Since the 1980s, the ancient county of Essex has acquired an unflattering image as an urban sprawl populated by ‘Essex men’ and ‘Essex girls’. But away from the built-up suburbs, there still exists an older and mysterious land of villages and hamlets. Not surprisingly, Essex still has its share of ghosts, and in this book Wesley Downes recalls his 60 years’ pursuing them around the county, taking us back to a time when investigation was a calmer, more solitary pursuit, free from orbs on digital photographs and Most Haunted hysterics.
This book confirms that one rarely encounters a ghost when on an investigation. Wesley Downes saw his first apparition quite unexpectedly while cycling along a road at Ardleigh in 1946, that of a boyhood friend killed in the D-Day landings. Manifestations tend to be encountered when least expected, though the last story details strange clicks and footsteps the author heard during a vigil at a churchyard at Wickhams Bishop, along with a team from BBC Radio Essex. An unusual apparition was his sighting of two luminous spots like eyes floating along a highway at Clinghoe Hill near Colchester during the 1950s. The author makes the extraordinary suggestion that these lights (also seen simultaneously by a relative travelling with him) represented the ghostly eyes of deer killed in a collision with a stage coach. On investigations, Wesley Downes has also encountered sensations of presences, cold spots and odd poltergeist phenomena surrounding a clock. However, most of the stories are derived from witness interviews rather than direct personal experience. A handful have been detailed elsewhere, such as the haunted Saxon chapel and adjacent wildfowler’s cottage at Bradwell on Sea – see In Search of Ghosts (1969) and Essex Ghosts (1974) by James Wentworth Day.
One reservation is the omission of the precise location of many of the haunted sites described. The identity of some witnesses is also obscured. Of course, if witnesses request anonymity, one should honour their wishes, and in some cases it is understandable, as with a haunting connected to a double murder and suicide in Chelmsford in the 1970s. But such reticence does preclude further investigation. This is regrettable, since many of the stories presented here are very interesting indeed, and surely deserve further study when current sensitivities have faded.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed this book greatly, and my major regret is that it is only 96 pages long. I am sure the author must have many more stories to share. During the early 1970s, he ran the Clacton-based Ghost and Occult Research Society. In the 1980s, he was involved with the Ghost Club and then, in the 1990s, with the splinter Ghost Club Society. He also published local pamphlets and magazines devoted to the paranormal. So my hope is he will write a further volume of memoirs, and preserve his Essex ghost-hunting files for posterity.
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