King’s College is perhaps Cambridge’s most iconic and well-known college. Trinity, Queens’ and St John’s may be larger and richer but King’s boasts unquestionably the finest building in Cambridge in the form of the college chapel, one of the great masterpieces of English architecture dating from the fifteenth century. The chapel took almost a hundred years to build and it shows in the way that it towers magnificently over every other building in central Cambridge, a symphony in Late Gothic design. It has a world-famous choir to boot, whose Christmas Eve service is broadcast across the world to an audience numbering in the hundreds of millions each year. For connoisseurs of supernatural literature this college is best known as the home of M R James, whom many regard as the author of the best ghost stories in the English language, but King’s also has an additional claim to fame in the realm of the paranormal: The Gibbs Building, one of the most haunted locations in Cambridge.
The Ghost of the Gibbs Building
7 Oct
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- Categories Folklore, Ghost City, Haunting, Mythology, Sightings, Tall Tale, Urban Legend
The Incomparable M R James
20 SepI’ve been looking forward to this one…
Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) is generally acknowledged as the founding father of the ghost story as it is known today. The son of a clergyman raised in rural Suffolk, England, M R James attended prep school at Eton and it was here that he discovered traditional ‘gothic’ ghost tales full of the old trappings of antique castles, terrified maidens and spectres clanking chains. He decided to try his own interpretation of the genre – one of plausibility, actuality and malevolence more suited to 20th century readers – when he later became a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. The publication of his first collection of ghostly tales in 1904 met with an enthusiastic public response. An antiquarian by nature, James was a master of topography, scholarly detail and seemingly authentic documentation, which appealed to the audience of sophisticated modern readers that he sought (even the least of his stories exhibits a craftsmanship and attention to detail that must be the envy of more hasty and prolific writers). James also inspired countless other ghost story writers, who to this day owe a debt to his conception of the form (in his own words – “Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way… and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage”).
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Tags: Cambridge, College, Ghost Stories, Lost Hearts, M R James
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- Categories Book, Horror, Review, Short Story
Places to Visit 1
16 SepIn what will become a regular feature on this site, I will be reviewing some of my favourite places to visit, including coffee shops, restaurants, museums and more, both all over this country and beyond. As a special treat you get three reviews for the price of one today!
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Tags: Cambridge, Chiang Mai, Chiang Mai Soup Kitchen, coffee shop, Indigo, Indigo coffee shop, Joe and the Juice, Juice Bar, Oxford, Oxford Circus, soup kitchen, Thai, Thai restaurant
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- Categories Review
An exorcism in Cambridge?
11 Sep
I’ve lived in Cambridge for about fifteen years but it’s only recently, much to my own surprise, that I’ve discovered that as well as being a famed university town and centre of technology, it is also reputedly one of the most haunted locations in the British Isles and has been the setting for a wide variety of supernatural phenomena over the centuries!
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Tags: Arthur Gray, Book, Cambridge, College, E F Benson, Exorcism, Ghost, Ghost Stories, Ghost Story Writers, Ghosts, Haunting, Hauntings, Horror, M R James, Paranormal, Student, Supernatural
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- Categories Ghost City, Haunting, Sightings, Tall Tale, Urban Legend
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H P Lovecraft
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The Dunwich Horror
The Dunwich Horror was written by H P Lovecraft in August 1928 and is considered one of the core tales in his Cthulhu mythos. There are several significant literary influences on the tale. The central premise – the sexual union of a ‘god’ or monster with a human woman – is taken directly from Arthur […]
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At the Mountains of Madness
At the Mountains of Madness is a novella by horror writer H P Lovecraft, written in 1931 and first published in Astounding Stories. The story is a summation of Lovecraft’s lifelong fascination with the Antartic, beginning from the time when he had followed with avidity reports of the explorations of Scott, Amundsen and others in […]
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Lovecraft and the Bard of Auburn
I’ve made mention before of the Lovecraft Circle, the group of visionary young American writers who, in the early years of the 20th century, contributed their horror stories to pulp magazines such as Weird Tales and Black Cat. Whilst Robert E Howard and H P Lovecraft himself would go on to become the most famous […]
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The Horrors of H P Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, where he also lived for most of his life and eventually died in 1937. Despite his relatively short life and modest literary output – three short novels and about sixty short stories – he left an indelible stamp on the field of supernatural […]
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