Halloween has a lot to answer for. It's yet another opportunity for supermarkets to pimp out lurid coloured plastic crap to kids. It's the subject of the worst series of Simpsons episodes ever. It doesn't even get you a day off work. But I still find myself drawn to the annual ritual.
It's pleasing to mark the beginning of winter and the drawing in of night with those pumpkin smiles glowing in defiance of the darkness. And when demons and ghouls are in the air, so too are ghost stories, their chilly pleasure only heightened by sunless skies and the newly bleak British landscape. While Whitby remains the ultimate destination for literary ghost-chasers, for quieter chills, as I discovered last weekend, Aldeburgh has a lot to offer.
In summer, this is a warm little place, so bright with flowers and buckets and spades that even the frosty London-by-sea boutiques and 4x4 drivers do little to dispel the sunny charm. But by late October, all that has changed. The main street funnels winds that blow direct to the Suffolk coast from Siberia and no amount of fish and chips can dispel their bite. Emptied of picnickers and buffeted by the grey North Sea, the shingle beach is desolate. It's possibly even more beautiful than it is in summer, but in a haunting way. It provokes a shiver both mental and physical – one entirely fitted to the setting of MR James's wonderful short story, "A Warning to the Curious".
The fun thing about Aldeburgh and "A Warning to the Curious" is that you can follow the story's progress almost exactly. The town is clearly recognisable from the description James gives of his fictional equivalent, Seaburgh, while "The Bear Inn" has a clear counterpart in The White Lion (where James in fact used to stay on his regular visits to the town). This hotel has suffered slightly from a Best Western makeover, but it's still easy enough to imagine the typically fusty academic types who narrate James's story sitting in one of the curious residents' sitting rooms beside the main vestibule. Easy, too, to follow the action out of the warmth of the White Lion, through the churchyard, up a claustrophobic path "with close high hedges" on to the ridge (now wooded) where the story's rash hero digs up an ancient Anglo Saxon crown – and with it a whole peck of trouble. Finally, the beach where this trouble kicks in is almost exactly as James describes. I didn't see any of the old fortifications that the narrator encounters, and the looming presence of Sizewell up the coast adds a new sinister edge all of its own, but otherwise, on the sand at the edge of the sea, cut off from the town beneath the steep shingle bank, it's easy to feel the "loneliness" that James evokes so well.
Of course, I was more fortunate than those in James's story. No mists rolled in and no shadowy figures came to lure me to my doom. But I could well imagine them – and I did come across something mildly spooky. From a distance this looked like the wreck of a boat, but as I approached it resolved itself into a giant stainless steel scallop, pierced with the words: "I hear those voices that will not be drowned."
Later investigation revealed this to be a sculpture made by Maggi Hambling. The portentous quote is from local man Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes (in turn taken from a poem by George Crabbe). Prosaically enough the lovely thing has frequently been vandalised and was the subject of a concerted Nimby campaign when it was first erected a few years ago.
Approaching it unawares as I did, however, with a head full of spectres and MR James, it only added to the charge in the landscape. Those strange words in particular were something to mull over as I turned back for a reassuringly stodgy Sunday roast at the White Lion, well content with my morning's literary ghost-chasing, and already working up an appetite for more. To which end, I open it up to you. Any good recommendations for ghostly reading, places or better still a combination of the two?
