LISA Tuttle doesn't believe in ghosts, but has spent most of her life looking for them.

When she was a little girl growing up in Texas, she read about a place called Kilberry on the Kintyre peninsula – a remote spot reputedly haunted by the ghost of a Celtic goddess. To Tuttle, who lived in the boring grey suburbs of Houston, the peninsula sounded like a dark and wonderful place, and she was desperate to go there. Thirty years later, whether by coincidence or destiny she isn't sure, she now lives near Kilberry – just a few miles down the road from that ghost of the goddess.

It's not the only strangeness in Tuttle's life. She tells me about her great-grandmother, Eugenia Tuttle, who was a star of silent movies and was booked to sail on the Titanic when she had a premonition it would sink. She cancelled the trip, sailed on an earlier ship, and in the years that followed told everyone about the dream that saved her life.

Tuttle isn't sure how much of these tales of ghostly goddesses and premonitions she believes, but it hasn't stopped her building a career as a writer of stories filled with ghosts, folklore and myth, including her new short story, The Third Person, which features the unsettling idea of a haunted bed. It's as if, by writing stories, Tuttle is hoping some of it might come true. She's a rational person trying to bring the irrational to life.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in her most recent novel, The Silver Bough. The book is set in a fictional Scottish town called Appleton, which is suddenly cut off by a landslide. Within a few days the strangest things are happening: a golden apple appears on an old tree, people who have been dead for years appear on the street, and up on the moors the kelpies are on the move again.

The book was inspired by Campbeltown and by the feeling Tuttle gets in Scotland that you're always just a step away from the myths of the past. "Wander off across that rocky meadow," she writes, "or into the shelter of that dark forest ... and you might find yourself in another century."

When we meet in a cafe in Glasgow, Tuttle tells me that as well as weirdness and hauntings, The Silver Bough is full of little bits of autobiography. The central character is a teenager called Ashley who moves from America to Scotland, just like Tuttle did. Tuttle was born in Houston, where her father ran a shop selling car paint. The family lived in a 1950s kit house and it was a happy and protected life, though a little bit boring.

For Tuttle, her escape was the library her dad built in the dining room and, in particular, her father's collection of old Edwardian children's novels. "I used to think, 'I'm going to write' I knew that from quite early on," says Tuttle, "but I also thought maybe I'll be an explorer or a spy and it all came from books. I can't remember a time when I didn't write or make up stories, because it seemed to come with reading."

Her particular obsession was E Nesbit, author of The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Railway Children, and ghost stories ("I can remember having nightmares and there would be a crackdown: 'no more ghost stories'"). But by the early 1970s, when she was in her teens, she had discovered science fiction and started writing her own stories. She sold her first one when she was 18.

"The 1970s were so wonderful for women writers," she says. "There were all these women and they were seen as doing the most interesting, innovative and exciting stuff in science fiction. I was inspired by that. The other person who really inspired me was Ray Bradbury with his Martian Chronicles and the idea you could go to another planet, but it's really a way of writing about our society right now."

Tuttle, who is 60, says there is some prejudice against women writing science fiction, which has been, and to some extent still is, seen as a man's game. "There was this idea," she says, "that we don't want to drag women into it because as soon as there's a woman, it becomes about sex." Whether there was prejudice or not, Tuttle quickly found success, winning awards for new writers and establishing a reputation for science fiction that not only makes you think but makes you feel as well.

By the late 1970s she was an established figure in the genre and in 1979 she came to Brighton for a science-fiction convention, where she met fellow science-fiction writer Christopher Priest. "We fell in love," she says. "And he came to visit me and we travelled around New England and by the end of that magical holiday we decided we had to be together so we got married. It was a mistake. If we'd had a year to have a relationship it would have wound down, but instead we got married."

In all, Tuttle and Priest, whose novel The Prestige was turned into the film starring Christian Bale, were married for four years. "We got married in Britain," says Tuttle, "and I have to admit part of the appeal was 'I'll go and live in Britain – how wonderful'. It's full of history. And the good thing was I couldn't get a job, certainly not right away, so I thought, 'You're going to have to write'."

When the marriage ended in the mid-1980s, Tuttle decided to stay on in the UK to continue working as a writer. She then met her second husband, Colin Murray, and in 1990 they moved to a house in the Achaglachgach Forest on the shore of West Loch Tarbert. As it happens, it was close to the haunted spot Tuttle had read about as a child in Texas and she sometimes wonders how that happened. Accident? Design?

"You start to think about strange coincidences," she says, "I'm quite a rational person but I'm drawn to the irrational. I love coincidences and I like to question that in fiction: is this random, or is there something working underneath?"

Whatever the reason for coming to Argyll, Tuttle settled in well and has now lived in the area for more than 20 years. Occasionally she works as a relief librarian in Campbeltown Library, on which the haunted library and museum in The Silver Bough is based. She has always loved libraries, she says, but is worried about their future.

"For book lovers, it's depressing," she says. "People don't use libraries as much and you have to think, 'If people don't want libraries for books, how can we reposition them?' because I think it would be a horrible loss if libraries disappeared, and once you lose something, you don't get it back."

Tuttle thinks the only solution is for libraries to adapt. "The library becomes more of a social thing," she says. "In the Netherlands, for example, they have huge libraries with meeting rooms, and games room for children. The people going to libraries now tend to be older and older. But there will be the occasional child who I always identify with. It's usually a girl and I think, 'Yeah, that's how I was.'"

In some ways, Tuttle always comes back to her childhood, particularly in the stories of fairytales and legends. At the moment, she's working on another novel as well as preparing for the first Tarbert Book Festival, which she is helping to organise for November 23. A couple of her books are also being republished this month and she has a new idea about a pair of supernatural Victorian detectives that she's keen to develop. It's all part of her mission, the one that started when she was a child: the mission to find a ghost.

The Third Person by Lisa Tuttle is featured in The Best British Fantasy 2013, published by Salt on July 18. Gabriel and Familiar Spirit are published by Jo Fletcher Books this month. For information on the Tarbert Book Festival, see www.tarbertfestivals.co.uk.