Christmas when I was a child was always about Event Books. Not paperback novels; those would be bought after Christmas with the book tokens I always received both on the big day and for my January birthday, feasting on the gems in the January sale at Smiths in Wigan – not WH, but an independent, family-owned bookshop.

But under the tree would be big rectangular packages – the requisite comic book annuals, of course, and occasionally the Guinness Book of Records, but also a big old hardback book, often obtained cheap from remaindered shops, obscure volumes of science fiction or fantasy art with a nominal narrative thread loosely connecting the images, or Reader’s Digest explorations of uncanny phenomena.

And one of my most treasured Event Books, which I must have got sometime in the late 1970s or very early 80s, was Usborne’s The World of the Unknown: Ghosts.

It was meant to be a child-friendly introduction to the world of the paranormal — and it fascinated and terrified me in equal measure. The big, airy graphic pages and breezy text belied the utterly blood-freezing content.

As for many people of my generation, the book branded the words “Borley Rectory” into my brain – which, as everyone knows, is the most haunted house in England. Even the cover was terrifying … a line of ghostly monks, or perhaps the same ghostly monk, caught in repeated freeze frame, with the ruins of an abbey behind him as the main image, topped with a panel of graphic blurbs promising haunted houses, famous fakes, a grinning skull and a candle guttering in a mysterious, spirit wind.

I devoured the book, first published in 1977, in the long days of the Christmas week. It was fine when there were jolly movies on all afternoon and the lights of the fake tree were glittering, but once under the bed covers with the midwinter moon shining through the curtains, the tales of ghostly dogs, vengeful pirates and the tips on how to hunt ghosts were brought into sharp focus. Every creaking floorboard in our mid-terraced house, every distant dog bark, every shadow crossing the sodium orange glow cast on the ceiling by the streetlight outside, was surely evidence for the existence of ghosts.

It was the matter-of-fact way in which the book presented its information – as straightforward as if it were writing about trains or garden birds or mountains. There was never any suggestion that ghosts weren’t as real as those things. For many years I knew that ghosts existed because I had read about them in this book. And I was not alone … two years ago, Usborne re-published the book after years out of print, and I fervently hope it will be terrifying a new generation of children this Christmas.