colored a great deal of my writing.