Ghastly ghosts and gruesome ghouls will be at their most mischievous on Tuesday as Halloween when is upon us once again. To mark the eerie evening - in which it is said the gateway between the worlds of the dead and living is flung wide open - the SNJ asked prize-winning short story writer Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft, 15, to spin us a spooky yarn set in Stroud. Last month, Archway School pupil Isabelle was chosen as one of four winners from nearly 2,000 entries to the Booktrust Teenage Prize Short Story Competition.

Remember us THE young boy edged forward over the frozen ground.

Pulling aside a shadowy curtain of leaves he stepped into Bisley Road cemetery.

The path though the cemetery was his quickest route home but there are some places that should not be disturbed and some paths that should not be walked, not on the night of Halloween.

Inside the cemetery darkness hung as thick as velvet and tombstones loomed like hideous, misshapen silhouettes in the deepening gloom.

The boy caught sight of a flame flickering up ahead on the edge of his vision, round at the back of the cemetery, where the poor lie in their unmarked graves.

He turned, breath catching in his throat, but the light had gone, replaced once more by impenetrable darkness.

As he crept on though the cemetery, hardly daring to move, the boy imagined he could hear the cries and wails of the trapped souls lying hidden beneath the innocent looking grass.

The voices grew stronger, echoing back and forth as the spirits recounted tales of misery and the cruel vicious events that led them to lie, forever forgotten, in these hidden graves.

Closing his eyes the boy frantically tried to stop the voices but they were no longer products of his imagination, no longer inside his head.

All across the graveyard the voices shrieked, screeching out their stories, longing to be heard once more. He could hear the thin frail cries of children from the old union workhouse.

Forgotten even before their fleeting lives had passed, left forever beneath the grass with no stone or marker to say that they had ever lived.

Nathaniel Wheatly died at just eight weeks of age. Will Niblet, lived for six days before death claimed him. Fiona Rickerton lived to all of 21 months, while Walter Butcher perished after only seven short days in the workhouse that is now Stone Manor.

The names came to the boy like old memories, memories long ago forgotten that had suddenly surfaced from the depths of his mind.

The boy, now shaking with fear, opened his eyes to see beads of light hanging in the air.

Row upon row of tiny flickering flames marking where bodies lay hidden beneath the blanket of grass.

Seeing he was standing on one such hidden grave the boy jumped aside, falling to his knees amid the wavering sea of dancing flames.

Still the voices grew in strength, their screams splitting the air. The boy tried to run but fear had frozen him in place. Suddenly the lights vanished, the many voices joined in one sorrowful cry and the darkness descended to swallow the young boy, kneeling, terrified on the freezing ground.

The first rays of light from a new dawn warmed the icy figure lying in the cemetery.

As he drifted into wakefulness the terror of the night before returned to haunt him. Forcing his frozen limbs to work, the boy sat up and stared fearfully around.

All was quiet and still as the new day began, giving no hint of the events that had occurred under cover of the receding darkness.

Suddenly new memories began to unfold, bursting like fireworks in his mind, each spark a different tale.

The lives of every departed spirit and lost soul, long since forgotten, now remembered and revived in this one fragile mind.

As the boy moved from grave to unmarked grave, remembering the lives of each one, the spirits finally rested content knowing that the tales of their lives were now no longer lost in the endless mists of times but captured, and given life once more, in this one child.