CREATING SPIRITS

Here are some images of the people and places I was imagining while working on the novel. It’s historical fiction, but I took a lot of liberties. I can’t guarantee any of these folks has come back as a ghost. I didn’t invent Hitchcock’s party. That really happened.

Here’s my mother’s family: the Bankses at the turn of the century. The little girls in the front play a pivotal role in my novel, one a ghost, one an artist.
This is Isabella Banks Satterthwaite. She’s definitely a spirited woman. Wife to Dr. Thomas Satterthwaite, she was intrumental in her own right with establishing medical care for woman and babies in New York City. She and Thomas owned the house on East Eightieth, later rented by Alfred Hitchcock for his haunted party.
This is 285 Madison Avenue, former home to Young and Rubicam Advertising. This is where Pete Donoff was handed the task to find the right venue for Mr. Hitchcock’s party. Imagine Pete fretting over “the stipulations” behind one of those windows! (photo from the collections of the mcny.org)
Carolyn Banks and Pete Donoff pass Cleopatra’s Needle on their way to grab lunch in Central Park.
Does he need an introduction? The Man of the Hour, the Host with the Most: Alfred Hitchcock.
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This is the film Hitchcock was working on in March of 1956. Henry Fonda was a guest at the haunted party. He was wrestling with some spirits of his own.

James Lenox, my mother’s great-great-great uncle: millionaire agoraphobic book collector. His massive collection became one of the foundations of the New York Public Library.

My mother was teenage friends with the famed composer Johnny Kander. They met at a summer camp in Northern Wisconsin. While they didn’t keep in touch beyond their youth, my fictional version of Johnny does make an appearance at the party.

Early in the novel, a couple has their photo taken in The Flame, a fashionable nightspot in Duluth, Minnesota. This is sometime in the early 1950s, a date captured by The Flame’s roaming photographer. Here’s my mom. I’m not sure who the fella is. What smiles, right?

This is a painting by Isabella Banks Markell (the little girl in white in the first photograph!). She left Superior, Wisconsin, studied painting in Paris, lived in Manhattan, and did a series of paintings of the East River.

Isabella Markell at work, captured by the Herald Tribune.

The Brokaw Mansion. It’s gone now, but in 1956 housed the Institute of Radio Engineers. This is where Seymour Barnes is working on the night of the party.

This is Charles Addams, famed illustrator and creator of the Addams Family, and his second wife, Barbara Barb. He was a friend of Hitchcock’s and attended the haunted party. I’m not sure if Barbara was there in real life, but she is in my novel!

Isabella “Snug” Taylor was a real woman, my mother’s cousin, and a victim of the influenza of 1919. She’s also my favorite ghost. (Remember those little girls in the first photograph?). Snug fondly recalls riding the Witching Waves at Coney Island. Snug is quite proud the ride never made her queasy.

Snug also remembers seeing a Fatty Arbuckle film set at Coney Island. This is a still from that movie, released in 1917. The actress’ outfit is how I imagine Snug on her outtings. That bow!