Grace asked Joseph Delaney:

Where do you get your inspiration for books and characters? Are your stories mostly from thoughts, or do you base some characters / locations off of real people and places? If so, why did you choose those particular people/places?

Joseph Delaney I ‘discover’ things through dreams, sudden flashes of inspiration and hours spent jotting down possibilities on pieces of paper. But one source of inspiration has been real locations in Lancashire and I draw on childhood memories for many of my descriptions of the 'County'. The haunted house is based on the one in Preston where I lived until I was eleven years old – Number 1 Water Lane. As far as I know the house wasn’t haunted but it is where I had the recurrent nightmares that are featured in both ‘The Spook’s Apprentice’ and ‘The Spook’s Tale’. St Walburge's steeple is an icon of Preston and when I was a child I attended the church school, Talbot Road Boys’. In ‘The Spook’s curse’ I transformed St Walburge’s into ‘Priestown Cathedral’ and imagined a labyrinth beneath it, a system of tunnels where the daemonic Bane was confined behind a silver gate.
Before I became a teacher I was an apprentice like Tom, although I worked as an engineer, not a spook.

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