The end of British Summertime is a poignant and punitive moment. I love the last hour of light just now, between five and six o'clock, a bridge between day and evening, when the Moon is rising but the sky is not dark. Even in the city that light hour makes the end of the day bearable.

Tomorrow all that is over, supposedly so that children can walk in safety to school and farmers can go about their business. The fact is that children don't walk to school any more because legs are a thing of the past, and farming means one man on a tractor with lights so powerful that it could furrow a field in Hell without flattening the battery.

Nevertheless, summertime is gone.

As a consolation I will spend the newfound darkness finding spooky stories for Hallowe'en. There is nothing better than a hair-tingling tale of visits from another world, or those impressive transformations that allow a seeming-solid object to pass through a wall. According to quantum physics we are all seeming-solid objects that can, in theory, pass through walls. If we understood that we might spend less time banging our heads against them.

The Man in the Picture

Susan Hill's ghost story has some classic ingredients, plus listen to her reading from The Woman in Black

BACKGROUND

• The witch's promise

• The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories

• Jeanette Winterson

Related Internet Links

• Listen to Sophie Gee reading from Dracula

• AL Kennedy reads from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

• Susan Hill reads from The Woman in Black

So, instead of hurling myself against the winter wall of too-soon night, I will travel to the Other Side in the company of some genial and uncongenial visitors.

For amusement's sake, Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost is a wonderfully funny tale of culture clash between a 19th-century American family and a 16th-century ghost. I sometimes wonder if Sir Simon was the model for Moaning Myrtle, my favourite Harry Potter spook — the one who lives in the U-bend of the girls' loo.

Perhaps a website is a suitably non-existent place to visit for Hallowe'en, and if you are after a ghostly giggle, try a truly ridiculous site, www.trailerghost.com, the site dedicated to paranormal activity in mobile homes.

For literary laughs, there is, of course, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, her Gothic novel spoof.

But ghosts, surely, should be more fear than fun? I am not sure why M.R.James remains quite so terrifying, but it may be that his stories haunt the cusp of the believable. Perhaps few of us really believe in ghosts, and so the best stories gradually undermine our disbelief, moving us emotionally closer to the growing terror of the characters in the story, who like us are rational daylight creatures not likely to be troubled by Visitations.

Ruth Rendell tells me that even now she would not read James's Casting the Runes if she were alone in the house. Unfortunately she didn't tell me this many years ago when I was a young thing working in her large and isolated Essex farmhouse. As she left on a trip to Australia for six weeks, she handed me M.R.James. I learnt to sleep in the day.

Another James — Henry, this time — found in The Turn of the Screw the exact mix of menace and innocence that frightens like nothing else. It is always worth rereading, and I am still not sure whether Mrs Gross is mad or whether the ghosts are real.

Susan Hill's new ghost story, The Man in the Picture, is every bit as clever and terrible as The Woman in Black. I advise reading it with a bottle of wine, the curtains closed, and the fire in good heart. I had to finish it in one sitting and I went to sleep with the light on. I won't give away the ending but it is satisfying and dreadful.

A chillier website than trailer-trash horror is CastleofSpirits.com. Collected here are ghost stories from around the world and, of course, an opportunity to buy ghostly merchandise. For me, though, a ghost story is always best told in front of the fire with a suitable friend — so why not be inspired by the winner of the Times-Vintage Hallowe'en ghost story competition and invent your own this Hallowe'en?

And after Hallowe'en comes All Saints' Day on November 1 — publication date of a novella by Ali Smith for the Canongate Myth series. It isn't a ghost story, though the ghost of John Knox does send a black-edged card to our heroes, who naturally enough in a world of transformations are also heroines.

The great thing about stories is that they can build their own walls and then let us walk right through them. Girl Meets Boy is not about life after death, but it is a joyful celebration of life in all its strange shapes, on all sides of the wall.

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