I’ve been going over some of my old stories recently, and I’ve just been looking at one which I posted two versions of a while ago, alternately called ‘A Ghost Story‘ and ‘The Ghost of Sycamore Avenue‘. Generally, I’m not in the habit of creating two different finished versions of a story and I only did so for this story at the recommendation of my tutor.

Both versions follow exactly the same plotline: a slightly naive fourteen-year-old boy, Ben, invites his friend to spend a night with him in a haunted house and Ben’s friend invites some other people. Ben is obsessed with ghosts and with seeing a ghost and photographing it. The other kids don’t care about ghosts, but just want to have a party in this abandoned house. Tensions rise between Ben and the rest of a group because he’s something of an outsider. Two of the group, Gavin and Michelle, go off together and have sex in an adjacent room. Naive, over-imaginative Ben mistakes the sounds of their sex for the moaning and bumping of a ghost, and so convinces himself that he has had a paranormal encounter.

The difference between the two versions is that one is written as if it had been written by fourteen-year-old Ben and the other is written as if it was written by an older Ben looking back on the experience. Purely looking at the writing style, the second, alternate version, is clearly superior; the sentences are more considered, the vocabulary is more expansive, and the imagery is evocative. This version, we’ll call it Version 2 to save confusion, was written more in my ‘natural’ writing voice; it was written in the style of someone who is, say, studying a BA in Creative Writing.

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My name is Ben, I’m fourteen and I once saw a ghost. It was three weeks ago, in this old haunted house that stood empty at the bottom of my road for as long as I can remember. And for as long as I can remember, the place fascinated me because I’m really into ghosts and the paranormal and all that, and this place, with its dark, peeling paint, boarded up windows and overgrown front garden, looked just like a haunted house straight from Goosebumps.

Actually, I didn’t exactly see the ghost, but I know it was there. I could feel it. And I heard it. I’d take someone who knows about ghosts there to prove it, if I could, but they knocked the place down last week to make way for some housing estate, so instead, I’m writing this down, so there will be a record of ‘the ghost of Sycamore Avenue’ and of how I came to see it.

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