When Reece Shearsmith was a boy, he overheard relatives chatting at a New Year gathering. “One of them was talking about [the ghost of] a woman they’d seen standing on the village green at three in the morning,” he recalls. “Another knew a woman who woke up and found a figure sitting at the end of her bed. It’s my first recollection of being properly scared and loving it.”

From then on, the Yorkshire-born Shearsmith was fascinated by all things uncanny. He would stay up late to watch Hammer horror films – his mother allowed it because she loved them, too – and immerse himself in books including the Hamlyn Book of Horror, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. His obsession carried through into adulthood and his work: Shearsmith is best known as the co-creator of the surreal comedy series The League of Gentlemen, Psychoville and the horror anthology Inside No 9. “I’ve managed to forge a career from the things I loved as a kid,” he says.

Now 57, Shearsmith has written a book, Things I Took from the Dark, about his love of the macabre. It is a compendium of ghoulish stories, with accompanying illustrations by himself, and a memoir of his early years when he would scare his neighbours by wearing a glow-in-the-dark Dracula mask, with a soundtrack of thunderclaps and wolf howls, as they returned home from work.

The book is structured around an imaginary museum in which Shearsmith places the legends and artefacts that have terrified and shaped him: these include the Beast of Bodmin, the Highgate Vampire and the monster that stalks Glamis Castle in Scotland. Shearsmith has an attic room in his north London home where he keeps his eerie ephemera, including antique books, props, costumes from his TV shows and a Gottlieb Haunted House pinball machine: “The room is behind a door that looks like a bookcase,” he says, gleefully.

The book is stuffed with childhood anecdotes, such as the time he and his brother were in their grandad’s Reliant Robin and the car clipped the pavement, flipped over and slid down the road on its roof, sparks flying everywhere. Somehow, all emerged from the crash without injury. He also recalls the time that his dad tried to burn a toy fire engine in their fireplace, sending bits of melted plastic up the chimney which then lodged in the flue and caught fire. Eventually, the fire brigade was called to put out the blaze.

Along with his Dracula routine, Shearsmith’s childhood extracurricular activities included practising magic tricks, making models of his favourite monsters and recreating film scenes. He even struck up a correspondence with Christopher Tucker, the special effects and makeup supremo who worked on The Company of Wolves and The Elephant Man. After Shearsmith left school, Tucker invited him to do work experience at his studio, where he created latex masks for The Phantom of the Opera.

Eventually, Shearsmith’s love of acting overtook his desire to work in special effects and he studied drama at Bretton Hall College near Wakefield (since merged with the University of Leeds). There, he met Steve Pemberton, Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson, with whom he would work on The League of Gentlemen.

Shearsmith has never stopped drawing and making things, so he was thrilled to provide the illustrations for Things I Took from the Dark. He says the creepy characters in his TV projects were nearly always conceived as drawings which he would show to the makeup and costume departments.

It is a measure of our collective fascination with the uncanny that the tales in Shearsmith’s book have endured – in some cases for centuries. For Shearsmith, the lure of the supernatural lies not just in the storytelling but “the black horror of our own mortality. We are chilled by the creepiness, but we cling to the idea that death isn’t necessarily the end, and there’s comfort in that.”

Things I Took from the Dark by Reece Shearsmith is out now.

Reece’s pieces: ‘There’s always the possibility of truth piercing the myth’

The beast of Bodmin Moor (main image)
“On family holidays in Cornwall, we would cross Bodmin Moor to get there and back,” says Shearsmith. “The beast is a big cat: a lynx or a lion, maybe escaped from a zoo. There’s the possibility of truth piercing the myth and it’s all the more terrifying for it.”

The Hand of Glory
“If you sever and pickle a dead man’s hand and perform some incantations, you can use the hand in witchcraft. It’s said it can unlock any property and, when you light the fingertips, it will put anyone living there to sleep while you rob their house. It sounds mythical, yet there is one in Whitby Museum.”

Urbain Grandier
“This is a story about a French priest who was a notorious womaniser. To get rid of him, a group of nuns pretended to be possessed by the devil, and said he had bewitched them. It’s essentially a story of a cancelling, except that this man was doused in holy water and crushed until the marrow leaked from his pulverised bones.”

The FeeJee mermaid
“The American showman and philanthropist PT Barnum was behind this hoax mermaid, which he put in a New York museum. It had the mummified head and torso of a monkey and the tail of a fish. Rather than a beautiful siren with long hair, it was a monstrous, wizened thing with sharp teeth.”

The terror of Croglin Grange
“This is a centuries-old vampire tale about a family staying in a house near Carlisle. A monstrous man climbed in through a window and bit a woman on the neck. Hearing her screams, her brothers came in and shot the creature in the leg. Locals subsequently discovered a body in a coffin with a bullet hole in its leg, and burned it.”