Like many people who write about things that go bump in the night, Tina Vantyler has been fascinated by phantoms and paranormal phenomena since childhood.
Tina grew up in the north of England, moving to London at the end of the 1980s to pursue a career in journalism. Since then she has worked on a variety of women’s and teenage titles. Over the years, friends and acquaintances had recounted their brushes with the supernatural to her and, in 2021, Tina decided the time had come to marry journalism with her lifelong spooky obsession and gather the stories into a collection.
Her first paranormal book, Real Ghost Stories: True Tales Of The Supernatural From The UK, came out in early 2021. Since then she’s published three more books of true ghost stories, along with one volume of her own ghost horror stories. There are plenty more books in the works.
Tina has had several supernatural experiences of her own, which she wrote about in her first book. These, along with the chilling testimonies of those Tina has interviewed, have confirmed for her that, as Mr Shakespeare said, “There are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.
Tina’s shelves are groaning with books on ghosts, horror and the paranormal. She particularly loves short horror stories, with some of her favourites being W.F. Harvey’s The Beast With Five Fingers, W.W. Jacobs’s The Monkey’s Paw, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and M.R. James’s Oh, Whistle And I’ll Come To You, My Lad.
Tina enjoys hanging around cemeteries, exploring eerie or eccentric art galleries and museums, taking long train rides to spooky locations and dancing to 80s pop music in her kitchen.
She lives in London but plans to escape to a (hopefully ghost-free or at least minimally haunted) cottage by the seaside.