The Skunk Under the Oak: A Story of Research

I write suspense novels, so apart from knowing something about the protagonist's profession and the various ways people frighten or kill one another, what topics do I need to research? Plenty, of course; the more I know and the greater number of options at my command, the more fun I have when I'm writing. Now I find that there's nothing like new information to plump up a plot.
This week, with barely 40,000 of my projected 50,000 words of A Murder of Crones to be dictated by month's end, and with lots and lots of other writing to do, I checked out two library books which promise to become game-changers: Encyclopedia of the Unexplained and Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology. On these topics I am a fount of misinformation and conjecture; I'll need to rely on their indices in order to study. But here's the thing: based on just a cursory scan of an entry about Wales, I've altered a couple of scenes, added a death and implicated a group of nice old ladies (NOLs).

The NOLs want to explore the occult, so they meet at the full of the moon in a tiny garden stuffed into a parking lot beneath a large oak tree. Now, the oak was worshiped by the ancient Druids of Wales. Since they probably performed human sacrifice in their rituals, the rest, i.e. the new death and the fact that it happened under the oak, became irresistible to me.

Reading further about Wales, and I really really love this, I found, "... there were reports of mysterious luminous phenomena associated with revivalism" during the 19th Century. Who wouldn't want to put that into a paranormal suspense novel? Obviously as the NOLs do their stuff, something luminous and airy has to ascend toward the rising full moon and infuse their fear with an unforgettable sense of, well, horror.  So here's another bit I already had (!) from previous research; when the wandering nocturnal skunk is startled into releasing his smelly weapon, said weapon rises, a luminous green cloud, airy and ethereal as a puff of smoke. Luminous.  I kid you not.

I've been having fun with this book about old women, and always knew that the basic story is one of half-admitted magic.  If I thought I could get away with it, I'd reincarnate Merlin as the hero, or maybe Leonardo.  If.  Obviously I didn't count on the factual, useful skunk under the oak.  Lucky me.