AS Halloween creeps up on us, a local author talks about unexplained encounters at a historic abbey and what lies beneath the perfect terrifying tale.

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Gill Jepson, 58, from Barrow, is the author of children’s fantasy book series, Out of Time .

After returning to the Furness area in 2000 after years of living in London, it has provided her with plenty of ghostly material to fill her books.

Producing three mysterious fictional novels, as well as two stories about a grumpy gargoyle called Guy, the writer explains what she thinks creates the perfect scary story.

Mrs Jepson, said: “It’s all about the setting and obviously the abbey provides the perfect setting.

“You’ve got to set the scene and play with the imagination with creaky noises, spooky shadows, and stories of terrible deeds in the past.

“You’ve got to feed that in straight away.

“That’s really how my books started – with a story that my dad used to tell me about a monk he saw at the abbey when he used to deliver meat from a butchers as a young boy.

“I would always take the story with a pinch of salt and it was strange because I always looked out for a monk and never saw one, until last year.”

Mrs Jepson began writing seriously in 2005, a year after her dad passed away.

Her third book in the Out of Time series is set around Furness Abbey.

Cistercian Conspiracy focuses on a boy called Rob who finds himself plunged into the midst of an adventure where strange things start to happen.

Using inspiration from the abbey to come up with characters, plots and twists, Mrs Jepson, added: “You have to get the readers to respond to the ghosts and the characters. You have to put yourself in their shoes and, in real life if you did see a ghost, you would be quite shocked, and probably quite taken aback.

“It’s all about seeing something that is out of place, something out of the norm, and something that would make you do a double take.

“I often walk around the abbey and I do feel a bit of a prickling, and whether that is my imagination forcing me to think like that, I just don’t know.”

Got any ghost stories? Ever been up, close and personal with a ghostly spirit or not been able to explain something strange?

Send your spooky stories into rachel.flynn@nwemail. co.uk