'I WAS ONCE A HAUNTED HOUSE' – An old Victorian school building is refitted as a conference centre and becomes host to a symposium on supernatural fiction, only a killer lurks among the delegates. And it this story is the teller of the tale is the house itself.

As a child I enjoyed Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty not because I especially liked horses, but rather because I loved the idea of an animal telling his own story. I’d also liked those descriptions in Dickens where houses are portrayed as people. I particularly remember this from A Christmas Carol: ‘They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a louring pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.’

Well, then, why not combine those ideas and let a house tell its own tale? And since characters in stories often have a lacking of some sort or other why couldn’t my Victorian manor house be in want of a ghost? And when one unexpectedly arrives after the building is refurbished as a conference venue, where the first event is a symposium on ‘images of spectrality’, as academics insist on calling spooks, why not have it that the visiting ghost was murdered? And that’s how ‘I Was Once a Haunted House’ turned into a kind of supernatural whodunit.

"Steve Nallon’s collection of stories stands alone as a perfect amalgamation of dark British humour and truly chilling classic horror. It uniquely shows the creativity of an author who has excelled in a range of fields – giving it a voice of authority and authenticity that makes it impossible to put down!"

Matthew Cuss, Horror YouTuber and education consultant