Do you like ghost stories?

A Ghostly Company is a literary society formed in 2004, it takes its name from the title of the H. R. Wakefield ghost story collection. We are a society devoted to the ghost story in all its forms, with a bias towards the fiction of such writers as M. R. James, Edith Nesbit, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, etc. as well as contemporary authors. We publish a an annual fiction journal, The Silent Companion, to which members are entitled to submit their new stories for publication. There is an email group and a public Facebook presence with news and tidbits, there is also a quarterly newsletter. We hold meetings, known as Black Pilgrimages normally twice every year. Venues are decided because of links to writers, such as being used as the scenario for stories, or just because we want to go there!  Members, who are known as Companions, are encouraged to participate in events, submit a ghost story or write articles for the newsletter and participate in the news group..

Companions on the 2009 Black Pilgrimage, outside Newcastle's Literary & Philosphical Society within is the haunted 'Silence Room'. ©Antonio Monteiro

'There was something very wrong with this house. I had passed the stage of pretending otherwise, and my inclination was to take my family away from it the next day... I suddenly found myself at the end of the garden, attempting desperately to hide myself behind a rowan tree, while my eyes were held relentlessly to face the door. And then it began slowly to open, and something which was horribly unlike anything I had seen before began passing through it, and I knew It knew I was there, and then my head seemed burst and flamed asunder, splintered and destroyed, and I awoke trembling to feel that something in the darkness was poised an inch or two above me, and then drip, drip, drip, something began falling on my face.'

From, 'The Red Lodge,' in A Ghostly Company by H. R. Wakefield If you are a fan of ghost stories - please join us!