My short story, Lights On The Marsh, is appearing in
this week’s issue of The People’s Friend magazine. In the story, Laura is
warned never to whistle while walking across marshland in case it summons a
ghost – the Lantern Man. This blogpost will examine the folk legend, the lives
of marshmen and wherrymen as well as the story’s location, St Benet’s Abbey in
Norfolk.
The People’s Friend can be found in most newsagents or
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Illustration by Sailesh Thakrar
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At night, when the mists are thick and the moon
cloaked, strange lights can be seen floating over the marshes. Most called these
orbs will o’ the wisps, hinkypunks or corpse candles. Another name for this
curiosity was the Lantern Man. This ghost wandered along with his light, luring
travellers not towards the path home but to a watery grave. His most popular
haunt was around Wicken Fen.
During the 1800s, more and more stories about
travellers encountering this malignant spirit were told. Not all of them ended
in escape. One such story is the tale of Joseph Bexfield, whose grave can be
found at Thurlton. He was a wherryman whose drowning in 1809 was blamed on the
Lantern Man.
Having your own light did not dissuade this ghost,
instead drawing him nearer, but what always caught his attention was the sound
of someone whistling. As well as drowning his victims, he could steal a man’s
breath if he walked past.
Most advice was to drop your light and run. If the
Lantern Man still chased, then throwing yourself down and holding your breath
might work. Holding your breath appears multiple times in ghost lore across the
world, such as while walking through a graveyard in case you breathed in a spirit
(which is something I myself believed in when I was younger!) or to avoid being detected
by the hopping vampire jiangshi in China.
In popular media, folklore inspired video games have
featured the mechanic of holding your breath in the presence of supernatural
entities, for example in Red Candle Games’ Detention (set in Taiwan and also featuring a Lantern Man type spirit) and Wales Interactive’s newly
released Maid of Sker.
Some called the Lantern Man Jack O’ Lantern, though
this apparently infuriated him. When the marshes were aglow with many lights,
it was said multiple Lantern Men were roaming.
Who were these men and women who believed in the ghost
stories, though? In Lights On The Marsh, Laura’s father is a marshman who
vanished when she was a child. This was blamed on the Lantern Man, although
gossips in the village believed differently…
Marshmen were slightly better off than other labourers
living along the Broads, but they certainly had to work hard for their wage. No
matter the weather, which was often cold, damp and muddy, their tasks involved
tending to cattle, clearing obstructions from dykes, cutting reeds to supply
thatch for cottage roofs, and checking on drainage mills. Often their
designated area stretched for miles of isolated marshland. An example of how
marshmen lived can be found at Toad Cottage, How Hill.
Wherrymen were another iconic image of the Broads. They
would carry ice and wood along the rivers in their wherries, which were slim,
clinker-built vessels with a tar slickened sail and a Jenny Morgan weathervane
spinning on top. One of the last remaining wherries is the Albion.
Smugglers often enlisted these men to help them transport
their contraband further inland. Being caught by customs could be fatal for a
wherryman’s livelihood, the price being the destruction of their ship. One method
of avoiding being caught with the goods was by weighting barrels down in rivers
and using a small feather lure to mark the anchor point. This was known as ‘sowing
the crops’.
During the height of smuggling, local legends and
ghost stories became popular down the pub. In a smoky room before the calming
flicker-warmth of the fire, where night and the will o’ the wisps seemed
distant, villagers told stories of Lantern Men and Old Shuck.
It frightened sensible folk into hurrying to bed when
the moon winked and the roke clung like cotton to the trees. Any peculiar
lights or noises could be blamed on spirits, rather than a clumsy smuggler
dropping his lantern and setting his trousers on fire.
St Benet’s Abbey was originally a Benedictine
monastery founded around 1020AD. It is on a small island, which was once
called Cowholm, on the marshland near the River Bure. Artistic reconstructions suggest a thriving community with swathes of land to tend to
following the patronage of King Cnut. Now it is a mere ruin, with only a few
stone walls and indentations in the land to suggest what might have once been
there.
It survived Henry VIII’s dissolution of the
monasteries, but as people turned towards Protestantism the abbey fell to ruins
from neglect, its stones stolen away to form other buildings. However, the area
remains consecrated ground and the Bishop of Norwich holds a service there every
year.
Although it doesn’t feature in Lights On The Marsh, there
is another ghost who is known to wander the abbey grounds.
A monk was bribed by William the Conqueror to sneak
him inside so he could kill the other monks and take control of the monastery. The
monk’s reward for this treachery was the Normans turning around and stringing
him up over St Benet’s gate. Each year in May, his screams can be heard. A
second ghost, or possibly even the same one, is a monk riding in a boat with
his dog.
The most recognisable landmark at the abbey is the
mill, which is housed in the ruins of the gatehouse. St Benet’s mill was built
in the 1700s and it is one of the oldest in Norfolk. It was converted into a
drainage mill in the 1800s. The cap and sails were blown off by a storm in
1863.
Several artists, from John Sell Cotman to Thomas Lound,
have sketched and painted the mill. My biggest inspiration for Lights On The
Marsh’s setting was Henry Bright’s landscape painting of the drainage mill
during a storm in 1847. It must have been a striking sight while sailing past
in a wherry, perhaps even foreboding if it was late at night and the skipper
thought he had seen something writhing by the gate.
Of course, nowadays any floating orbs are blamed on
the random but natural ignition of marsh gasses rather than the Lantern Man.
But I much prefer the thought of spirits slithering through the green flecked
waters of the Broads. It paints an evocative picture of a person walking along
the Broads at night, alone with only their light. They don’t want to believe in
the stories, yet still shiver at something shifting amongst the reeds.
Whistling might steady their nerves, until they see the Lantern Man’s light
bobbing towards them...
