About the authors....

Phil Healey was born in Manchester and Rick Glanvill was born in London. They met in 1982 in Newcastle, where Rick was working as a disc jockey and Phil was studying graphic design at the Polytechnic. They shared an interest in the strange stories that people often told each other in pubs and bars and decided to start writing the stories down. They invented the phrase urban myth to describe these strange stories, and they started sending them to The Guardian newspaper for publication. The Guardian liked the stories so much that the editors decided to publish them in a weekly column.