Eight Ghosts review: These unsettling stories will send shivers down your spine

An impressive roster of authors has contributed stories.

Last year The Essex Serpent was named Waterstones Book Of The Year and its author Sarah Perry opens the collection with a creepy tale of a cursed Jacobean oak screen at Audley End.

Andrew Michael Hurley, winner of the Costa Prize-winning The Loney, set his sinister tale in Carlisle Castle.

During the trials of Jacobite rebels, gifted lawyer James Lanyard is tormented by the vision of a ghost who came to a heartbreakingly grisly end.

The Bunker by Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time, is set in the York Cold War Bunker.

As Nadine timeslips between a recognisable version of the real world and a bleak post-apocalyptic bunker, her husband takes her to an exorcist hoping to avoid losing her to the bunker for ever.

The exorcist is all the more chilling for her mundanity, “a plump, forgettable woman whose ivy-green cardigan was fastened by walnut-brown toggles”.

Jeanette Winterson tells the story of a wedding party in Pendennis Castle, haunted by a soldier whose appearance is deceptive.

And in Kamila Shamsie’s tale set in Kenilworth Castle, a sceptical security guard learns the hard way that ghosts most certainly do exist.

However, the most gripping tales in the collection were written by the less-familiar names.

The setting for Stuart Evers’ story is Dover Castle, here the location for a Hollywood movie starring an actress named Maya.

She stays alone in the castle to get into character and meets Edward, an American airman shot down in the war.

He takes her to a dance in the Great Hall where she discovers generations of dead people who see each other as they were in life.

“An airman danced with a girl in a wimple; two of Wellington’s men were embroiled in a drinking competition with a medieval friar.

” When Maya falls in love with Edward, there is a devastating twist in the tale. I also loved Kate Clanchy’s sad, startling story of a mother with a troubled daughter who tries to recapture happier days with a return to Housesteads Roman Fort.

Most haunting of all was Mrs Charbury At Eltham, Max Porter’s tale of a hedonistic socialite and her timid sister Delia who attended a house party at Eltham Palace during the 1930s, only for Delia to mysteriously disappear.

It is not until Mrs Charbury is in her 70s that the horrific truth of Delia’s fate is revealed.

It is a rare treat to find so many talented writers, all at the top of their game, collected in one volume.

These eerie, unsettling stories are guaranteed to send shivers down your spine.