Another idea I had for this list was to identify 12 stories to form an anthology of ‘municipal gothic’ – that is, weird fiction set in everyday post-war British environments such as council estates and shopping arcades.

Unsworth’s story is just such a modernist horror built around a quirky 1960s building at Forton services on the M6 near Lancaster. A ghost story of an antiquary this is not.

Unsworth, perhaps inspired by Fargo, opens the story with: “This is not fiction.” He insists that everything that follows is perfectly true, and makes the narrator a version of himself for added verisimilitude. The premise is that a 1960s motorway services restaurant can be haunted, or possessed, like a British Amityville.

He piles up the evidence and the urban legends one after another – missing people, murders, strange noises, unexplained phenomena. And provides footnotes, too, in case you should want to continue the research yourself.

It’s especially interesting to read as Danny Robins’s podcast and TV show Uncannytakes people’s personal ghost stories into the mainstream. If this was really a true story, he’d be all over it.

First published in Lost Places, Ash Tree Press, 2010