A Groping and Random Fashion: Ghosts in the Harford Hills

Easter Sunday morning skulking in the woods, and I came across the remains of a haphazard campsite / drug den. A thin plastic sheet erected from a few branches, blowing in the wind, put me in mind of a certain M R James bedsheet ghost: "... at once the spectator realised, with some horror and some relief, that it must be blind, for it seemed to feel about it with its muffled arms in a groping and random fashion..."

The East Anglian Perambulator: MR James' 'Suffolk and Norfolk'

I live and wander in East Anglia. None of these are new, but these pictures are all of locations visited by ghost story master M R James in his ‘Suffolk and Norfolk: A Perambulation of the Two Counties with Notices of Their History and Their Ancient Buildings.’

Perhaps no overtly supernatural leanings, but hopefully a vibe of the landscape that impacted him so. All captions are taken from James’ wonderful guide.

"Aldeburgh...has a special charm for those who, like myself, have known it since childhood; but I do not find it easy to put that charm into words."

"The good town of Aylsham would make a convenient centre for exploring much of the country with which I have been dealing."

"The vast dead inland flats from Yarmouth are very impressive."

(Castle Acre): "...no finer ruin is to be found in Norfolk."

(Attleborough): "Here legend says that St. Edmund resided for a year, and learnt the Psalter..."

(Dunwich): "How much of this once populous city with ''fifty-two churches' is left at the moment I will not undertake to say."

"Of the many modern attractions of Lowestoft I need not speak."

(Norwich): "...I imagine that both this [panel] and the other at St Peter Mancroft belong to a Last Judgement."

"A merman was caught at Orford in the thirteenth century, and kept for some time."

"Walberswick, a haunt of artists, also had a very large church."

(Watton): "Undistinguished except that near it the death of the Babes in the Wood is located, in Wayland or Wailing Wood."

Wraiths

Midwinter Hauntings

It's easy to see these East Anglian landscapes and see where ghost story writer M R James would have got some of his inspirations from.

The Three Crowns of Anglia

Dunwich Horrors: Images from the Suffolk Coast

Just spent a few days away in Dunwich, Suffolk. The village's incredible history is no secret - a major East Anglian port, Anglo-Saxon capital, comparable to London in size, almost completely lost to the sea over the centuries. From a population of thousands, a hundred or so people live there today. It is hidden behind marshes, forests, heathland.

For the horror aficionado, Dunwich also holds other appeals. One of the most famous of the fictional New England towns in the writings of HP Lovecraft takes its name from this lost city: the coastal doom and isolation are particularly appropriate for Lovecraft's work. Another earlier twentieth century author, the British scholar MR James, set many of his influential ghost stories along this stretch of the Suffolk coast, visited Dunwich numerous times, and clearly used aspects of the village for his own fictional locales. Due in no small way to the enormous influence of these two authors in particular, film, television, writing, and even role-playing games have turned to lonely Dunwich for further inspiration over the years, and in turn add to the village's sense of hidden, lurking magick.

'The Sinners of Crowsmere' - Shameless Self-Promotion Time!

A couple of days ago I published a short novel via Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service. As a former bookseller I will always choose the beauty and sensuality of a physical book if given the chance: however, I do like the potential ebook publishing offers. Arty chapbooks aside, literature doesn't quite have its equivalent of the DIY culture of music and film: self-published works produced by dodgy vanity press companies often feel and look cheap and nasty. There's rarely the thrill of looking through the undiscovered: something I have actually experienced whilst browsing through listings of ebooks online. The market is still dominated by established authors and established publishing houses, and I can't see that changing any time soon, but it's cool to have the possibility of having mad, bizarre, original content up there in easy reach.



My book is called 'The Sinners of Crowsmere.' It's trim - about 13300 words - and I include about a dozen photographs, some from EastScapes and re-edited, some seeing the light for the first time. The blurb reads thus:

"A man is released from prison and returns to his coastal home town. Broken figures inhabit a decaying landscape. Curses and crows haunt the air.

As influenced by the transgressive writings of Dennis Cooper and Derek McCormack as the East Anglian ghost stories of M R James, The Sinners of Crowsmere is a bleakly skeletal novel about erosion, misogyny, folklore, old photographs, and half-remembered films."

The book's relationship to EastScapes is actually fairly strong - it started life as me attempting to put my photography into words, and sort of remained that way. As a reader, I'm not terribly interested in page-turning thrillers with complex plot and character interactions: I prefer things that are stranger, follow their own pace, wander off the track into the wilderness, sometimes returning, sometimes not. If this sounds like a preemptive defense of any criticism, well, I guess it kind of is - but it's also true. Authors I have found massively inspirational include the likes of Dennis Cooper, Derek McCormack, and Harmony Korine - all of whom dance to the beat of their own drum, and all of whom have crafted beautiful pieces of writings that at times seem so spare and slight they could at any moment fade into the nothingness.

'The Sinners of Crowsmere' is also, of course, about the East Anglian landscape, my usual obsessions all correct and present - coastal erosion, darkness beneath the surface of the landscape, M R Jamesian folklore, broken things. Its subtitle is 'A Fractured Novella,' and that's how I like to think of it: broken, oddly-shaped, a bit freaky. Hopefully like some of the images I stick up here.

'The Sinners of Crowsmere' can be seen here:

Buy The Sinners of Crowsmere here

Haunted Bottle

I found this half-buried in the dirt whilst tramping round the old Harford Farm site. I'm assuming this is an old medicine bottle. As well as being the area of a former farm and Anglo-Saxon burial ground (covered in previous posts), it is also next to an old (now capped) landfill site. I've spoken to a chap who said his brother used to go exploring there as a kid and collect any medicine bottles that had been buried there.

However, as I'm still on a big M R James trip, I'm convinced it is in fact some cursed artifact of Lovecraftian evil. A witch bottle, at least. Unlikely, but still.

A Slice of (Haunted) Birthday Cake

Late by a few days - I should really have posted this on the 1st - but hey. Happy 150th birthday, MR James. I have mentioned James elsewhere in this blog, so shall try not to repeat myself, but James is one of the most celebrated writers of the traditional ghost story. As many of his works (including two of his most famous stories: 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad, and 'A Warning to the Curious') are set in bleak and lonely stretches of East Anglia, his writings have a particular power over me. Whether successful or not, most of the pictures on this blog do attempt something inherently Jamesian: to hint at the ghosts and forgotten fragments beneath the region's surface.

Warnings to the Curious: In the Holkham - Wells Pinewoods

Woodland structures in the beachside pinewoods between Holkham and Wells Next the Sea. The reality is no doubt far from anything even remotely sinister, but the knowledge that these woods were used as a filming location for the 1972 BBC adaptation of M R James' 'A Warning to the Curious' does give them a nice creep factor. James' East Anglian ghost stories were written in the early twentieth century and several were adapted by the BBC in the 1970s as part of their 'Ghost Story for Christsmas' series. Often set in a thinly-disguised Suffolk and filmed in Norfolk, both the stories and the films offer peerless, quiet, chilling visions of the loneliness and forgotten folklore of the region.

The ghost stories of M R James are of increasing influence not only to me: my former housemate Will is now one of the hosts of the excellent MR James podcast, A Podcast to the Curious. For fans of James, weird fiction, or simply neat and intelligent podcasting, listening is strongly recommended.

http://www.mrjamespodcast.com/