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.

Horror comics

Children today have ready access to many different ways of terrifying themselves, be it craftily watching forbidden DVDs, slipping 'Resident Evil' into the playstation, discovering that grooming is not just something that happens to their 'my little pony' collection or being told that with the economy the shape it's in, they will have to walk to school instead of being driven the 500 yards in a 4x4. Just a few short decades ago, things were very different, when I was a kid one had to put real effort into terrifying oneself, and by that I don't mean the sort of fear that was visited upon you in the supermarket when, upon looking up, you realised that you had been following the wrong set of legs for the last five minutes and your parent has misplaced you, or that you had forgotten your PE kit and pant related humiliation beckoned, rather I mean premeditated terror when you set out to scare yourself.

For instance, before VHS meant that every under supervised kid was one short 'play' button away from watching a movie resulting in their having to sleep with the light on for the next two years, horror was most freely available in book form. Available, but not easily available. Stephen King, for instance, wrote books roughly the thickness of breeze blocks, and about as penetrable.

That's why the preferred literary chiller of choice was the horror comic.

And the best way to come across these was when they were to be found rolled up and on offer at some seaside tat shop. Titles such as 'Dracula' and 'Werewolf by night' featured characters previously safely confined to a European village located a safe distance away, the Universal back-lot to be precise, appearing in black and white and doing horrible things to ugly blokes and good looking women before being pulped by angry villagers, so no great threat. The horror comic though, usually relocated the character to the present day and while this was usually still somewhere in America, the threat felt more immediate, especially after the sun went down.

While traditional stories about well known but handily out-of-copyright characters were good stuff, even if the way the comics were purchased meant that the sequential nature of the longer story arc couldn't be fully enjoyed (although the reader could probably guess that each edition was pretty much the same, featuring comics-code approved gore and a lot of shadowy suspense), the real finds were the anthology comics, where lesser supernatural threats such as demons and gouls lurked. This was great as, while the average kid had no trouble at all torturing themselves with fresh horrors based on existing monsters, adding new characters to the bedtime bestiary took things to a whole new level.

But it was British horror comics that really made the breakthrough. While most stories had supernatural threats handing out some sort of justice to those who deserved to be punished, and even had avenging ghosts or spirits revenging their earthly forms, occasional stories about evil preying on the innocent crept through.

It's a shame really that, even effective as they were, this was never perfected. If the comic publishers really wanted to scare the hell out of kids, then they should have published stories about dreadful creatures inhabiting the toilet block at the caravan site, a story sure to fix on the imagination of any impressionable youngster and no doubt leading to wilting bushes in caravan sites around the nation.

Maybe it's time for horror comics to make a return. Hollywood had turned monsters into harmless teens that come in two varieties; pouty (vampires, must be the teeth that make their mouth form into the shape of a massive sulk) and brooding (werewolves, bushy eyebrows make for a perpetual frown). What's needed is much less Glee meets Hammer and more kid-taunts-reclusive-bloke-who-lives-in-caravan, who beats the kid to death with a hammer. (Moral: don't taunt nutters.) Or a few more haunted appliances; there has to be something in a story about a possessed washing machine, fridge or car. Although I think Stephen King may have got there first. Possessed Bop-it?

The art of the sale

Something is only worth what somebody will pay for it, and this is usually a lot less than you hoped it would be worth, especially if you’ve been carefully keeping the thing in question in a cupboard for decades, waiting for it to accrue value.

My mother is slowly whittling down her mountain of crap she brought with her on the move by handing it to me and saying ‘put this on eBay and we’ll split the profit’.

In this case it’s a Conway ‘popular model’ camera. It’s actually something of a thing of beauty, a metal and bakelite box with two viewfinders, one for portrait and the other for landscape – you turn the camera on its side! Genius! Take that photoshop.

It is, of course, worth little in terms of money. A little research showed that the camera was mass-produced in Birmingham for the ‘budget’ end of the market, a little time on eBay shows them on sale for a couple of quid. So, it sits on my desk.

The way to sell it is to sell the idea rather than the actuality. Put a dent in the side and it becomes the camera that stopped a bullet for Laurie Lee in the Spanish civil war. Put a scratch down the side and it was the camera that Hemmingway had with him on safari. This camera could have been used by gangsters, bootleggers, lords, ladies, it could have been used to manufacture scandal, it could have been the camera that took photographs of a ghost, of a miracle.


It could even be cursed – because, you see, this camera belonged to Roderick Fanshaw, quite famous in the 1960s as a ghost-hunter and debunker (note to self- set up fake Wikipedia page) who’s last case was investigating a crypt in a church where, local legend had it, something, maybe even the devil himself, was said to appear at certain times. Certainly Fanshaw had been called in by a concerned former school chum, now a doctor in the area that had treated a young girl for shock after she said she saw something. Tosh, of course, but if Fanshaw could prove it was tosh, then it would be good for the village and for the girl. Fanshaw descended to the crypt for the night with some blankets, a lantern, a thermos of tea and his Conway.

When they found him the next morning he was sitting on the floor of the crypt, his back to the wall, a look of utter terror on his face. Stone dead, with the Conway camera gripped tightly in his cold, stiff hands.

There had been one exposure taken. After much discussion it was decided to develop the film, possibly revealing who, or what had literally scared Fanshaw to death.

Option A: a copy of the photograph, the original of which is now in a private collection, is being sold with the camera. Opening bid: £25. (Photograph is actually of Fanshaw in the crypt, already dead but the crypt sealed – whoever or whatever killed him took the photograph – spooooooooooky!)

Option B: When they opened the camera, the film had burned to ash inside the camera, but there was no damage to the camera itself. Did Fanshaw really photograph the Devil himself? Ash included in purchase, opening bid: £25.

The stuff we buy today will not be on eBay decades hence, most likely it’ll be propping up some landfill somewhere. Things that we like to spend money on, like tellys and games consoles and computers have a new problem – obsolescence, they simply fail to work. A few months ago the very last poleroid film made passed its ‘use by’ date. No more poleroids. These days you’ve barely got your computer unpacked before you find it can’t run some application.

The Christmas Horror

There’s a time and a place for horror and this is not, apparently, when you are putting your nine year old nephew to bed and you tell him the story of the ghost of the little boy who haunts his house, a little boy who was beaten to death by his enraged uncle with a hammer because he would not go to bed when he was told. (Success with this story? You’ll probably need the sequel: the ghost of the boy who drowned in his own pee because he kept wetting the bed).

M.R. James wrote horror stories that are traditionally associated with Christmas. Not because they take place at Christmas but because he was a house master at Eton and, on Christmas Eve, would invite the senior boys to his study and after plying them with sherry tell them ghost stories. At the turn of the century such behaviour was quite normal, well, about as normal as having one of the greatest masters of the ghost story genre who ever lived being a house master. OFSTEAD would, I am sure, have something to say about such behaviour but judging by the behaviour of today’s senior boys at public school, you’d have a hell of a job getting the spliff out of their mouths for long enough to ply them with sherry.

The Christmas connection has been reinforced by the BBC who, on and off for the past decade or two, have broadcast MR James stories in their ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’ slot. Sometimes an eminent ac-tor plays James himself (memorably Christopher Lee and Robert Powell) narrating a story from a cosy looking study. If you think it’s shocking to regale your nephew with ‘the story of the hammered child’, that’s as bloody nothing to the effect of an impressionable young teen, up late because it’s Christmas, tuning innocently into BBC2 and hearing, all unprepared, the story of ‘the Mezziotint’. I’ve been terrified of paintings, the BBC, MR James, Robert Powell and Christmas ever since.

James’s stories, good on teevee, are great on the page but reading them at any other time of year just feels, well, wrong.

The same has to be said for that other master of horror, H P Lovecraft. Maybe it’s because there’s nothing quite like an initial impression and the first time I read Lovecraft was on a summer holiday in a caravan park in Great Yarmouth. It was, I seem to recall, great weather almost every day, not that this mattered to me because I had discovered that the campsite’s amusement arcade had a Star Wars video game and was spending quite a lot of time using the force, and most of my pocket money, trying to blow up that freaking Death Star.

One day though the fog rolled in and we were pretty much confined to the caravan – never a problem for a family that likes to read. So I read my Lovecraft omnibus; mostly about old sea-towns on the New England coast that, cut off by geography fog and inbreeding, are hosts to diabolical going on. I think I finally got to sleep about seven years later.

Since that formative/traumatic experience I’ve always associated Lovecraft with the season of mists, except The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which I associate with beads of rain falling against a car window. But all the stories are associated with a sort of nagging dread.

Judging from their proliferation on the shelves of most bookshops (and that’s just Stephen King), people still love a good horror story, or even a mediocre horror story. There’s something about reading a horror story and I think it may be that one can always close the book and trap the horror safely between the pages. Certainly if you want horror in real life, you can simply watch the news or the ‘Why? Factor’ or something. Of course, sometimes the horror escapes the page and follows you, which is why it’s perfectly acceptable to check under the bed and inside the closet before retiring and to always keep handy the ultimate ghost deterrent – a camera, I mean, have you ever seen a convincing picture of one?