Usborne’s Ghosts, Christopher Maynard and Bosworth Hall Hotel

I can remember exactly where I was sitting when the Spectre of Newby Church first froze the blood in my unsuspecting eight-year-old veins. I was in my tiny, North-Eastern home town of Yarm, in the corner of Levendale Primary School library: a makeshift enclave of plastic shelving units between ‘Middle Band’ and ‘Upper Band’; an educational liminal space packed with Target paperbacks, encyclopaedias that fell suspiciously open at the ‘human reproduction’ pages, and an unseemly collection of Willard Price novellas.

“Look,” said Christopher Herbert, his customary aroma of guinea pigs and acute flatulence filling the room with a wafting, beige haze. “It’s a ghost”.

I peered at the book that lay open on his bony knees, and every vital fluid in my body instantly evaporated. My limbs felt cold and lifeless, my senses numbed in a split-second of sheer terror. It was a ghost. Unmistakeably. A towering spectral monk, thin…