I was doing my utmost to see a ghost.

Wakenhyrst

Wakenhyrst

I'd booked a weekend at an ancient inn over Hallowe'een in a remote, reputedly haunted hamlet in deepest Suffolk.

A suitably ghoulish cab-driver collected me from the deserted railway station and regaled me with tales of polishing off roadkill with his rifle. As we drew near the hamlet, we were engulfed by the thickest fog I've ever experienced.

After dumping my bags at the inn, I set off alone into the dark, across the most haunted Common in East Anglia. I was heading for somewhere with the promising name of Dead Man's Covert: also said to be haunted.

So as you can see, I was optimising my chances! I was deep into writing my Gothic novel, Wakenhyrst, and I've learnt that the ONLY way to make readers feel they're living the story is to live it yourself.

Not surprisingly, the ghosts saw me coming and stayed away - although once or twice, something rustled and I nearly jumped out of my skin. But I didn't care that the ghosts were a no-show. What I'd come for was the experience. To hear the menacing hiss of reeds stirred by a breeze that came from nowhere, then suddenly died. To catch a whiff of rottenness rising from the marsh. To glimpse a figure lurching out of the mist...

Wakenhyrst starts in 1906. My heroine Maud is a lonely upper-class child in an isolated manor-house in the Suffolk marshes. Her life is ruled by her father: a fiercely religious woman-hater, secretly riddled by guilt. As Maud grows to womanhood, her life becomes a battle of wills: is Father losing his mind? Or is there really something haunting the fen?

But the beating heart of Wakenhyrst comes from what my mother told me about my great-grandma, who lived at the same time as Maud. She was married at seventeen to a man who beat her - and who "didn't like children, but liked making them" (yeuch). She had several miscarriages and lost three children in one week to diphtheria. When her husband finally died, she visited the cemetery every week - maybe to make sure he'd stay there.

Back then, lots of women lived like that. They're the real ghosts in Wakenhyrst. And my god, do they make me glad that I live now and not then.

But here's my favourite story, which helped inspire the book. My great-grandma was too poor to buy her youngest daughter dolls, so she used to "liberate" the small plaster angels that in those days adorned the wreaths on graves. Her little daughter grew up to become my grandma.  

I wrote Wakenhyrst to entertain and to frighten. I want to make the reader pleasurably afraid to look out of the window at night - yet unable to stop turning the pages.

It's for you to see if I've succeeded.

Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver is published in paperback on Hallowe'en by Head of Zeus, price £8.99.