Wilmington's Ghost Guide: Rebekah Carmichael's "The Not-So-Scary Guide to Ghosts"

Have you ever been drifting off to sleep in the night and swore you heard voices coming from nowhere and everywhere at once? Have you ever seen a shadow flicker in the corner of a room, only to turn around to nothing there? Have you ever had a thought so intrusive, you weren’t sure it was fully your own?

Rebekah Carmichael has. The viral TikTok Ghost Guide’s debut book, “The Not-So-Scary Guide to Ghosts” is filled with her experiences, perceptions, opinions, and advice around supernatural phenomena. 

Carmichael started having unexplainable experiences as a child, noting the confusion and lack of outlets to explore or question what was happening to her.

“My mother was getting dressed up and asked how she looked. I said, ‘Orange’ —except she wasn’t wearing any orange in her outfit at all! I was seeing what people call an ‘aura’. She probably thought ‘Oh no, my child doesn’t know her basic colors!’ I didn't have the vocabulary or the language at that time.”

From auras to shadows to walking-talking ghosts in haunted cities, Carmichael's literary debut is part memoir and part manual, aiming to give vocabulary, community, and structured practices to people struggling with experiences that can be hard to define and even harder to discuss. In her “Not-So-Scary Guide,” Carmichael explains her personal beliefs around what we perceive as ghosts—that the souls of loved ones do not have to be in a binary of either stuck here or moved on, but that fragments of spirits can move to higher frequencies while other bits “may lag around guarding their favorite chair.”

She recognizes that not all people may agree with her beliefs around ghosts, but that shouldn’t prevent people from exploring the ideas in her new book.“I wanted to create something that made me feel seen in a way I did not feel seen as a child and teenager,” she explains, “to build a place where people could be curious and ask questions and say ‘that made me think!’ I encourage people to develop their opinion through experience and learning instead of being told what to think.”

Carmichael also encourages the development of spiritual communication, defining seven psychic senses and exercises to cultivate them that include journaling, games and mindfulness meditations. Though supernatural experiences can be frightening at first, Carmichael insists they do not need to stay that way. Instead of being a passive experiencer of hauntings and paranormal activity, Carmichael asks “What if we could bridge the communication and go from experiencing things to inviting experiences to happen?”

“Allow yourself to be treated with respect,” Carmichael cautions, as her guide includes chapters on spiritual hygiene like cleansing energy, shielding yourself, and employing protective assets like jewelry.

Even with defensive precautions in place, Carmichael focuses on showing compassion and etiquette for the dead. “Would you walk into a place you’ve never been and ask a person you’d never met before to tell you about the most traumatic time in their life? Would you demand they tell you their name and their innermost secrets? I would hope not! Don’t do this with ghosts either!”

“In my opinion,” Carmichael says, “Wilmington is the most underrated haunted town in the South.” Carmichael says to anything below Fifth Street can be considered haunted ground, mentioning the historic Thalian Hall and Burguin-Wright House museum specifically.

“It’s not all doom and gloom,” she explains. “There is a very active gossip chain in the Wilmington spiritual world.” Carmichael’s book is full of tips and tricks for eliciting authentic conversations with spirits, including acknowledging one’s own psychic bias and how to validate your experiences and knowledge. 

From gossipy ghosts to haunted houses and psychic powers, readers will discover practical advice, thought provoking questions, and a sense of community in the “Not-So-Scary Guide.” “Storytelling is how people relate to each other, and we discover we have a connection to all these other people who have had experiences,” Carmichael says.

Carmichael distilled her advice to future ghost seekers into this one sentence: “You know more than you think, if you allow yourself to know it.” 

“The Not-So-Scary Guide to Ghosts” will be released on July 28, with a launch event and book signing at Pomegranate Books. 

Launch Event Date: July 28 Location: Pomegranate Books, Wilmington, NC Time: 6pm