“Is there anybody there?”

What makes a good ghost story? When we first discussed publishing a new anthology of ghost stories by women from Wales, we had no idea what would come to haunt us. We hoped that others would share our fascination with the ‘evocative and the eerie’, with ‘the shiver induced by the thunder of a black, stormy night’, could imagine being held spell-bound by a mysterious and, perhaps, macabre tale as the clock strikes midnight: the hour when all light has been extinguished and we poor mortals are most acutely aware of our human limitations. Might not the dead come back to glide silently across our paths, or to scream out of the walls, demanding justice or revenge?

‘Is there anybody there?’ is a question that most of us have asked at some point or another. The question lies at the kernel of all good ghost stories – and in this collection the unknown answers back! All the tales raise the possibility that we do not finish in eternal silence, that there may be a mysterious purpose to life’s arbitrary unfairnesses and disappointments. That there may even be the chance of reunions with those we have loved and lost – or the possibility that we are not to blame for our failings, that there are indeed powerful, sometimes malignant forces that shape our destinies.

So we keep on being fascinated, drawn to poke into our imagination’s darkest corners, where we keep thoughts that have no place in our daylight worlds. Let such fears surface and we might struggle to function. Yet, when repressed, our imaginations bubble and boil and another world rises through the floorboards of our daily lives.  And so writers continue to question their darker instincts: ‘Is there anybody there?’ 

You may be of a more sceptical nature. Perhaps for you ghost stories are all flapping sheets and Scooby Doo. Fun and occasionally scary but holding nothing of any allure. Maybe you prefer the supernatural setting of fairy tales peopled by snow queens and wild swans. Remember though that you can’t have such fascinating creatures without the wicked witches and dangerous beasts that come along with them, lurking at the edge of the seductive dream.

What then turns a bunch of clichés into truths that touch the core of our deepest hopes and fears? What makes a good ghost story? We offer just one suggestion – pick up this book and read on.

We hope you will discover intriguing stories of the weird and wonderful. They are all surprising, thrilling, full of suspense and very different each from the other. We think there will be something here to satisfy all tastes: from the beautiful, poignant and tender to the downright horrific. These are stories that will take you to somewhere else, maybe just a stone’s throw away. Here are crumbling old houses, gothic to their core, such as the mansion of I, King, with its Miss Havisham-style rotting fruit, its elusive but open door, appearing suddenly when least expected, always beckoning at the end of a line of trees. Here is the atmospheric: the oppression of heat as beautifully created in Ants and Shade, the eerie cold of The Pull of the North, the significance of Seashells. Every slight flicker in the ambience takes on a new import as you read, offers glimpses that may tempt you to look over your shoulder, just for a moment… Here are stories that present, to quote Henry James (a past master of the form), ‘The strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy.’

Many, inevitably, work around loss, facing life’s tragedies, as in Broad Beach and The View From Up Here. Here the voices of the dead yearn to teach the living lessons about life, the mystery that is The Girl in the Grass, the call for humanity and justice in The Soldier’s Tale and a Matter of Light. There are also the outrageously funny – the bawdy melodrama of Sovay, Sovay and the downright naughtiness of Ghosts. And, yes, there are even flapping sheets in Making Ghosts, a tightly wound tale that subverts conventions, reminding us that we are as numerous as the blades of grass on the great plains; like the one grain of sand on a broad beach that even so cannot exist without its singularity.

A word of warning though: watch your step, much may not be as it seems in this anthology. There are unreliable narrators, apparently friendly guides, who may take you by the hand and lead you onto treacherous ground. Should we trust the narrators of the gloriously crafted The Wish Dog and Caretakers? And it is only ever a short distance to what we may call madness, touchingly and hauntingly evoked in stories such as Mad Maisy Sad and Convention is the Mother of Reality.

Preparing this book, what mattered most was not which secret of the otherworldly our authors chose to conjure for us, but the dexterity (even sleight of hand) with which they exposed it. Whether your taste is for fireside shivers or for the exploitation of the ‘other side’, a few words perfectly placed, a theatrical incantation, or a glut of gothic adornment, this collection offers so much that is wonderfully and entrancingly told. In Harvest there is even a haunting, primordial myth promising a terrifying end for those who live for language, stories and the telling of them.

But I think we may have said too much; it will be light soon and you’ve not begun to read yet…

Penny Thomas and Stephanie Tillotson