Armada Ghost Books

With my Seth's Christmas Ghost Stories up-to-date (it turns out the book I am waiting for doesn't reach these shores until May), I decided to grow the odd few Armada Ghost Books I have into a real collection. 

I will share them as I add each next volume in the series to my shelves, but I wanted to use today's post for the very first book in the series, which by 1978 came in two editions.

With the plume of ghostly anthologies being published in the gloriously creative 1960s, it was hardly a surprise when, in 1967 Armada produced a children's version of the great and hugely popular Fontana and Pan ghost story collections:

Whilst the collection was aimed squarely at older children, their covers promised genuine eerie content and their intended audience lapped them up with relish.

The Armada Ghost Book's cover featured a young lad racing from a huge and terrifying spectral lady in white. The whole scene is beautifully illustrated by artist Gino D'Achille with a suitably crooked tree and a ragged fat crow completing the front image: 

The rear cover continues the scene and introduces more crows and an archetypal haunted house in a stage of creepy disrepair. A sole light shines from a window beneath its tall tower and suggests the boy, has awakened something he oughtn't have whilst investigating the decrepit property. 

It's a great cover, and, to ensure a prospective reader purchases the book whilst browsing its pages in a bookshop, the artist was commissioned to illustrate several of the stories contained in the volume.

The book contains 11 eclectic tales and was a huge success for Armada, spawning another 14 entries in the series before concluding in 1983.

To blend the book seamlessly with its sequels, it was republished with a fresh reworking of the original cover art and a new title in 1978:

The book's contents, however, remained identical: