The serene, low-lying countryside of Suffolk, with its scattered farms, water-meadows and extensive coastline, seems an unlikely area to be associated with ghosts and demons. Yet, a motley array are said to haunt the region. The most famous is the Black Dog, a spectral hound, which in the year 1577 terrorised and killed parishioners in the churches of Bungay and Blythburgh, and continues to exert a strong presence today.
Other strange phenomena include phantom coaches, rattling through the countryside at night, drawn by spectral horses and driven by a headless coachman, and the freshwater mermaids who lure young children to their deaths in pools and rivers. Tobias Gill the black drummer haunts the crossroads near Blythburgh where he was hanged for the murder of a servant girl, and Mrs. Short, the ‘Queen of Hell’, can still raise the hairs on your neck if you wander in the region of Boulge Hall near Woodbridge. Famous characters such as Anne Boleyn, Earl Hugh Bigod, and St. Edmund add an additional lustre to folk tales of the area, and strange happenings occur in many of the churchyards, Suffolk having more churches per acre than almost any other county.
This fascinating account of local ‘sightings’ deals with all the traditional historical legends as well as modern day sightings, and investigates their relevance and significance for the modern age.
THE AUTHOR
Christopher Reeve is the curator of Bungay Museum and was Keeper of Art for Bury St Edmunds Borough Council. His other books include A Strange And Terrible Wonder: The Story of the Black Dog of Bungay, Bungay to Beccles and The Town Recorder: A History of Bungay in Photographs. He has also contributed several entries on to the current DNB. He is currently writing a new history of the Waveney Valley.
He lives in Bungay.
235 x 156 mm | paperback original | 136 pages | 50 illustrations
