I see dead people - by Lu Hersey

This is a post about exploring eerie settings, evoking an atmosphere and trying to describe the inexplicable in your writing. I did see a ghost once, but it's not entirely relevant, so I'll save it to the end.

Whether you're writing a ghost story, a book with an element of otherworldliness, folklore, magic, or anything spooky, your aim is to write something that will stay with children for years to come. I still remember the feeling I got from the reveal in Tom's Midnight Garden (an all time favourite) decades after I read it, and that's the kind of 'feel' I strive to achieve in my own writing.

For many years I worked for a publisher in Bristol that specialised in producing local non fiction books. One book I wrote (or wrote most of) for them was on the subject of local ghosts (ironically I was writing as a ghost writer - the credited authors were celebrity ghost hunters). Research involved visiting a number of haunted venues and interviewing people about their personal encounters with ghosts, and so I learnt quite a lot about the subject on the way.

If you want to spook your reader, it can really help to find an environment with the right kind of ambience. Direct experience of your setting is often key to unlocking a story, so put yourself in a suitably haunting place. When writing the ghost book, I discovered the most popular ghost hangouts include the following:

• Castles. Castles ALWAYS seem to have ghosts. A visit to a castle can give you a real sense of eeriness. The musty smell, dark cellars, ancient tapestries and walls covered in portraits of dead relatives. Some, like Berkeley Castle, even have a history of regicide, and you can inspect the glory hole where they cast Edward II before killing him brutally (won't go into details, but you can easily find out), and a blood stain that can't be removed from the floor in one of the rooms. Many castles lie in ruins, and have a different feel, especially at dusk or on a gloomy day, when jackdaws squabble high on crumbling battlements. For the ghost book, I talked at length to one of the staff at Farleigh Hungerford Castle, who related all kinds of really hair-raising experiences she'd had (which sadly I wasn't allowed to include because the owners didn't want the castle getting a reputation - but the castle is open to the public, if you want to investigate yourself....)

• Graveyards. Graveyards are wonderful. Gravestones can tell you so much about a location, and though cemeteries are generally peaceful places filled with the quiet (rather than unquiet) dead, they have very distinctive atmospheres, and you can pick up some excellent story ideas by simply visiting them. Many of the characters in my books have names I found on gravestones. I recommend Highgate Cemetery if you've never been, or Arnos Vale if you live near Bristol - but any graveyard surrounding any church in the country will have an atmosphere of its own.

• Hotels. The number of haunted hotels around may surprise you - practically every town can boast at least one. Click here for a list of the seven of the reputedly most haunted hotels in Britain. There's nothing like a big hotel with too many rooms and winding corridors to give you nightmares, so maybe go and stay in one...

• Asylums. Not so easy to visit, but there are places like Glenside in Bristol, now converted into a museum, that provide a chilling history of the appalling way we've treated people with mental health issues in the past. It's no wonder these places are so often reputed to be haunted. If you can't face a real life visit, you can find plenty of pictures of abandoned asylums online - just take a look at Pinterest. 

• Old orphanages and former workhouses. Also places that tend to have terrible histories and are not easy to visit, though weirdly quite a few have now been converted into luxury apartments. Again, take a look online for images to give you the creepiest ideas.

• Haunted houses. Believe it or not, some people actually WANT to live in a haunted house, so there are specific online property searches for the creepiest currently available on the market. If you're really keen, you could make the effort to view one, or just click here for a quick look.

• Misty moorland. Folk tales abound with misty moorland settings - and there's nothing like a good mist to set your imagination free. It doesn't even have to be moorland. Sea mist, London fog - all kinds of things can be hidden out there. Next time there's a mist close to home, venture out in it for a while to find out how mist muffles sounds, and experience how very different everyday things can look. (But watch out for ghost dogs, obviously. You don't want to end up in Grimpen Mire.)

Even if you don't write ghost stories, it's worth experiencing the atmosphere of some of these spooky places. They can conjure strong emotions, and add spark to your writing. Who knows what new ideas will come to you?

So to finish - about the time I saw a dead man walking.

For 20 years, when my children were growing up, we lived in the same house. Across the street lived a very unpleasant old couple and their two nasty sons, who were both middle aged, unmarried, and had never left home. I referred to their house (the biggest by far in the road) as the Bates Motel. Fortunately my kids didn't get the reference until they were much older.

This family were challenging neighbours. Always starting disputes and goading others - including me. They flattened my car tyres on two separate occasions when I dared to disagree with them, and called the police on me when I confronted them about the 'anonymous' poison pen letters they posted through my door (the foul language, written all in capitals, shocked even me). The police told me I wasn't the first, but since I couldn't prove anything, it would be best to simply avoid them.

So I did. But of course I knew them well by sight and saw them in passing most days. They never spoke or acknowledged me (or anyone else) in the street unless they were sparking a new conflict. The old man had a strong, unwashed smell about him.

Anyway one day the old man had a heart attack and died, and it was the talk of the road. My neighbour Marlene had the decency to put a condolence card through their door, even though they'd constantly made racist remarks to her face and even to her two young children. The psycho sons tore up the card and posted it back through Marlene's letterbox.

Then about a week after he died, I was really surprised when the old man passed me on the pavement outside my house. No wonder they tore up Marlene's card I thought. He looked directly at me and said hello. He'd never said hello in all the years I'd lived there, and I was so surprised I said hello back.  I only realised afterwards, when neighbours assured me I couldn't have seen him as he was definitely dead (they'd seen the funeral hearse) - that there wasn't the usual smell about him. But he looked exactly the same as he always had, and it was broad daylight. Which is probably the least scary ghost story you've ever heard, but it's true. Direct sunlight, no mist, no castles, not even a spooky atmosphere.

In the end, all I can say is we may enjoy the eeriness of haunted places, and they may help us with our writing - but in reality, sometimes death improves people.


Lu Hersey
website luhersey.com
twitter @LuWrites

'One Dark And Stormy Night' by Steve Gladwin

Some Reflections On Reading Thirty Two Ghost Stories. 

First, let's see the sixteen authors. For those who pored over last month's blog - and there may well have been a few - here are the same sixteen pictures again, but this time in chronological order. The earliest of them is Edward Bulwe- Lytton, who wrote only one ghost story, but The Haunted and The Haunters is a fine example of the genre. Last is Walter de La Mere, best known of course for his chilling poem The Listeners, which is really a ghost story by any other name, but just happens to be a poem. 

Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1803-1873

Edgar Allen Poe 1809-1849

Sheridan Le Fanu 1814-1873

Ambrose Bierce 1842-1914

Bram Stoker 1847-1912

E Nesbit 1858-1924

Arthur Conan Doyle 1859-1930

Robert Louis Stephenson !862?

Edith Wharton 1862-1937

M.R. James 1862-1936

W.W. Jacobs 1863-1943

Arthur Machen 1863-1947

E.F. Benson 1867-1940

Algernon Blackwood 1869-1951

Oliver Onions 1873-1961

Walter de La Mere 1873-1956

What is immediately apparent is that if you take out the earlier writers at the beginning of the nineteenth century - Bulwer Lytton, Poe and Le Fanu-we see that some of the greatest writers of ghost stories were born within an astonishingly short thirty one year span, beginning with Ambrose Bierce and concluding with Walter de La Mere and Oliver Onions. M.R. James and Edith Wharton were born in the same year, 1862 and W.W. Jacobs and Arthur Machen a year later.

Taking this little further, there were at least five writers who I didn't have the time to read. Of these, L.P. Hartley and H.P. Lovecraft were born later, whereas William Hope Hodgson sits well within the forty year bracket- being born in 1877, but Guy de Maupassant,  O. Henry and Arthur Quiller Couch were born in 1850, 1862, (the same year as Edith Wharton and M. R. James) and 1863, (the year of the births of both W.W. Jacobs and Arthur Machen) respectively. There must surely have been something spooky in the water during those thirty five golden years of creativity.

Well I've spent a good chunk of my spare time in the last few months reading all of these authors and I've enjoyed every moment of it. I was obliged, against my principles, to do my reading on Kindle, because of its amazing collections.In the case of Bulwer-Lytton, as I have just written, there really wasn't another story to read, but I think that reading wise that would be more than made up for by the length of some of the others I read, more than one of which turned out to be novellas. Edith Wharton and Sheridan Le Fanu were particularly guilty in this, especially in the latter's Room at The Dragon Volant, which thoroughly enjoyable as it is, really is rather long. The same goes for Carmilla, but that's such a splendidly chilling account and probably the first true vampire novel, that it was well worth it. The opposite can be said for the brevity of E Nesbit, whose classic Man Sized in Marble, almost made my top five. Nesbit understands in the same way as Stoker and Conan Doyle, the power of brevity in order to make an impact. E. F. Benson's stories were a revelation. I was enthusiastically warned about this, by my good friend Stuart Croskell, who provided me with the wonderful list I had to work through. Without Stu's help and wide reading my knowledge of who to read would have been sketchy at best. There are. however, stories which have the impact of a full on collision, and one of these of Benson's, made my top five.

Rather than spend too much time on analysing all of these writers at length. I'd prefer to concentrate on plot, characterisation and above all atmosphere. Probably the most prolific of these writers was Algernon Blackwood, a recent 'rediscovery, and if there is anyone who can better conjure the deadly elemental power of the outdoors, I'd love to read him, or her. That he, uniquely, can do entirely the opposite by providing equally chilling examples of the claustrophobia and close terror of a whole variety of indoor spaces almost as well as M.R. James does, (which is saying something) shows just how good at this stuff he was. But Sheridan Le Fanu or Edith Wharton or E.F Benson wouldn't be far behind him and the same goes for Walter de La Mere.

The perennial trope of the Haunted House is well illustrated in the stories I've read, but possibly the respective versions of it by Bulwer-Lytton in The Haunted and the Haunters - if you write only one ghost story, best make it as good as this one, or Oliver Onions, the quite stunningly disturbing The Beckoning Fair One which reads at times like Psycho long before Robert Bloch conceived the idea. And no matter how much W.W Jacob's The Monkey's Paw has become a parodied cliche everywhere, that doesn't take away from it's wonderful building of it's three act structure, or that telling moment at the end when you say don't,  just don't answer that door. Ambrose Bierce's well known 'Incident at Owl Creek' is written in a manner well ahead of its time and is hauntingly evocative in its time slipping narrative as much as Edith Wharton's eerie All Souls. M. R. James The Ash Tree is another masterpiece of chilling construction, with the dark sentinel of the old tree and it's resident witch terrifying it's way through three generations.  And if you don't want to be terrified out of your wits and are also squeamish as I am about incidents and instruments of torture, I beg you to avoid Conan Doyle's The Leather Funnel and Bram Stoker's The Squaw. The former takes you to places neither you nor the narrator wishes to go, whereas the latter manages to evoke the tormenting practices of two very different cultures either side of the Atlantic and throw in a sinister black cat for good measure. Of course the most famous black cat came from the pen of Edgar Allen Poe, and really, no-one writes in the same feverish half madness he creates in both The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart.

Before listing my top ten in reverse order, I should explain that I'm only allowing myself to include two stories from each author that I hadn't read before, (with the obvious exception of Bulwer Lytton) and my summing up and grading is based only on these thirty one stories, (co-incidentally the same number as the years span in which nearly all of these authors were born).

So here, in reverse order, are the results. In one or two cases I have read many more of the author's stories than I originally set out to do, Apart from Blackwood, Le Fanu, Edith Wharton, E Nesbit and E.F. Benson had somewhat of an advantage.

10. The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe.This is the story I've known the longest, so I thought it a good idea to visit it again, It could easily have been number one on a different day. Poe's ability to not only reduce a story to the tortured meanderings of a disturbed mind, but to actually render that mind on paper is masterly. No-one has ever captured the disordered mind as well.

9. Seaton's Aunt by Walter de La Mere. When I read the first of my two tales, All Hallows, I was a little confused by the author's 'hands-off' and somewhat ambiguous approach', I was somewhat confused. The evocation of the old cathedral by the sea with something evil at its heart in the former is brilliantly done, but it is nothing to the depiction of the evil personage that is Seaton's Aunt. The feeling of discomfort and creeping dread is in the background all the way through. And yet the mind is left to play with both reality and memory just as its hero in obliged to do. If there is such a thing as leaving a nasty taste in the mind, this story has it in spades. De La Mere's most famous poem The Listener has exactly the same quality.

8. The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. There appear to be two creative sides to Edward Bulwer-Lytton. On the one hand his prolific output is balanced by a reputation of being one of the worst writers ever - it being he incidentally who first came up with the title line which is the title of this blog! But notwithstanding 'one dark and stormy night', if Bulwer Lytton had only written one story, his classic haunted house story is worthy of celebration. Of course his very dates must make him one of the originators of this type of story. He and Poe are the only writers in this group to share such eas rly nineteenth century origins, but both the theme and execution of The Haunted and the Haunters feel very modern. It is also very scary.

7. The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs. This story has undergone so many parodies, (most memorably) as a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Halloween special) and references and jokes not worthy of the original, that it comes as a bit of a shock to discover just how good it is. What hits you first is how it is a classic three act structure, used to perfection. Secondly and somewhat uniquely when we are used to the worlds of James, Blackwood and Machen, say, here are two characters who you come to care enough about to say 'don't answer the door' with feeling. This is one of the most well loved of all ghost stories and fully deserves to be. The other obvious debt The Monkey's Paw has is to folk-tale, of which much more anon. Read it!

6. The Ash Tree by M.R. James. M.R. James is quite possibly the best writer of ghost stories that ever lived and he is often people's first experience of the genre - especially those of us who grew up or saw on later repeats the chilling black and white Christmas ghost stories. Michael Hordern and the terrifying 'sheet monster' is always the stated example, but for me it it was seeing the pale ghosts of the gypsy children, a hole where there hearts should be, with the demonic sound of the hurdy-gurdy in the background.So  Lost Hearts would be high on my list, had I chosen it as one of my reads, but I decided to return to The Ash Tree. This is masterly venture into the power of both nature and stored memory worthy of Blackwood. As in so many of James stories, the ghost or demon is not seen, being evoked instead either by reportage, or the appearance of the many mini Shelobs which are her off-spring. The Ash Tree is another classic example of the three act structure, with the most disturbing of off-stage witches. 

5. The Room in the Tower by E.F.Benson. Entering the top five I will say in advance that any one of these stories could have ended up at number one. No more so than with so with this story, which has a continuous refrain that stays with you for a long time afterwards. If, unlike the protagonist, you don't want the lines 'Jack will show you to your room:I have given you the room in the tower.' to continue into your sleep, I suggest you skip through them when they occur. Part recurring dream come true terror, part meditation on class and place in society, and above all part tale of sheer terror. The Room in the Tower, Benson's most famous tale, has a distinctive power, which despite the deceptively simple prose, which is almost impossible to ignore. Definitely one to put on your ghost story bucket list.

4. The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onions. So many classic ghost stories depend on the mind and whether or not it can be entirely relied on.The Beckoning Fair One is a novella moves without warning from the tale of a recluse with a lady friend to whom he shows no romantic interest in, to her replacement by another kind of female presence, which gradually comes to obsess him, until his alienation from the outside world becomes total and his mind trips into madness. The ending is shockingly unexpected and reads more like something by Val McDeirmid, Taken from his first ghost story collection, 'Widdershins' the story has a shockingly modern, ahead of its time feel to it and a startlingly bleak message underneath its diary like surface.

3. The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen. Talking of bleakness, there is no story more bleak and unforgiving than this one. The Great God Pan has the feel of the rule book not so much being torn up, as flushed down the toilet. It begins with a suitably risky and sinister experiment, followed by the shockingly cruel and dismissive act of a guardian. After this, we can only be fools if we believe that such a callous act can have no consequences, but the cleverness of the narrative causes us to forget, only to be brought back to the shocking reality at the end. To my huge surprise this tale made no great impact on me when I read it three years ago, only for me to be stunned by its power and implications on my recent re-read. Stephen King has called it one of the greatest of all stories. I'm not about to disagree with him, but maybe I'll give it a while before re-reading it!

2. The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood. I make no bones about my rekindled enthusiasm for the stories of Algernon Blackwood and so I deliberately read The Wendigo late on. The result was that it could have made number one, but instead I reviewed all the others and still felt it should come this high, if not at the top. When I read Blackwood's story The Willows, I thought it elementally scary and powerful enough, but nothing prepared my for the power of The Wendigo, another story with a repeated refrain, this time  one terrified and desperate, the voice of the old trapper who has accompanied the narrator on a moose hunting journey in the Canadian wilderness, and found what he most feared and dreaded in The Wendigo, a terrifying monster and animal presence which has the power to lift its victim high into the air while somehow still allowing your tired, tormented feel to walk for hour after hour and even in your sleep. 'Oh, my feet of fire' indeed. One of the great things about Blackwood is that he was so prolific with his dark tales, but this one, like The Willows. The John Silence stories, The Wood of the Dead and May Eve, is one of his very best.

1. At the top comes a story first encountered in another form, many years ago, which I finally read. I left it until last, knowing that in order to make the top of the list, it had to be really, really good. And Sheridan Le Fanu's,Strange Event in the life of Schalken the Painter truly is that, a story so chilling and with such terrifyingly disturbing off-stage implications that its best not to try to get your head round them. I say I'd not read the story, but I had seen the well-known and much praised TV adaptation by the BBC, adapted and directed by Leslie Megahey as part of the series Omnibus, in 1979, in the days when they still did that sort of thing! It was conceived along the lines of an earlier series called A Ghost Story for Christmas and along with the adaptation of James Lost Hearts is one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen. You can see it on youtube, if you don't believe me. It's the story of a corpse who buys a wife - if you want the plot put simply - the mysterious Mr Vanderhausen desires the hand of the lovely Rose Verlderkaust,, ward of the Painter Gerard Douw, much to the consternation of his pupil, Godfrey Schalken. The suitably venal Douw sells out poor Rose to her doom in the disturbingly easy way of such unenlightened times. The most terrifying scene in the adaptation, (especially to an impressionable twenty year old) comes when Jeremy Clyde's callow Schalken meets Cheryl Kennedy's Rose in the cathedral and dreadful the nature of her marriage becomes all too clear. Vanderhausen incidentally is interestingly cast in the form of the actor John Justin, once the handsome, blind prince in the Alexander Korda classic, The Thief of Baghdad, now made up with the kind of face which could haunt your dreams. It also has the great Charles Gray as narrator, and you can't say better than that!. Needless to say, none of this would be possible without the power of the original and some wonderful and at times empathetic writing. So it's Sheridan Le Fanu's Strange Event in the life of Schalken the Painter which takes the number one slot.

Except ---

its not quite as simple as that --

because I've cheated --

and -

- I'm about to tell you how.



The Mystery of Stephenson's Cousin

In the pictures above you'll see that the one of Robert Louis Stephenson is highlighted and has a question mark next to the date of 1862 and nothing further. Well the reason for that is although RLS would make any great writers of horror list because of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, is that the only reason I included him is because there is no picture of his less famous cousin Mabel/Marie Balfour. In fact Mabel Clothilde Balfour's name and legacy is hardly known, but to the world of ghosts and terror it really should be a major one.

Reading The Monkey's Paw and one or two others I came to the conclusion that a great many of our classic ghost stories might have been created either quite consciously, (such as Algernon Blackwood and his wide travels and understanding of Native American and Canadian myths and tales), or through trace memories of folk -tales, as they have many of their types and motifs.

Mabel Balfour supposedly collected a series of Tales of the Lincolnshire Carrs, nearly all recorded from their tellers in suitably unintelligible dialect, (best illustrated in Neil Philips's collection of English Folk Tales. The Lincolnshire Carrs are as close to Fenland as makes no difference and of course Norfolk is the next county down. Many have questioned whether Marie Clothilde Balfour actually did record this series of bleak, relentless and frankly terrifying tales, but in the unlikely event that she didn't, their possible independent creation would have made her one of the greatest writers of ghost/horror stories. You only have to read something like Long Tom and The Dead Hand or Samuel's Ghost or the best known tale, Yallery Brown, in which the narrator gets involved with the sort of spirit who turns out-, all too late-to provide bad luck disguised as good luck. With the addition of a terrifying, often repeated refrain of the sort beloved by E.F. Benson and Algernon Blackwood, you'll want to push these stories to the top of any list like this. For my money for sheer raw, visceral power, invention and above all shock, they really should be my number one. With the exception of the most well known of them A Pottle Of Brains, they are all of them quite both bleak and shattering and make a few of the nasties in my top ten seem a bit half-hearted.

The best way of exploring these tales without the considerable barrier of the dialect, (I'm from Lincolnshire, so I should know) is through Kevin Crossley Holland's wonderful collection of Fenland tales, The Old Stories. In a future blog I may explore them further. In the meantime here are the stories which just missed the cut.

An Incident at Owl Creek by Ambrose Bierce, The Wood of the Dead by Algernon Blackwood, The Leather Funnel by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, Man-Sized in Marble by E Nesbit, Jerry Bundler by W.W. Jacobs, All Souls by Edith Wharton, Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fan, and The Squaw by Bram Stoker.

I'd like to acknowledge Amazon Kindle for making every one of these stories available in a whole series of almost free and sometimes actually free online collections - as long as you don't mind typos.

You can find Leslie Megahey's classic adaptation of Schalken the Painter on youtubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw81RHCjiVI


You can also find new and used copies of Kevin's The Old Stories on Amazon, which has nearly all
  the Lincolnshire Carrs tales in it and a whole load more folk tale delights, but in the meantime here's a good site for the Tales. http://tellinghistory.co.uk/content/legends-carrs

​Steve Gladwin

'Tales From The Realm' - Story and Screen Dream

Connecting Myth, Faerie and Magic

Author of 'The Seven' - Shortlisted for Welsh Books Prize, 2014

A Ghost Writer's Quiz by Steve Gladwin

After the death of my wife Celia in 2006, I turned against horror and ghost stories in a big way. Maybe it was partly because reading one of them seemed to anticipate the circumstances of her death so much that it all felt a bit too close to home. However, if I told you what it was called and who it was by, it would ruin one of the answers to the quiz which follows.

Recently and for reasons I don't fully understand, (ie it coincides with another health crisis) I have come back to these stories in a massive way and have rather embraced them like some long-lost ghostly brother. Now I can't get enough of them. Maybe it's due to not being able to find my own answers that I end up seeking the help of those who have to deal with and often accept the impossible and allow such fictional darkness to fall over me like some psychological comfort blanket. 

Of course a far bigger reason is that I really enjoy reading them and thanks to kindle, which serves its own purpose in this respect, I can download vast collections and choose to wade through them in strict order - as I am doing with Algernon Blackwood - or cherry pick the spookiest in other writer's work. But I have a bit of a collection mania and just as hearing Christoper Maltman singing Schumann's Dichterliebe resulted in my simply having to have the complete Schumann songs, so I am finding with Blackwood and others. But, whereas you can easily collect all thirteen CD's of Schumann's songs, if you start looking into nineteenth and twentieth century ghost story writers, you can disappear into the vaults of horror and never reappear. There is so, so much wonderful stuff and, having decided in good faith to pick and explore the ghost stories of thirteen of these luminaries and maybe write about them in a two part blog, two things have happened in the last two weeks.

First the trouble with doing this is you go in with the intention of reading several writers and get so caught up with the work of one, you lose most of the time you started with.

Secondly and literally a few minutes ago, I discovered that in compiling my thirteen, I was about to miss out one of the greatest of all ghost story writers, Then I remembered another - and so on.

Of course people will read this blog and the one which follows next month and will ask where so and so is. No-one for example may forgive me missing out Dickens, and both A Christmas Carol and The Signalman etc etc, There are just too many to choose from.

So in the interim I have devised a quiz for this month, giving me hopefully plenty of time I read all the others, (which currently is most of them), before next month

There follow some pictures of famous writers of ghost stories, followed by a jumble of some of the most stories they wrote. What you have to do, without initially using wikipedia or some such aid, is to match them together, with either one or both of their stories. I've mixed up well-known stories with some lesser knows works and there is one author who doesn't appear at all but is represented by her cousin, who was also rather good at this sort of thing and probably should be there him self as he wrote one of the great horror stories of all time. If you spot the two of them and the connection, there may be a special prize for the first one.

OK then folks, exam conditions, off you go and I'll be back next month with some more detailed enthusiasm.

Here then are are a list of their works. I've included two for each writer. Seaton's Aunt, The Haunted and the Haunters, An Incident at Owl Creek, The Wood of the Dead, Lot No 249, The Room in the Tower, Man Sized in Marble, Long Tom and the Dead Hand, The Monkey's Paw, In the Eyes, The Tell-tale Heart, Schalken the Painter, The Star Trap, The Great God Pan and The Beckoning Fair One,

And also All Hallows, The Damned Thing, The Occupant of the Room, The Leather Funnel, The Horror Horn, John Charrington's  Wedding, Yallery Brown, Jerry Bundler, Afterwards, The Black Cat, Mr Justice Harbottle, The Squaw, The White People and The Painted Face.

NB I've just checked and I've only read ten of the thirty so far, so I have a lot of spooky homework to do before next month. Best of luck with the answers.

All images courtesy of wikipedia apart from the tenth, which I can't quote a source for, or I'd give away an answer. 

Spooky Tales from Wales by Eloise Williams

In the lead up to Halloween I’m working away at a ghost story. 

I know, perfect timing, what with the storms every other day, the clocks going back, and the scary unknown faces at the window. Well, maybe not the last one.

Gaslight is out there in the world spreading its dark, gritty, little-bit-scary mystery and I am trying to come up with a design for my pumpkin lantern and a better costume than last year’s. Although I think you’ll agree it was quite a superb effort.

 

At this time of year, actually at every time of year, I like to curl up and read spooky stories.

There’s something so satisfying in feeling the hairs on the back of your neck prickling up, the uncertainty when you switch off the light, then switch it back on again, then off again with every determination of being a grown-up.

Then back on again TO READ.  

I thought I’d share some of my recent creepily brilliant favourites with you and also a few words from the authors on why they wrote these superlative spooky stories. So here they are – some spooky tales from Wales. Enjoy! 

  

The Boy who Drew the Future by Rhian Ivory 

"I wrote TBWDTF because I had a nightmare about a boy called Noah who could draw the future but he didn't view it as a gift, he saw it as curse. I was visited by the ghost of a boy and his dog while writing Noah's story. I decided to tell the ghost's story too, he became Blaze who also draws the future but in 1865 when it was much more dangerous to be caught predicting anything. During the writing process I randomly chose Sible Hedingham for my setting as the odd village name appealed to me. I later found out that Sible Hedingham is the last place in the UK to swim a witch. The man known as Dummy was taken down to the river and accused of being a witch because he'd been caught drawing pictures of women the village's fates and futures. Shudder? Yes, I did."

"Fate, destiny, the future, whatever you want to call it, unless you run fast, keep running and don't turn around to see who or what's behind you, it'll find you. It'll find you, catch you and trip you up until you stumble and fall."

Grace-Ella: Spells for Beginners by Sharon Marie Jones

As a child I believed in magic. I had a fairy door on the crab apple tree at the bottom of the garden; there was a wishing tree in a field where I would walk and of course, we all knew that a wicked witch lived in the small cottage by the river, with the overgrown garden and dirty, cracked windows.

Halloween was a dress-as-a-witch time, and a gathering of friends where ghost stories were shared in hushed whispers, eyes wide with excited fear. That imagination has never left me. It was no surprise to me that my first children’s book is about a young witch, her rather haughty black cat and a sprinkling of magical mayhem.

Children will always love magic, they’ll always listen with a fear-filled fascination to tales of ghosts and ghouls. And at Halloween, anything can happen…

'Vampire bats and witches’ hats, give us a howl and a scream.

Ghosts and ghouls come out to play, tonight on Halloween.’

The Jewelled Jaguar by Sharon Tregenza 

I do enjoy a bit of dark, dark, darkness so it’s no surprise that it seeps into my children’s books. A little scarifying is a delicious thing.  Of all things dark, I think the unknown is the most unsettling so I use it with glee.

In my latest book ‘The Jewelled Jaguar’ Griff and Cinnamon are lost in a labyrinth of underground tunnels. As if that isn’t scary enough their hearts stop beating when they hear something totally unexpected…

The plink, plink, plink of water echoed in the distance.

Cinnamon’s teeth chattered. ‘Shh,’ she said. Somewhere, in the darkness, deep in the tangle of tunnels and caves, we heard singing.

The House on March Lane by Michelle Briscombe

A few years ago I visited an old reclamation warehouse in Bridgend looking for wood block flooring, it was a fascinating place, a sprawling maze of the most incredible items, yet at the same time it was dark and slightly unnerving in some of the rooms I wandered through. Brimming with objects that had been removed from houses, pubs, Victorian hospitals and schools it started me thinking about the links those objects might have with people and events through time. The idea of a warehouse full of ghosts connected to items and two young detectives helping a girl from almost two hundred years ago bounded into view. 

My son was studying to be a zoologist at Bangor University and it was a visit to him in North Wales that prompted my story link to Darwin. I would have liked to have set the story in Wales but Darwin wasn’t a Welshman and therefore to be (roughly) correct geographically, that wasn’t possible.

I’m a great lover of supernatural tales, perhaps that’s a Welsh thing, we have a wealth of stories based on myths and legends, most of which I enjoyed as a child and then read to my own children.

‘Archie, it’s always drafty in here. Remember that time in the yard when the leaves started to fly around in the wind and came through the door and across the warehouse floor?’ She smiled trying to reassure him but she was starting to feel unsettled by his reaction. Archie was always brave, he had too much going on in his troubled life to be afraid of anything.

‘It wasn’t the wind,’ Archie said harshly and then he spoke so quietly that Flora had to crouch down to hear him. ‘Something…..whispered my name.’

Mr Mahli’s Shed by Laura Sheldon 

I wrote Mr Mahli’s Shed about the ghost of Dylan Thomas because I was teaching a wonderful bunch of Y4 children at the time, who were keen on building a shed in the school grounds, which they could go in to write. I got carried away with the idea of an ‘inspirational writing shed’ and began to imagine what it would be like to be a child who discovered that the shed was occupied by the spirit of a famous writer – dead, naturally – who could help little writers create masterpieces.

The story turned out very differently in the end, but the poet in the shed was too full of mischief to want to help anyone out with their writing ambitions!

It's not the spookiest of tales - the ghost is friendly (if a bit dramatic) but there is a creepy part when the daring duo of Tom and Alys first discover that the seemingly empty shed, isn't empty at all...

The air was cold inside the shed.  Alys and TB moved closer together as they felt shivers creep over their skin.  There was nothing in there.  Just as they'd seen from the outside, the shed was empty, yet they felt as though there was something.  In a strange way, something that could be felt but not seen was in the shed with them.  The door creaked in the wind and Alys jumped.

'I don't like it in here TB, it's spooky,'

'I know,' TB replied 'there's something well odd... why is it so cold?''Ooo yes, it is!  And it smells weird... like... cigarettes.'

'Cigars,' said a deep voice and the children screamed, leaped out of the shed as fast as they could and ran, leaving the shed door swinging in the breeze.

Blackfin Sky by Kat Ellis

Having grown up hearing the myths and legends of Wales - about monsters and dragons, witches and giants - I learned to look for the weird and spooky in the books I read and enjoyed. When it came to writing my own stories, bringing the creep-factor to the forefront felt like the natural thing to do!

'It's just this town, you know. All the staring, the whispering ... it's this Blackfin weirdness that gets into people's heads. There's nothing special about me, Sean.'

'Except you drowned, then came back.'

Alien Rain by Ruth Morgan 

I love contrasts and mash-ups of different genres, so a sci-fi story with added ghosts really appealed when I was coming up with the idea for Alien Rain.  The spooky action takes place in the National Museum, Cardiff and having known people who've worked there, who've told me real life ghost stories about the place, the setting put me in the right frame of mind for writing a chiller thriller.

 "I could not make out any shape in the chair and yet I knew someone had sat down on it and was sitting so close that I could have reached out and touched them...I was almost too scared to blink, in case in that shaved second the dark matter might suddenly coagulate into my nightmare."

Eloise Williams

www.eloisewilliams.com

@eloisejwilliams