Despite being premiered a decade ago, Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson's spooky stage hit Ghost Stories has become something of a Mousetrap: no-one spills the beans on its secrets.

“Secrets are precious,” explains co-creator of the show coming to Canterbury this week, Andy. “If you give people a secret that they really enjoy and you ask them nicely to keep it, they do.”

If anyone should know about secrets, it’s him. Before writing Ghost Stories, he was the man behind many of Derren Brown’s mystery-filled stage shows and early TV performances.

He says of so many things today: “Everything is spoiled for you. Every single film and television trailer ruins plot points. Jeremy and I love the experience of telling people a really good story without them knowing anything about it in advance. You feel the buzz in the audience.”

So what can we say about Ghost Stories? Andy says: “It's a 90-minute scary, thrill-ride experience about a professor of parapsychology who investigates three cases. That’s as much as you get and that’s more than we ever used to give.”

When pressed, however, he adds: "It will make you scream like a banshee and giggle like a schoolchild, probably at the same time."

He and co-writer Jeremy Dyson, best known for his work with The League of Gentlemen, have a shared love of the horror genre that saw them forge a teenage friendship.

“It probably started, for me, with Scooby Doo,” says Jeremy. “There were a lot of scary things for kids around in the 70s, and lots I was enchanted by. Doctor Who would have been a part of that, which in the 70s had a real horror edge to it. So the groundwork was done by the time I was seven or eight years old. People used to buy me collections of ghost stories for my birthdays. They were supposed to be for kids, but they were the most terrifying tales.”

“It’s a very English genre,” he adds. "Certainly when it comes to the supernatural side of things. It’s a very English tradition, and there’s no question that’s part of what we’re celebrating in Ghost Stories.”

Stage horror, however, is not something you see that often.

“I think it’s hard to do well,” he adds. “You have to have a love both for theatre and for horror. It’s a bit like comedy. People talk about comedy writers having funny bones. I think you need scary bones to write horror.”

The pair really do care whether audiences leap out of their seats with a heady mix of fear, excitement and joy. “If people are paying their hard-earned money to see a show you’re putting on, you have a massive responsibility to give them more than they pay for,” he says.

The story was made into a film in 2018 starring Andy as Professor Goodman, Martin Freeman and Paul Whitehouse.

Ghost Stories is at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury from Tuesday, March 3 to Saturday, March 7. Book at marlowetheatre.com or call 01227 787787.

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