Tales of my London Trip: Part II

Tweet Yesterday I posted part one of my write-up of my recent London trip, talking about Saturday 16 March, and the entry was getting a bit long so I decided to split it in two and put the events of Sunday 17th into a separate entry.

Sunday saw us check out of our hotel and take a trip along the District line back to old London to visit the Tower, one of the five Historic Royal Palaces in the city. I'd been to the Tower a couple of times before, the last time about four years ago, but Gemz had never been and wanted to see the Crown Jewels. As you can see, I wasn't particularly impressed by the damp and drizzly weather, and I was just glad I'd taken my raincoat with me! I think I had hoped that the poor weather might put people off venturing out of doors, but the Tower was really busy, and the continual rain meant that all of the indoor attractions were rather full. The Jewel House in particular was very busy, although I can't help thinking the mammoth steel doors are a better indication of royal might than the impressive range of royal plate and jewelled ephemera on display. It's a good job they have a moving walkway in front of the crowns, otherwise you'd never be able to get anywhere near them!

The Tower of London was founded in the latter half of 1066 after the Norman Conquest of Britain, and only Tower Hill separates it from the eastern boundary of the City of London. It's been used as both a royal palace and a prison, not to mention a symbol of royal power, and various monarchs have added different towers and functions. It used to house the Royal Mint and the treasury, as well as a Menagerie, and currently houses the Crown Jewels in the Jewel House, as well as the Royal Armouries in the White Tower. It also houses seven ravens, due to the legend that says if the ravens leave, the Tower will fall.

The Royal Armouries in the White Tower contain both the weaponry belonging to individual monarchs, such as Charles I's suit of armour and an articulated suit of armour for the thirteen year old Edward VI, as well as those weapons etc. that have been donated as gifts over the years. For example, they have a suit of samurai armour dating back to 1610. We came across this particular display, where a range of weapons and other items, were turned into a gigantic dragon. It was rather steampunk in its own way, and I couldn't not take a photo. I've been trying to find it online to see if there's a particular reason for its being there, but I can't find anything, so I don't know if it signifies anything, or a curator just got bored and wanted to do something a bit different with one of the displays.

One of the displays is of weapons as art, and I couldn't not take this photo! Apparently the legendary US gunsmiths Smith & Wesson donated this revolver to the Royal Armouries in 1989. The Trustees of the Armouries commissioned Tiffany & Co. to decorate it as part of their policy to commission and collect fine craftsmanship. The decoration features leaves representing five different woods used in gun-making. They did also have a couple of other guns but they were a bit too 'bling' for my liking.

This is me faffing about outside the White Tower, pointing at a rather large cannon. I pinched this from Gemz, which is why I've tagged it with her web address instead of mine. (Give her website a look if you need to employ a web ninja!) As you can see, I have no problem with posing like an idiot in photographs, especially where heavy weaponry is involved. I think the rain had briefly stopped by this point, but the day was still somewhat dull and overcast. Still, we're Northerners so we're used to crap weather. All I can say is at least it wasn't snowing!

One of the strange things about the Tower is the fact it was once this imposing symbol of royal power, and it's now been dwarfed by the rest of modern London, now nothing more than a tourist attraction on the banks of the Thames. I took this photo from beside the south east corner of the White Tower, looking across the inner ward towards the Shard on the southern side of the Thames. The little black dot on the lawn to the right of the tree is one of the Tower's famous ravens, having a bit of a wander. While inside any of the buildings, you really do get a sense of the age and history of the place, but the second you get outside, the skyline is dominated by the hideous glass monuments to commerce that seem to have sprung up all over London. I suppose it's one of the signs of modern life, and perhaps I'm just too much of a traditionalist, but I really do prefer the 'historic' parts of London, as opposed to those glittering modern areas.

All over the Tower they now have these wire sculptures of various animals by Kendra Haste - we spotted lions, an elephant, a polar bear, a leopard and monkeys, all testament to the Menagerie that the Tower had between 1251 and 1835. No one actually knows where the Menagerie was kept, although the lions were kept, somewhat unsurprisingly, in the Lion Tower. The Menagerie was originally for the benefit of the monarch, and visiting royalty often gifted animals to join the Menagerie, but it was opened to the public in the seventeenth century. It was moved out to a site in Regent's Park in the nineteenth century, where it became London Zoo.

After the Tower, we crossed Tower Bridge, and took a walk along the South Bank towards the Tate Modern, passing Southwark Cathedral, Borough Market, and this, the Golden Hinde II in Pickford's Wharf. It's a replica of Sir Francis Drake's famous vessel, and while I've been on the original in Brixham, I've never been on the replica. It's something of a favourite for children's pirate themed parties (well Drake was a privateer, which is pretty much a polite way of saying he was a State-sponsored pirate) and there was one going on as we went past.

From there it was on to the Tate Modern, which is not one of my favourite art galleries due to my general aversion to modern art, but it's always worth a look. We'd wanted to see the Lichtenstein exhibition but so did the world and his wife so we ended up having to give it a miss due to the time difference between the time we were there, and the next available time for entry. We had a look around the other galleries, and I was somewhat disappointed to see that their collection of Pop Art has gone, as has their collection of Soviet political posters (I can only assume they're on loan to another gallery elsewhere). Obviously you're not really supposed to take photos, but I did take a photo of this particular piece of art. Well, it's a mirror, so I'm not sure how an artist could really claim that a mirror is art, but I don't really want to get into debates around found art, or other philosophical considerations. Plus, as the subject of the photo is me, I can claim copyright :-p

Here's me posing with an example of knitting in the Tate Modern, so really, if it's in an art gallery then it must be art...right? I've been campaigning for knitting to be considered art for a while! This is an example of tubular knitting, done on double pointed needles, and I think this one was done using nylon. That would absolutely wreck your fingers, but it certainly looks good It's actually Untitled by Marisa Merz, from 1969, and is in the Energy and Process gallery. I think knitting IS an art but it is also a process, and a very valuable one, so it was nice to come across something representative of my hobby in an art gallery.

Here's the view of the Millennium Bridge from the viewing platform of the Tate Modern. Obviously that's the extremely distinctive dome of St Paul's Cathedral that you can see beyond all of the other buildings. The London skyline never fails to amaze me - Newcastle's is naturally somewhat smaller, and given our city centre stretches up a hill from the Quayside, our skyline is a bit more 'staggered', whereas the flat expanse of London gives you a good idea of its scale. I do quite like the Millennium Bridge, and if you've seen the Harry Potter films, you should recognise it.

You are now entering the City of London...here be dragons! One of the weird things about London is that it's actually two cities for the price of one. The City is the square mile (well, 1.12 square miles) in the east that contains the likes of the Bank of England and Guildhall, and the area around it is Greater London. Boris Johnson might be Mayor of London, but the City has its own, the Lord Mayor of London, who holds office for a year. The City is pretty much the site of Londinium, and is therefore the oldest part of town, and the London Wall used to originally mark its boundaries. There are only fragments of it left, making it pretty useless as a wall, and I love the fact that they now use silver dragon statues to mark its boundaries. The dragons also appear on the City of London Corporation's crest, and some people think they refer to the legend of St George. This particular dragon marks the boundary between the City of London and the City of Westminster, and stands outside Temple Bar.

We walked along Aldwych from here to reach Somerset House, the palatial building on the north bank of the Thames where they now hold London Fashion Week. I'd only ever been in the courtyard before, and it's home to various gallery spaces, as well as the Courtauld Institute and part of King's College. Other royal palaces have stood on the site for centuries, but the present Somerset House was built in the late 1700s/early 1800s as a public building for organisations such as the Admiralty. It was even the home of the Inland Revenue until a couple of years ago.

This was one of the exhibitions that was on, the Wool House expo for the Campaign of Wool. Considering Gemz and I are both very keen knitters (and I've recently taken up crochet), we couldn't very well not have a look around, especially since it was almost finished as an exhibition (it actually finished on Sunday). The Campaign for Wool has HRH The Prince of Wales as a patron, and it's a global community of sheep farmers, retailers, designers, manufacturers and wool users who want to educate people about the benefits and versatility of wool. There's a real push to make the wool industry big again to help those small businesses and local farmers that depend on it. Wool House was the world's biggest celebration of wool, and contained all sorts of yarn-related delights, from rooms decorated entirely with woollen products, to educational events and workshops. They also had rooms dedicated to wool in the fashion industry, including shoes by Vivienne Westwood that I would kill to own*!  *Not really.

This is one of the rooms on display, and I'm determined that I will one day have a room like this in a house I own, with rustic wooden furniture and plenty of fabric and wool to hand. This is the Natural Room by Josephine Ryan, and she's created a room with naturally coloured yarns, coarse textures and layers. Other rooms in the exhibition featured interiors for modern living rooms, children's nurseries and entrance halls. If wool was a cheaper fabric, I'm sure I'd try and use a lot more of it at home! It was certainly a very inspirational exhibition and had me itching to reach for a ball of yarn and a pair of needles.

The other thing we saw was the Positive View Foundation's exhibition, Landmark: The Fields of Photography. It's on until 28 April and it's FREE so if you're in London and you like photography, I really recommend it. It's a huge exhibition, and knocks the stuff at the Tate Modern into a cocked hat. It features work by photographers from all over the world, with the common theme being that of landscape. It's not all digital work, either - some of the photographers have used 19th Century techniques involving plate photography, while others have used drones and satellites to capture their images. The exhibition's curator, William A. Ewing, says that “landscape has been and remains one of the most powerful forms of photography, and is even more so in a world which is changing so fast we can hardly keep up" and you get the feeling that the only way you'll be able to see a lot of these landscapes is through exhibitions like this, because the landscapes are either totally inaccessible, or on the brink of destruction.

It was a really busy and tiring weekend, but I thoroughly enjoyed the mix of history and culture, and I came back with a lot of ideas marinading in the back of my mind...

Tales of my London Trip: Part I

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It's taken me a while, but I've finally gotten around to sorting out my photographs from my trip to London last weekend. I wanted to celebrate my birthday but I prefer weekends away to nights out, and there was an exhibition I wanted to see at the Museum of London, so the destination choice was fairly obvious...

Gemz and I travelled down on Friday, and we were staying in the Gloucester Road Holiday Inn. How's this for a creepy corridor? I put the photo on Instagram and a lot of people had visions of the Overlook. We were also amused by a 'what to do in an emergency' sign that included the line 'Do not panic'. Well that's us told, isn't it? What made the corridor especially weird was how low the ceiling is - I'm only 5ft 6ins and even I felt like I was having to duck.

Anyway. The whole reason I'd wanted to go down was for the Doctors, Dissectionists and Resurrection Men exhibition at the Museum of London up in Barbican. (We couldn't take photos in the exhibition so Gemz took this photo of the sign in the entrance). It was a fascinating exhibition, split into three areas. Bodysnatching came first, along with the tale of London's own bodysnatchers, known as Burkers (named after Burke and Hare). The bodysnatchers operated in the years prior to 1832, when bodies for anatomy lectures were scarce and difficult to come by through legal means. The next part of the exhibition was dedicated to the doctors, followed by the art of dissection. It was an interesting exhibition, featuring skeletons uncovered during excavations at the Royal Hospital in Whitechapel, and it left you aghast at the practice at bodysnatching, but aware that without such sordid acts, medical science might not have advanced the way that it did.

The Museum of London is a fascinating place to visit, telling the story of the city from its prehistoric origins, through its occupation by the Romans, and then through the Plague, the Great Fire, the War, and on into the Sixties and Seventies. There isn't much evidence of London's medieval past, let alone anything earlier, and much of their Jacobean architecture has even been demolished, but the museum does afford a good view of a section of London Wall, part of the defence wall built by the Romans to protect Londinium. Apparently the wall dates to the late second or early third century, between 190 and 225 AD.

Next up was the Science Museum, where I wanted to see an exhibition on alchemy (as you do). We also visited Google's Web Lab, where they were running various experiments where visitors could try out things in the exhibition, and other experiments were controlled by online users. It was predictably busy, and half of those experiments available for use within the museum seemed to be out of order, though I'm not surprised having seen the way a lot of people were just hammering on the machines with no idea of what they were supposed to be doing. The Science Museum isn't my favourite of all of the museums in London but they do have some pretty cool stuff, and considering it's free entry, it's always worth a visit.

On Saturday night we headed off to the Bank of England to do a ghost walk around the alleyways of the City of London. The photo on the left is the plaza outside the Royal Exchange. I used to work on the edge of the City, and the pub where I DJed is on Cannon Street, just along from the Bank of England, and I've always found the City to be a fascinating place. It's pretty much deserted after about 7pm, and it's surprisingly quiet on a weekend, and it's a place where the old brushes up against the new within the confines of the medieval City.

Our guide led us down Birchin Lane and into Birchin Court, where we saw the alleged sight of Ebenezer Scrooge's counting house in A Christmas Carol. The streets in this area are very narrow, running between tall buildings and giving you a sense of what our fair capital must have looked like in Dickens' day...albeit without as much sewage and filth in the gutter. So many tiny pubs and other gems are tucked away down these alleys and in these back streets, and it often makes me wonder how people come across them, unless it's by accident. If that's the case, what else could you accidentally stumble across?

We ended up in Fredericks Place, off Old Jewry, which was the site of a story about the Cripplegate Ghost. According to our guide, Alice Gilliford was living in this court when she died, and she was laid out for burial in her wedding dress, wearing her wedding ring. The sexton of the church decided to make off with the ring before she was buried...except the wife came to life just as he dug his knife into her finger. It turns out the woman was narcoleptic and was not dead, merely in a death-like coma, and the pain brought her round. She fled home through the streets carrying the lantern discarded by the terrified sexton, and became known as the Cripplegate Ghost even in her lifetime. She lived many more years and even had four more children before she finally passed away.

The walk also took in Guildhall, a fabulous building on Gresham Street that is the home of the City of London Corporation. Built in the fifteenth century, it's one of the few remnants of medieval London, and it's now a Grade I listed building - it's the only stone built building not owned by the Church to survive the Great Fire of London in 1666. Lady Jane Grey, the famed Nine Days Queen, was tried here for treason in 1553. The façade is beautiful enough on its own but what is perhaps more interesting is the fact that Guildhall stands on the site of Londinium's Roman ampitheatre. You can see the remains of the eastern approach to the arena if you descend into the basement below Guildhall Art Gallery, something I did a couple of years ago when I was in the area. Coming from the north east where we have Roman ruins aplenty, I'm never particularly phased by seeing them elsewhere, but I have to admit, seeing part of an amphitheatre is still rather impressive! Thing is, the area still feels thick with something, as those who fought and died in the arena haven't quite managed to pass on. It's definitely a very weird place, and the combination of a fairytale frontage and a Roman amphitheatre make Guildhall a great place to visit.

After the tour, we took a walk across to Leadenhall Market on Gracechurch Street. The market site dates back to the 14th century, providing another link to London's medieval past, and was originally a game, poultry and meat market. Now it sells all sorts and is even home to aPizza Express and Ben's Cookies. The current design dates to 1881,  and has appeared as Diagon Alley in Harry Potter, and was also used in The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. It was restored in 1991 and is now a Grade II listed building. I've been in before, a few years ago at Christmas, but the only time I think you can really appreciate it is actually at night when it's deserted.

Here's me posing by one of the pillars. I absolutely love Leadenhall Market, and I've got a bit of a thing about covered markets. They're just such a good idea, and the fact that they're covered gives them a feeling of permanence denied to regular markets. We used to have two covered markets in Newcastle, but the Green Market was turned into an extension for the main shopping centre, leaving just the Grainger Market, which has seen something of a regeneration in recent years. Places like Leadenhall Market become tourist attractions, not to mention fashionable, and it's an easy way to preserve little slices of history.

After Leadenhall Market we took a ride in the lift up to the roof of One New Change, the shopping and restaurant complex beside St Paul's Cathedral. Our ghost walk guide told us that one of the planning conditions for the complex was a viewing area, so they decided to use the roof, giving you amazing views of the Cathedral, and across the river to the likes of the Shard. I absolutely love St Paul's, designed by Christopher Wren after the previous cathedral was gutted during the Fire. Due to the cost of entry, I've never actually been in, but one of the days, I will have a look inside. Anyway, it was dark and very windy when we went up onto the roof of One New Change, and it was also raining, but I'm sure the view is astounding on a clear day.

The hour was growing late and the weather increasingly wild so we headed back to west London, and a truly horrendous late night trip to Tesco Express. If the zombie apocalypse had broken out, I don't think we would have noticed the difference.

I'll post the photos and write-up of our Sunday activities tomorrow...

Happy Halloween

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Happy Halloween, one and all! Yes, it's my favourite day of the year and as a writer of spooky tales, and someone who's studying spooky films for her thesis, it seemed only right to talk about something spooky today. However, rather than making a list of my favourite ghost stories, or horror films, which would be all too easy but also all too predictable, I thought it might be more interesting to list the top five weird things that have ever happened to me! There are a lot more than just these five, but these were unusual enough to warrant inclusion. They're in no particular order, and given the fact I don't remember actually being scared, just 'weirded out', I think I must have the psychic constitution of a concrete elephant!

1) Talking to a fictional character on a ouija board.
Last April, I went to a ghost hunt at Kielder Castle in Northumberland, where I was blogging about the event. A ouija board session was started in one of the downstairs rooms, and after a couple had apparently had a conversation with a deceased relative, someone (or something) spelled out my real name. I asked who it was, and the planchette spelled out 'Grey'. By now I'm pretty sure you're all familiar with Grey O'Donnell, the bounty hunter hero of my pulp Western, The Guns of Retribution. I was a little taken aback, so I asked him if he had a message. He said simply 'Thank you', and when I asked what for, he replied 'Life'. He said goodbye and that was that - and I found it completely weird! It was especially strange since neither I nor the only other person in the room who knew my real name were actually touching the board, and the other three people didn't know me, or Grey, from a hole in the ground. Question is, did I create Grey and imbue him with some form of life through the creative process...or did he come to me to tell his story?

2) Feeling a hand on my shoulder.
During another ghost hunt, I was in the pit beneath the Black Gate in Newcastle. It's allegedly a site of poltergeist activity, and people often report ouija conversations with a seventeenth century witch finder named Thomas in the area. We were doing another ouija board in the pit, when I suddenly felt something touch my shoulder, as though someone had tried to get my attention. There was no one near me and at the time, I had this stupid notion that a spider had dropped on me, but it would have needed to be a spider that weighed about the same as a small house cat to make the same impact! Was it a hand? And if so...whose hand was it?

3) There was someone behind us.
I went to Wales in 2008 with my parents, and one of our trips was to the Llechwedd Slate Mines. It's a fascinating place, if you ever find yourself in that neck of the woods, and one of the things to see is the mine workings that lie about ten storeys underground. In the first room, we were standing in a group looking up at one of the slate workings, and the staff turned off the lights so we could experience exactly how dark it would have been in its heyday. My mother and I were standing right at the back of the group and we both turned around at the same time, convinced that someone else was standing behind us. The lights came back on and there was no one there, and no one in the room had moved, so who, or what, was it? Having seen The Descent, I can only speculate...

4) The woman on the landing.
In my last flat, I lived on the second floor at the top of the building. There was a landing outside my door, and every now and then, I'd feel like I wasn't alone if I went onto the landing - usually at dusk, and especially in the winter. I usually chalked it up to an over-active imagination but on one particular occasion, I had to venture out onto the landing to go downstairs to the toilet. I practically threw myself down the stairs, such was my discomfort at being out there and my hurry to get back to my flat, and as I was passing underneath the landing on the lower staircase, I got a peculiar mental image of a blonde woman, dangling from a short rope. Even stranger, the name 'Miranda' popped into my head. I turned it into a story, The Stairs, which is in my Checkmate story collection, but that landing never stopped freaking me out.

5) The doll who moved on his own.
One of my previous boyfriends was a huge fan of Final Fantasy and for his birthday one year, I bought him one of the collectible figures of Squall from Final Fantasy VIII. Thing was, Squall wouldn't stay where you left him. I remember seeing him in my boyfriend's bedroom, then going into the bathroom and finding Squall lying on the edge of the bath. Given my boyfriend was in the back garden at the time and I was the only one inside, I found it a little strange that Squall should beat me to the bathroom. He kept turning up in all kinds of places, including the shed, and we never did get to the bottom of it. There was some sort of presence in that flat, one that definitely didn't like me, and it used to make my boyfriend's kitten go nuts, but I have no idea if it's still there.

How about you? What weird experiences have you had?

Creepy Houses

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Abandoned Mansion, Ostrowo, Poland
Photo by Michał Żebrowski

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you might have seen me talking about a dream which actually unsettled me. I rarely remember my dreams, and when I do, they've often just been weird as opposed to actually creepy or even scary - in fact, I don't even remember ever having had a nightmare. However in this case, not only did I remember my dream, I also dreamed about the same thing twice. In this case, that 'thing' was a house.

Naturally the details of dreams fade, but I remember it was a large house set in some kind of parkland, with a cemetery nearby. In the first dream, I simply visited it, and can only remember the large square entrance hall with the marble floor and balustrade running around the upper gallery. In the second dream, it transpired that my parents had bought it - for some reason their room was downstairs at the back of the house, and constantly in shadow due to the trees outside. My brother and I had rooms on the upper floor, but at opposite ends of the house. Mine was reached via an absolute maze of corridors that all looked alike, and I hated the fact that we were so spread out throughout the house. I got the distinct impression that the house enjoyed the isolation.

There was nothing really wrong with the house, apart from its peculiar decor, a mixture of wood-panelling and 1970s kitsch, but the whole time I was there, I felt continually as though I was being watched, and a general air of discomfort hung over the place. For the nights following, I found myself unwilling to go to sleep for fear of returning to a house that, as far as I know, was created by my imagination.

Borley Rectory, said to be one of the most
haunted houses in England - now demolished

So what is it about houses? It's hardly surprising I'd be dreaming about them, considering the focus of my PhD upon haunted spaces in cinema, and my fascination with the Gothic as a literary device. Houses are supposed to provide warmth and shelter, not harbour threats or danger. Yet houses reflect the living - they're transformed into homes by the activity of their inhabitants, inanimate shells gaining animation by proxy. How often do we return from periods away from the home to find they have become cold and almost unfamiliar? We don't feel comfortable in our own home until our presence has returned the semblance of warmth and life.

It is the privileged position of the house as primary provider of shelter, the place in which we are at our most vulnerable during sleep, which grants the abandoned house, or simply a house which has stood empty for some time, that special air of creepiness. An abandoned house no longer fulfils its function of providing shelter - with no inhabitants, it ceases to exist according to its purpose, and becomes instead an arrangement of bricks and mortar.

Consider, too, the vast array of literary and cinematic examples of the haunted house. Yes, we have examples of ghosts haunting spaces other than that of the house (I'm thinking here of Ghost and its subway spectre, or the cab driving phantom of Ghostbusters) but the ghost's primary location is that of a domestic space. Naturally we are therefore conditioned to view old or rundown houses as being potentially haunted, and it is entirely possible that we project our own beliefs into the space, generating the signs and signifiers of a haunting ourselves. In many cases, abandoned houses are met with the words "Oh it's so sad", as though we feel a sense of sympathy for the house itself. Imbued with life by its inhabitants, a residue remains following their departure.

I can only assume that a combination of these factors, along with my own interest in the paranormal, the history of the Gothic and my experience with 'haunted' houses, has conspired to create an imaginary space in which to explore these feelings of dread and discomfort. I'm choosing that reading of the dream - I don't even want to consider it as some kind of metaphor...

Friday Flash - The Priest Hole

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Pete threw down the EMF meter in disgust. The needle lay at the neutral end of the scale. Six hours of staring at it, and the damn thing refused to move. He hoped he could find the receipt when he got home.

Pete made another circuit of the room. His objects remained where he’d planted them. No footprints disturbed the flour sprinkled across the floorboards. The thermometer wouldn’t budge below a consistent 22°C.

He yanked open the door and stomped into the corridor. A trail of flour followed him down the hall.

“Hello? Who’s there? Is that a spirit?”

A voice called from the library. Melanie. The supposed psychic who called him in on the job to accompany her. Oh Bettley Hall is definitely haunted, she’d said. I felt a real presence when I went to see Lady Maude, she’d said. I’m sure we’ll have success this time, she’d said.

“No, Mel, it’s just me,” he replied.

“Oh.”

Pete pushed open the door to the library. Melanie sat cross-legged on the floor, a ouija board laid out in front of her. She sat at the northern point of a square formed along with her three assistants. The teenagers kept their black hair long and straight, and wore identical black outfits. They turned their sullen gazes towards him.

“Any luck?” he asked.

“Not as yet, although I’m still hopeful,” replied Melanie.

“I thought you said you’d felt a presence,” said Pete.

“I did. I can’t understand it, I thought we would have made contact by now. But there’s still time,” said Melanie.

“Still time,” echoed her assistants.

“It’s nearly dawn. We’ve been here for hours. Surely, if something was going to happen, it would have happened by now?”

“It’s your negative energy, that’s the problem. You’ve chased it away.”

“Oh really? Maybe I should go into exorcisms then.”

Melanie pouted. She leaned in toward the ouija board. Her assistants did the same, and they all laid their fingers on the glass.

“Would you mind leaving the room? I don’t want your negative energy blocking the spirit,” said Melanie.

Pete rolled his eyes and left the library. He walked back down the corridor to the morning room. Lady Maude claimed most incidents happened there. Disembodied voices, orbs, cold spots, floating body parts - Pete couldn’t think of a typical symptom of a haunting she hadn’t listed.

He retrieved the EMF meter from the floor under the table. He switched on his digital camera and waved the meter over it. The needle flickered, and dropped back to zero when he turned the camera off.

“So at least you’re working,” he murmured.

Pete checked his watch. Only an hour until dawn.

“Seriously, is there anybody there?” he called.

Nothing. The EMF meter remained quiet. Pete walked around the room, feeling for cold spots. He switched the camera back on and took a few aimless shots. He couldn’t see anything on the viewer but maybe something would show up on his PC.

Who am I kidding? There’s nothing here, he thought. I’m just a ghost hunter who can’t find any bloody ghosts.

The anticipation of the vigil had turned to boredom some time earlier, and Pete left the morning room again. Instead of turning left to the library, he turned right. The corridor crooked around a corner. Pete ducked under a cracked oak lintel into a narrow passage. Threadbare tapestries covered the panelled walls, and the pitted floorboards creaked beneath his boots.

Pete shivered. He guessed the passage led to the west wing, the original block of the house. Lady Maude told him the first Bettley Hall dated back to the Tudors, and the family harboured priests during Elizabeth I’s campaign to uncover Catholics.

Pete shoved his hands into his pockets. Puffs of his breath hung in the cold air. Pete wondered why Lady Maude never installed heating in this part of the castle. She could make a fortune renting it out as holiday accommodation.

The EMF meter crackled into life in his pocket. Pete pulled it out, feeling the cold nip at his fingers. The needle shot up the scale, buzzing around the upper level. Pete’s jaw dropped open.

A sharp knock made him jump. It came from the wall to his right. Pete swept the meter along the wall. The meter squealed when it reached a moth-eaten tapestry depicting a pregnant woman kneeling at an altar.

“Is there anybody there?”

“Succurro mihi.” 

The disembodied voice came from behind the tapestry. Pete held out a trembling hand. He fumbled with the edge of the fabric. Plain wood panelling lay behind the wall hanging.

“Wh-wh-where are you?” called Pete.

“Hic, hac.”

An opaque figure passed through the wall into the corridor. It wore the robes of a priest. A large crucifix hung around its neck. It turned its bald head to face Pete. He looked into empty, staring eyes of the apparition, and fainted.

* * *

Fowlis Westerby pulled off his ridiculous Tudor priest disguise. He straightened his hat and moustache. The Cavalier looked down at the pitiable ghost hunter at his feet.

“I do apologise, old boy. You’re just so much easier to scare when you’re not expecting to see anything.”

The ghost strolled down the corridor towards the library. The séance would surely net him scores of Scare Points.

* * *

The theme for this week’s flash came from the Write Anything Fiction Friday prompt, “Include this theme in your story… After a long night, a hunter sees something he/she cannot believe.” It also marks the second appearance of Fowlis Westerby on my blog – you can read his first appearance here. My beloved spectral Cavalier ghost stars in my very first novel, currently in the redrafting process.

Click here for more information on priest holes!

Friday Flash - A Black Night in the Churchyard

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A small rock scuttled across the medieval stones. A fox looked up from his foraging near the gate. His amber eyes saw the Black Knight sitting on a low tomb. The knight kicked his feet against the faded inscription, and fiddled with his gauntlets. He cast his gaze around the lurching gravestones. He no longer saw the names; he knew each and every one of them. He knew their dates of birth, and their dates of death. He occasionally invented stories for them to keep himself amused.

Drunken chatter drifted across the still air. He looked up, but watched in dismay as the four shrill girls continued past the gate. The churchyard used to be a popular thoroughfare between two busy streets. An office block now blocked the way at the northern end, its car park butted up against the graveyard wall. The neglected church sat as if invisible while the city grew up around it, a medieval island in a sea of modernity.

The knight knew what it was to be forgotten. He hauled himself off the tomb to roam the small churchyard. Years of local building development altered the yard, changing its boundaries and disturbing graves. He hoped a developer might find his grave by accident. Caught in limbo, he was confined to the churchyard until he knew where his body was buried.

The Black Knight had guarded the churchyard for eight centuries. In earlier times, grave robbers, murderers, rapists, gangsters, and thieves all tried to ply their trade in his yard. The oath he swore to punish the evildoer held as much sway in death as it did in life. He consumed their souls and left their bodies as shambling walking corpses. His reputation even prevented crime as tales of clanking armour and dark shadows carried far and wide across the region.

Times changed. No one believed in ghosts or justice any more. He patrolled his abandoned corner of the city centre, forgotten and lonely. Not to mention hungry. What was it, forty, or fifty, years since his last meal? The sun rose and set, and still he wandered among the graves. The wind whistled through the dilapidated church, while weeds grew rampant. In his earlier years, he tried knocking on the coffins. He got no answer. Their occupants had already sailed across the Styx, but Charon would not take him. Without his body, he had no payment for the ferry.

Glass smashed near the gate. The knight looked up. A fat youth threw a second bottle over the wall. Green glass shattered against a moss-covered gravestone. The knight's sacred duty to protect swelled in his chest as the youth pushed open the gate. The hinges squealed in protest. The youth staggered along the overgrown path. He lurched behind Mrs Martha Eddowes’ gravestone to relieve himself. The knight drew his sword.

The youth zipped up his trousers. He turned around to face the church. Only one window remained intact. The stained glass told the story of the Annunciation. The Black Knight guarded it with a possessive zealotry. Besides the church, that single window was the only thing on this ground older than him. Twelfth century glass, and still perfect.

The youth picked up a large stone. He tested the weight in his hand. The Black Knight growled. He didn’t like where this was going, but he could do nothing until the youth did something wrong.

The stone flew through the air, and crashed into the ancient window. The glass imploded inwards, raining down on the pitted stone floor inside. The Black Knight howled. The youth whirled around, startled by the sudden noise. He saw a black shadow, and heard metal sing as it split the air.

The youth’s body staggered backwards. The Black Knight stood tall and furious in the churchyard. He held his sword in one hand, the youth’s soul in the other. It writhed in his grasp, a roiling mass of deceit, violence and malice. The Black Knight took one last look at the gaping wound in the wall of the church. As the youth’s body stumbled toward the gate, the Knight sat down to devour the soul. Such a satisfying meal, but at such a price.

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The image for this story is actually the abandoned chapel at the centre of Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, London, although the flash was inspired by the legend of the Black Knight, who is reputed to haunt the small churchyard attached to St Nicolas' Cathedral in Newcastle upon Tyne. The St Nicolas churchyard is not overgrown and the Cathedral is one of the most beautiful ecclesiastical buildings in the country, but it suited the flash better that the church be neglected, so I've taken a bit of artistic license. I'm also not sure why the Knight is stuck in the churchyard, but this made the most sense to me. It is true that someone threw a brick through the oldest window in the Cathedral, though what happened to the hooligan is anybody's guess...

Paranormal Activity

Tweet After much hype in the press, I finally went to see Paranormal Activity today. I'd heard mixed reviews in the UK, but I have to say that despite its tediously slow start, I actually enjoyed it. By the end of the film, I was aware that my heart was attempting to crawl up into my mouth - the last film to have that effect upon me was Aja's remake of The Hills Have Eyes. I do think in part that Paranormal Activity relies too heavily upon jump-scares, although its utilisation of sound to achieve these, instead of the CGI equivalent of a ghost train rubber skeleton, lets it wriggle somewhat off its hook.

It brought to mind the more 'Gothic' tradition of horror, as opposed to the gore-soaked franchises courting controversy that we have become used to of late. A slow burner in many senses, it scatters clues about the pasts of our protagonists thought the narrative, foregoing the typical chunk of backstory exposition that many filmmakers feel is necessary. The film piles weird occurrence onto weird occurrence until the suspense is pulled so taut that you could probably pick out a tune on it. Maybe Danse Macabre?

Anyway. It's nice to see a film that never actually shows you its 'monster'. It never manages to come quite as close to the pure genius of Robert Wise's 1963 classic The Haunting, and it's not quite as creepy as Poltergeist (incidentally the only horror film to actually scare me) but its low budget, limited location and restricted point of view serve well to ramp up the claustrophobia felt by the couple. We only know as much as they know, although we do clearly benefit from some awareness of cinematic conventions, i.e. ouija boards rarely spell out good news and broken pictures are often bad omens.

Still, I'm glad to see that people are still making ghost movies, and telling ghost stories. I am personally a bit of a believer in ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties having had a few very peculiar experiences myself, and there's something a lot more unsettling about a thud during the night with no obvious source, as opposed to a zombie lurching toward you clutching the scabby remains of a human arm. I was beginning to worry that ghost stories had become a dying art, but I think there's life in the old dog yet...