Starting in the summer of 2009, and ending in the spring of 2010, the Cowley County Paranormal Research Society investigated over a half dozen reputedly haunted locations in and around Winfield, Kansas. In the course of our investigations, we captured on video numerous apparitions, recorded voices we could not identify, and had personal experiences such as being touched by unseen hands.
My name is Adam Catlin, and I was the leader of this organization. I am a former Winfield resident, having graduated from Southwestern College there in 2002. During that time, I spent many a night walking among these haunted locations we investigated. From Among the Dead is a heavily fictionalized account of our investigations. With the recent popularity of paranormal-themed television shows and movies, there is certainly a market for this book. In Kansas, there is a myth that Atchison, KS, is the most haunted town in the state. Thanks to media hype, that distinction keeps being repeated. My novel definitely puts the kibosh on Atchison.
From Among the Dead begins in the summer of 1993, when Winfield native Derek Roberts and his long-time girlfriend, Emily Shepherd, get together with their best friends Henry Gordon and his girlfriend Katie Kline, and assemble a paranormal investigative group to scope out haunted locations in the Winfield and Cowley County area. After their first investigation in Union/Graham Cemetery is a rousing success, they go onto investigate other locations in Winfield, including the movie theater and the site of an old observatory that had been torn down in the 1920s. Despite only being in high school, they manage to garner media coverage in the local newspapers with their exploits. But, after an unauthorized investigation in Baden Square goes wrong just before high school graduation in 1994, the group is disbanded, and the two couples go their separate ways.
Sixteen years later, Derek Roberts is at a crossroad in his life. Now a former Navy man, his wife, Emily, is dead, having been murdered in Wichita the previous summer. Following her death, he suffered a public emotional breakdown resulting in an extended stay in a mental hospital. Upon his release—and against the advice of his doctors—Derek returns home to Winfield to start over.
It does not take long before Derek begins to revisit the haunted locations his old friends used to investigate all those years before. After a particularly harrowing experience with a ghost in the apartment he is now living in, he goes and contacts Henry and Katie, who are now married and going about their lives. Katie is a teacher, but also acts and performs in the local theater group, while Henry is in law enforcement.
While speaking to Katie inside the Winfield Community Theater in the old St Johns College auditorium in Meyer Hall, Derek soon becomes reacquainted with the mysterious past that Meyer Hall and the rest of Baden Square still has to offer. As Derek reassembles the surviving members of his old team, and brings on new faces to fill out the ranks, he and his friends begin to unravel a mystery stretching back over a hundred years—before the college was even built—that will change their lives forever.