Exploring whatis real or not inhaunted history

Lecturer and author Lorna Gibb will be launching her latest book, A Ghost’s Story: A Novel, at the New Lanark Institute on Tuesday November 10 at 6pm.

Lorna will discuss the haunted history of New Lanark and why we continue to be fascinated by the spirit world.

Originally from Bellshill, Lorna is a university lecturer now living in London. She is the author of Lady Hester: Queen of the East and West’s World: The Extraordinary Life of Dame Rebecca West.  

A Ghost’s Story, her first novel, is the spell-binding tale of Katie King, the most famous ghost of the last two centuries.

(Katie is not a fictional ghost invented by Lorna — she had a history of appearing at seances as far apart as New York and London in the 1870s)

Katie King made her first ghostly appearance in New Lanark, in a factory of stone and sweat and dusty death.

Through spirit writing and a bookshop computer, Katie takes the readers from London to Lanark (with its haunted Clydesdale Inn) to Russia and back, through phoney seances and prophetic dreams, from 1912 to the present day.

At the launch Lorna will take her audience on a social history of the séance from the 19th century to the 21st, exploring the boundaries between what is real and what is unreal and ultimately examining why we are all so gripped by ghost stories.

A Ghost’s Story will be on sale there at a discounted price of £10. Admission is free but those planning to go must RSVP publishers 
Granta Books at [email protected].