Site-specific folklore

But is there anything as deliciously British as site-specific folklore?

 Maybe pork scratchings.

Every country has its folklore. Britain is a haunted country with a spook and a story hiding behind every bush. Creepy old houses, stone circles and telephone boxes that smell slightly of wee and the paranormal are standard issue.

 Continental Europe specialises in grimmer folk tales, from the trolls of Scandinavia to the unhappy happenings in the dark forests of the interior. The United States has some cracking folklore, from native American superstitions those those from the modern age: crossroads, prairie campfires and spectral locomotives being especially popular.

As for the Far East, they have so many batshit crazy wailing ghosts that they have formed the lynchpin of the continent’s film industry.

That stories (or can we use the term ‘tales’ in this context? yes, yes I think we can) about strange events or weird happenings attach themselves to certain locations should be no surprise; let’s be pragmatic here, people are always looking for some way to attach fame to a location for sound commercial reasons.  If Queen Elizabeth I actually did sleep in as many historic houses, now conveniently converted into boutique hotels, as claimed in the brochures, it’s amazing that she found any time at all to get out of bed, put on a ginger wig and twat the Spanish.

It’s when the locals seek to play down a place’s association or reputation that the stories are likely to be authentic.

Britain leads when it comes to the sheer volume of weird tales in the haunted landscape. Sometimes you are forced to conclude that every postcode has its own legend. Possibly this is because you can’t go far in Britain without seeing a spooky house, an oddly shaped tree or a sinister looking alley, country lane or bus stop. But more likely it’s because of the proliferation of public houses and the treasured local custom of talking bollocks and teasing tourists.

There are places though, both ancient and modern, where it doesn’t take much to imagine strange or sinister things happening.  This can be a crooked country lane at dusk but can just as easily be a grimy underpass, especially if it smells of cider-pee and hoodie.

Deserted rural landscapes provide a happy home for local legends, like Black Shuck, the devil dog of the Fens.  Black dogs are a popular myth in East Anglia, seen as harbingers of death, but Black Shuck, an enormous spectral hound that haunts the North Norfolk coast, has the distinction of being the legend that, when recounted to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he was staying in Cromer, inspired him to write ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, although SACD relocated the action from Norfolk to Dartmoor, possibly at the bidding of the Dartmoor tourist board, or the Norfolk tourist board, it's not clear.

It’s natural enough to imagine a landscape soaked in blood and history as the home of spooky tales, real or invented, but because all folktales have to start somewhere I don’t see why modern landmarks shouldn’t have their own gruesome tales attached, even if there are fewer ‘heritage and culture centres’, or ‘pubs’ as they are also known, than there used to be for those stories to be invented, told and retold.  

For instance, canal towpaths are more than places where condoms are discarded and fishermen take refuge from their unhappy marriages, they can be genuinely spooky places when deserted at twilight, even if they are only a graveyard for shopping trollies. A road laybys can be spooky too, and not just because they are the evidence disposal site of choice for lorry drivers.  I know of at least three laybys where the smell of bacon sandwiches has been reported, even though there are no cafes present.

It takes a certain something for a site to cross over from being sad to spooky. Caravan sites, children's playgrounds and concrete corners that are strangers to sunlight can all seem forlorn, and can even be tipped into tragic through the simple edition of half a dozen petrol garage bouquets left there, but to become spooky they need time and imagination. Or maybe just an unexpected creak.