She’s been dead since 1945, and she still has opinions about the wallpaper.
I get asked a lot whether Bitterport is a scary place. It isn’t. Not in the way people mean when they ask. But it is haunted, and if you’re going to meet one resident of Millmerran House before any other, it should be Elvira.
She died in 1945. She has been waiting, patiently and then not-so-patiently, ever since. And when Aiden Bellingan inherited a crumbling Victorian mansion and thought his biggest problem would be finding a decent contractor, Elvira had other plans for him.
What she wants
Justice, mostly. Eighty years is a long time to wait for someone to notice you were murdered. Elvira isn’t interested in scaring anyone out of the house, she’s interested in someone finally listening. That’s the thing about her that I think readers respond to. She isn’t a jump-scare. She’s a woman who ran out of time to finish something, and she is done being patient about it.
What she’s like to be haunted by
Direct. Extremely direct. Eighty years of watching the living stumble around making bad decisions will do that to a person — living or otherwise. She doesn’t worry about social conventions anymore, which means she’ll tell Aiden exactly what she thinks of his renovation choices, whether he asked or not. She is, by a wide margin, the most opinionated interior consultant Millmerran House has ever had, and she isn’t charging for it.
She’s also — and this surprised me while I was writing her — genuinely helpful. She points Aiden and Marielle toward clues. She nudges. She’s spent decades in that house; she knows where the bodies are buried, so to speak, and she’s tired of being the only one who does.
Why I didn’t write her as a scare
This is the part of Bitterport I care about most. I don’t write horror — I write healing stories that happen to involve ghosts. Elvira isn’t a warning or a threat. She’s a woman with unfinished business, and the mystery only resolves when someone finally gives her the thing she’s been asking for the whole time: to be heard.
Every restless spirit in Bitterport wants the same thing. Every crumbling house has a story it’s been waiting to tell. Elvira just happens to be the loudest about it.
Murder at Millmerran House is available now wherever you get your books. Come meet Elvira for yourself — just don’t touch the wallpaper without asking her first.
Raven Corbin 