People who didn’t live as long as we do – people who were often dead in their fifties – understood both distance and apartness in a way that we don’t. All travel is time travel. So, I try to think of this absence from you as a long separation. I must take care of the house and garden, and I am trying my best. You liked things neat and elegant.

No Ghost Ghost Story What kind of a ghost story has no ghost? Towards the end of your life, you promised me that if it were possible, you would send a sign, a sign to let me know that somewhere out there is the person I love. A person recognisable as you. I am sitting at my garden table watching the night. As I type this, I hope the keyboard starts

What do I think? What do I believe? I don’t know – and that’s the best answer I can give. I do know that scrubbing away all traces of the supernatural hasn’t worked too well for the human psyche. There is a valve, a pressure release, that comes with being able to say, ‘I can’t explain this.’ It’s not anti-science, it’s not superstitious.

Shoes off. Kettle on. Tea in pot. And I say, out loud, ‘It’s over.’ Without any prompt, at volume, from the Sonos speaker, a song John liked to play: Dream a little dream of me … ‘Alexa! Stop the song!’

When I was thinking about my own ghost stories, I knew I wanted to write a few of them where place would be integral to the haunting. But I am also interested in how a person may unleash the unholiness of a place, as Jack Torrance does in The Shining.

In the kitchen, the counter-lights are on low. The fridge hums. The radio is playing. I listen. It’s one of those shock-jock radio hosts. Conspiracy. Aliens. Vaccines. John’s late-night listening. On the table there’s a bottle of Pinot Noir and a half-drunk glass. John’s jacket hangs over the chair.

As the night steadies around me and my body relaxes, I open my eyes. What’s that? What can I hear? Why do we open our eyes when we hear something in the dark? We can’t see it.

My phone vibrates. Stealthily, I take a look at the screen on top of my handbag; there’s a message: Don’t cry. The message is from you. Dear dead John. My sister has set it up on your phone. She’s a therapist. She says talking to the Dead is helpful for up to six months.

Malevolence inside and outside is key to the supernatural as imagined by Edgar Allan Poe. Humans are not innocent beings assaulted by dreadful forces over which they have no control; the human psyche is the door that is left open. Such troubling questions, and their terrifying conclusions, would resurface again, much later, in the work of Shirley