The Coffin Path is a seventeenth-century ghost story. A story in which the oppression and wild beauty of the Yorkshire moors provides a compelling backdrop, where a sense of encroaching malevolence seeps like a ‘winding sheet of fog … silent, still, watching’ through the very stones of Scarcross Hall, and the fates of all who live there. Scarcross […]
The Traditions of Halloween
The festival of Halloween has become so popular that almost every street you walk will have windows aglow with pumpkin-head lanterns, signalling that any children out to celebrate are welcome to come and ‘Trick or Treat’. Many of those children will be dressed as skeletons, witches and ghosts – some of them might even wear the […]
The Faithful by Juliet West
The Faithful is a compelling read where intimate personal narratives are influenced by historical events leading up to World War II. At the centre of the novel is the character of Hazel, to whom we are first introduced in the summer of 1935. By this time in the teenaged Hazel’s life her well-to-do parents have […]
The Ghosts of Silent Film
I’ve long had a fascination with the art of Victorian photography – how those grainy old sepia images enable us to peer straight through a historical mirror into the past: for the very first time to be able to see exactly how people looked back then. Even the sparkle in their eyes. Because of this […]
The Muse for Alice in Wonderland
This year, 2015, is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the classic Victorian fantasy for which the author, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, used the pen name of Lewis Carroll. But it was in 1864 when Dodgson (then a young clergyman and mathematics don at Oxford) presented a girl who was twelve […]