Lights On The Marsh - The People's Friend

 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 you can subscribe at: https://www.thepeoplesfriend.co.uk/

 

Illustration by Sailesh Thakrar

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...