When I was eight years old, in a small city by the Colombian Caribbean coast, I found myself desperate for a new adventure, a new world to get lost in. I had already gone through my own stack of books twice, everything from The Wizard of Oz to Little Women, and my local bookstore and library didn’t have a huge selection. My eyes kept wandering to my dad’s side of the bookshelf–where the forbidden titles rested, too mature for me, but so undeniably tempting. And there, halfway tucked behind other volumes, was the Spanish translation of The Shining by Stephen King. It was a book that I knew I shouldn’t touch, but the urge to dive into something fresh was too strong to ignore.

I pulled it from the shelf, adrenaline coursing through me as I cracked open the first page. I read and reread sentences, passages, chapters. Read it all the way through and started to read it over again. I have reread it twenty-three times since then.

I became obsessed, not just with the story, but with the power of place. The haunted, crumbling Overlook Hotel wasn’t just a setting; it was a living, breathing character, filled with its own history, and secrets. But instead of just thinking about Jack, Danny, and Wendy, I wanted to create my own version–something inspired by my favorite book but also uniquely mine.

Years later, in my late twenties, I found a real place–an old, weathered hotel perched on the edge of a quiet mountain in the Andean Hills, far from anything resembling civilization, overlooking a 505-foot waterfall, El Salto del Tequendama. A mere hour away from Bogota, on Muisca land where the natives worshiped Bochica, lived the Colombian version of the Overlook Hotel. The five-story mansion was Colombia’s first luxury hotel in the early 1920s and was abandoned in the late 1950s, after bodies began to pile up at the bottom of the fall and stories of ghosts and demons began to drive people away. La Casona was restored into a museum in 2012 and still welcomes visitors today.

After a quick visit in 2021, I spent hours imagining how the echoes of La Casona’s past might bleed into the present. I came up with my own haunted house story, with ghosts of my own, drawing from Colombian mysticism, and deeply inspired by the stories of locals who claim to have experienced paranormal phenomena. It was my tribute, my homage to The Shining–the book that planted the seeds of my obsession and sparked my desire to write. But it was also a story of my own, with characters who looked like me, shared my culture, and experienced places that I had seen, breathed, and lived in. It was a story that had been brewing within me for years, simmering, until it was ready to come out.

At its heart, Bochica is a book about the ghosts we carry within ourselves–the things we cannot escape, our legacy, the griefs we’re never truly free of, and the power we are willing to chase, even when it comes at a cost. It’s about women finding a place in a world ruled by men, determined by religious beliefs.

After years of obsessing over horror stories, I’ve come to understand that oftentimes the most frightening things are not the things we see–or think we see, lurking in the night–but the things we refuse to see within ourselves. It’s the realization that the scariest ghosts are the ones inside us.

Bochica is for anyone who has ever carried a piece of their past with them, unable to let it go, like a haunting no one is able to exorcise. I hope Bochica helps readers confront the things that linger, and maybe, sets them free. But it’s also for those who carry a story within them like a ghost. Some books begin to take shape even before we put the first line to paper, like how stealing my dad’s copy of The Shining put me on a wild path I could have never imagined.

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Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro is a Colombian author of genre bending speculative fiction based in Bogotá, Colombia. Bochica, pitched as Mexican Gothic meets The Shining, was published by Atria Books/Primero Sueño Press on May 13. Her work is fueled by curiosity, her love of history and the supernatural, and the desire to give voice to traditionally marginalized perspectives. When she’s not writing, she can be found sipping black coffee, puzzling, and listening to audiobooks.