TAUNTON — For author Brenda Lee Hendricks, ghosts and things that go bump in the night are more than the stuff of horror and fantasy.

When Hendricks visits her mother at her childhood home on Clark Avenue, she senses the presence of her late father.

Growing up, the toilet would flush and doors would open and close on their own, and Hendricks said she would see the apparition of an old woman who seemed to resemble her late grandmother.

The morning she was diagnosed with glaucoma, Hendricks said she heard a man's voice tell her, “You're going to be all right,” she said.

“It's true,” she said, adding people either believe in ghosts or they do not.

“If you don't believe in them, you don't believe in them. Maybe something has never happened to you. Maybe you're in denial,” she said.

Hendricks, who now lives on Danforth Street with her husband, Frank Hendricks, said she even encounters the supernatural at Taunton State Hospital, where she works as a dietitian.

One time, a dish started flying and spinning on its own, and sometimes the faucets turn themselves on and off.

She said she remembers well the eerie time when she was trapped in an elevator that got stuck between floors.

“I love it. I do. I really do,” she said.

It's the stranger-than-fiction reality of her life that inspires her fiction, she said.

Hendricks' second book, “Time Lock,” will be released on April 30, and will be available through online book sellers and from the author.

According to PublishAmerica, the collection's publisher, Hendricks' first story is about a young couple who purchase a Southern manor dating back to the Civil War, where past tragedy reflects on them. The next story is about a young woman whose life becomes confusing as she attempts to distinguish between dreams and reality.

The third story is about a young married woman determined to solve her cousin's death, no matter what the cost. In the final story, a Dutch colonial home holds unpleasant memories of an evil past, according to a Hendricks' story synopsis.

She said there is a thin line between fact and fiction.

“We are here and alive. But people who are ghosts, they're still alive in their own way. There is a way of interacting with them. People should believe another life exists and they're close to us,” Hendricks said.

With her writing, she said, “I make up things. It's made up things, but it is things that could happen. It may have happened or it could.”

For Hendricks, writing about the supernatural and life after death has been a life passion.

Growing up, Hendricks said she spent a lot of time in the Taunton Public Library, where she was inspired by writers such as Phyllis A. Whitney, Daphne du Maurier and Mary Stewart.

Today, her favorite authors are Stephen King, Jeffrey Deaver and Leslie and Ann Rule.

“I just love the way they wrote. I love their stories,” she said. “I told myself I'm going to be a writer someday.”

With the encouragement of family and friends, had her first book, “Touched by Darkness,” published in 2005 by PublishAmerica. Hendricks, who originally hails from East Bridgewater, is working on her third collection now, she said.

PublishAmerica, with about 20,000 authors, is a traditional publishing company that pays its authors advances and royalties, makes its books available in both the United States and Europe through all bookstores and does not charge fees for its services, according to the publisher.

Hendricks said she enjoys setting her stories in the Colonial and Victorian eras, as well as during the Revolutionary War and Civil War.

She said the writing process involves some muse and some mechanic.

Hendricks said she sits down and types whatever comes into her mind, then goes back to edit.

“If I get the writer's block, I have to stop going over the same thing. It's a blank,” she said.

When she's not writing, Hendricks also likes to take pictures of old cemeteries, and said she has captured images of ghosts in one Boston cemetery.

She said she is blessed with an ability to sense spirits and attract them to her.

“I think a lot of it is in believing,” she said. “Oh yes, I'm a believer.”

The article above was found on Google and was published originally on The Enterprise