A low-lying, dank place tends to be lowering to the spirits, and we all know that constant wind drives people mad. But a harsh climate and a hard landscape toughen people. Thomas Hardy believed that places are as important as people in fiction, because people are formed by the landscapes in which they are born and bred, though that is probably less true now than it was in his day, when, especially in rural areas, they tended to remain rooted in one place. Otherwise, I have no clear idea where she came from. Why a "woman in black"? I must have had Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White in mind but it was more than 25 years since I had read his novel. The grief and craving for revenge must be released or she cannot find resolution and peace on either side of the grave.
She cannot let go, and her revenge is an evil that continues to be visited on Crythin Gifford. But my ghost returns to exact revenge and it is the nature of revenge that it is never satisfied and so, loss and grief lead the woman in black on, trying to exact revenge for her child's accidental death by causing those of others. But moral points come out of character, and I kept asking myself the question: "Why does a ghost return to this life?" Perhaps to give information that they have withheld in life – the whereabouts of a will, say, or the identity of a murderer, or to warn. I knew my ghost story, like all my fiction, had to have a serious point and it was this that must sustain the length and underpin the sense of place, the creation of atmosphere and the events. Not that trying to induce a delicious thrill of fear is bad – it is another form of entertainment, and what is wrong with being an entertainer? Dickens certainly considered himself to be one. There also has to be more than an easy manipulation of the reader's superficial emotions – unless making someone jump out of their skin is the writer's only aim. There has to be more to fiction than that. The ghosts are there and they apparently go through the same motions again and again.
A headless horseman rides by, a phantom coach clatters down a dark road, a veiled lady drifts up a staircase and through a wall, a pale and misty child's face is glimpsed at a window – and that is all. There are dozens of little books of "true" ghost stories, usually sorted by geographical location, but almost without exception the ghosts have no purpose and so the stories are ultimately unsatisfying. A footnote to "ghost" was a) of a human being and b) with a purpose. The list of ingredients included atmosphere, a ghost, a haunted house and other places, and weather.
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