‘Truth is everything, even in a ghost story’
From Poe to MR James, le Fanu and Stephen King, The Dead House author Billy O’Callaghan always loved ghost stories but his grandmother’s tales influence him most.
Maybe because I’ve always been one of those people who feel themselves on the edge of things, who struggle at times to find a solid footing in life and whose world tends to exist a lot in glimpses, my antenna has always stirred at the first suggestion of anything even vaguely supernatural, the sense that there might be something more to what we see and hear than is immediately apparent.
It’s been that way for me from as far back as I can remember. And even now, sit me in the half-dark with a glass of something nourishing to hand, a turf fire burning and the hum of a gale lapping at the eaves, have somebody who’s tucked a good few years behind them lean forward with the confession of some recollected tale that needs the late hour for its telling, and I’ll find contentment.
"At four or five years old I’d sit enraptured at her knee while she spun yarns of fairies, deaths in the family, Jack O’Lantern and the Black and Tans"
