IAN  JARVIS

I was writing about a ghost dog in my new novel and got to wondering about animal spirits and pet hauntings. Are they genuine, or just harmless self delusion to comfort us after the death of a beloved member of the family? Back in the late 1980s, I knew a girl named Linda who worked as a ‘psychic’, enabling people to speak with their dead loved ones for money – at the time, she charged £30 for thirty minutes. She’d explain to her clients how their pets had spirits too, just l

A pictorial visit to the Suffolk locations used in Witchfinder General and a look at Matthew Hopkins himself. Witchfinder General. The 1968 folk horror film by the young director Michael Reeves was renamed the Conqueror Worm in the USA in a mercenary attempt to cash in on the Vincent Price / Edgar Allan Poe series of 1960s films. Conqueror Worm was a poem about death by Poe and, although the title made no sense and had absolutely no bearing on the film whatsoever, this is wh

I watched one of those ghost shows recently, those 'reality' programmes, bought cheaply from the USA and shown on obscure Freeview channels – When Ghosts Attack, Paranormal Nightmares, Ghost Adventures, OMG I Shagged a Ghost, etc. I don’t recall which one it was, but the episode took us back to the 1980s and introduced us to a child named Billy. In a series of dramatic reconstructions, with unknown actors and ominous music, it showed how Billy often walked by a creepy detache

There are only two places in Britain named Cottingley and, for some bizarre reason, they’re just fifteen miles apart from each other in Yorkshire. If you’re planning a visit, make sure you get the right location. One Cottingley is a large council estate on the edge of Leeds, the other is a little suburb off the A650 next to Bingley, a few miles northwest of Bradford. The original old village is on the southern side of this, a lovely cluster of sandstone terraces and buildings

A pictorial visit to the Georgetown locations used in the Exorcist. In the 53 years since the Exorcist opened in cinemas very little has changed in the leafy streets of Georgetown, Washington. It’s a lovely little suburb of attractive houses and buildings, art galleries, vegan bistros, and craft beers. Apart from the newer streetlamps, modern cars and a lack of Mesopotamian demons, everything is pretty much as it was back in 1973. It isn’t often that the locations in a work o

A pictorial look at the Californian filming locations to see if anything has changed in (almost) fifty years. Scenes from the 1979 television mini-series and the same locations photographed in June 2026. Apart from the icocnic house, everything is pretty much the same. There have been other, more recent, film versions of Stephen King's 1975 bestselling novel, but for many, including myself, the 1979 mini-series directed by Tobe Hooper is still the best. Most people remember h

A pictorial look at how the filming locations have changed over the last forty-six years. In virtually every case... they haven't. The Howling has always been a bit of a cult classic for me. Joe Dante directed this horror back in 1980 - between May and June - and released the movie in 1981. One of two werewolf films to appear that year, the other being An American Werewolf in London. Dee Wallace starred in this one, alongside Christopher Stone, Patrick Macnee, Belinda Balask

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR… unless, of course, you’re wishing for a comical, supernatural mystery. Persian or Persians Unknown was released by MX Publishing on the 12th of December, the latest in the Bernie Quist series of detective novels set on the northern city of York. A modern-day Sherlock Holmes, Bernie Quist operates as a consultant detective from Baker Avenue in York. His assistant is Watson, although this Watson is a streetwise youth from the Grimpen housing estat

THE BIZARRE CURSE OF ROBERT THE DOLL. Thanks to Hollywood, many people are now aware of the doll named Annabelle (possessed by pure evil, but now safely locked away in a ‘special' glass cabinet by the late ‘demonologist’ Lorraine Warren) but not so many have heard of Robert the Doll. The enigmatic Robert resides in an old American Civil War fort on the Florida island of Key West. Constructed by the US army in 1862, Fort East Martello was positioned on the south coast of Key W

The famous Enfield poltergeist case of 1977 made it onto the cinema screens in 2016 as the Conjuring 2. If you’ve seen the other horror films by director James Wan, you can probably imagine how his take on the paranormal activity is a touch more sensational than the excellent 2015 screen version - the Enfield Haunting, a down-to-earth television dramatization with Timothy Spall and Matthew Macfadyen. As with the first Conjuring film, Conjuring 2 follows the investigations of

Where did Bram Stoker write his celebrated novel, Dracula? Take a pictorial tour of the locations that inspired the book and the places...

Why do people have this bizarre urge to literally throw away their money, especially these days in our current ‘cost of living’ crisis?...

The Rumba of the Beast was released by MX Publishing in September 2023, the latest in the Bernie Quist series of humorous detective...

Croglin is a tiny settlement in the wilds of Cumbria, nestling in the beautiful Eden Valley some fifteen miles north of Penrith. This...

With all the recent wildfires, flooding and other planetary catastrophes, the media is once again filled with horror stories of global...

Advice for spirits in the afterlife who wish to contact the living. One of the central characters in my novel Badda Moon Rising is a fake...

Writing the Bernie Quist series of detective mysteries has involved plenty of research on werewolf legends, but one story that I was already well aware of was the strange Hexham legend from the 1970s. I remember this being covered by the Nationwide television show, a popular factual programme back then, and I still recall the bizarre details. which I found quite unnerving as a young teenager I recently tracked down and photographed the house involved in the story, and most o

Judgment Clay was released by MX Publishing on May the 15th, the latest in the series of humorous mysteries featuring York private...

Standing by the harbour in the pretty Yorkshire fishing port of Whitby you’ll find a wooden shack owned by a gypsy named Lee Ester Alita...

I was nominated on one of those Facebook polls, sent by friends, to come up with a book that makes me feel happy. Mark Chapman would...