Welcome Erica Ruth Neubauer – on turning mysterious podcasts into fiction

By Liz, welcoming Erica Ruth Neubauer to the blog today! As someone who is obsessed with true crime podcasts, I love how a supernatural podcast inspired Erica’s newest book. Enjoy!

I listen to some pretty odd podcasts, which is good both because I find them interesting, but also because sometimes they offer up some good fodder for book ideas. I was especially excited when I listened to a podcast called Supernatural, and they had an episode dedicated to the mysterious case of Netta Fornario. Netta was a real woman who died on the Scottish Isle of Iona in the 1920s under mysterious circumstances. When she was found out on the moor, she was naked except for a cloak, lying on a cross that had been carved into the ground, and she was sadly dead. The time period was perfect for my series—which is set in the 1920s, and the topic of the occult was perfect as well, since spiritualism and the occult were hot at that time and something that I wanted to address in my series. 

And so, in book five of my series, SECRETS OF A SCOTTISH ISLE, Jane Wunderly finds herself investigating Netta’s death on that remote Scottish Isle. 

It was fascinating to research both Netta’s last days and her unfortunate demise as well as the Order of the Golden Dawn, which is the occult group that she belonged to. I was able to find books that outlined some of the rituals of the group, the political issues and rivalries that splintered the group, and the fact that W.B. Yeats had been a member years before Netta Fornario. It all made for a lot of interesting reading, as well as a lot of fun in creating the characters that would—in my fictional world at least—surround Netta in the days before her death. 

It was also fun to create a villain in this space. I’m always delighted to read a villain that you love to hate, and I found exactly that in Robert Nightingale, the man that Jane has been sent to Scotland to investigate. He was loosely based on a real-life member, but was largely a product of my imagination. On the other hand, it was also interesting to portray a real historical character for the first time, since once I learned that W.B. Yeats used to be a part of this occult group, I couldn’t let him off the hook—he had to return to the Golden Dawn for one last ritual. I did quite a lot of research on the Irish poet, and I hope that I was able to capture the man, even though his presence on Iona was entirely fictional—he’d long since left the group before Netta died. 

But ultimately, and on a serious note, I hope that I was able to do some justice to Netta Fornario herself. She was a complicated woman with unusual interests, especially for the time period, and looking back from the year 2024, it seems as though she had mental health issues that may have led to her death. In talking about it, I hope that we can continue the larger conversation about helping one another to seek help when help is needed so that tragic deaths like Netta’s can be prevented.