GHOST STORIES BY SIMON R GREEN

My most recent Ishmael Jones mystery, The House on Widows Hill, features a murder in a haunted house. There’s a telling moment when one of the characters asks everyone to tell their own personal ghost story. Because everyone has one.

We can and should argue about exactly what it is people see when they see ghosts, but you can’t say people don’t see ghosts; they always have. The venerable historian Pliny wrote about a haunted villa more than two thousand years ago. Encounters with ghosts have been recorded in all countries and cultures.

Here are three of my own experiences, which appear in my novel. Because writers never waste good material.

A few years ago, I woke up in the early hours of the morning. An invisible figure was leaning over me, holding me down. I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel its weight. Feel its hands on my arms, the individual fingers as they dug into my flesh. But I wasn’t scared; I was furious. I fought the invisible presence and threw it off. The sense of a presence was gone, and I thought: I know what that was! That was sleep paralysis!

When we’re sleeping, a part of our brain paralyses us so we don’t physically act out what we do in dreams. But sometimes we wake up too quickly and, in our half-awake state, the brain manufactures an explanation; like an invisible presence holding us down.

Going back some thirty years, I used to work in my father’s shop in Bradford-on-Avon. It was very old, parts of it dating back to the Thirteenth Century. There was a ground floor for the shop, and a second floor for stock. And sometimes, when I was on my own, I would hear footsteps moving about upstairs. But when I went up to check, there was never anyone there.

It took me ages to work out what was going on. The shop had a wooden floor, connected by wooden stairs to a second wooden floor. I was hearing my own footsteps that had travelled up the stairs and reverberated in the upper floor. Just a delayed echo; not a ghost at all.

Go back still further, to when I was about six years old. I woke up in the early hours of a summer morning. The room was full of light. I was just lying there, waiting to go back to sleep, when a dark human shape walked out of the wall to my left, crossed in front of my bed, and then disappeared through the right-hand wall.

At that age, you tend to accept things. I waited to see if it would show up again, and when it didn’t I went back to sleep. In the morning, I told my mother what I had seen. She said it must have been my father, looking to check I was all right. I said no. Then it must have been a dream, she said. She was starting to sound a bit impatient, so I just got on with my breakfast.

What was it, really? I have no idea.
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Ghosts are only dangerous if you let them haunt you.

Ishmael Jones investigates a haunted house . . . but is haunted by his own past in the latest of this quirky paranormal mystery series. "That house is a bad place. Bad things happen there . . ." Set high on top of Widows Hill, Harrow House has remained empty for years. Now, on behalf of an anonymous prospective buyer, Ishmael and Penny are spending a night there in order to investigate the rumours of strange lights, mysterious voices, unexplained disappearances, and establish whether the house is really haunted. What really happened at Harrow House all those years ago? Joined by a celebrity psychic, a professional ghost-hunter, a local historian and a newspaper reporter, it becomes clear that each member of 'Team Ghost' has their own pet theory as to the cause of the alleged haunting. But when one of the group suddenly drops dead with no obvious cause, Ishmael realizes that if he can find out how and why the victim died, he will have the key to solving the mystery.

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Simon R. Green was born in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, where he still lives. He is the New York Times bestselling author of more than fifty science fiction and fantasy novels, including the Nightside, Secret Histories and Ghost Finders series, and eight previous Ishmael Jones mysteries, including Into the Thinnest of Air, Murder in the Dark, Till Sudden Death Do Us Part and Night Train to Murder.

WEBSITE LINKS
Personal website: www.simonrgreen.co.uk
Publisher website: http://severnhouse.com/book/The+House+on+Widows+Hill/9108
Twitter: @TheSimonRGreen
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41942.Simon_R_Green

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