50 Day Meme Challenge 2014 - Day 22

[changeling67]

22) Do you have a favourite ghost story? What about a personal ghost story?

There are a few popular ones in the village where I live - like the ghost of a young woman and child who drowned on our local beach over a century ago and supposedly is seen and heard (dressed in white, like every apparition in ghost stories) crying for her child and that there was the ghost of an old woman who was seen out in her nightie, calling her cat, conveniently wandering in front of the local branchline train.  When I was a kid, I had a friend who used to live right by the church, where the blacksmiths used to be.  She swore blind that she saw his ghost with his face smashed by a horse that had lashed out; plus she told me that the diamond-shaped portrait inside the church would move and spin at night and she had seen it.

All fanciful stuff, but it scares you half to death when you are a kid.

Comments

[bethnoir.livejournal.com]

cool! I had a few books of Cornish ghost stories, published by local presses with piskies and knockers also featuring. Every time I moved I looked for these sort of little local legends and ghosts, I find them fascinating :-)

[calico-pye.livejournal.com]

It is interesting and adds to the mysticism of a place. I do like how folklore grows. We were discussing this yesterday in our Victorian lecture how there was a positive correlation between periods of an unsettling amount of change (war/economic and social change) and recurring surge of interest in fairies and folklore. Not only did we have this in the Victorian era, via the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, we can see this in later in the late nineteen thirties with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (much of which was written during World War II).

Maybe there is a link between people feeling that they are ‘diminished’ in some way, considering themselves as ‘downsized people’ – a response to threatening forces beyond their control.

[bethnoir.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I'd never looked at it from that perspective, but I definitely felt that I wanted to understand the new place I was in and thought that folklore would help me do that. Very interesting. I love ghost stories :-)