Welcome to Midnightish

Fancy some off-the-wall, afterlife-affirming ghosts stories? Then you’re in the right place.

Midnightish is a shared universe of short stories told from the ghosts’ point of view. It’s about how you get on with living even when you’re not even living, You’re a long time dead, and you can’t switch on a TV, make a cup of tea or superglue yourself to an oil company’s head office doors any more, so what can you do to occupy your time?

Would a whole new post-life society develop? Or would everyone just lose their minds as well as their corporeal bodies?

There are rules to this universe but I won’t expand on them here. I think it’ll be more fun to discover them through the stories themselves.

There will be recurring characters, but they won’t be in every story. So if you really dig a certain character and they turn out to be popular, let me know. They may return by popular demand.

I have to stress, though – the majority of these stories are not horror, or even particularly dark. Some will be, and I do have a couple of more stomach-churning tales in the pipeline. But mostly, there’ll be a lot of quirky character pieces that just happen to feature the former living trying to get on with their deaths.

You can read all these stories, and any I add in future (I’m hoping to add a couple a month), totally for free. But there is a Donate button at the bottom of every page, should you feel the urge to help offset the site’s running costs / give me enough to buy me a pint (or some peanuts) as reward for my efforts. (It’s PayPal donations only at the moment.)

And please, if you enjoy these tales, spread the word and send more people this way. I don’t seek riches and fame but it’d nice if these little oddities find some kind of appreciative audience. You never know, if, in three years time, the readership’s into double figures, I might qualify as enough of a celebrity to get invited on Richard Osman’s House of Games.

• Many thanks to Jayne Nelson for subbing the vast majority of these tales. If any typos remain it’s because I’ve changed something at her suggestion (which I usually do as she’s good with suggestions) and inserted a new typo in the process.

• Many thanks to Dave Bradley, who encouraged me to carry on with this project after I abandoned it for a few years. That happened because the BBC launched the brilliant sitcom Ghosts, and I was worried that people would think I was just copying it. Dave eventually convinced me that Midnightish was worth persevering with and did have something unique to offer.

• This site is dedicated to Joy and Geoff Golder, currently haunting each other.