Since February 2026, my good friend – the multi-talented, highly acclaimed storyteller Gav Cross – and I have been doing a podcast together. It was my idea. I had it in January, and I tried to take it back, but it was already too late.
The podcast is called Haunted Book Club, and the premise is simple. It’s a book club centred around short Ghost Stories and creepy tales, where members don’t even have to do the reading. We (well, Gav) will do the reading for you. You can listen to his version of our chosen story one week, then join us live on Substack to discuss that story the next. The stories and conversations are then magically beamed out to wherever you get your podcasts from, for you to enjoy at your leisure. You can even suggest stories you’d like us to cover in the future.
So far, there are ten episodes of Haunted Book Club out there. We’ve covered stories by Charles Dickens, E F Benson, E. Nesbit, Edgar Allan Poe, and Edith Wharton so far. We plan to keep going. Don’t try to stop us.
On Saturday, the 18th of April, we did our first-ever live in-person version of Haunted Book Club. It took place at the incredible Norton Priory. By special permission of the estate of Lucy M. Boston, we had the pleasure of reading and discussing her short story Curfew with our audience.
If you have never read Curfew yourself, then I can highly recommend the Swan River Press collection Curfew & Other Eerie Tales. The only other book the story has ever been published in, The House of Nightmare and Other Eerie Tales, isn’t too hard to find second-hand either.
I won’t spoil the story for you (not least because it is, genuinely, a really good one), but I will tell you a few things about it and its setting.
Norton Priory is a historic site in Norton, Runcorn, Cheshire, England, comprising the remains of an Augustinian abbey complex dating from the 12th to 16th centuries, and an 18th-century country house.
![“The empty stone coffins of forgotten Abbots [...] solid blocks of local stone hollowed to the austerest outline of the human body with a round resting place for the head” photo by Ned Cross](https://i0.wp.com/www.moorereppion.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_1067-edited-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C2133&ssl=1)
Norton Abbey was closed in 1536, as part of the dissolution of the monasteries. Nine years later, the surviving structures, together with the manor of Norton, were purchased by Sir Richard Brooke, who built a Tudor house on the site, incorporating part of the abbey. In the 18th century a Georgian house replaced the Tudor one. The Brooke family eventually left the manor house in 1921, and it was partially demolished in 1928. In 1966 the site was given in trust for the use of the general public.
The site was opened to the public as a visitor attraction in the 1970s. The 42-acre site, run by an independent charitable trust, includes a museum, the excavated abbey ruins, and the surrounding garden and woodland. In 1984, the walled garden was redesigned and opened to the public. The museum was extended and revamped in 2016.
Lucy Maria Wood, born in Southport in 1892, married Harold Boston in 1917. Together, the newlyweds moved to Norton Lodge, in Runcorn, in the grounds of today’s Norton Priory Museum. The crumbling Abbey Manor, which features in Curfew, is based on Norton Manor, and the farmhouse belonging to Aunt Catherine and Uncle Tom in the story is a version of Norton Lodge. The characters of Aunt Catherine and Uncle Tom are, supposedly, based on Harold and Lucy themselves.
My earliest introduction to Boston’s work was the 1986 BBC television adaptation of The Children of Green Knowe, which was as compelling as it was terrifying. In The Children of Green Knowe, a gigantic statue of Saint Christopher comes to life. That statue – the real one, carved in the 14th century, and over eleven feet tall – still stands at Norton. Clearly, it made an impression on Lucy when she lived there.
“The empty stone coffins of forgotten Abbots […] solid blocks of local stone hollowed to the austerest outline of the human body with a round resting place for the head” mentioned in Curfew are very much still in evidence at Norton.
The setting of a ruined, forgotten Abbey and its surroundings might have seemed fantastical and perhaps overly Gothic to many readers, but it was a reality for Lucy, Harold, and their son, Peter, when they lived at Norton Lodge. Peter Boston, by the way, grew up to be an architect and an artist who illustrated his mother’s Green Knowe books, amongst others.
Norton was, therefore, the perfect setting for our Curfew special, and we had a brilliant time chatting with the book clubbers about the story.
The next Haunted Book Club live (in-person) event will take place at the incredible Portico Library in Manchester.
On Thursday, the 14th of May, we’ll be reading and discussing Elisabeth Gaskell’s The Old Nurse’s Tale. Tickets are available now, and we hope to see you there.