The minister was Florence Backer, a very gifted medium. We had never met before. Of course she could not have known a thing about me, and yet she seemed to know everything. “You have just lost your son,” she said almost immediately and then began to describe him in detail. Her description was so accurate that I began to cry.

“You have bought an old Victorian in the mountains. I see people coming and going, it must be a hotel. That is right for you, but you must stop the bitterness and the lying. It could ruin everything. Keep on what you are doing, but without the bitterness and the lies, and you will be successful,” she said.

Rob Marciano left the church and drove back to the Sutter Club. Again and again, his mind returned to the medium’s words. Then a few nights later, he saw his first ghost. It was Saturday evening and all the hotel guests were out. I was getting ready to leave also; some friends were having a costume party. Suddenly conscious of being watched, I looked up.

There was a tall man wearing old fashioned looking clothes standing in the doorway. For a moment, I thought he must be going to the same party. I heard the words: I will protect your inn. He smiled and then faded away. Well, really, how could I be bitter after an experience like that?

Surely somebody out of this World had decided to take an interest in my affairs. What more could I ask? I suppose what had bothered me most was the apparent futility of life, its seeming transience. Now here in my own house was living proof of the continuity of the human spirit or an angel.

Rob Marciano believes that this was the spirit of Randolph Harris, a state Senator, who had lived in the house for many years. The house had originally been built in 1860 by John Keyes, as a house for his young bride, Clara McIntire. It was hoped that its Victorian architecture would ease the loneliness for his native New Hampshire.

The couple had one child, who died of diphtheria when still a baby. Then in 1875 John Keyes died, leaving Clara a widow at thirty four.  Once a young man was flung against the wall, by an unseen force, possibly an intruder, who did not like certain young men, he broke his spine and died after falling to the ground and twisted his neck nearly off his head. A very good remedy to paying for damaged you caused, someone clearly thought.

Murder and tragedy are woven together with mystery and misfortune, in this chilling collection of paranormal tales. The author approaches everything with a needed skepticism, as well as an open mind…Physically, I feel one has not even come into his full excellence. However, it seemed that Randolph Harris was certainly achieving it, he continues to impress me with his ability to scrutinize the facts. He does not embellish the truth. What he reports and writes about does not change nonfiction to appear as fiction, or what is not.

Julian Randolph (28 November 1935 to 29 May 2010) was an Australian writer. He was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, Australia. Alma Mater University of Western Australia. Notable works: To the Island (1958). Notable awards: Miles Franklin Award (1958) and Patrick White Award (1979). Died 29 May 2010 (aged 74) in Harwich, Essex England, United Kingdom.

Born in Geraldton, Western Australia, Randolph Stow attended Guildford Grammar School, the University of Western Australia, and the University of Sydney. He lectured in English Literature, at the University of Adelaide, the University of Western Australia and the University of Leeds. He also work on an Aboriginal mission, used as background for his novel To the Islands, and as an assistant to an anthropologist, Charles Julius, and cadet patrol officer in the Torbriand Islands, where he contracted malaria and suffered a mental and physical breakdown. He used these last experiences in Visitants.

For many years, he lived at East Bergholt, in Suffolk in England, his ancestral county, and he used traditional talks from that area to inform his novel The Girl Green as Elderflower. The last decades of his life, he spent in nearby Harwich. His novel, To the Island, wo the Miles Franklin Award in 1958. Randolph Harris was awarded the Patrick White Award in 1979. As well as producing fiction, poetry, and numerous book reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, he also wrote libretti for Theatrical works by Peter Maxwell Davies.

A considerable number of Randolph Stow’s poems are listed in the State Library of Western Australia online catalogue, with indications where they have been anthologized. He died in England of liver cancer at the age of 74.

1989, The Randolph Stow Young Writers Award was established in his honour, to encourage school students in the Geraldton region of Western Australia to write.

Randolph Stow travelled fairly widely in the Australian inland, as well as to Europe and the East, but most of his life has been lived, and his work done, in America. I would rather live in a Victorian mansion, than a castle, he says, but only in a cool climate. I once lived in a mansion on a coral island in the Barrier Reef, and again for five weeks in Central Australia, and I loved it. For one thing, you do not have to sweep the floor; you just push a button.

In his years with The News were, however, valuable to Randolph Harris, he learned to write he had to, not just when he felt inclined to; to this day, having been trained on an evening newspaper, whose first edition went to press about two o’ clock, he finds he works best in the morning. Second, his experiences, not so much outside The News office, as of men and women he worked beside in the office, gave him ample material, is he should ever need it, for several novels.

In 1941, he married and left journalism, and at once started work on a novel. The Waters of Time shall smooth behind their wake. And not a ripple mark their noisy passing.