WHEN I WAS A GIRL – ABOUT 9, I think – there was a book in my school library called The Stately Ghosts of England(that may not be quite right, but you get the idea). Every week I took it out and when it was due back, I renewed it. I must have had it in my possession for about a year. In the middle section were photographic plates, including one of “the Brown Lady” from Raynham Hall in Norfolk (as Google Images has just helped me to recall). A shrouded figure moves down a staircase, the stairs quite visible behind it.

I loved this image. Or, I hated it. I was eager to reach that part of the book where I knew it lay; at the same time, I dreaded it. I lost sleep. I was afraid of stairs. I knew this was ridiculous, and yet . . .

Do not doubt that ghosts exist. No, I’m not saying that I’m after proof of the paranormal; but I believe that ghosts exist because human beings need them to. The truth is out there, as Mulder and Scully had it; there seems to be a need (OK, not for Richard Dawkins, granted) to believe in “something else”, whatever that is, and however likely it is to be hokum.

Ghost stories, however, are not hokum. Literature speaks across time: surely that’s what ghosts do, too – so it’s a marriage made in heaven, if that’s the right expression. And yet good ghost stories are a rarity, for reasons that Susan Hill, one of the judges of our scarily exciting ghost story competition, outlines on page 6. Among the classics she mentions is Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which I would rank as one of my favourite stories of any sort. Yes, the bar is high . . . but consider the mixture of wonder and horror conjured by the image of Scrooge’s doorknocker metamorphosing into his dead partner Jacob Marley’s face at the beginning. What might rise from the past to haunt the characters you create? Is your setting the past, present, or future?

You have about a month to write; and we’ll let you know the winner in good time for Hallowe’en. I am grateful to my fellow judges, Hill and the Vintage editor Liz Foley – and not just for reading everything that will doubtless pile in. I hope that they will also be willing to hold my hand as we sit (round a blazing fire, candles lit, cobwebs in the corners) and get spooked by your stories!

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