Where Ghosts Gather

In 1977, Usborne published World of the Unknown: Ghosts, the children’s book that inspired a generation of junior forteans. Four decades on, following a concerted fan campaign, the book is back in print... and the perpetually haunted BOB FISCHER tracked down its pleasantly surprised writer, Christopher Maynard, to discuss its genesis and unexpected impact.

- Bob Fischer

The man responsible for some of my more potent childhood nightmares is sitting opposite me at a picnic table in Old Spitalfields Market, basking in the syrupy east London sunshine of a late summer’s afternoon and – quite frankly – he’s at it again.

“There was an animal called the Behinder,” says Christopher Maynard, in the mellifluous Montreal accent that has lost none of its delicious resonance since he left his native Canada for postswinging London in the early 1970s. “You can tell when you’re being followed by a Behinder, because the hairs on the back of your neck prickle, and stand up. And the way to check that you’re being followed by a Behinder... when that happens, whip around really fast. If there’s nothing there, but you’ve still got that feeling, you know you’re being followed…”

Good grief, Chris. What do they look like?

“You can feel them, sense them, almost taste the fear they engender, but see them? Never! I’ve heard tell that you would drop dead if you ever saw one face to face. Though I take that with a pinch of salt.”

Forty years on, the architect of my 1970s night terrors is proving to be brilliant, engaging, and very funny company.

In 1977, Chris poured this fascination with the ghost stories of his Canadian childhood – told in hushed tones around the crackling fires of woodland summer camps – into a book that became a ubiquitous, and thrilling, mainstay of every British school library for years to follow. Ghosts was one of the earliest successes of the nascent Usborne Publishing house, one third of a trio of books issued under the umbrella title The World of the Unknown... the others being, inevitably, Monsters and