Tracy Petry

I began writing Cast Down; A New England Haunting several years ago, but the story itself has haunted me personally for most of my life. The tale is a fictional one but it's based in reality and in memory of a time long in my past. The characters are loosely based upon people I knew, in the small New England town of my childhood.  A town that left its mark on me.  The following is an excerpt from the novel, available through Amazon online in print and in electronic format.  ----- The elderly woman sat in her wheelchair and stared out the window.  The other senior residents gave her a wide berth each time they shuffled by.  Her eyes were as wild as her unkempt hair – hair she refused to have brushed.  Screeches would erupt from her should anyone even reach out in an attempt to simply touch her.  The screeches would be accompanied by thrashing limbs and even spitting if anyone brave enough attempted to get a brush or comb through her twisted mane....

What a lot of readers may not know is that my husband and I are Seventh Day Adventists.  When people find out that we're members of the SDA church one of the first questions they ask is, "What's different about your church?" A lot of people think it's some kind of cult.  It's not. The difference between us and other Christian churches is that we go to church on Saturday; we're Sabbath keepers.  The SDA is a Christian church - we believe in what's in the Bible.  Jesus tells us that if we love him, to keep his commandments.  We love Jesus, so we keep his commandments.  All ten of them.  The fourth commandment (the longest commandment, the one that starts with "Remember", because God knew that someday we would forget) says to keep the Sabbath day holy. Jesus kept the Sabbath.  The apostles kept the Sabbath.  The early church for several hundreds of years after Jesus went to the cross kept the Sabbath.  Nowhere in scripture does it say th...

These days, the terms Fifty Shades of Grey just means that it's time to color my hair again. Fifty. Fifty. Forty-nine... Fifty. Really? Me? How did this happen? I swear, I was 23 just yesterday. And now I'm 50. I got a birthday card in the mail from AARP... and I joined. I almost feel like an adult now.    To be clear, I'm not really afraid of getting "old", I'm just wondering how the time slipped through my fingers so quickly. If I didn't believe in salvation and eternal life I guess I might be scared. I suppose if I believed that this life was all there was... well, I'd be scrambling now.  I don't know that I'd say I have regrets, but there are definitely things I'd do differently if I had them to do over again. Although I like the place I've arrived at, there are other roads I would have taken to get here. Less bumpy roads, maybe. Or maybe I just would have traveled those roads with different compa...

Most people who know me know that I love a good scary movie, or book... or TV show. I was reading Stephen King when I was ten years old. And Dean Koontz, he was another favorite of mine. I watched The Exorcist every time it was on TV, no matter how late at night it was. And I slept with the TV on until I was in my 40's because having spent years in the "ghost hunting" racket I KNEW what was in the dark. When The Walking Dead first premiered I was pretty excited. I love zombie movies. The idea of a weekly zombie soap opera just lit up my twisted little world. I popped popcorn and made a real event of the series premiere in our house, which included torturing my husband with it - he couldn't really care less about any of this foolishness. Over the course of five years I fell in love with the characters and bit my nails along with the rest of the fan world every time it looked like we might lose someone. Now, there were acceptable losses like Laurie and Andrea... I tho...

It's raining today. First rain we've gotten here in what seems like forever. The summer was beyond brutal - record breaking number of days over 90 degrees. It will be October before the week is over and it's finally just down into the 80's, with some 70 degree days in the ten day forecast. The local folks tell me this has not been a normal summer. The winter weather is the real payoff for me here. No blizzards, no negative number temps. Working was a real challenge this summer for both my husband and myself. We earn the lion's share of our income through doing remodeling and cleaning of mobile homes which are vacant and seldom have power or water on, so no A/C and those tin boxes turn into furnaces once the sun comes up. I've been painting for the last few days, doing the interior of a trailer or two but today... it's raining. Not such a great kind of day to paint - it's too dark inside, and too damp. But later we're going to our church to hang som...

About a year ago I came across this old photo, clipped from the pages of the Ridgefield Press, my old hometown newspaper.  I find interesting little things every time I pack and move.  Mostly I find memories. I grew up in Ridgefield, a small CT town on the NY state line.  I remember most of us kids complaining that there wasn't anything to DO in town.  At least that was our excuse when we got into trouble.  But for me there was always theatre.  When I was a pre-teen I was a member of a group called Spotlight and we met in a little building behind Ballard Park.  Once I hit high school I was able to "graduate" to the teen/adult group in town - Ridgefield Workshop for the Performing Arts. RWPA, for years, had been performing their summer shows on the stage at one of the local schools, and storing sets and props in an old barn on a dead-end street.  My first summer as a member was 1982, right after my freshman year of high school.  That y...

Life rarely seems to pause for anything. Unfortunately the lack of pause means a lack of writing, at least that's what it means for me. A year after the completion of my last book - Cast Down - and I still haven't finished the sequel that I genuinely thought I'd have finished within a month or two. We've moved yet again, in case I hadn't mentioned it. Four times in three years. In September of 2013 we moved from a long time residence in East Haven, CT to Blowing Rock, NC. The winter was just too much for us. Temperatures with wind chills of 30 degrees below zero were not what we were looking for when we moved South, so we came down off the mountain to the city of Gastonia, near Charlotte. We didn't realize when we signed the lease that we were living in the 'hood. The gunshots at night, the drug dealers, the crime... it was an interesting year and we rode out the lease but then we had to go. Our next stop was a pretty little mobile home park in King'...