It had to be written—I don’t know why.
LIVING INSIDE HISTORY: That Barbarian, Bavarian 70ies story.
Katrina, 17, lives in 2000-year-old village. And yet her historical essays stink. Success comes when Katrina plagiarizes her late grandmother’s diary and the story gets run in the paper. Now the whole village is up in arms against her. There was some old dirt and a skeleton in the closet. This is only the beginning of Katrina’s adventures, because soon a real skeleton is found.
What a story! Katrina is looking for love in all the wrong places until she starts seeing ghosts. Now the Celtic Stallion is out in English! The Celtic Stallion now also rides the American plains.

St. George’s Chapel on the hill, minus the horse ghost, painted by my grandmother Katharina
The original “Keltenschimmel” started in my Bavarian home town. There was a sensational archaeological find in the village: in the year 2000, a Celtic princess was unearthed during the renovation project of an old farm house. Imagine—she comes to life again. And imagine all the other ghosts in between. St. George’s Chapel on the hill had at least four of them: the dragon, the hound, the witch, and the white stallion.
I sat down and wrote the Celtic Stallion then, perhaps in a pursuit of preserving the “good old days.” My book of coming-of-age amidst village myths—between a Celtic burial 2000 years ago and the Comanche who roamed the area during WWII—spilled forth on the pages. I could not have turned this off. But why this urge?

Votive paintings, such as these, are part of a church robbery in the story that Katrina gets blamed for
Was I processing my past? Perhaps. Back then, as a teenager, I could feel the exclusion and sublime bullying caused by my pursuit of higher education. Was I processing the present? Maybe even more so. Conglomerate farming and the insanity of modern times had knocked tradition to the ground. Nobody went to church, but everybody was at the Corn Field Party. Does this show my age? I (hypocrite) am not such a good church goer myself. And, finally, I could not handle the fact that another archaeological study was done towards clearance for a hypermarket building permit. All that was discovered there, is now buried under the sales floor of the grocery store. And even more farmland fell victim to the new commercial district.

This could be the hen house in which Katrina dueled with her type writer against grandpa’s peening clanks
Enough of that. My story plays in a small, 70s, Bavarian village, when the world was mostly still in order. Or so Katrina, the 17-year-old high school student thought. Oh, well, not so OK for a capricious teenager. Katrina was looking for love in all the wrong places, wrote the worst essays ever, and sparred against her mute grandfather in a duel of clattering noises: he sharpening his scythes, she hacking away at her typewriter in the hen house. Needless to say, a modern girl who lives in an old-fashioned village is bound to run into trouble. And ghosts as well. The Celtic Stallion indulges you with the Otherworld or Adventureland of modern German mythology. Be entertained by Katrina’s mishaps and the devious ghosts of St. George’s Hill: the witch, the dragon, and the white stallion. They all come to life, one way or another. History never dies.
The Celtic Stallion is now available in English on Amazon.

The German reading at the Grabenmühle near my hometown was staged with love and care. We had four presenters, who practiced their stage skills. Harp music and singing, were all part of it.