Feature Articles

Part 2 : More of ghosts, hauntings & the paranormal in the English Midlands.
                                     An Interview with the editor, John Roberts 

What are your most popular books at the moment?

Books about ghosts and the paranormal, closely followed by murders. I sell my biographies and histories quite regularly but in much smaller quantities. No, the British public, or at least, the part of it that lives in the Midlands, wants to read about ghosts and murders.  

Why are they so popular?

The most popular reading of all is fiction, and I think people find ghosts and murders interesting for the same reasons. I don?t mean that they think the ghosts and murders are made up, but like the fiction, they are about things outside our ordinary lives. They are also mysterious, and perhaps we are all fascinated by things unknown and not understood.   

What sort of feedback do you get from the public?

Feedback comes mainly to the authors. Most of the correspondence about ghosts comes from people telling us about their own experiences, so I pass them on to Anne Bradford for investigation. She and Barrie Roberts have written the ghost books I have published so far.We get letters and emails about murders most often from people who no longer live in this area, and especially from overseas, who think they have some distant connection with an old murder. A chap emailed from Australia to say that one of his female ancestors was murdered in Willenhall in the late 19^th century. Barrie Roberts, who is also my murder expert, is in touch with him because the woman may have been a victim of the Darlaston Ripper who was about at the time. 

Why do you think England, and especially the Midlands, has so many ghosts and hauntings?

I have never come across a paranormal experience that did not in some way involve people, and I am sure that ghosts and hauntings all come in some way from the minds of human beings.

Often they seem to reflect some intense emotional experience. You might therefore expect to find the greatest density of ghosts (if ghosts have density) where you have the greatest concentrations of people, and there are plenty of us in the Midlands. 

What do you think ghosts are? Can anyone see or experience one.

Really, I haven?t got a clue, but I look at it this way. There are thousands upon thousands of stories about what we call ghosts and paranormal events and they seem to have been told since human beings first learnt how to speak.  No doubt some of them have been inventions, but there are so many and from all corners of the earth that most of them must represent genuine experiences. Barrie Roberts put his views on this topic in the opening chapter of Midland Ghosts & Hauntings. 

When you study and compare ghost/paranormal stories they usually fall into certain categories. We have grey ladies and black monks, we have poltergeists and telepathy, time slips and appearances of people later found to have died, various kinds of misty apparitions, vanishing hitch hikers, etc etc. It seems to me we are talking about a range of different phenomena, which may or may not be related, but they are all perceived by people. Since they all seem to defy the ordinary laws of physics it may be that the experiences are not of objective realities but projections from people?s minds. Maybe we receive some sort of signals in certain places. The last chapter of Strange Meetings is very interesting on this.

What?s the most frightening ghost story you?ve ever heard?

?The House over the Waters? was the last story in Midland Ghosts & Hauntings. A family move into a house in Stratford on Avon which they find is full of strange things. For years they seem to get on very well with their ghosts but the last two pages are hair raising. The other story that stayed in my mind was ?The Banshee? in the same book, in which an Irish maid comes to work in a house in Wolverhampton and brings a terrifying piece of her folklore with her.  

Actually, I find more stories intriguing than frightening. ?The Vision of Misery? (Midland Ghosts & Hauntings) is a time slip experience in which a schoolboy rounds a familiar corner and finds himself in a village he has never seen. Later as a First World War Army officer he finds himself in France and comes across the same strange village. I also loved the one about the troop of Roman soldiers found occupying the garden seats of a house in Shropshire (?Roman Soldiers? from Strange Meetings).

Have you any more books on the paranormal planned? 

Certainly. Barrie is writing up a collection called to be called The Weird. These are not exactly ghost stories but accounts of the unexplained, and I suppose time slips like the two above, come into this category. One tale is about a runner in Kidderminster who was practising for a race and being followed along the road by two friend in a pony and trap. The runner?s foot struck a stone, he stumbled and completely disappeared.  I am looking forward to this one. Then Dave Taylor and Andrew Homer are getting together Beer & Spirits, a book of haunted pubs in the Black Country and possibly Birmingham. It will tell you about the ghosts and hauntings of each pub and also ales they serve, and since this is the Black Country, they will be worth investigating.

Thanks a lot John. 

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