Welcome To My Site

My name is Richard Walkup. I have been a writer, in one form or another, since the 1960s, but it wasn't until I retired from the Federal Aviation Administration in 1994 that I became serious about it. In the 1980s and '90s, I'd had several opinion pieces published in the local newspapers, but it wasn't until I began writing life-experience short stories and novels that I considered becoming a published fiction writer.

My most recent novel is called The Haint, a supernatural horror story about a young couple who move from New York City to the young man’s hometown in northern Mississippi. The house he buys for himself and his fiancé had been lived in by an elderly woman until her recent death. Before he moved in, a neighbor informs him that the woman had been an evil witch in life, and that her evil spirit is destined to wander the earth forever unless she can tempt or otherwise persuade the new owner to let her spirit in at night. If that should happen, they would switch places, the house would again become hers and he would become a lost, wandering spirit.

The first pages of this novel won third place in the Kansas Writers Association (KWA) 2008 Prose and Poetry Competition. A memoir I entered also placed third. Seven other works of mine have placed in previous contests, with two taking first and second place.