Thanks to Deborah Abela for our second guest author blog post. Deborah has been part of WestWords from our earliest days, delivering creative writing workshops for us in places like Casula Powerhouse and as part of the St Marys Storymakers program. Deborah first made her mark on Australian children’s books with her Max Remy series. Since then she’s moved from spies to spooks, with wonderful ghost stories such as The Remarkable Secret of Aurelie Bonhoffen and her new Ghost Club series. Here, Deborah shares with us the spooky stories—both real and imaginary—that inspired her over the years. At the end of the post, you’ll find details how you can win a copy of Deborah’s latest Ghost Club story, The Haunted School.
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When Charles Dickens was a kid, his nanny, Mary Wellar, used to delight in telling him frightening stories from serialised publications known as Penny Dreadfuls. He both adored and deplored the gory, horrifying tales of terror, but couldn’t bring himself to tell her to stop. Of his nanny, he said, “…Her name was Mercy*, though she had none on me.
This began Dickens’ lifelong fascination for ghost stories, both as a reader and as a teller of paranormal tales, my favourite of his being, A Christmas Carol. The curmudgeonly and miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is met with the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, which, if he keeps carrying on in his miserable and scrooge-like ways, will be a very sad and lonely affair.
I loved this story as a kid. I pictured the bent and money-grubbing Scrooge and his hoarding of the things in life that will ultimately prove to be meaningless unless they were shared. I loved his emotional transformation into a human being, who like the Tin Man, finally finds that he does have a heart.
Along with this story there was also Casper the Friendly Ghost, Scooby Doo and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. So many stories that dealt with the intoxicatingly delightful spectre of ghosts.
When I was young, I’d spend holidays with my very feisty and no-nonsense nanna. She lived in Warragamba, a town in NSW with its identical fibro houses built especially for the workers who constructed the famous dam. I used to sleep in a feather bed that was so tall, I had to use a suitcase to climb into it and it was from there that my nanna used to tell me ghost stories. They weren’t nearly as terrifying as those Mary Wellar told Charles Dickens but like Dickens, it fired in me a life-long love of ghost stories.
My nanna’s stories weren’t made up or from a magazine—they were real. My nanna could see ghosts, like many of the women in her family for generations, and she would tell me stories about them. She would tell me about cousins who had passed away that she could see down the street, long-dead sisters sipping tea and men fishing in boats late at night whose hair turned stark white at meeting ghosts in the middle of lakes in the early hours whilst fishing.
I’d wanted to write a story about a character who could see ghosts and, like my nanna, found it completely normal. It was years later during a trip to Brighton that I knew I had my location…
The story was going to be about a young girl whose family ran an amusement park on a seaside pier and on her twelfth birthday she sees something unusual that she can’t explain. But when she questions her uncles about this, they cuddle her and take her inside, not letting her finish her questions. After a few more curious incidents, her uncles tell her that their family has a one-hundred-year-old secret….and it has something to do with ghosts. The book became The Remarkable Secret of Aurelie Bonhoffen.
But I still wasn’t done with ghosts. This year was the 200th birthday of Dickens and whilst searching about his past, I discovered he not only claimed to see ghosts like my nanna but he was the founding member of a club called Ghost Club. One hundred and fifty years later, the club still meets today to talk about and investigate ghostly happenings in the UK. This was the perfect inspiration for my next book, where I would create my own ghost club and two of the youngest members were their most successful ghost catchers. Like the real clubsters, they would go to haunted sites, try to track down the ghosts and convince them to stop their haunting ways. So in this way it would be more Scooby Doo than Ghostbusters and Ghost Club was born.
As much as I admired my nanna, I always thought if I ever saw a ghost I would go running scared. But I didn’t. I’ve only ever seen one ghost and it was late at night when I’d climbed onto another high bed that I had when I lived in an old warehouse. I’d climbed onto my knees and grabbed both curtains on either side of my bed and was about to pull them closed when I saw the face of my nanna through the window. She never said anything, simply stared straight at me. I didn’t run, I didn’t scream and I wasn’t the least bit scared. After a few minutes, she faded away. I calmly drew the curtains shut, felt as if Nanna was still looking out for me and had a deep and restful sleep. Which was probably one more peaceful sleep than Dickens had after Mary Wellar paid him a visit and began his love of ghost stories almost two hundred years ago.
*Mercy was probably a nickname for Dickens’ nanny Mary.
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What’s your favourite ghost story? Share it with us here in under 200 words to be in the running to win a copy of Ghost Club: The Haunted School by Deborah Abela. It can be a true story, or you can share with us your favourite ghost story from a book. Competition closes Friday 22 September.
WestWords staff will select the ghost story that scares us the most to win the prize. No correspondence will be entered into.