The film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining and I entered the world in the same year, and I started watching horror films at the tender age of four or five (thanks to a mischievous teenaged auntie and cable television). However, I wouldn’t consider any of that a first encounter with the Gothic. My relationship with the Gothic is something inherited from folklore, family, and the landscapes that raised me.

I’ve lived in England my entire adult life, but I grew up in Appalachian Ohio. The area was rich with eerie folklore: haunted cemeteries, cursed roads, the shadowy rumours of a cult living near the covered bridge. A dreamy, solitary child, I took the idea of living with spectres much further than necessary – every barn, shed, closet, creepy doll, cellar, dirt road, and stand of trees I came across was obviously haunted.

Stories of ancestors from other parts of Appalachia filtered down to me through grandparents. One distant grandmother smoked a pipe and lived in a ghost-filled house with heavy velvet curtains she always kept closed. Another, my grandpa’s beloved mother, was a granny woman – an herbalist who could cure myriad ailments with the right blends of local plants, and it was said she often knew about things before they happened. She understood birth and death, and how inseparable our lives are from the latter. My grandpa inherited her fearless acceptance of the unknown, and did his best to pass it down to me.

I went camping and fishing with my grandpa from a very young age, and whenever we heard a bobcat scream, he’d tell me it was ‘a wampus kitty’ – an uncanny human-cat chimera belonging to the mountains and woods of his East Tennessee childhood. He told me plenty about less mythical animals, too – raccoons, opossums, and yes, bobcats – but the lesson was easy to accept: there are creatures around us, natural or otherwise, and we have to respect them.

It was inevitable that by middle school I’d be winding my bookworm way around literature with Gothic elements, even if I didn’t know what the Gothic was at the time: I read Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and wanted to wander the wild Yorkshire moors of Wuthering Heights and The Secret Garden. Little did I know Yorkshire would become my adopted second homeland, and later, as a twentysomething living in Sheffield, I discovered the writing of Daphne du Maurier, a master of unsettling fiction who also happened to adopt a second home – Cornwall.

Now, as a Yorkshire-Appalachian living in the West Midlands, my current postgraduate research thesis explores ecoGothic landscapes in Daphne du Maurier’s work, and the haunted relationship between the human and more-than-human world that often nests within those landscapes. Because I was raised on a particular homegrown, rural Gothic, I know there’s strangeness in the land if we allow ourselves to see it, there’s no life without death, and how to keep my heart open to mysterious things – wherever I happen to be at the time.