Michelle L. Cullen has lived and traveled all over the world: from working as a decent (if powered by enough espresso) bilingual secretary in Paris to backpacking around Europe, Central America, and Southern Africa, to helping to rebuild communities after war throughout Africa, East Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific. She studied anthropology at Melbourne University in Australia and sociology at the London School of Economics in England. She currently lives in Annapolis, Maryland, where she’s busy doing yoga, playing outside, or plotting murder. Her latest novel, A Field Guide to Death and Deceit, will be published September 15, 2026, and you can get more information and order it right here.
Michelle is a proud member of SinC, ITW, MWA, and The Authors Guild.
But what scares her? What terrifying places has she been to and lived to tell the tales? Read on to find out…
What is your greatest fear?
It’s not my greatest fear, but it is a new one…I no longer like to fly, which is a bit nuts given how much I’ve traveled in my life. I’ve been to over 60 countries and have flown on everything from jumbo jets to four seaters, and twin engines to prop planes. I’ve even taken lessons to fly a helicopter and have flown one myself.
But a few years ago, I had a very bad flight. We got stuck in a thunderstorm and had to divert to make an unplanned landing in a neighboring state. Between the turbulence, thunder, and lightening, the flight left its mark. I’ve flown since then, but the ease that I felt before isn’t there. I’m hoping it returns soon because I have no plans to stop traveling.
“A few years ago, I had a very bad flight… Between the turbulence, thunder, and lightening, the flight left its mark.”
What’s something that most people are afraid of that you are not?
Amusingly, while I’m now a nervous flyer, I’m not afraid of heights. My highest rock-climbing record is 900 feet. In fact, my favorite climb is Seneca Rocks because near the top, one of the last pitches requires you to step out from a small ledge over a sheer drop of about 800 feet. It’s exhilarating.
What’s the scariest place you’ve ever been?
After studying to be an anthropologist, I worked for the World Bank doing post-conflict reconstruction, with my first assignment in Rwanda just four years after the genocide. Given the tenuous situation, there was a curfew every evening at sundown. Wherever you were at 6 p.m., you were there for the night—which for me was usually the Hôtel des Mille Collines (aka the hotel in Hotel Rwanda), where over a thousand Tutsi fled for their lives during the war. While doing field work, I had an unarmed driver who would escort me around the country to conduct interviews and gather information to help design projects. I talked to all sorts of people, from individuals who were attacked during the war, to those who lost loved ones, to those who slaughtered their own families. With each trip, there were concerns about landmines, getting hijacked, and running into rebels or guerilla forces. Then there was the smaller enemy—mosquitos that could infect me with malaria or dengue fever. As a petite woman just out of grad school, it was one hell of a first job to start my career.
Have you ever had premonitions or known when something was about to go wrong?
I wouldn’t call it premonitions, but my work in war-torn countries amped up my spidey senses, honing my instincts on people and situations. Once, I was in a famine-stricken village in Burkina Faso near the Sahel Desert, where the annual income was less than $10 USD. I sat outside with the village chief and leaders in a men’s drinking circle as we wrapped up our discussion on living conditions when a cell phone chimed in the distance. Since no one who lived in that village could have afforded a cell phone, I knew that someone in the area was likely linked to gangs that had been stopping and robbing cars carrying aid workers. I quickly thanked the village chief for his time, said we needed to leave, then asked my driver to take the longest route back to the hotel, as the gangs would not expect us to use those roads. For the first 20 minutes of that slow, nerve-wracking ride, my driver and I anticipated an ambush around every turn. I was ridiculously happy to get back to my concrete block hotel that evening.
Have you ever had an incident that totally freaked you out?
Normally when I travel in the bush, at night I do a quick check to make sure there aren’t any large bugs in the bedsheets. One night, I didn’t remember until the lights were out and I was already lying down. Exhausted from the day, I half-heartedly propped myself up on my elbow and lifted my pillow. Something large and dark crawled over the side of the bed. I curved my fingers around the edge of the mattress to flick whatever it was onto the ground, then stopped when the hair on the back of my neck raised one by one. Somewhere in my brain I registered that whatever it was didn’t move like a cockroach.
I got up and turned on the lights, then peeked over the side of the bed. It was a scorpion. I went to the hotel front desk to get help, and we eventually found and killed the scorpion. Later, when I had access to the internet, I tried to figure out what kind it could have been. Given where we were and what it looked like, it was probably a venomous fattail scorpion, one of the most dangerous types in the world. My field research team was convinced that a witch had put it there, but that’s another story…
What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever written?
I tried to write a thriller based on my work in post-genocidal Rwanda, doing my best to make it sinister and atmospheric. An editor friend who reviewed it for me kindly noted that perhaps “dark” isn’t my thing because I had people smiling and laughing on every third page.
What person living today terrifies you the most and why?
There are a lot of people who terrify me at the moment, and I mean A LOT, but I’m going to keep this apolitical.
What’s creepier: clowns, dolls, or wax figures?
That’s easy. Clown dolls. I had one as a kid, and after I saw Poltergeist, I made my mom put it in a box then store it in the crawl space in our basement; which then, of course, made me afraid to go down into the basement on my own unless every light was on.
