The Wight Ghost Story

The Wight Ghost Emporium came to be out of a combined love of history, storytelling and the arts. Resident on the Island since 1995, I grew up surrounded by Norman castles; Roman villas; ancient churches; bronze age burial mounds; royal residences; fossil-rich beaches; colourful local legends of smugglers, soldiers and scoundrels and the many hundreds of ghost stories for which the Island is notorious. At one point in time many years ago,  you might even have found me in costume as a long-since departed nurse or serving girl, drifting past the crowds as I punctuated  Marc Tuckey's infamous ghost walks as one of his 'grumblers'.

Many years later, at the end of 2021, exhausted from a busy period at work and feeling nostalgic for the creative hobbies I had used to enjoy but had found less and less time for, I picked up a block of clay and, in a rare evening break and unsure of what I was aiming for, I made my first ghost. It looked nothing like they do today and was by no means perfect, but I felt oddly at peace as I fiddled with the clay and it sparked a conversation with my partner which stretched long into the evening about the Island and its stories and, as it wound down, he remarked in passing that I should see if I could find a way to make an Isle of Wight ghost. Fast forward to 2022 and I sold my first Wight Ghost, with their distinctive Island-shaped base and local story, on Etsy and watched it grow into The Wight Ghost Emporium. Today there are thousands of Wight Ghosts all over the world, from Alaska to Australia, and I have been lucky enough to share my love of legends, history and stories from my tiny corner of the world with hundreds of people across the globe.