The Ghost of a Place (2)

I woke last night in the middle of the night and this is always a great time to think. I began to think about writing and some of the recent blog posts I've done on www.tonywalker.live.

I was trying to find what essence that is in common between all the things I do and write. I was listening to a marketing podcast by some guy whose name I forgotten – but he was speaking a lot of sense, at least it seemed to me. He said that if you listen to someone talking. then you will find what they're interested in. He said some people will always talk to people about parenting or sports, or cars of writing. That's how you can identify their key themes.

In my case it's always been about ghosts, the paranormal,the feeling that you get in certain places. And that really is the key theme in my work. I see that I write about places I've been and when I wonder why I've gone to these places it's because of this feeling of numinosityy that I am looking for. In the ancient cultures of Europe and Asia and America the Native Americans and the South American native peoples and in Australia, in fact all over the world there are certain places which are set apart is being sacred.

This is the Temenos - the sacred lying around the place where people went to see the gods. And I know that I've always been interested in going to places like that in the UK - at Glastonbury, Iona Lindisfarne - in fact the whole of Wales for me - Cornwall, the list goes on. And when I go on holiday abroad to Japan are Europe or America I find myself going to temples and sacred sites.

I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I used to run ghost tours. How that started it was that I wanted to go to these places myself and show people what there was to be seen or more exactly what there was to be felt in them. You may have read about the dragon energy in the stone circles. This was a project done in the 1970s and that they found this bizarre energy in certain places that was partly electromagnetic. I had a funny experience this year at Avebury stone circle in the south of England. And here there is a village have - a pretty, old village – surrounded by stone circle and I was trying to find with my compass at East and kept spinning round it was most bizarre.

So,  I used to run goes tours and I used to go to old castles and very atmospheric buildings and put on these Cthulhu mythos murder mysteries. That was set in the 1920s so I got to got to dress up but instead of being a Miss Marple or Agatha Christie thing it ended up being some horrible tentacled monster or a Dimensional Shambler going to get you. It was great fun but it was an attempt to artificially create this feeling of the Other. And I see that in my writing - I tend to go to that again and again/  I tend to talk about places in my writing very specifically and link it to this feeling of something else being there. Now this could be a monster or a ghost or just a feeling that there is some intelligence that that isn't human. And I guess ultimately I'm looking for God. Whatever that means.

But how does that link to this blog? I think that I'm trying to share with you my discoveries - so my discoveries about books and films and especially places where we can get that special feeling that there may be something there , something more mysterious something that reminds us that we not alone that there is an intelligence in this world that is in human

By the way, did you hear that we've found signals from aliens finally?

Follow me on Twitter for a lot of tweets about this kind of stuff @bigtonywalker

The Ghost of a Place

I notice that in my writing I am often very specific about places. The train stops at Craven Arms; he navigates from Glasgow Central to Glasgow Queen Street station; his office is on Bedford Square; he lives in St John’s Wood and drives down past Point Lobos on the Pacific Coast Highway. Places are important to me.

In fact, I have often wondered whether places have souls. This year, the beloved Sheila and I travelled to Great Malvern to climb the Malvern Hills  (from the Welsh Moelfryn – bald hill – I’m interested in words too, but you knew that.)

Then we went through Gloucestershire (see I’m at it again) Worcestershire, with a brief dip into Herefordshire before hitting Somerset and Glastonbury. As part of the trip we went to Stonehenge and Avebury before coming back through the Cotswolds on a sad and rainy Brexit day in Stow on the Wold then up to Cumbria and across into Scotland for a weekend in Kirkcubright.   Some of these places breathe when we’re not looking. I’m sure of it.

In a previous career, not wholly unrelated to my writing, I was a tour leader for ghost tours. And from the age of a kid right up to dotage, I’ve stood by lakes and watched the snow come in, or on mountains feeling the wind, or in the middle of a marsh calf deep in peat,  or by the sea when the waves are breaking from Ireland (or even in Ireland watching the phosphorescence off the coast of Connemara).  But the feeling I get in these places, where does it arise?

Is it from the places themselves – so Glastonbury, or Tara or Whitby (or Jerusalem when woken by the call to prayer) – is it in the places – the dragon energy – that we feel. Does this cause the shiver in the haunted house, or do we take the haunting there ourselves?  My rational brain tells me the haunting is all our own, but my heart tells me the world breathes. I’m heart over head every time. Except when I’m not. What about you?