#120 EERIE Haunted house inspires SOMETHING I KEEP UPSTAIRS: Author J D Barker interview

In this episode, you hear New York Times and international bestselling author. J.D. share how a real haunted house became the spine-chilling inspiration for his latest novel titled: SOMETHING I KEEP UPSTAIRS. releasing on the 13th of May 2025.

WIN A NIGHT IN A HAUNTED HOUSE
J.D. has a competition where YOU and 3 friends can spend a night in the very house he writes about... ARE YOU UP FOR THE CHALLENGE? If hell yeah, is the first thing that comes to mind, check out:
Click here to enter: J.D.'s website competition page link 

J.D.'S SOCIALS

Website: https://jdbarker.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jdbarker_author
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/therealjdbarker

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INTRO AND OUTRO MUSIC: Pixabay.com - Deep in the dell by Geoff Harvey, Creepy whispering by Raspberry Tickle Creepy music box by Modification1089, Terror...

Transcript

Speaker 1: Anna Schmidt (Host)  Speaker 2: J.D. Barker

Hello and here we are at Perfectly Paranormal episode 120

My name is Anna Schmidt, and I'm here every week to share with you true paranormal encounters and information about devils, demons and dark energy beings that no one else talks about. Today, today, we are speaking with J.D Barker, a New York Times and international bestselling author. J.D share how a real haunted house became the spine-chilling inspiration for his latest novel titled Something I Keep Upstairs. releasing on the 13th May. I can't wait to read it. Let's get into our interview with J. D.

I'd like to welcome J. D. Barker here with us today on Perfectly Paranormal. How are you, J. D.? 

J.D.Barker: I'm doing great. How are you? 

Anna: Oh, wonderful. I'm really excited to be speaking with you. Would you like to share with the listeners some of your background and how you became inspired to write international bestselling suspense thrillers? 

J.D.Barker: I've been at this for a really long time. I've basically been writing my entire life, but I'm one of those people where, I was told it was, it's a fantastic hobby, but you can't make a living at it. So you have to get a real job.  I worked in the corporate world for 23 years. I was a chief compliance officer at a brokerage firm, but I would come home and I would write at night. And that's how I kept myself sane. 

And, over the years, I just, I developed the craft and I ended up publishing my very first novel. It was 10 years ago in November when it came out. I've been at it for a little over a decade. Hit the ground running and haven't looked back. I had a string of bestsellers. I do a lot of books with James Patterson. I wrote a prequel [00:02:00] to Dracula for Bram Stoker's family. It's been a ball. 

Anna: Wonderful. And I hear that you have a new book coming out soon. So I'm interested, because I hear there is a real life paranormal element to it. 

J.D.Barker: There is. So the title is Something I Keep Upstairs. It releases May 13th of this year. So I love paranormal, I love horror but my books are primarily thrillers. So horror is, something I step out to and I do every once in a while.

I live on a little island off the coast of Portsmouth in, in New England, in New Hampshire, and every day I go for a run after I finish up my work. I do a lap around the island. It's 4. 2 miles. And at one point I crossed the beach, and when I'm standing out on the beach, right off our coast, there's another little island.

It's real small, it's only about an acre, and there's only one house on it. It's a little white house with a red roof. And it's just far enough out where, you can see it, but you can't really tell what's going on out there. And as an author, I saw that for a good two years, and you're like, my, that what if gene within me starts going off.

You're like, what if this is going on? What if that's going [00:03:00] on? So I started to research it a little bit, and I learned that it was a Coast Guard life saving station at one point. That was its last life. But it had fallen in disrepair, it had been abandoned for a really long time, and, even though it looked nice from our beach, from what I was told, if you got up close, it was in real, real bad shape.

I got a hold of a guy who started a charity to raise money to actually restore it, and he wanted to turn it into a museum, and he asked if I wanted to go out there. So he took me out to this island on his boat, and honestly, as soon as I got off that boat and stood in the house, I wanted to leave. And I don't know if you've ever had that kind of feeling, but like the hair on the back of my neck was standing up I just didn't like it.

I didn't want to be there. And it's funny, I've thought about this quite a bit, if you're standing in a room with a cat, and you hear a weird noise in the corner, like the cat just disappears. It'll just bolt out of the room. It doesn't want to know what made that sound. It doesn't care.

It's just gone. Us humans we're stupid. Like we, we stand around, we, like we, we don't leave, like these are instinctual reactions. And like over time, we've tuned them out. But something wanted me to get out of that house and, I stayed, to be polite. And then we left, started to research the place and I [00:04:00] realized what kind of history it had. And back in the day, like it was used as a yellow fever quarantine zone for a while during the Spanish American war, they used to if they captured a ship, they would dock the ship out there and they would basically keep the people on the boat until they starved or died of disease.

And then they would take the boat, so like a lot of deaths, a lot of really bad things happened out on this island. And the more I researched it, the more I realized I need to write a book about this place. So I just, I started asking around all the locals and just got all the local lore and I took a, a lot of the facts, a lot of the true stuff and mixed them up with a little fiction and I came up with this book.

The tagline for the story is for a haunted house to be born, somebody has to die. It's all about a kid who inherits this house when he's 17 years old and him and his friends basically decide they want to turn it into a haunted house, but things get, have the mind of their own. 

Anna: Yeah, they don't they? I love the paranormal. I love speaking with people that talk about the paranormal in all different ways. I'm sure the listeners would love to hear your process. How you actually blend the realized ghost stories into the [00:05:00] supernatural fiction. Have you had any other experiences that you bring in? Or, how is it that you put all the paranormal together with what you do?

J.D.Barker: A lot of it, it's when you talk to like locals, like this place has been around for forever. Like the town that I live in, like there's houses that were built in the 1600s and for the U. S. here that's old, so there's legends that have been around for just as long.

And a lot of them, like when I kept hearing the same stories over and over again, those are the ones that I wanted to include the book. There's one about a little girl that a lot of people have just seen on the beach. She's eight or nine years old. She has blonde hair, she's wearing a white dress.

A lot of people have told me that they've seen her out there, but nobody can explain who she is. So I started to research it, and the general thinking is that she's the ghost of a girl who drowned in a well on Newcastle, on the island where I live, years and years ago, a couple of centuries ago.

So like, when you trace every one of these things back, there always seems to be some type of origin story. And when you start hearing it from multiple people, there's got to be a kernel of truth to it. You don't know what that truth is, but there's something there. Those are the types [00:06:00] of things that I try to include in the book.

My favourite thing as a reader is, I finish up a book like this, like this is a crazy scary book, and you finish it up and you read the author's note at the end, and I actually tell you how much of it was real. And that's the part that really frightens you because then you can get on Google and research this for yourself and realise just how much of it is actually true.

Anna: Have you had people read the book already before it's actually been published? Like people reading it and getting responses and what they think and how they feel about the story? 

J.D.Barker: Yeah we always do advanced reader copies. I'm not sure when this is gonna air, but right now it's available on a site called Net Galley so people are able to get it through that. Copies have gone out to all the press and reviewers and influencers and people like that. So a lot of people have it in their hands right now. 

Anna: What sort of responses are you getting? 

J.D.Barker: Oh they love it. I've been really lucky people just eat up my books. I write what I call literary popcorn. It's like you turn one page and you have to have another, have to have another, have to have another, before you know it, you're 500 pages in and you finish the book. But this one seems to flow as, as good as, as well as all the ones in the past. People are just they're eating it up and talking about it.

We're doing a fun contest with this one, too, because it is a real house. We're actually giving away an overnight stay to one reader. We're gonna pick one name one month after publication date. They're gonna be able to pick three of their friends. We're gonna take them out to this island. The house is on a private island, take them out there by boat, drop them off on the dock, and they're going to stay out there for 24 hours in a haunted house. 

Anna: So how do people become part of this competition to win this overnight stay? 

J.D.Barker: It's all over Facebook, so you can find it there. If you go to my website, which is JDBarker. com there's links there. If you just Google it at this point, I'm sure it'll probably come up. Just type in Wood Island or something I keep upstairs by J. D. Barker. 

Anna: That's wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. Do you have any more books planned in the future that might include paranormal content? 

J.D.Barker: I'm always doing something. Like I sell a lot more thrillers than I do horror, but I love writing horror. Are you familiar with a movie called Flatliners from the 90s? Yes, I am. Yes, it had a crazy cast, Kiefer [00:08:00] Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Billy Baldwin, Oliver Platt, all at the start of their career, so basically before they were household names. And it's about some medical students who decide to kill each other one at a time and then bring each other back just to see if there's anything, life after death.

It's a story that I've loved, like that movie is one of my all time favorites, and the guy who wrote it happens to be on one of my other film projects. And we decided we're going to reboot the franchise. So I'm in the middle of writing a novel right now to reboot the Flatliners franchise. So that's my latest. And there's a lot of paranormal involved in that, just like with this book we're mixing it up with that the fact we're modernizing it and making it, in a lot of ways, believable. 

Anna: I actually loved that movie. That was one of my most memorable. I remember Keith O'Sullivan in that movie. It was fascinating to see the fact that they were so interested in life after death and they wanted to experience it. So talking about the paranormal, did you have any paranormal experience as a child? Was there anything that kickstarted your interest in the paranormal when you were a youngster? 

J.D.Barker: I never really had any particular [00:09:00] experiences. I grew up in a house that was in the middle of a forest. And it's funny, because my dad built the house, so it was basically brand new, but immediately it was considered the haunted house in the neighborhood, because it was a big English Tudor set back in a giant, oak forest, it just, it looked a little spooky, a little ominous from the street, so all the other kids considered it to be a haunted house so legends and stories sprouted up out of nowhere about hauntings in our woods, and things like that and being kids we just, kept those stories going, it's like a telephone game.

You hear it from one person, you add a little something to make it a little bit better and tell it to somebody else. So that was probably the closest, but as a kid, I loved being scared. Like I was a reader from a very early age. We didn't have a TV in the house, so we were always hitting the library, but the very first adult book that I felt like I ever read was Dracula and it scared me.

Like I had to leave the lights on for a couple of weeks after reading that. And the fact that it. got that kind of an emotional response out of me. That I think triggered something within me and it made like I've been chasing that ever since trying to write that and create that feeling.

Anna: That's fascinating. That's fascinating because it's always, we all have some sort of [00:10:00] interest in the paranormal and most people, not most people, a lot of people go down the fear path and don't want to know, but I love the way you explore it and you include it in your thrillers. You've given us your socials and I will include all your social details, how people can be part of this competition.
I'd really like to thank you for being with me here today on Perfectly Paranormal. It's been wonderful speaking with you, JD. 

J.D.Barker: Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. 

Anna: So in episode 121, you will hear, oh my goodness, you will hear my internal debate about the dangers of tapping into the unknown through two methods that I have tried myself. The first one is table tipping. The second one is using Ouija boards. And I've used both of these in The Path, and do they open treacherous doorways into other realms and realities? We're going to explore this, and you can make up your own mind. So stay tuned for next week's divination dilemma, and I look forward to spending time with you then.

If you like this spooky content of this episode today, Please hit the subscribe button and you will get a notification when every new episode is released to the public. And stay tuned for many more episodes unpacking the strange and unseen aspects of the paranormal world around us. So, thank you for joining me today and don't forget if you want to share a paranormal experience just with myself or you would like me to share one of your experiences through my podcast, you can do a voice recording or you can write out your experience and I will read it exactly as you have written.

You can email me at spiritualbeing44@gmail dot com. And for information on paranormal house clearing, you can visit my website, Spiritual Be-ing.com.au You will find the address in the description box. And I look forward to sharing this spooky space again with you next week. 

And remember, life, perfectly paranormal.