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About the Characters Mean Spirits centers on the Pennfields, a prominent American family whose ancestor, Charles Pennfield, came over to America on the Mayflower. Through flashbacks, it follows the Pennfields through multiple generations, revealing incidents in the family’s past that are causing strange phenomena to haunt the family’s present day members. Some of the main characters in the book are: Professor Christopher Pennfield — The Chairman of the Philosophy Dept. and Chair of the Tenure Committee at Pennfield College, a small, highly-respected academic institution in rural Vermont founded in the late 1800s by his industrialist great-grandfather. Pennfield, 52, is a highly popular professor of Philosophy. Some consider Christopher Pennfield a bit of a snob, as he is very proud – overly proud – of his family’s cherished lineage. Recently, Prof. Pennfield has been experiencing a strange feeling of paralysis during his sleep whenever he spends a night at his family’s Newport cottage. During these episodes, he can swear he sees two large human figures hovering over his bed, one of them brandishing a knife. While married to his wife, Elizabeth, for almost thirty years, he has roaming eyes, and is rumored to have been involved with several Pennfield College coeds over the years. Jonathan Pennfield — Christopher’s younger brother. He’s in his early forties, and is an executive at GlobalAir, an airline founded by his grandfather, Benjamin Pennfield. The family iconoclast, Jonathan has kept a distance from his older brother Christopher for years. It all started in 1972, when Jonathan campaigned for George McGovern, in strict defiance of the family’s Republican heritage. As the story begins, Jonathan is enjoying a sailing weekend off Nantucket Island on his prized possession, The Speedwell, a thirty five foot sloop. As he sails near the shoals of Nantucket Sound, he is attacked by a violent storm at sea, which no one else sailing in the area that day can even detect on their radar. Edwina "Winnie" Pennfield — The twenty seven year old niece of Christopher and Jonathan, she is the daughter of Robin Pennfield, the oldest of three Pennfield brothers who was killed in a car crash in the late 1970s. She’s beautiful, sophisticated, brilliant and a real go-getter. In four short years, she rose to the level of Editor ‘n Chief of Avanti magazine, a cutting edge publication catering to the jet-set. Xenobia Pennfield Harthgate —The family outcast, Xenobia Pennfield Harthgate is the seventy-nine year old cousin of Christopher and Jonathan. A very strange person, Xenobia lives by herself in an old unkempt Victorian house in Middletown, RI, not far from the family’s Newport Cottage. To a person, her neighbors all claim that she’s some sort of witch. It started one day in the early 1980s when Xenobia scared a young neighborhood child by placing her crooked finger on the child’s chin and reciting a strange phrase, "The mean spirits of the wrongful dead damn their living perpetrators." Most everyone in the neighborhood believes that Xenobia’s house is haunted, as more than several of her neighbors have seen the figure of a woman dressed in black gliding back and forth around the house’s large wraparound porch. Ed Swann — A retired construction contractor in his mid-sixties. Early in his retirement, Swann became very bored with the usual retirement activities, and considered going back to work. However, these plans changed one day when Swann was served with papers; Swann was apparently being sued because a buyer of one of his houses near Princeton, NJ claimed the house was haunted by the ghost of a revolutionary war soldier. This incident sparked a passing interest in psychic phenomena by Swann which soon grew into an outright obsession. Using a combination of his practical skills as a construction contractor and his academic pursuit of psychic phenomena, Swann became a true-to-life ghost hunter. His reputation in finding (or disproving) hauntings grew rapidly throughout the Northeastern United States. When the Pennfields become concerned about the strange psychic phenomena haunting their family, there was only one person they could turn to. |
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