The Ghost Story Teller

When I was around seven years old I lived in the terraced house in Harehills, Leeds, with a damp cellar that had within it a brick enclosure, probably once used to store coal, blocking out any chance of light. It was, as they say, as dark as death. Perhaps I was a strange child but I would go down into that world of blackness and challenge myself with fear. Whatever lurked in the darkness would eventually come alive in my mind and I would do a runner, often tripping myself up on the sharp edge of the steps and scraping my knee. Those bloody scabs were the price I paid for my experiments with fright.

Was I crazy? I don’t think so. Stephen King points out in his book Danse Macabre that human beings have a psychological tendency to return to what frightens them and I think what I was doing was testing myself and in the process strengthening my resolve. But perhaps something else was going on too. My father’s schizophrenia manifested itself as religious mania, for he truly believed that the voices he heard in his head were demons. And sometimes he saw these monsters too. One night he told me that the world was going to end and he could prove it by turning the grass blue. Of course the world didn’t come to an end and the grass stayed green and I slowly came to realise he was mentally ill. I mention my father’s situation in the context of the cellar story because a playwright once said to me, “Has it ever occurred to you that what lurked in the darkness was your father’s madness – and that’s what you were frightened of and so wanted to control?” Hmm. Not sure. But I do think that in that dark damp cellar lay the genesis of my fascination with stories weird and wonderful.

My father on his saner days could be a charming and funny man. He was very bright and when I gave him an old computer he went inside its workings and, without any training, started analysing the coding. People say that a writer needs a compost mind from which stories can sprout and grow. Perhaps that odd childhood of mine was ultimately my father’s gift to me. A few hours on the psychiatrist’s couch might lead to some answers but I’ve never sought that kind of analysis. I still think my fascination with ghost tales comes mainly from the movies I watched, plus television series such as Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and The Ghosts of Motley Hall. And I doubt I would ever have written ‘I Was Once a Haunted House’ had it not been for the fact that every Tuesday I’d run home from school to catch Scooby Doo, Where Are You!.