Why do so many writers choose English seaside towns for their eerie yarns?
As we tentatively set off on summer holidays after months of lockdown, take heed: if you’re heading to the coast beware the ghosts, warns David Barnett
The seaside in summer is a place of life and happiness, when it’s at its best; the brittle shrieks of children running on hot sand to paddle in the shallows; the obstinate cries of gulls patrolling the skies for the unwary holidaymaker carrying aloft an unshielded ice cream or pasty; tinny music floating from a dozen windbreaked beach encampments to form a cacophony that rises up to meet the scudding white clouds in faultless blue skies; the crashing of the waves on the shore, lulling the foolish and drink-happy into an un-lotioned doze on a hired sun-lounger, to awaken lobster-red and shrieking louder than the children running pell-mell for the sea.
But when the sun has gone down, and the sand has cooled, and the music has faded, and the shouts have become just echoes, the seaside can become a very different place.
Perhaps your name is Tom and you are walking along the beach at dusk, and hear the creaking of ropes and the distant ringing of bells, and yet no ship or boat troubles the water between you and the far horizon. Maybe you, Philip, are sitting, reading, in a deserted cove, and from the corner of your eye catch a movement in the caves renowned to have been used by smugglers and wreckers centuries ago, and the faint calling of your name… or it could just be the birds crying out.
Possibly, Tracey, you are sitting, lost in thought, on a deserted, out-of-season promenade, and notice that someone has carved in giant letters into the wet sand, “Happy birthday”, yet you are there alone and no one knows it is your birthday, and the tide washes over the message and it disappears even as you wonder if it was there at all. Or you, Susan, pick up a shell on the shoreline, put it to your ear, and instead of the comforting sound of the sea you hear the screams of tortured souls.
The coast is what psychogeographers, those concerned with the relationship between place and people, might call “liminal”; being in a transitional state, straddling a boundary or threshold. It is where land meets the sea, where earth becomes water, solid becomes liquid, the eternally unmoving becomes the constantly shifting. It is a place of elemental, almost alchemical change.
By themselves. the land and the sea can be powerful things. When one acts on the other, when they become coast, a new and beautiful and sometimes frightening thing is created. At night, if you look out, the sky and the sea and the land are almost indistinguishable, just a mass of minutely graded blackness, hinting at things out there that come from realms beyond that which we know. So it’s of little surprise that so many writers have chosen to set tales of the supernatural, of mystery, of speculation, at the seaside.
Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 in Kent, a few miles inland from where it juts out into the English Channel at England’s south-easterly corner. An academic and a medievalist, he is best known for being a writer of ghost stories, generally being set in remote villages or seaside towns in England, France or Denmark, and featuring scholarly protagonists like himself whose investigations and research into old books or antiques generally yield terrifying results.
MR James, as he is more widely known, didn’t set all of his stories by the sea, but in his Oh Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad, which was included in his debut collection, Ghost Stories of An Antiquary, in 1904, and A Warning To The Curious, published in 1925, James wrote two of the quintessential coastal terror tales.
In the first story, a university professor named Parkins is on a golfing holiday in the fictional Suffolk seaside town of Burnstow when he finds on the beach an old whistle inscribed with Latin; foolishly blowing it he unleashes an ancient terror that stalks him to his lodgings and manifests in a most horrible manner.
Before he comes face to face with the terror he dreams of it: “A long stretch of shore, shingle edged by sand, and intersected at short intervals with black groynes running down to the water…the light was obscure, conveying an impression of gathering storm, late winter evening, and slight cold rain…Then, in the distance, a bobbing black object appeared; a moment more, and it’s a man running, jumping, clambering over the groynes, and every few seconds looking eagerly back. The nearer he came the more obvious it was that he was not only anxious, but even terribly frightened.”
A Warning To The Curious treads similar ground; with Paxton, an antiquarian, visiting the Suffolk coast (this time Seaburgh, standing in for Aldeburgh, as Burnstow had for Felixstowe) and finding an Anglo-Saxon crown which, legend has it, protects the country from invaders. As ever with James’s stories, removing antiquities from their proper resting places can only ever end badly, and it does for Paxton, his fate hidden from the reader by the descent of a thick sea-fret on the Seaburgh beach.
For the author Ramsey Campbell, A Warning to the Curious is one of the finest examples of the coastal ghost story, and he says it “conveys all the eeriness of a Suffolk beach.”
Campbell is the author of dozens of short stories and more than 30 novels, beginning with The Doll Who Ate His Mother in 1976 and his latest, The Wise Friend, published this year. He’s written many stories with a seaside backdrop, and for him the location is integral to his fiction.
Perhaps it’s also that nostalgia for seaside holidays can evoke especially vivid memories and resurrect emotions, those ghosts that haunt us all
“Generally the setting is the seed of the story,” says Campbell. “My story The Companion grew out of an actual abandoned fairground in New Brighton, where it rotted for years and grew enticingly uncanny after dark. The Last Revelation of Gla’aki draws on the atmosphere of a lakeland seaside resort we stayed in many years ago, where the beach was hardly visible for fog even on a sunny afternoon.
“Again, scenes in The Wise Friend take place at the edge of the sea here, which gave me plenty of thematic material. For instance: ‘as the windmills on the horizon began to glow like branding irons prepared for an interrogation I grew tired of waiting for Bella. Sunset bruised the sky with elongated welts of cloud while waves flocked towards the dimming bay as if they were recoiling from the prospect’ – in other words it’s a pool or a flood, you might say, of ideas and images. The story The Ferries was an attempt to convey all the strangeness of Parkgate, the Wirral fishing village where the river has been ousted by grass, which on a windy night can resemble a ghost of water.”
Campbell grew up in Liverpool, and as a child holidayed with his mother in Southport. He recalls: “Even then it felt like stepping back in history – the palm court orchestra in the Winter Gardens, the Victorian arcades, the cast iron awnings of Main Street. Remembering brings back a Proustian taste of sliced cold ham and fresh tomato in the dinner salad at a boarding house. These days I go there to visit Broadhursts, a splendid bookshop on several floors.”
Now he lives in Wallasey, at the mouth of the Mersey, and the sea still plays an important part in his life and his fiction. “Mist often lies along the middle of the river, and on stormy days the waves heave higher than I’m tall. These are spectacles I wouldn’t be without or move away from,” he says. “Perhaps it’s the sense of the land giving way to an apparent infinity of water, or the ability that such places give us to see the edge of the world. And they can give rise to fog, that great source of mystery and menace. Perhaps it’s also that nostalgia for seaside holidays can evoke especially vivid memories and resurrect emotions, those ghosts that haunt us all.”
Ghost stories of course, are never just about ghosts. They are about the people that they haunt, or the places that they lurk. Which is why the coast is such an evocative place for supernatural fiction. It is nature, wild and untrammelled, black waves crashing on lonely shores. If, as we said, the seaside is a liminal place, a borderland between ocean and terra firma, might it also be a place where the boundaries are blurred, the fabric is thinned, between this world and the next? But it’s the presence of humanity that brings forth such spirits. We try to tame the coast, attempt to make it our own, and it is these trappings of civilisation that, when shuttered for winter or closed for the night, take on an eeriness they never exhibit in the scorching light of the sun.
Campbell’s aforementioned The Companions, a short story often cited as a classic of seaside horror, is set in a deserted fairground, and can there be a more sinister and melancholy sort of place?
Author Jenn Ashworth edited for Bluemoose Books in 2018 an anthology of coastal stories set around the North-west of England, called Seaside Special: Postcards from the Edge. Not all of them are ghost stories, but even the ones that aren’t are unsettling and unnerving. For Ashworth, the trick is to take the familiar and to twist it a little, to look at it askance, to not tread the well-worn paths littered with candy floss sticks and fish and chip trays.
In her introduction to the collection she says: “To write about the North-west coast is to do battle with the tenacity of stereotype. It is to dodge well-worn evocations of depressed, down-at-heel seaside towns, gaudy sea-front arcades, Ferris wheels, roller coasters and caravan parks and of past-their-best Lakeland towns with stunning views and grim prospects. To write about these places is to somehow acknowledge a variety of well-publicised truths about the social and economic struggles of neglected and disenfranchised populations and also to dig deeper – to find the views and perspectives that surprise and make strange.”
Ashworth adds: “I endeavoured to curate a collection of short tales that, as a postcard does, present glimpses of a landscape. This region is not one that we who live here possess, but one that we who write about are possessed by, that is at once known and unknown, familiar and strange, a place of both leisure and work, refuge and threat.”
Ashworth is the author of Fell, an atmospheric tale about a woman who returns to the house in Morecambe where she grew up, and Ghosted, which is published early next year by Sceptre, of which she says: “It’s a story of a woman whose husband goes missing and how she deals with that, a mysterious haunting presence in her flat, and confusing advice from telephone psychics. It’s set in a small university town within sight of the North-west coast, Half Moon Bay and Heysham power station. It isn’t quite a ghost story, though she is haunted, and it isn’t quite a murder mystery, though there is a murder in it. I hope in the end it’s a love story.
Often it’s a place of pleasure, of holiday, of rest and recuperation and escape. And it is also huge, entirely outside of our control, physically dangerous a lot of the time
Ashworth lives in Lancaster, and can see the sea from her bedroom windows. She muses: “My favourite bit of the bay is Heysham: there’s this strange combination of a nuclear power station, an old church with Viking burial grounds, wide open skies and a changing, muddy, treacherous beach. The contrast and clashes between these different times and landscapes is very striking.”
The perfect landscape for a coastal haunting, then. But what makes a good one? “A great seaside ghost story gives you that chill of the uncanny – surprises in familiar landscapes,” she says. “Quite often the ‘spirit’ of a place is shifting, difficult to pin down – almost hostile — we could apply all that to the sea itself too — and stories that used ghosts and the supernatural to explore that really appeal to me.
“British people are islanders and most of us, one way or another, have a familiar relation to the sea. Often it’s a place of pleasure, of holiday, of rest and recuperation and escape. And it is also huge, entirely outside of our control, physically dangerous a lot of the time, ever-changing and impossible to explore fully. That combination is really fertile ground for stories of the supernatural, where quite often familiar or comforting landscapes or relationships reveal themselves to have murky and unfathomable depths.”
So if you are preparing to head off to the coast, what should you be reading for that extra supernatural thrill as you look out at the distant ships’ lights winking on a horizon barely distinguishable from the night sky?
Jenn Ashworth recommends Ringing the Changes, a story by the great, but somewhat under-appreciated, British writer Robert Aickman. She says: “I think Robert Aickman is one of my favourite short story writers; though his stories are more strange, uncanny, kind of unnatural, rather than specifically ghostly. Ringing the Changes shows us a honeymooning couple by the East Anglian seaside. The church bells are pealing incessantly an, it becomes clear that their purpose is to raise the dead, and – well – I won’t give it away, suffice to say that the couple get a seaside holiday to remember…”
Campbell also cites the Aickman story, calling it a “great seaside nightmare” and adds: “Alison Moore’s Eastmouth, a perfect gem of understated menace and suggestiveness. Reggie Oliver’s Holiday from Hell epitomises the grisliness of some seaside boarding-houses and then leads us into nightmare. Not quite horror, but Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock evokes the seedy seaside for me as few other prose works can.”
For classic chills, William Hope Hodgson, a contemporary of MR James, wrote a number of sea-bound novels and short stories before his death at Ypres in 1918, notably The Voice In The Night and The Boats of the Glen Carrig, which forms part of his Sargasso Sea collection. But which contemporary novelists are lurking where the waves lap the shoreline with ghostly tales of the sea and the coast?
Published just a few months ago, Alma Katsu’s The Deep adds a spooky twist to one of the most famous sea-faring tragedies of all time: the sinking of the Titanic. And equally chilly, at least in location, is Michelle Paver’s excellent Dark Matter, a creepy thriller that builds tension on an Arctic expedition to the coast of Svalbard.
Stephen King, of course, is the master of horror, and his 2008 novel Duma Key is set in a beach house on the Florida coast where a man recovering from an almost-fatal accident finds his nascent art hobby starts to unleash strange phenomena. And the freshly-minted Spirited by Julie Cohen focuses on a celebrated, but fake, spirit medium and the grieving woman she meets whose photography captures real ghosts on the Isle of Portland off the Dorset coast.
For an ambiguous, unsettling read try The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley, about two troubled brothers whose annual trip with their God-fearing family’s religious group to a lonely spit of land on the north Lancashire coast turns into an eerie and terrifying experience, while Lucy Woods’ novel Weathering and short story collections Diving Belles and The Sing of the Shore offer sometimes magical, sometimes discomfiting glimpses of the coastal lives of Cornish people, often with a huge dollop of the supernatural.
The sea is constantly shifting, the land immutable. Yet at the place where they meet, dark deeds and secret things are carried out in the dead of night, and their echoes and reverberations bring forth a specific type of unease and terror. Perhaps that noise you hear on your summer holiday is just the wind, or a gull crying out, or maybe it’s something more…
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