Eerie but True: Britain After Midnight

In this first of a series:

Britain switches off the lights. The stories stay awake.

After midnight, familiar places begin to misbehave.

A phantom coach crosses a modern road and leaves no tracks. A light moves across an empty field without revealing its source. A driver sees someone waiting on a lonely verge, glances in the mirror and finds the road deserted. Inside ordinary homes, knocks answer questions, objects move and families give unseen disturbances names because terror becomes slightly more manageable when it sounds like someone who might have borrowed a ladder.

Eerie but True: Britain After Midnight is a witty, atmospheric journey through twenty of Britain’s strangest reported encounters.

Robin Wickens follows the stories back through witness testimony, local newspapers, folklore, psychical research and historical records. Each case asks what was actually reported, which details appeared later and whether weather, landscape, perception, memory or human intervention can explain what happened.

The answers are often messy.

Some mysteries weaken under examination. Others reveal how legends grow around genuine fear, grief or uncertainty. A few remain stubbornly difficult—the sort of stories that return when the road is dark and the next house is several miles away.

Inside, readers will encounter phantom coaches, mysterious lights, roadside figures, unexplained knocks, disruptive poltergeists and Britain’s most inconvenient household ghosts. The journey ends with a responsible guide to unusual encounters, an examination of the natural ingredients of hauntings, a clear glossary, and twenty questions for assessing supernatural claims.

Respectful towards witnesses, sceptical of convenient legends and never entirely safe from dry British humour, Eerie but True: Britain After Midnight is for readers who enjoy folklore, unusual history and mysteries that do not collapse at the first sensible question.

Read it before midnight.