Ransom Riggs

I have an unusual hobby: I collect pictures of people I don't know. It started when I was a kid growing up in South Florida, the land of junk stores, garage sales, and flea markets, as a kind of coping mechanism.

I've always been interested in exploration and the history of exploring the world, but it seems like we've found everything now.

Ghost stories and Sherlock Holmes mysteries were great. And I had a major soft spot for those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.

The undiscovered places that are interesting to me are these places that contain bits of our disappearing history, like a ghost town.

I grew up in Florida, which is the land of flea markets and swap meets. My grandmother loved to go these places, and she'd take me along.

My happy place is 40 feet out in the Gulf of Mexico, sitting on a sandbar in 80-degree water, watching clouds crawl by. Absolute heaven.

I went to film school, trained as a director, have made a lot of movies, and taken a lot of photographs, so I tend to envision things spatially. As I'm working, I need to have a map of the space. I need to know what's happening in all corners simultaneously.

Los Angeles, which is where I live, happens to be a great place for junk. People have a lot of it, and they sell it and trade it: At these big swap meets, many, many hundreds of dealers of junk will descend upon a football field on a Saturday and sell all their stuff.

I didn't know who I was writing for initially. I assumed 'Miss Peregrine' was for adults, because I was an adult - but I didn't know much about publishing back then.

I happen to collect the weird stuff - photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little. The uncanny.

Every snapshot collector has obsessions. Some only collect photos of cars. Others like World War II, or babies, or old-timey girls in old-timey swimsuits. I happen to collect the weird stuff: photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little. The uncanny.

It never occurred to me that there were so many wonderful photos that had been orphaned and were out there in the world, waiting to be found. Over time, I found a lot of very strange pictures of kids, and I wanted to know who they were, what their stories were. Since the photos had no context, I decided I needed to make it up.