‘I wants to make your flesh creep.” The ambition of theatrical impresarios to follow the example of The Fat Boy in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers is understandable in view of the huge success of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black — 21 years in the West End and counting. So we get Bill Kenwright’s new production, cheekily presented as “Charles Dickens’ The Haunting”.

I might as accurately have said that the play was misleadingly, even mendaciously, thus styled, for the great novelist penned no tale with the title, characters or plot of this two-hour entertainment. Writer Hugh Janes claims to have gained “inspiration” from various of his short stories, which is fair enough. But I feel sure that Dickens — ever on guard against people taking liberties with his work — would have bridled at the notion that here is an adaptation (as the programme claims) of some of it.

This gripe out of the way, I must acknowledge that The Haunting is far from being a failure. Hokum though it is, the play supplies thrills, if at times as much laughter. Its spine-tingling effect is achieved by the age-old devices of spooky set (Simon Scullion), music (Laura Tisdall) and sound effects (Jonathan Suffolk), sombre lighting (Nick Richings) and sudden shocks.

The plot owes much (surprise, surprise!) to that of The Woman in Black, with a young man arriving at a creepy old house on the edge of the marshes to help settle the affairs of a deceased former occupant. David Filde’s purpose here, though, is not to sort through the dead owner’s family papers but through his impressive collection of books.

Recently succeeded to his father’s title, the new Lord Gray (Paul Nicholas) is anxious to secure the maximum sum for these precious volumes as a means of paying off the late peer’s creditors. There must be no interruption to the work, he tells the book-dealer (Sean Maguire) — and certainly no time wasted, should the need for it appear to have arisen, on psychic investigation, since (as the peer insists) this is all stuff and nonsense. Everything in this world is susceptible to rational explanation, he says.

But this is to forget the Other World — at least one denizen of which seems uncomfortably close at hand . . .

Initially glimpsed amid the boughs of a gnarled and leafless tree beyond the french windows of the late Lord G’s gloomy study-cum-bedroom (he died there, says his son — ooh-err, missus!), the spectral visitor is shortly to be observed indoors.

Who she turns out to be (or rather to have been) strains credibility when the discovery is made. But, no matter, for she has soon departed. Or at least the actor playing her has, because the director Hugh Wooldridge (in defiance of theatrical convention) permits Hannah Steele no appearance at the curtain call with her admittedly much-harder working colleagues.

The Haunting continues at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, until Saturday. Box office: Tel. 01242 572573 (www.everymantheatre.org.uk).