Supernatural

M R James wrote a wonderful story called 'Oh Whistle, And I'll Come To You My Lad' - It involves an entity which is awakened appearing to possess no substance other than the bed sheets from which it rises, the classic (or rather clichéd) image of a ghost. I think I've captured something of that 'pleasing terror' I get from his stories.

“In Roman mythology a Genius Loci was the protective spirit of a place. In contemporary usage, ‘Genius Loci’ usually refers to a location’s distinctive atmosphere, or ‘spirit of place’” Andreas Vogler & Arturo Vittori

There are some places which in the depths of winter when the sun never quite breaks through the dark clouds and the shrouding mist never leaves the woods, it is probably best not to wander too far from the ancient track.

It was Halloween and the mist that morning could not have been more eerie.

The surreal and eerie landscape of the Cambridge Fens can be unsettling and disturbing.

For me this is a faintly disturbing photograph, the resting cold marble figure of the child lends an eerie tone to the scene.

(Memorial located in Haddon Hall, High Peak District, Derbyshire, England.)

Ever since seeing Michael Redgrave in that classic British 1945 black and white horror film: Dead of Night I have always been wary of Ventriloquists and their dummies. This photograph I think captures some of that disquiet.

Wardsend Cemetery, Sheffield.

When was it? I cannot tell?
That last moment you were remembered?
The last moment before you were forgotten
And shadows fell like rain

When was your name called for the final time?
When you were not there to answer
Who was the last person to say goodbye?
Who then turned away never to look back?

When did the ivy begin to grow?
Over how many years and decades?
Until mouldering green, you were lost
The remembrances ironically unremembered
Gone as well as forgotten then

This little time we have, to end like this?
In fettered ranks and back to back
With funeral urns and jam jars filled with plastic flowers
No ticket here for paradise the price too high by half

If you had known this was journeys end
What other path would you have taken? 
What other route would you have followed?
No wonder Gods are called upon
To stem a culling tide

So I will not come here again
I trespass in your sleep
But soon enough this autumn world awaits
And life as they say is for the living

'Our visitor - his name was Paxton - was in a worse state of shivers than before, and went hurriedly into the room, and beckoned us after him, turned on the light, and shut the door carefully. Then he unlocked his kit-bag, and produced a bundle of clean pocket-handkerchiefs in which something was wrapped, laid it on the bed, and undid it. I can now say I have seen an actual Anglo-Saxon crown. It was of silver - as the Rendlesham one is always said to have been - '

Edensor Church in the High Peak District contains a rather disturbing representation of death. Of course, it awaits us all.

There are very few places that I have encountered where I have felt that something was not ‘quite right’ so to speak. But this flight of stairs inside St Stephens Church located in the New Town of Edinburgh is one of them. It is difficult to articulate the experience, however there was something amiss here, a moment in time and space which was out of kilter with everything else.

M R James wrote a wonderful story called; ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. A rationalist academic is confronted by a supernatural figure who pursues him after blowing a relic whistle with a strange Latin inscription. What is the figure and what does it want?

A mannequin head of a young girl - I was immediately struck by the look this individual had and the immediate impact of the gaze.

I think the expression is meant to express joy and happiness. To me it imparts a sense of consciousness or awareness and looks like someone on the edge of madness.