7 seriously spooky stories

Ever since I first was allowed to wander off at the library, there was one word I could never resist typing into the library cataloguing system. I’d say the letters under my breath as I tapped them in with one little finger

g‑h-o-s-t‑s
ENTER.

It was like a tiny séance. The ghosts were summoned.

I’d scroll the results, noting the shelf numbers of a few glossier books on the subject. But the further I drifted down the page, the more interesting the results became. This was the good stuff; the serious material with unsensational titles like Haunted Britain and Ireland or A Guide to the Ghosts of Godshill. 

These were practical – even a touch academic – recanting the weirdest of experiences with very little fuss: almost as if they had really happened. As if it were entirely possible that sitting alongside our own dimension was another dimension. A foggy realm in which houses breathed, skulls screamed and spectres invisible to our naked eye restlessly drifted.

And from these books with their plain-spoken tales of tragedy and mystery, of secrets and despair, it became clear to me how horror was born. Because tragic stories inevitably became tragic ghost tales: wind shrieking across moor stones transformed into a banshee; fortunes sinking and floors subsiding conjured notions of a hunched spectre wandering the corridors of the house on the hill. 

Ghosts, it seems to me, emerge from between the lines.

The Agency for All Things Spectral is my children’s horror series. The first book, The Case of Dr. Dust, carries Billy Duggery and her friends on a haunting romp into the spectral wavelengths beyond our own, and is an undoubted response to my first investigations as a kid when I tapped those six letters into the catalogue station keyboard.

Let’s search up a reading list of my favourite titles which dig into all things paranormal now, donning our Spectracles in case we happen to spot anything other-worldly along the way. Are you ready?

g‑h-o-s-t‑s
ENTER.

Forgive me, but I’ve just got to, if only for the sheer volume of additions to the canon of children’s horror alone. 

Goosebumps has been many people’s first step into spook-filled worlds beyond our own and for good reason: there’s 62 of them and they cover all manner of paranormal peculiarities from your staples (mummies, ghosts, werewolves) all the way through to the uncategorisable (children growing fur and egg monsters from Mars).

Not exactly ​‘fiction’ (I’m sure this statement could start some spirited debate), but my mum found this book at a charity shop for me when I was a kid and to this day I still keep a copy. It’s serious and fun and a perfect starter kit for anyone who is drawn to the topic of ghosts. 

Fun fact: the section on ​‘Britain’s Most Haunted House’ had such an impact on me as a kid that I actually made my own short film about the events at Borley Rectory, which even featured the character of famed psychic researcher and paranormal investigator, Harry Price (played at various points by me, my brother, and an unconvincing wig).

If you haven’t yet picked up one of these and you’ve read this far down the list then you’d better. The Haunting of Aveline Jones (the first book in the series) is a whole lot of spine-tingling fun with tonnes of old-fashioned ghost tales and dark academia. There’s something in Hickes’ writing that I find so wonderfully evocative of the feeling of cold. This one’s best enjoyed with tea with milk and two sugars! 

A ghost hunting agency embarks on a grisly adventure wherein only young people have the psychic ability to see and eradicate the spectres and spirits that have started appearing all over London. It’s Sherlockian and crisp in a pocket watch kind of way, and yet relatable and brimming with a lifetime supply of paranormalia.

I can’t write this list in good faith without including my fellow Australian and master of the weird, Paul Jennings. UK readers may have heard of his seminal kids series Round the Twist, which both delighted and repulsed a generation of kids during the 90s.

His spooky stories are clever, funny and strange in a way that only suburbia can be. But the lone descriptor which seems peculiar enough to sum them up has got to be the name of the legendary author himself. Because for Aussies, Paul Jennings = wonderfully weird.

Small Spaces is the kind of book that would have made me feel really grown up if I read it as a kid. It’s gripping, twisty, Pollocked with some Americana horror, and celebrates our shared love of reading whilst delivering a plot that blurs the lines of folklore and urban legend.

Shiver Point is boring. At least, that’s what its protagonist, Alex, thinks. But allow me to correct the record for him: It Came from The Woods, the first book in the series, is a hair-raising adventure complete with a band of misfits and a boisterous tone. It manages to somehow seem both fresh and wonderfully nostalgic as meteorites and bodysnatchers plummet out of the sky and into Shiver Point.

The Case of Dr. Dust by Samuel Halpin, illustrated by Laura Borio, is available now.