A MORNING FOR THE CURIOUS

 Last week the Missus and me went on a road trip to Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk and parts of it were great for the ghost story buff like me.

In Oxburgh Hall the ancient skyline reminded me completely of the opening images of the Belasco pile in 1973's shocker The Legend of Hell House.

Driving on we passed a name familiar to all fans of HP Lovecraft, Dunwich, on the Suffolk Coast. In The Dunwich Horror, Dunwich is a fictitious name but I wonder if he knew about the Suffolk village?

                                             Running in Suffolk

Next we stayed at friends, who's barn conversion contained two startling clay tiles of one Black Shuck, the devil dog of East Anglia. These tiles were on the huge chimney breasts and perhaps they were to prevent the black dog entering therein?

Further black doggery was found in the town of Bungay, purportedly the devilry capital of England, as seen in this shop's name.

Whilst rummaging in Bungay I saw these cute See No Evil brass monkeys.

They always remind me of the not so cute Monkey's Paw segment of the brilliant 1972 anthology film Tales from the Crypt.

You know the one. The couple are granted three wishes. They wish they hadn't been!

The pinnacle of our trip was a morning tour to Aldburgh, a gorgeous seaside town on the Suffolk coast and the setting of M.R. James's well-known ghost story, A Warning to the Curious, in which James calls the town Seaburgh.

James published it in 1925. It took till 1972 to appear on the small screen, as part of the BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas cycle. As the TV play wasn't filmed in Aldburgh I stuck to the original story for our walkabout.

In it amateur archeologist Paxton desperately searches for three mythical East Anglian crowns lost in the mists of time somewhere in the dunes of 'Seaburgh' (aka Aldburgh). He visits St. Peter and Paul's Church graveyard, as we did, although the Agar family, fictitious guardians of the crowns, are not buried there, as they are in the story.

We entered the church, which boasts a fine old pulpit, typical of James' gothic settings.

Paxton visits the Bear, which in reality is the White Lion, which we stood in front of.

Aldburgh beach is long and somewhere along it and behind the wooded dunes Paxton, despite all the warnings, eventually unearths a lost crown, something he profoundly regrets later.

Two things which would never have featured in A Warning to the Curious are on the modern Aldburgh horizon; Sizewell B Nuclear Power Station and the House in the Clouds, both pictured here far left.

To celebrate my visit I bought a copy of MR James's collected ghost stories in the Aldburgh Bookshop and purchased a small sherry glass in a charity shop there, from which I will enjoy a tipple when I read the book one dark night!

If you wish to see much more detailed location finding then go no further than You Tube, where searches will take you to other intrepid explorers' investigations of 'Seaburgh'.

I heeded the warning and deigned to visit the site of the crown in the story,

A Warning to the Curious!

Do you like MR James? Have you visited Suffolk and maybe Aldburgh?