Agent Pitch Finalist #33 - Afterlife

AFTERLIFE
YA Paranomal
61,700

Query:

Samantha Cole never believed in ghosts, until she got a letter from her brother two months after his death, blaming her for the accident. She’s  spent the last two years hunting ghosts, in the hope that she will find out what happened to her brother, and be able to make amends.

Now  sixteen, Samantha and  Matt, her best friend and ghost hunting partner, have explored most of the east coast, looking for evidence of paranormal activity, with no results. Until Matt finds a lead, a story surrounding a child ghost in the rural stretches of Rhode Island. Sam risks expulsion and escapes from her boarding school to investigate, but the answers she finds confuse her more than enlighten her.

The ghost that she finds can become corporeal, a revelation that challenges Sam’s  preconceptions, and prompts Matt to make a shocking confession: he passed away nearly twenty years before he ever met Sam.  Sam finds herself torn, unsure of how to help the ghosts in her life, and swept up into a century old murder investigation.

First 150 Words:

The dilapidated house looked perfect for a haunting. The walkway was covered with a thick layer of fallen leaves that had been gathering for long enough that the bottom layer had rotted, making the air smell faintly musty and damp.The house even carried an excessive history of violence including at least one murder and a suicide. But in the end the science didn’t lie, all of the meters and metrics I took pointed to one solidly boring, and soon to be condemned house. I sighed and stared wistfully at the colonial. I’d thought that it’d be our first break, but I’d thought that a lot over the past two years.

“There’s nothing here, Matt,” I said through the walkie. This was the fifth house we had investigated in a  year that was either a hoax or a mistake.

I heard him sigh. “Yeah, I’m kind of getting that.”