Do you remember the Luminous Spooks, a set of ‘glow-in-the-dark’ ghostly figures given away with Quaker Sugar Puffs breakfast cereal in the UK in 1965?
There were eight of them to collect and they could be mounted in a ‘Super 3-D Haunted Manor’ (as a comic advert put it) constructed from the cereal packet.
The Luminous Spooks were special to me, not only because they were the first glowing items I’d ever seen, but also because of the ghostly theme, reinforced by the spooky artwork on the cereal box and by an atmospheric TV advertisement.
The thrill of seeing them glow in the dark is one of the enduring memories of my childhood. Just occasionally I’ll get a fleeting memory of exactly how it felt at the time. Pure magic!
There was a writing competition organized by the local library, or a bookshop perhaps. My entry was entitled ‘The Most Luminous Spooks Ever’. It appeared in a printed booklet along with the other entries and I had a copy of that.
At some point, I imagine the Manor become just a tatty box and so was binned. The Spooks were probably consigned to a drawer for a few years and thrown out when they just became bits of plastic to my eyes. What a mistake!
They made a HUGE impression on me at the time, so much so that I have created a website dedicated to them (http://sites.google.com/site/hauntedmanor/Home). If you can add to the information there or just have memories to share, I’d love to hear from you.
