Blog of First Pages - A Ghostly Encounter

BURY ST. EDMUNDS

In the year of 1908

It was twelve months or more since I had left my tutoring post at the University of Cambridge. You may recall that I recorded in my journal the extraordinary events that befell me during a short vacation at Caister-on-Sea in the east of England. The experience of coming face-to-face with the supernatural had for many months quite an unsettling effect upon my mind. As a fundamental materialis,t I had comfortably reasoned away in the closet of my mind any belief in the hereafter, gods, ghosts and ghouls of any size or shape. The existence of a nether world which was inhabited by immaterial beings was to me absurd. To what purpose would these elements exist? So much nonsense is written about these things and sometimes even by meritorious professors who, during the day expounded on science, human history and rational philosophy and by night seemed to lose their wits and descend into sheer nonsense.
Look at Arthur Conan Doyle whose fictional hero Sherlock Holmes, unremittingly champions the high skills of forensic science, and robustly dismisses all kinds of sentimental notions and pseudo-magical deceptions; yet Doyle the creator of this arch-realist maintains in his private aspirations, a belief in Spiritualism, albeit after the untimely death of his wife Louisa which occurred only a short time ago. I can accept that the loss of a dearly beloved can lead one into the realms of misguided beliefs in heaven and life after death, because it is surely an assured way to assuage the pain and anguish of death, and the stark truth of human mortality. I read with sympathetic contempt of these situations that drive intelligent men into the mire and mists of worlds whose main currency is hocus pocus and mumbo jumbo and whose chosen language is utter gibberish. Why even the established Church of England entertains such spurious utterances, glossolalia, a babbling tongue in a non-existent language as the dictionary rightly defines it.

Since writing this first page Fred has completed over 15,000 words of this epic ghost story set in Edwardian Bury St. Edmunds. The first story 'Borders in the Mists' is available on Kinde for just 77p here http://tinyurl.com/7yap7lf