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

The Haunted Attic by Lu Hersey

Moving is traumatic. I know, because I moved this week. For me, the trauma wasn’t so much about the upheaval or change of neighbourhood –  it was dealing with the bodies in the attic.

Not my attic - way too interesting...

Somehow the loft had accumulated a number of dead relatives, and I had to clear everyone out. There weren’t any actual bodies of course (sorry to disappoint) - I’m talking about family history. Sentimental attachment. Guilt. More guilt. People’s entire lives in a few boxes.

I hate dark, spidery loft spaces, and have a fear of death by falling from a loft – so over the last 20 years, I’d been shoving things up there just to get them out of sight, thinking I’d deal with them later.

Bad idea. The day comes when you have to confront them all, and that time is when you move house. The loft had to be totally emptied, so I was forced to clear out the ghosts. All those things you get landed with when people die, the detritus left from other people’s lives.

Years ago, I had to translate a chunk of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle from the reign of Alfred the Great (an interesting man, who didn’t just burn cakes) as part of my English degree. It was about a visitor to Alfred’s court from somewhere in Scandinavia, telling them about the customs of his people.

King Alfred

When someone died in his community, all the dead person’s possessions were piled up in a big heap in the middle of the village. Then everyone raced to take what they wanted before the rest was burned. Alfred probably recorded this to make a point to his courtiers - that inheritance isn’t a foregone conclusion.

However, since King Alfred chose not to introduce this custom over here, we still end up dealing with our dead relatives’ possessions. If we’re lucky, these will include useful things, like treasure and property. Sadly, not in my attic. 

My grandmother was up there, confined to a box of photos of her family, a moth-eaten patchwork quilt, a horseshoe from her wedding cake, a few sad letters relating to the death of one of her children, and more on the death of my grandfather. My grandfather was divided between the photo box, and a collection of watercolours in varying degrees of awful.

An unknown dead relative from the attic, and his horse

 My mother took up a lot more attic space. After my father remarried, I got landed with all the photos ever taken of her, her books, all her dreadful paintings, and a collection of letters (which I’ve never read) between her and my father when he was away on National Service.  And all the letters she wrote to me when she knew she was dying. 

My mother with me, a long time ago...

So what we’re talking about is a lot of things you can hardly bear to look through, and leave you feeling like an emotional wreck when you do, but you feel obliged to keep. It’s all that is left of them. And that makes it very hard to get rid of.

Worse, my dead relatives were just the tip of the loftberg. There were all the paintings my children did at school. Four children can do a lot of paintings over the years. And they get a lot of school reports and bring home a mountain of school work. Two very large boxes and a trunk’s worth to be precise. Fortunately, my two youngest showed up to laugh at their old stuff and share the best of it with their friends online, and we managed to more than halve the quantity after some harsh quality control.

Lastly, there were the ghosts of my own past. Photos of people I’d forgotten existed, letters from old boyfriends, and piles of folders of ‘ideas’ (mostly pieces from magazines and old journals, all yellowing around the edges, and frankly the easiest thing in the loft to bin.) There were old computers I thought might still hold info I needed, old tvs that ‘might come in useful’, and tins of paint. Enough to paint entire mansions in a range of out-of-date colours.

My stuff was the easiest to deal with. I junked it all, entirely guilt free because it was mine to junk. My relatives were the real problem. In the end, I squeezed them into a few boxes, and the charity shop benefitted from the rest. Maybe other people will like the some of the terrible paintings. I thought about burning all my parents’ letters, but my youngest daughter persuaded me to keep them. So now they’re in a box marked ‘archive’ – and they’ll become her problem one day.  

But part of me is still tempted to dump all of it. Along with all the guilt and the sadness. As it is, I’ve spent much of the last year writing a book about people in a Mesolithic type environment who aren’t overloaded with stuff. In fact they own nothing.

It’s been very therapeutic...

Lu Hersey

w: luhersey.com

t: @LuWrites

Sending your baby to the house of tomorrow - Liz Kessler

I’ve ummed and ahhhed more than usual over what to write about this month. I’ve thought of and then rejected at least half a dozen ideas.

I was on the verge of asking if anyone wanted to do a guest post on my date – and then the advance copy of my new book turned up, and I realised that the joy of holding your new book in your hands for the first time never goes away.

You made this thing. It has so much of you poured into it. And yet, now that it exists in its own right, now that it is out there in the world – your role is done and you have to stand back and let it find its own way.

The letting go can be hard.

See, the thing is – I absolutely love this book. I love the characters, falling in love despite the biggest divide there is.

I loved writing it – each new scene unfolding virtually in front of my eyes as I walked along the wild coast path watching waves crashing on rocks, and listening to a playlist that brought me to tears more often than not.

I loved the process – the collaborating with the amazing poet, Ella Frears, who was so in tune with me that the poems she wrote felt as if they came from the pens of my actual characters. The songs she shared with me felt as if they came directly from the story I was weaving.

I loved all of it. And now that the book is going out there, it is taking a bit of my heart with it.

I am not a parent, so I don’t know if this analogy is as true as it feels, but producing a book does seem, to me, to be a bit like having a child. To be fair, probably not as painful as actual childbirth (although excruciatingly painful at times, in its own way!) Perhaps the process is more like the struggles, joys and extremes of bringing up a child from baby to adulthood.

I spent about eighteen months living with characters who had all sorts thrown at them. Bullying, panic attacks, life-threatening illnesses, drug overdoses, grief. Characters who somehow managed to choose love over all of these, again and again.

So yeah. It was an intense journey. And now, the book is out of my hands and – hopefully – into other people’s. It is finished, and I have to let go.

Luckily for me, I have an amazing editor, Helen Thomas, who helped break the intensity of the moment by sending me a text of the plotline - told in emojis! I love this as much as all the other things.

I have friends who are saying goodbye to their children as they go to university this month. I have witnessed their mixture of pride, fear, grief, loss, excitement and hope.

This is how it is with a book. I want the best for it. I want it to be liked – loved – thought well of.

If I had a child going to university right now, I don’t think I’d be rooting for them to come home with a first class degree and the highest praise for every piece of work they produced. Yes, of course, those things would be nice. But more than that, I believe the things that would make my heart swell would be to hear that they had made friends, they’d fallen in love, they were happy.

And so with the book – I don’t care about awards and shortlistings. Yes, they are nice (I haven’t had many in over a decade as a published author!) But I’d much rather my book found its way into the hands of young people who loved it, whose lives were enriched for having found it, who felt warm for reading it and wanted to share it with their friends.

I will do all I can to try to make this happen. In a few days, I’m off on a book tour where I will be meeting lots of young people all around the UK and sharing my book with them. Next week, I’m holding a book launch where I will celebrate its release. I'll accept every invitation I get to go and talk about it with young people.

I’ll give my baby the best upbringing I can, and send it off with a case full of clothes and books and a heart full of hope. Will people like it? I don't know. Will they criticise it, give it a rough time? They might. Once I've let it go, I have no control over what happens out there. And that’s how it should be. That’s part of the process. The letting go.

As Kahlil Gibran says, in The Prophet:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

I hope that Haunt Me has a great time, out there in the house of tomorrow.

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