The Man Behind the Monsters - Part One Eddi Mills
The Boy Who Loved Monsters
People often ask me where my stories come from.
The answer is simple.
I’ve always loved monsters.
Not just horror films themselves, but the creatures inside them: vampires, werewolves, demons, ghosts. Anything with claws, fangs, glowing eyes, or things that lurk just beyond the edge of the light. While most kids grew up wanting to be superheroes, I wanted to be Dracula himself. I was fascinated by what could be hiding under my bed, living in my loft, or simply sitting in the shadows waiting for the landing light to go out.
Some people grow out of those kinds of fascinations.
I never did.
Growing Up with Horror
My fascination with horror began long before I ever thought about writing books.
My mother was, and still is, a passionate horror fan. Growing up, the house was filled with the works of authors like Stephen King and James Herbert, and I found myself returning to these books again and again. Long before I was old enough to appreciate them fully, I was already being drawn into the worlds of monsters, ghosts and things that lurked in the dark.
One story in particular captured my imagination more than any other.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
I read it at a surprisingly young age, and it remains my favourite story of all time. There was something about the atmosphere, the mystery, and the sense that evil could hide behind a polite smile that fascinated me. Looking back, I suspect that many of the themes that would later find their way into my own writing can be traced back to those pages.
Like many children born in the 1980s, I also discovered horror films perhaps a little earlier than I should have. Watching Stephen King’s IT with friends shortly after it arrived on video left me with a completely irrational fear of clowns that lasted decades. In truth, I only really got over it within the last ten years or so.
Despite this, I never stopped loving scary stories, books, films, television programmes, ghost stories, folklore… if it had the potential to send a shiver down my spine, I was interested.
The First Stories I Tried to Tell
I was also a lover of literature itself. As a child, I spent hours writing short poems and limericks, often at the expense of my friends, who probably deserved it at the time. Words fascinated me, and by the age of eleven I had decided that I wanted to write a novel.
I sat down and wrote an outline about a young boy who secretly turned out to be the antichrist.
Only after finishing it did I realise that I had essentially written the synopsis for The Omen.
Thankfully, copyright law was spared the embarrassment of taking the young version of me to court.
As I grew older, life gradually pulled me away from the world of literature. Careers, responsibilities, and everyday life took centre stage. Writing slipped into the background, but my love of horror never disappeared.
I never stopped reading; I never stopped watching. And somewhere in my mid-twenties, stories began to appear. Ideas for books I wished existed, characters I wanted to meet, worlds I wanted to explore.
For years, those stories lived only in my imagination, not because I lacked ideas, but because I lacked confidence.
Deep down, I don’t think the dream of that eleven-year-old boy ever left.
It was simply waiting for the right moment to wake up.
When Reality Became Stranger Than Fiction
Long before documentaries, investigations, and late-night rabbit holes on the internet, there was a book. I can’t remember its name, although I wish I could.
It was a children’s book I received one Christmas, filled with strange events, paranormal mysteries, and incredible stories from around Britain. Hills where gravity appeared to work backwards. Spontaneous human combustion. Extraordinary feats and unexplained occurrences.
Being a children’s book, the darker details were softened, but none of that mattered to me. I must have read that book a hundred times.
My fascination with strange things was also nurtured by my grandfather. He was a very old-fashioned man, and as I sat beside him in his truck, he would tell me stories about local folklore, old superstitions, and the strange beliefs that had survived for generations.
I was fascinated. And no doubt drove him mad with endless questions.
Growing up, if there was an abandoned building, an empty house, or some forgotten place surrounded by eerie rumours, I was usually the first among my friends to say, “Let’s go.”
Folklore, Faith, and the Unexplained
At school, I was never particularly enthusiastic about religious education. At least, not publicly. Like most teenagers, it wasn’t exactly what I would have considered cool. But secretly, I loved it. Not because I was looking for answers, but because I was fascinated by the questions.
How could cultures separated by oceans and centuries tell stories that seemed strangely familiar?
Why did myths and legends appear again and again, often telling the same stories but with different characters throughout history?
And why did so many religions and beliefs seem to share the same themes, even when interpreted in completely different ways?
It made me wonder if perhaps there was more truth hidden within these stories than we often realise.
As I grew older, another influence entered my life.
The X-Files.
Like so many people of my generation, I became obsessed with stories about cryptids, aliens, and government conspiracies. The idea that strange creatures and impossible mysteries might exist just beyond the edge of everyday life fascinated me.
Then came the internet. And with it, the rabbit holes. Hours became days, days became weeks, and one strange story would lead to another.
Folklore became mythology. Mythology became religion. Religion became demonology. Before long, I found myself studying subjects most people chose to avoid.
Not because I was searching for monsters, but because I was searching for understanding.
That fascination would eventually lead to paranormal investigations.
Chasing the Strange
As a young man, I would explore local legends with friends. Later, I attended organised investigations with my sister, spending countless hours searching for answers in old buildings and forgotten places.
Eventually, I realised I didn’t need somebody else to organise the adventure. I decided to stop paying others to chase mysteries and set up my own investigation team. All I needed was a camera, some paranormal investigation equipment, and permission to enter the places that had fascinated me for so long.
Because if life has taught me anything, it’s this:
Reality is often stranger than fiction.
And sometimes the most extraordinary stories are the ones hidden in plain sight.
The Name We Leave Behind
Growing up, I had two heroes.
My father and my grandfather.
To me, they were real-life superheroes. Both men shared the same full name as me, and both possessed qualities I still hope to embody today. They were strong, intelligent, kind, and funny. More than that, they seemed invincible.
As a child, my grandfather would often tell me that our shared name made us immortal.
“No one will ever forget us,” he would say. “Our name will always be passed down and heard throughout time.”
At the time, I misunderstood what he meant. I took it literally. In my young mind, my grandfather, my father, and I were immortal.
Oddly enough, I have never looked back on that misunderstanding as a bad thing. If anything, it made me fearless. I wasn’t afraid of much as a child. Whilst that fearlessness occasionally got me into trouble, it also meant I grew up believing that you could become anything and do anything.
Then life intervened.
In 2015, my father became seriously ill and required a pacemaker to keep him alive. Around the same time, my grandfather passed away.
Without realising it, the bubble of immortality I had carried around since childhood burst.
A few years later, my father died.
And with him, part of me died too.
For the first time in my life, I truly understood that I wasn’t immortal. But instead of using that realisation to improve myself, I travelled down a darker road.
I convinced myself that life was short and that I might as well enjoy it while I could. I ate what I wanted. Drank what I wanted. I stopped thinking about tomorrow.
A Wake-Up Call
Five years later, I found myself sitting in a hospital cubicle after suffering a heart attack.
Miraculously, the damage wasn’t caused by poor health. My heart, I would later discover, was as healthy as the next man’s, but sitting there, I didn’t know that. All I knew was that life was fragile. And suddenly, the words my grandfather had spoken decades earlier returned to me.
“No one will ever forget us.”
Other than my children, what was I leaving behind? What contribution had I made to the world? How would I make myself truly immortal?
The answer wasn’t fame. It wasn’t money. It was legacy.
Building INSIDIA
That was when everything changed. I decided to create documentaries about the things I loved. Horror. History. Folklore. The paranormal. I wanted to entertain people, to teach people, and to leave something behind.
After completing my first documentary about Market Weighton, I remember smiling to myself and thinking:
“That’s it, you’re immortal now.”
Around the same time, I began putting together a paranormal investigation team and eventually qualified as a paranormal investigator myself.
I wanted a place where all of my passions could live together under one roof: horror, folklore, history, the paranormal, and documentary making.
So I created INSIDIA.
Originally, I envisioned it as a business and a home for everything I loved. It wasn’t just about ghost hunting or horror. It was about curiosity, about telling stories, about exploring the strange and the unexplained. For a time, INSIDIA became the umbrella, beneath which all of those passions could coexist.
But life has a way of changing our plans.
Becoming the Brand
As I continued creating documentaries and eventually became an author, I realised something important. People connect with people. Not companies, not logos, not brands.
People.
And the more I wrote, the more I understood that I didn’t need another name. I didn’t need a brand.
I was the brand.
INSIDIA had served its purpose. It had brought together the things I loved and helped me rediscover who I was after one of the darkest periods of my life.
But it was never the destination. It was a chapter.
Today, while traces of INSIDIA still exist in old documents and forgotten corners of the internet, it no longer defines me.
Because the stories, the documentaries, the investigations, and the books were never truly about INSIDIA. They were always about me.
Eddi Mills.
And perhaps that’s exactly how it was always supposed to be.
The Road Back to Writing
But life had one more surprise waiting for me.
For years, there had been a story living in my head. One that followed me since my twenties. I had even started writing it once before, but the notes had long since disappeared.
One day, while discussing the idea with my wife, she encouraged me to stop talking about it and simply write it.
So I did.
Looking back, I wish I had spent more time on that first story. Nevertheless, I wrote it. I studied self-publishing, and I released it into the world.
The Road to Miller Farm.
Once I had published that first book, there was no holding me back, because somewhere along the way, I realised that my grandfather had been right all along.
Immortality has nothing to do with living forever.
It comes from leaving something behind. A story, a memory, a lesson. A name. And perhaps, if you’re lucky, something that outlives you.
I spent much of my life searching for monsters. In the end, I discovered something far more important.
I had finally found my purpose.
And my own path to immortality.
© 2026 Eddi Mills. All rights reserved.
The Man Behind the Monsters – Part One is an original work by Eddi Mills. No part of this article may be reproduced or distributed without permission.
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