Long before James Turberville put his thoughts onto the page about psychic twins, wandering spirits, and a strange soul catcher, he had already been wrestling with one question for years. What could be out there, beyond what most people notice.
His early life was heavy. There was fear in the house, and a family tragedy that stayed with him. He also had experiences he could not easily explain, the kind he later linked to spirits.
For decades he worked in medicine, close to life and also close to death. Then something shifted. He moved away from painting and into writing.
All of it came together in The Boley Twins: A Ghost Story.
James Turberville was twelve when something strange took place in his grandparents’ home. It stuck with him for the rest of his life.
He was in the dining room by himself, piecing together a puzzle that showed the Sistine Chapel.
At some point, for no clear reason, his mood shifted. Fear came on fast.
He stopped what he was doing and scanned the room.
Then he caught a smell.
Turberville left right away. He went into the backyard and waited until his grandparents came home.
Much later, in 1971, he was looking for an apartment in Tuscaloosa. He stepped into a rental house.
The same smell hit him again.
The realtor nearby stood there and seemed calm. She did not react.
Turberville did
He walked away from the place. He did not take it.
Even now, he links that smell with ghosts.
It does not really matter if every reader would explain it the same way. The point, for understanding Turberville as a writer, is that he did something with what he felt. Those moments shaped how he thought about death, awareness, and the idea that something could last after the body is done.
Years on, those thoughts made their way into his stories.
Still, before any of that, there was a longer life to get through.
A Childhood Shaped by Anxiety
Turberville tells his childhood story plainly.
He does not dress it up.
He had a hard stutter as a kid.
His father, as Turberville puts it, often mocked him.
Because of that, Turberville was not the sporty boy his father wanted.
Talking could feel like a burden.
His stutter was bad enough that he tried to skip the phone.
He worried he would get stuck mid talk.
Then he would feel exposed.
He recalls his childhood as “a nail biting anxiety lived life.”
There was also grief.
In third grade, their house burned down.
He remembers the fire as more than the damage.
He saw a shift afterward.
His parents seemed to lose their spark.
“From that time onward they never appeared to have any joy,” he says.
“Joy had left them.”
More trouble came through the wider family.
His grandfather was talked about as someone who could remove warts.
Family stories said it ran in the men on the eldest line.
Turberville’s uncle might have had it too.
But the uncle died in a car wreck.
It happened about a month after he came back from World War II.
He died along with his first cousin.
Later, Turberville’s mother was paired with an identical twin.
Her twin’s life ended after a crash.
The plane her husband was flying hit a mountain.
Turberville says his mother felt the loss before anyone called.
The family learned afterward.
That same tale mattered later on.
It helped shape The Boley Twins.
The Rocking Chair Nobody Wanted to Discuss
Turberville’s family had odd tales, and people did not always pretend otherwise.
In the late 1960s, after his great grandmother died, she was old enough that it felt expected. Still, Turberville recalls her rocking chair going on moving. It kept rocking for a while, longer than anyone figured it should.
His family handled it in a very plain way.
They shut the door.
After that, no one wanted to talk about it.
Turberville, though, kept circling the same thoughts. He could not just drop it.
As the years passed, he started to see things differently. The line between the living and the dead did not seem as firm as it was usually treated.
He says spirits can stay nearby. He also says animals can have spirits, too. At night, he sometimes feels like he can sense animals that have died.
He has told others he has seen dark shapes. He also talks about picturing himself surrounded by bright light, as a kind of shield.
These are his own views. They are not promises that his fiction demands reader’s test.
Still, they help explain why the supernatural in The Boley Twins feels less like a brand new trick to him. It feels more like a creative way to follow questions he has carried for a long time.
Working at the Edge of Life and Death
Turberville eventually moved into a field built on science, not ghosts.
He got a license as a respiratory therapist. He also trained as an EEG technician.
For a few years, he ran graded exercise tests. Those tests helped doctors judge how the heart was functioning.
His job often put him near some of the hardest moments people ever face.
He took part in situations where patients pulled through.
At the same time, he was there when things did not go well.
He remembers people telling him, in plain words, that they felt it was their last day.
He also heard patients talk about family members who they said were there with them.
When he worked as an EEG technician, he sometimes tested people who might become organ donors. The goal was to check whether electrical brain signals still showed up.
During those checks, he says he would sometimes feel as if someone else was present.
Medicine never offered him a clear conclusion about anything supernatural.
Still, doing this work again and again around death gave him a view that very few writers can claim from firsthand experience.
Death was not an idea.
He had been close to it in real time.
He had seen families meet it, right there in the room.
He had heard patients talk as they were nearing it.
Later, when he started writing about the dead, he leaned on a life where questions about dying came from both his work and his own experience.
The Artist Who Became a Writer
Turberville had not planned to retire as a writer.
His plan was art.
He earned a degree in studio art. In his head, retirement meant painting.
At the same time, he kept leaning toward old and handmade things. He collected folk art, early pottery, and stereoscopic views. He also worked with antiques.
Then his hands shifted the plan.
After three surgeries on his hands, Turberville could not paint the way he wanted anymore.
He searched for another way to make things.
He chose words.
He did not try to write in a serious way until he was already retired.
One of his first big projects was Monroeville, Harper Lee & Me. He finished a version of the manuscript in 2017. After that, he went to Europe. While there, he started to rethink parts of what he had written.
When he came back, he set the draft aside.
He felt he needed something else to hold his attention.
That turned into a ghost story.
A Book Written in a Weekend
Turberville finished The Boley Twins: A Ghost Story in just one weekend.
He started with no outline.
At first, he thought more chapters might come later.
Every time he tried, it felt off, like the story would not cooperate.
So he stopped adding and let the book end when it should.
He believed there would be time for another book later.
That choice may be part of why the novel feels so lively.
The Boley Twins reads quickly. It does not drown the supernatural parts in long setup. Turberville pulls you into the story through twin characters with psychic powers. Then the unanswered pieces keep showing up and stacking.
Most of the time, the twins help people get rid of ghosts that will not leave them alone.
Still, the town they reach is different.
Something there feels worse.
The past does not stay put.
Soon you see more and more questions.
Why do so many dead people linger?
Are the graves empty, or were they covered up?
Can the lost souls be brought back to safety?
What is the soul catcher?
Will the town make it through what is coming back?
And can the twins?
Through all that fear, there is also a ghost dog. It does not just haunt the background. It seems to want notice.
That part matters.
Turberville supports shelter animals, and he believes animals can have spirits. Because of that, the ghost dog is not only a quick spooky detail. It fits the bigger view the author brings to his work.
Even when ghosts are everywhere in the story, the animal still counts.
Review: The Mystery Inside The Boley Twins
The Boley Twins is interesting, but not only because ghosts show up.
Ghost tales have been around for a long time
What makes Turberville stand out is the way he builds a structure around those ghosts.
The twins are not the same in what they can do.
One twin can actually see spirits.
The other twin can control them.
That split sets up teamwork, but it also leaves space for trouble, new answers, and more growth later.
Turberville says he traces the core idea to his mother and her identical twin.
He remembers her story about sensing her sister’s death before she knew the details
He turns that family memory into a bigger supernatural idea.
He asks a simple question: could the twin link reach past normal sight?
After that, Turberville pushes the premise further.
His ghosts are not just scary background pieces.
Some of them need help.
Some act out and cause problems.
Some stay around longer than they should.
And some forces in the story go much darker.
The soul catcher is one of the novel’s best creations. Turberville writes it as a being with its own goal inside a larger supernatural order. He plans to follow that thread in a sequel.
The fact that this mythology is not fully finished helps the book feel open, like a door you can walk through, not a lid you close.
There is more to this world than the twins know, and more than the reader has learned so far.
Why the Simplicity Works
Turberville chose to keep the Boley Twins stories plain and fast.
That choice makes the book easier to step into.
You do not have to learn a huge supernatural world before things start.
The story rules show up as the twins do.
Psychic abilities matter here.
Spirits show up, too.
Old events bring real risks.
You keep getting questions about the dead and what they want.
You also wonder if they can be aided.
What stands out most is the push and pull between fear and care.
The twins are not only out there to chase ghosts and fight monsters.
Their gifts can also reach those who have passed.
So the book treats the right and wrong in a different way.
A ghost can scare you without being a villain.
A haunting can feel rough when an issue never got settled.
Sometimes the dead need help just like the living do.
And since the author worked for years with patients near the edge of life and death, that point lands with extra weight.
The Ideas Behind the Supernatural
Turberville’s interests go past the usual ghost-story stuff.
He points to H. P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine as the book he likes most in occult philosophy. He also pays attention to early science fiction, especially Robert A. Heinlein.
He follows Dolores Cannon too. He uses her hypnosis approach called QHHT. Turberville claims he has done regressions with a few people. He also says he personally believes in reincarnation.
These are his views. That is all.
They do not matter in his writing because of what a reader believes. They matter because Turberville brings his own angle to supernatural tales. He is not just pulling from well-known horror images.
In his stories, consciousness might continue after death. Spiritual beings might be present. Reincarnation is on the table, along with memory that could show up later in strange ways.
He even thinks granite can hold on to memories.
That whole mix leaves room for more stories down the line.
A Different Kind of Second Career
It seems right that James Turberville turned to writing only after he retired.
Before that, life kept handing him usable details.
As a boy, he had a severe stutter, and he grew up knowing what it is like to fight for words.
When he was young and his house burned down, he learned how fast a family’s mood can shift.
As a grandson, sitting alone with a puzzle from the Sistine Chapel, he ran into something he could not pin down.
Later, he worked in medicine, where illness, staying alive, and dying were never far away.
He also trained himself as an artist, learning to see shape, small notes of detail, and the feel of a scene.
And as a collector, he came to care about objects, not just for how they looked, but for the stories attached to them.
Then hand surgery threw off the path he had planned for himself.
Painting turned hard for him
After that, the man who used to avoid the telephone, because talking could feel humiliating, found another way to reach people.
He wrote.
Turberville has also coauthored Red Team Development and Operations: A Practical Guide, and that shows a side that is far from supernatural fiction.
Still, The Boley Twins feels tied to something more private.
It reaches back.
Back to his mother and her twin.
Back to the rocking chair.
Back to the odd smell in his grandparents’ house.
Back to patients who talked about relatives who had already passed
Back to the questions that followed him for years.
James Turberville does not ask every reader to accept his exact beliefs.
A ghost story does not need that kind of agreement.
It needs curiosity.
What if?
What if the dead stay nearer than we think?
What if some are harmful, while others only need help?
What if animals still carry a link to the people who loved them?
What if two twins can notice what the rest of us miss?
What if the events we cannot explain now become, later, the tales we were meant to tell?
All through his life, Turberville has lived close to mysteries in one form or another.
In The Boley Twins, he finally gives those mysteries a place to land.
Explore James Turberville and The Boley Twins
The Boley Twins: A Ghost Story
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