Audio Storytelling is Magic: A Guest Post from Kate Winkler Dawson, Author of the Audiobook, The Ghost Club

I love a good ghost story — I grew up riding horses with my local 4H club in rural Texas in the late 1980s. After a long trail ride along the San Marcos River, we’d set up our tents and supplies, then sit by a campfire, and listen to spooky tales all night. Television couldn’t compete with those stories about spirits who roamed the floors above our bedrooms. When I was a young teen, my stepmother convinced me that our old farmhouse was haunted because it was once owned by the county’s first undertaker. Hundreds, even thousands of bodies had entered and left that home. After I moved in, the home creaked and moaned all night long. There’s still nothing more frightening to me than a solo walk through the dark countryside with only starlight and moonlight to show you the way home.   

When I discovered the almost forgotten history of The Ghost Club, I knew that it was destined to be an audio-only book because… how else would I tell a series of real ghost stories set in foggy, eerie London at the turn of the 20^th century? As I pulled up a chair in my home audio booth last December, I tried to imagine myself sitting cross-legged by one of those campfires on a cold winter night, listening to a very frightening tale of ghosts and witches — characters who were likely fiction. But what if they were real? And what if there really were people on earth who could connect with the dead? That’s the central question at the heart of The Ghost Club… the scariest story I’ve ever told.   

Recounting a story through audio is so powerful because your voice, as the narrator, connects the listener to the story in a visceral way that words on a page just cannot. You can hear the urgency in my voice when ghost hunter Harry Price has spotted the ghostly nun in the haunted rectory he’s investigating. I insert a bit of humor when I unravel the tale of a dead cricket player who decides to help a member of the Ghost Club with a challenging shot. And you hear my exasperation as I detail how fraudulent mediums duped unsuspecting clients from their money with the promise of one final conversation with their dead loved one.  

Audio storytelling is magic — with a narrator’s spirit behind the words, a tale which might read as simply spooky on a page becomes distressing, even alarming, through headphones. If your narrator is frightened, then you should be, too.