"He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.” Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Eerie inns, cursed castles, wicked woods, grey ladies, black dogs, and red rooms. Plus Dracula Town, The City of 1,000 Ghosts, Jack the Ripper's pub, and the cobbled village where Henry James wrote Turn of the Screw. Explore England's most haunted places, while reading ghost stories by the famous authors who lived there and spinning your own dark yarns inspired by their work.
Fri. May 23 - Sat. June 7. APPLICATION LINK AVAILABLE SOON!
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| The Shambles, York, "City of 1,000 Ghosts" |
We'll start with a train journey north to "Haunted York," which claims to have a ghost on every street, home to the Shambles (said to be the inspiration for Harry Potter's Diagon Alley). Then it's up to Whitby for two nights (the town that inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula), to visit the pirate graveyard and the looming clifftop ruin of Whitby Abbey (as well as "Jacob's Ladder," the 199 steps that lead to it, up which bounded Dracula himself, disguised as a big black dog).
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| The clifftop ruin of Whitby Abbey |
Then it's down to Essex for ten days, where we'll write/workshop in the cafe's and pubs of Lewes, a hilly sixth century Saxon village with half beam bookshops, medieval streets, and an imposing Norman castle, all wedged between the bone white cliffs of the dreamy South Downs, With day trips to the highly haunted Arundel Castle, the Ten Bells Pub, and the Mermaid Inn (known as "the most haunted hotel in England," with its sliding wall panels, secret passageways, and priest holes).
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| The Mermaid Inn, Rye. "England's Most Haunted Hotel." |
Plus an intimate sea shanty "concert" by the Wellington Wailers at a haunted 200-year-old bayside pub ('Twas then I spied off the starboard side, a strange mysterious sight; I froze with fear as it drifted near like a ghost in the dark of night."), Sherlock Holmes' retirement cottage, a ghost walk of the Lanes (Brighton's historic haunted quarter), the Long Man of Wilmington (which Neil Gaiman interpreted as the guardian of the gate to Faerie in his Sandman series), Rudyard Kipling's sprawling lichen-covered manse (with its witch marks and hag stones), and Monk's House, where Virginia Woolf lived, wrote, and ultimately drowned herself by filling her pockets with stones and jumping into the nearby River Ouse. And so much more!
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| The Wellington Wailers at the haunted Duke of Wellington Pub |
More info soon. Interested? Write Aimee Labrie at al1048@english.rutgers.edu.
Note: "Things strange and unguessable..." is a phrase from Turn of the Screw by Henry James.