cuckfield

Cuckfield

What interests me especially is how the old lore 

tended to make ghost stories a little more bizarre. 

Take for instance the story of the haunting in the Tower

of London, where a group seated at a dinner table saw

a tube of liquid revolving in the air manifesting itself,

And sloshing around.

Or what about the ghost of a coal sack, 

which attacked and chased people walking 

through the streets at night.

That has to be one of the most weird hauntings ever.

It wouldn't sit well with the scientufic materialistic and prosaic

orientation of the mind of culture today.

Cuckfield's neighbouring village of Twineham can boast

another weird one, which has got into the fiction

of the supernatural a little more readily.

The Rectory has a number of ghosts, apparently, including

a black kid skin  glove, which crawls along the landing.

The rectory is worth a return visit, anyway,

 as it appears an active place.

 But for now, i'll stay with the general idea, 

given the association with witches noted at Wilmington Mill,

and the  Wesley Rectory, for instance, the witch's familiar

used to regularly creep into haunting stories,

and the spirit of a fast moving small animal

was often seen, usually by children.

Remember a witch was often supposed

 to take the form if a running hare to elude pursuit.

So what on earth would we make today of the tale of 

A haunting by Jef, the talking mongoose,

And to actually write a book about it?