Kamila Shamsie

In my adolescence, there was no historical figure that I was more intrigued by than Elizabeth I. Her love-affair with the Earl of Leicester was a particular area of interest. So when English Heritage offered up a list of potential sites for a ghost story, which included Kenilworth castle, where Leicester unsuccessfully proposed to Elizabeth, the adolescent in me immediately said “yes”. But the imagination works in strange ways. Once I was at Kenilworth it wasn’t the story of Elizabeth and Leicester that I found myself thinking about – neither the proposal nor the death of Leicester’s wife as told in Walter Scott’s historically inaccurate novel Kenilworth.

As I listened to the guides telling me of unexplained phenomena encountered by visitors and staff at Kenilworth, it became clear that my ghost story would not be about the ghosts themselves – and certainly not the ghosts of figures remembered by history who don’t need to exist in ghostly form to retain their place in the imagination – but rather about encounters with ghosts, such as those being described to me. The ghost story is about the living rather than the dead. That thought was the one that lead me into my story of a night guard at Kenilworth, recently arrived in Britain from a war-torn country.

Sarah Perry

I arrived at Audley End in Essex with no idea what story I’d tell, but determined to write about what frightens me most: not being loved, even by those obliged to do so. I’d been taken to the house as a child, but remembered nothing about it, so that when I looked at its gigantic Jacobean screen it was as if I were seeing it for the first time. Inspiration struck like a brick in a sock. Those grinning faces, that dark wood, had a malevolent inviting look that repelled and delighted me. I was shown other rooms and treasures, but paid little attention: I knew what I would do.

I’ve often wondered why ghost stories are so seductive. I suppose it is partly that for 15 minutes or so they make a perforation in our solid, explained-away world, with its rules and regulations, and fill it with the numinous and strange. Then of course the perforation is decently slammed shut, and we can return to the accounts or the hoovering, confident that the odd tapping noise in the distance is nothing but the boiler on the blink.

As a writer, I’m drawn to ghost stories because I’m excited by genre and form – the conventions of ghost stories (the bespectacled don by the fireside! The anxious governess!) don’t seem to me cliched, any more than the presence of a detective in a crime novel is cliched, or the flawed hero in a Greek tragedy. Their familiarity is a comfort, which of course makes the chill they deliver even colder. They allow me to be both cynic and believer – as Madame de Staël said: “I do not believe in ghosts, but I am afraid of them nevertheless.”

Jeanette Winterson

Have you ever seen a ghost? Me neither, though I have had one touch me – horrible! And I have heard one running upstairs, and later opened a locked room and found its contents thrown all over the place. I don’t have an explanation for my experiences, but as a fiction writer I look for a good story. And I like to tell myself stories before I tell them to anyone else. So writing about a ghost at Pendennis castle in Cornwall fused together real history with fantasy. I wanted to use the architecture of the place, and give a reader a sense of its time line, as well as create a spooky shiver.

Reading ghost stories is for autumn and winter nights, either by the fire, or tucked up in bed with a wavering candle. I love MR James of course, and HP Lovecraft, and if I visit a heritage property I always look in the gift shop for a volume about the local ghost. Britain is rich in headless horsemen, wailing brides, red-eyed cats and pale children who will lead you by the hand to the well where they drowned.

For my money the best ghost story by a living writer is The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. The stage show is still the most terrifying thing in the West End, because, like the novella, it works on suggestion. The film made everything too solid – and whatever ghosts are, they are not solid. For fun, and at Christmas, I always read Oscar Wilde’s sublime “The Canterville Ghost”.

Max Porter

I had a grandfather who excelled in the art of scaring the shit out of children with ghost stories. His weapon of choice was usually MR James. His special skill was the tap, tap, tap at the window pane much later at night, a ghastly four-dimensional fear delivery system, which means that 30 years later I still have nightmares derived exactly from the psychosexual and archaeological arsenal of MR James. There is a scarecrow in the allotments behind my house, and the scarecrow is coming for me ...

The exciting thing about Eltham palace in south-east London is the way a lavish art deco party pad has been plonked on a medieval palace. It’s a perfectly restored jumble, a collage of very peculiar juxtapositions, oozing interesting history. If you are keen on seeing historical examples of the outrageous interior design whims of the super-rich, then Eltham is a must-visit. It is also one of the most obviously haunted places I’ve ever been. It is a palpably, stonkingly, manifestly haunted ghost superstore nestling quietly and eccentrically off the South Circular.

I therefore wanted to plonk a jazzy art deco haunting, very camp, very glitzy, into a stuffy old ghost story format and have them jar slightly. I wanted the preposterous parlour-tale mannerisms of the bedtime stories of my childhood but I also wanted a realistic modern visitor to the palace; grumpy, alone, spooked and acted upon by this brilliantly strange place. Aficionados of Eltham palace will also know that I could not omit a spoilt lemur.

Mark Haddon

I’m not a great fan of ghost stories: the houselights on the moor; things going bump in the night; the unhappy dead. But at the heart of every ghost story is a deep anxiety about how we come to terms with death, and that’s an anxiety that runs through nearly all literary fiction.

Consequently, when I took up this challenge I knew I didn’t want to write a story based on the standard template and I knew I didn’t want to set it in a graveyard or a castle. The York cold war bunker, in contrast, was where members of the Royal Observer Corps would hole up to monitor the end of western civilisation. If you want a flavour of what would be going on above ground – radiation sickness, starvation, martial law – watch the 1984 BBC drama Threads, set in Sheffield during a nuclear strike, but you’ll have a sleepless night afterwards.

The ROC members themselves would spend six weeks in a land-locked submarine with 59 other people, 20 beds and three toilets until the food, water and diesel ran out. And then? Would they kill and eat one another? Would they freeze to death? Would they go up top and take their chances with the cockroaches?

In short, during a nuclear war ghosts would come a very long way down anyone’s list of worries. So how do you weave genuine horror and fantastical horror into one story? Only when I’d solved that problem did I finally work out how to write the story.

Kate Clanchy

I do like reading classic ghost stories of the MR James sort, where the puzzles are as intricate as an Agatha Christie murder mystery, and the answers are deep in a Tudor past, but I don’t find them very moving. My favourite ghosts are those that are all around us, parts of our loss: the voices of the dead in Under Milk Wood, for example, or the child in The Sixth Sense.

When I went to Housesteads (the Roman fort, on Hadrian’s Wall), I was struck, not by any historical drama, but by the depth of quotidian loss in the place: the way a whole system of living, and inventions like hypocausts and saunas, had suddenly passed with the Romans. I was especially moved by the little bath house, and its still visible boiler hole and scorch marks.

I worried about the coal merchant who must have serviced the bath, the industry behind that. So my story is about a deliberately ordinary loss, and the very ordinary ghost that accompanies it. There is a small twist though – you do need that in a ghost story.

Andrew Michael Hurley

From the outside, Carlisle castle looks austere and impregnable but its sandstone walls are soft enough for people to have left their mark. And it was these remnants of human occupation that were the inspiration for the story I eventually wrote. The gatehouse is scrawled with medieval graffiti and the keep is decorated with bizarre, intricate carvings made by jaded prison guards. But it was the dungeons, where many Jacobite prisoners were held in horrific conditions after the battle of Culloden in 1746, that I knew would be at the heart of the story. At the back of the lightless cells there are indents in the stones where men apparently licked off the moisture to sustain themselves as they awaited trial and it’s possible to find small saltires etched into the bricks to ward off evil spirits.

Writing a ghost story is a daunting task. It’s like writing a sonnet or a sonata. The bar is already set high. There are rules of a kind but none so tight that, followed, they ensure success. It seems an all or nothing genre. A ghost story works or it doesn’t. Despite that, it’s a fascinating mode, not least because it destabilises the expectations of the reader by ignoring our need to understand motivation. Who the entity is or what it wants in MR James’s “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, for instance, is never disclosed. Quite what the bells summon and why in Robert Aickman’s “Ringing the Changes” is left ambiguous. Ghosts do not have to account for themselves. That’s what scares the living.

Stuart Evers

We had the castle to ourselves, our children miles away, and the lights of Dover below us intimated disco, youth and half-forgotten freedoms. We looked down on the town, looked back to the great hall, green-bathed from uplighters, caught it in our viewfinders. We held hands, made off toward the castle gates, and it felt as though we were the only people alive. And so I thought of death.

As we walked back from dinner, I looked up at the great hall and wondered if it were haunted, whether there was a hierarchy of ghosts. Would the undead of Henry II’s reign have dominion over the later spectres? Would a man who died carrying a camcorder be friendly with a woman who succumbed to the Black Death? In such history-steeped surrounds, I suspected they would.

And so a cast of ghosts, temporally diverse, suggested themselves. I glanced back at the great hall before bed and imagined an afterlife ball being thrown inside; the dead dancing and drinking, a party to which I was not invited. And in its midst, a love story that would not end well.

• Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories is published by September (£12.99). Proceeds from the book will go towards the conservation of English Heritage sites across the country.