Hobbe’s Folly

Hobbe’s Folly (Swift Press, £14.99) offers a “ghost story set in a coastal town somewhere that just might be in Sussex.”

It comes from Adam Macqueen, aged 51, who lives in St Leonards on Sea.

The book is available online and from Hare and Hawthorn in Hastings Old Town.

The book’s landscape and atmosphere were “certainly inspired by the area where I have lived for the past twenty-one years, and by the bonfire societies and events like the Hastings Green Man festival,” says Adam whose day job is as a journalist on Private Eye magazine.

“The house we live in has played a bit part in sending me spooky as well. It’s part of one of the old hospital buildings strung out along the top of the cliff at the western end of St Leonards, which in its time was both the country branch of the Chelsea Hospital for Women – where ladies from London who had ‘got into trouble’ came to quietly give birth and relinquish their babies for adoption before never speaking about it again – and also as a mental asylum.

“We’re consistently reminded of the building’s past, not least by the ghost who we frequently hear walking about upstairs when the whole family are gathered in the sitting room beneath.

“Maybe even more than our house, though, Hobbe’s Folly was inspired by the building site next door, which has lain empty and overgrown for more than 30 years.

“While the planning process for the houses that are now going up on it was going through – and while I was staring out of the window, which is a very important part of the writing process – I started to wonder what might happen if some builders discovered a mysterious structure that had been sealed up and forgotten in a corner of the land they were hoping to develop and what they might find inside. Perhaps a small, brick-built building with no door and no windows.

“And I started to think about those weird little buildings you walk past all the time without really noticing, shut away behind locked gates with signs on them saying Danger of Death. People say they’re just electricity substations – and any of us who remember growing up in the 1970s with those public information films on the telly all the time know exactly how frightening those can be, but what if what’s shut away inside is actually something even more terrifying?

“I started writing ghost stories over 20 years ago and sending them to my friends and family every December instead of Christmas cards. It was a modern version of how M R James, the Edwardian master of the ghost story, used to gather his students and colleagues in his rooms at Cambridge University together each Christmas Eve and read them a new tale by candlelight – with the BBC later adapting many of them for broadcast every December many decades later.

“All of mine are standalone stories, with settings that ranged from an Edwardian lighthouse to a modern-day bedsit with some very noisy but never-seen neighbours, to a remote Scottish island where the locals have an unusual way of ensuring their survival through the harsh winters, and plenty more. It became a bit of a rod for my own back. People started expecting and even demanding them every year, and the run-up to Christmas is always my busiest time at work too. But I loved the reaction they got – the really good sign was if, at the family Boxing Day party, my mother-in-law complained that she’d been having nightmares because of me: that was when I knew that year’s story was definitely a good one!

“Then a few years ago my publisher Swift Press got to hear about them and ended up putting out a selection of their favourites as Haunted Tales just in time for Halloween 2024. They went down really well in both bookshops and at the story-reading events I did around Hastings in the run-up to Christmas that year. I’ll never forget the gasps from the audience when a candle was snuffed out in the middle of a particularly creepy one I read on stage at the Printworks in Hastings. When spring came around, Swift Press asked me if I’d be interested in writing a longer ghost story, and I said ‘It’s funny you should say that. I’m about ten thousand words into one right now.’ And that’s what has become Hobbe’s Folly.”