We love to be scared. It’s why we love horror movies, roller-coasters and day-trips to Alloa. It’s thrilling to experience the excitement of peril without the threat of consequences (with the exception of a day-trip to Alloa, which really can be fatal).

There’s a long tradition of horror-based pranks in my family, most of them emanating from my older cousins. I say pranks. Many of them skirted the edges of full-blown psychological torture, but I guess they were character-building in their own way: people dressed as vampires, complete with cloak and fangs, waking you up in the dark of night; legends of a creature living beneath the bottom step of my aunt’s and uncle’s staircase, ready to grab you and drag you down into the sub-dimensional depths of the universe that lurked just beneath the carpet; being locked in a room with a particularly gruesome horror movie playing on the TV without any means to turn it off.

Later in life, my older brother-in-law took up the mischievous mantle. Once when I was at his house, when my nephew was a baby, he tied a string to a bedroom door and tugged on it hard, delighted to see me vault my nephew’s baby-gate in terror at the sight of the suddenly and inexplicably animate door. Another time he collaborated with my sister to make it seem like my mother’s house was encircled by intruders then took me out round the garden with an air rifle in the pitch black, organising a few jump scares along the way.  It was family time with a sprinkling of Guantanamo Bay and a garnish of Resident Evil.

Still, possibly as a consequence of all this, I became a life-long horror fan. As a young teenager I watched movies like Hellraiser and Candyman with my older cousin; gorged on his brutal and bloody 2000AD comics. I started collecting horror posters from video rental places like Blockbuster and my local shop to put on my bedroom wall (Dannii Minogue and Pinhead made strange wall-fellows indeed). I’m not as prolific a fan of horror as I used to be, but I appreciate a bit of gore-bite-bleed-kersplat as much as the next man, especially if the next man is Freddy Krueger.

Being scared is cathartic. It sparks the mind and the imagination. It reminds you a little of what it is to be alive. I couldn’t wait to pass the torch on to my kids, albeit not in such a way that would risk leaving them quivering mental wrecks.

Or so I thought…

It’s apt that I should have used a torch-based analogy, because a torch was at the root of the misjudgement to come.

We visited my mother and father (he’s my step-dad, but I’m going to call him father, because it’s less clunky, and there’s something reductive about the ‘step’ prefix) in their cottage in the countryside. The kids were messing about with a torch. They eventually found themselves in the only room in my mother’s house capable of encapsulating day-time darkness, a little box room with no windows that was at one time a bedroom, then a wine cupboard (my father always called it a ‘cellar’ in a bid to lend it some sophistication), and now a pantry and general junk-room. Swinging a ray of light around a wee dark room apropos of nothing holds enough fascination on its own to enrapture a child for weeks at a time, but I thought I’d help diversify and enrich their beam-based shenanigans, starting with shadow puppetry. After a few minutes of rabbits and raptors – about the only creatures we were capable of conjuring, besides hands – we moved on to ghost stories, each taking turns with the torch held under our chins, illuminating our faces like haunted pumpkins.

I went first, spinning a simple but atmospheric yarn about a concerned neighbour chapping on the door of a musty old house. The house’s equally musty old occupant hadn’t been seen around the village for a while, and people were worried. So the man knocks, shouts, and gets no answer, so he moves around the house trying to peer through the windows. He notes the grime on the insides of the windows, so thick he can hardly see through them. He notices a flicker through the gloom on the pane, figures it’s the old lady. Goes back to the front door, tries it, and discovers it’s unlocked, though there’s something blocking the way forwards. He barges it and it gives, ripping through thick swirls and strands of cobwebs. How long has she been stuck in here? he wonders. It’s dark in the house, suffocatingly dark, so he brings out a torch, swinging it this way and that through the murk. Gets to the door that leads into the lady’s living room, pushes it open. Calls her name again. Uses the torch beam to survey the dank and dingy room, finds the old lady. She’s stuck up on the wall, her mouth hanging open, quite dead, her body wrapped in place with spider webs. Before he can even scream, a giant spider – much bigger than a man – emerges from the shadows in the corner of the room, and barrels towards him as fast as a jungle cat. He realises it’s too late to run. More than that, he can’t move. The torch drops from his hand into the springy, clinging carpet of cobwebs woven at his feet.

They were spooked, but smiling. I’d given them the general idea of how to build tension in a scary story; how to weaponise the ordinary; use the tone and pitch of your voice to lull, unnerve and shock. Little Chris, 3, took the next turn. He nailed the tense poise and grave whisper, peppered his story with lots of husky ‘and thennnnn’s. His plot also revolved around a seemingly deserted house, but lacked an ending. Or a middle. People – a daddy and two boys – crept into a cottage, reacting to noises, sensing danger all around them, and thennnnn, and thennnnn, AND THENNNNN… a monster came and ate them all up. It was an amusingly perfunctory ending, one that had me chuckling. At least it was decisive. None of this ambiguous, ‘you write your own ending’ shit. BOOM. Eaten by a monster. THE END.

I had another turn, inadvertently ripping off the basic plot of Jeepers Creepers 2. Then Jack used the abandoned house template to tell a tale of toys that came to life – animatronic Santas, toy soldiers – and pursued the plucky protagonists through and out of the house, and down deserted country roads in a spooky night-time chase. Both boys were good at this, and seemed to really enjoy our time telling terrifying tales around the virtual campfire we’d created inside the tiny room. But I wanted the session to go out with a bang. So I started a new story, a story within a story, a meta story, about a dad and his two sons who were swapping spooky stories in a darkened box room by torch-light, while above them, through the open loft-hatch, sat a swarm of hungry creatures just waiting for their chance to jump down and feast. But they couldn’t. Because they were allergic to light. So as long as the torch stayed on, so long as the batteries held, they were safe. But at any moment… if their torch was to run out of batteries… if that light was to go of….

Click.

You see what I did there, right? This was a miscalculation on my part. I knew it as soon as my eldest son, Jack, threw open the door behind him and fled for his life down the bright corridor, screaming in terror. My youngest, brave little Chris, looked up at me in the half-light cast from the suddenly opened door with a look on his face that seemed to say, ‘What the fuck was that all about?’ Jack had locked himself in the bathroom, and wouldn’t let me in. His fright had given way to anger. A flood of Diet Adrenalin was thundering its way through his little circulatory system, breaking his rational thoughts against the rocks of his temper. I kept knocking. ‘Come on, buddy, I’m sorry, if I’d known it would scare you that much I would never have told that story. I thought you’d laugh!’

I felt as I’d felt when my nephew was a nipper and I’d granted a piece of burnt toast sentience before dropping it into the fiery clutches of my mum’s coal-fuelled central heating system. ‘Noooo, please don’t burn me, mister, I’m burnt enough, I don’t deserve this!’ I thought he’d laugh. Instead he’d screamed.

After a few minutes Jack padded through to the kitchen and sat down at the table, completely recovered from his traumatic experience. Since the little fella has evidenced a burgeoning talent for both creative writing and thinking I decided to turn his terror into a teachable moment.

‘You know ghosts and monsters and things like that aren’t real, right?’

I’ve always stressed this, because I know how much kids worry about ghosts and monsters even when they’re sure they don’t exist, never mind where there’s doubt.

‘Yeah.’

‘And you know the creatures I created in the story weren’t real either, right? They were just words out of my mouth.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But you were still scared of them, right?’

He nodded.

‘That’s the power of stories,’ I told him. ‘You can use stories to make people think and feel real things about things that aren’t real. And you can’t just make them scared. You can make them happy, you can make them laugh, you can change their minds about things. Stories are powerful.’

He nodded sagely.

It must have got through to him, because later that day, back at home, he started writing his magnum opus, The Abandoned House, its front cover dotted with monsters and spider-webs.

It’ll assuage my guilt at terrifying him somewhat if he becomes the next Stephen King.

Plus, a premium retirement home would be nice, too.