Daily Ghost Anthology 32
The 32nd issue of the Daily Ghost magazine brings together all the Deeping St Jude folk horror stories. Please share them if you enjoy them and encourage other people to subscribe.
Just one week to go!
The mission was to write an original ghost story every day for a year - and on Sunday 4 July that will be ‘Mission Accomplished.’
Most of the stories are already written, but I’m taking extra time (and twice as many words - 800) on the last one, to make it a bit special.
Counting down the time …
I’ve wrapped up a lot of the series established over the last year and this week saw the last instalment of the ghoul-haunted village tales from Deeping St Jude.
This week’s magazine anthologises all the stories. There isn’t a strict order to them - they’re more like stand-alones linked by a setting and a sense of shared mythology, although hapless Courtney (introduced in the first story) transforms in unpleasant ways and the little girl from the first story reappears later, older and more tragic.
Please enjoy the series and savour the mist-shrouded weirdness of the East Anglian Fens.
Deeping St Jude Welcomes Careful Drivers
There's no shortage of endless lanes beside sunken fields in East Anglia. The villages often have these double-barrelled names, ending in the local church. St Jude, or Judas Thaddaeus, is the patron saint of lost causes - but I wonder if the church in Deeping St Jude isn't named after the other, more notorious Judas...
The shadows lengthened across the fens. Not a soul moved on the street. The windows were all dark.
Jesus, Courtney! Where are you?
“I’ll check inside,” I remembered her saying, finding the door to the Sedge Hotel open. “Someone will know directions.”
Women. Always so keen to ask for directions. We had fallen out over it, driving in furious silence, with me cursing the satnav. Then, suddenly, we were in Deeping St Jude, with a nearly empty tank and no phone signal. Not on any map, but sagging brick cottages, a dilapidated hotel and a church steeple like a preacher’s hectoring finger.
Still no Courtney. How long has it been?
I saw a pale girl in a dirty frock leave the old almshouse.
I lowered the window and called out.
“Which direction is the B1454?” No answer, so: “King’s Lynn? Anywhere?”
She approached the car and I noticed her leathery cheeks and bruised lips. No beauties in rural East Anglia.
“Take me with you,” she said – no, hissed.
“I don’t think your mother would like that.”
“She’s not coming back, your woman. Take me instead!”
Her little hand grabbed my collar. I struggled, but her grip was too tight. I flicked the switch and the window rose, pinning her thin wrist. Terror made me pitiless. I drove forward, with the horrible imp running beside, her fingers trapped in the door.
That’s when I saw them: faces, in every window; eyes like cold lamps, unkind and covetous.
I put my foot down. The girl fell away and Deeping St Jude disappeared from my rear view mirror.
When the car sputtered to a halt, I walked through the evening until I found a proper road. A pickup truck stopped for me and I insisted the old driver search for my girlfriend. We trundled back down the lane until it emerged near Burnham Market. We returned, to my waiting car. No village.
“Do you recall the name,” asked the old man “of your missing lady friend?”
But I couldn’t remember who or what I’d been looking for.
He hooked a chain to tow my car.
“I don’t like to be on these lanes at night,” he grumbled, as we pulled away. “Too close to Deeping St Jude for my liking.”
I nodded, reflecting on the odd names they give these funny little places, while I calculated the size of my breakdown bill.
The Bells of Deeping St Jude
Visitors to Deeping St Jude really should keep driving. This pair are obviously from outside the county. I’m enjoying adding a Lovecraftian element to Deeping St Jude’s strange goings-on, with the hint that, whatever’s being worshipped in that church, it isn’t a God the Archbishop of Canterbury would recognise.
It was a squalid little village but I was hungry and weary of the endless fens. Deeping St Jude had one hotel – the Sedge – but no one was about.
“They’re at Church,” said Gordon, pointing to the black steeple. A discordant peal of bells chimed with the insistence of a dull child.
The hotel was dark and fusty, but we sat at a table, trying to ignore the relentless bells. Presently a young woman in a disheveled dress emerged from the cellar. She stared at us stupidly.
“Is the kitchen open?” Gordon had to shout above the bells.
She shook her head. Her eyes brimmed with tears.
“What’s your name, dear?” I asked.
She looked perplexed, then answered, “Courtney.”
“We’d love a cup of tea, Courtney.”
She wandered away. Gordon mouthed ‘A Bit Simple’ but I shushed him.
On and on the bells chimed, rattling the window panes and echoing among the cobwebbed rafters.
“I’m going to stretch my legs,” said Gordon, “maybe take a look at this church business.”
It was awful sitting alone. I was glad when our waitress returned with a pot of tea, albeit no cups. She stared at Gordon’s empty seat.
Suddenly, the bells stopped. The silence seemed even more horrible.
“You must leave,” said Courtney.
“But we haven’t had our tea.”
“The service is over,” she said. “Get out of here,” she whimpered.
Then she walked down the steps into the cellar, pulling the door shut behind her with a crash.
It was unbearable sitting there alone, so I went out to the car. Someone approached down the middle of the road, weaving like a drunk. It was Gordon.
“Gordon, thank God. I don’t like this place.”
He stared at me stupidly.
“Did you find the church?”
He nodded. I hurried him into the car.
“It’s not really a church,” he said as he started the engine.
“What is it then?”
Deeping St Jude’s steeple moved into the rear-view mirror.
“Something…” he said, “older.”
Suddenly, that bell chimed again. Not a peal, but a steady chime, slow and dreadful, like a failing heart.
The car stopped.
“What are you doing?”
In the rear-view mirror, figures appeared. It looked like some sort of procession approaching.
“Gordon, get us out of here.”
But Gordon sat weeping in the driver’s seat, while the procession from the church drew closer, to the tolling of that hideous bell.
The Girl From Deeping St Jude
I feel a bit like H P Lovecraft or Stephen King, in my own little way, building up a fictionalised, eerie, ghost-haunted version of the Fens of East Anglia, and the odd mythology surrounding Deeping St Jude with its 'lamp-eyed' ghouls. I like this tale because it takes us outside the village itself and hints that its denizens might be capable of love, at least for a while. It’s in my mind that the young woman here is the child from the first story, now grown up.
You get a sense, with farmers, when the unspoken stuff is getting to them. I’ve walked into barns to find a pair of dangling feet slowly turning north-west to south-east. Farmers own guns, so sometimes you find them under the kitchen table.
I got that feeling about Ian Bell, alone for so long, so I took to dropping in when delivering the post, just for a chat.
Then she turned up in his life, the girl from Deeping St Jude.
Her name was Arabella. She looked like she drowned in that ditch Ian found her in and no living under his roof, no hot baths, no log fires, ever seemed to warm her. She was cold and clammy, with lank dark hair and a pinched face. But Ian loved her.
Loved her too much. But who am I to set limits on love? I bring the hospital appointments, the unwelcome test results, the letters of condolence. The dark earth of the Fens takes love and then yields it up and I was glad for Ian and his strange foundling woman. But I kept an eye out.
Arabella never came to the door. His little house became their fortress all summer long.
Then I met him one autumn morning, patrolling the fields with a shotgun loaded.
“A big dog,” he explained. “Arabella saw it. Eyes like lamps, she said. It ran off that way.”
“Deeping St Jude is that way.”
He shrugged unhappily. We both felt the year stumble past us towards its sorry end.
The next time I visited, my old instinct made me try the door. It was unlocked. Ian was in the kitchen, contemplating the barrel of his gun.
“They came last night,” he said. “They were in the fields, surrounding the house. Their eyes… Then the knock on the door. Heavy. Like something sodden. The stink. And no answer when I called.”
He levelled his gun at the door, then lowered it.
“But Arabella said, No. Said it was time. She kissed me goodbye.”
We listened to the clock ticking in the hall.
“Ian, you’re not going to do anything stupid?”
He said, “Like shoot myself?”
“Like go to Deeping St Jude to look for her.”
“No,” he said. “I won’t do that.”
I left him there, cradling his shotgun.
As I cycled away, the raucous crows were startled from their nests overhead.
Christmas in Deeping St Jude
A seasonal Deeping St Jude story, which doesn’t add much to the setting or its lore, but does at least show us characters from the earlier stories. Poor Courtney is starting to change …
I stumbled into Deeping St Jude after sunset, with the wind whipping across the Fens and Orion marching out of the eastern sky.
My clothes were soaked and torn from lurching through ditches, fences and hedgerows. Then the car had caught me in its beams and knocked me down the lane, flopping and bouncing like an eel on the line.
A squeal of brakes. The slam of a door. The patter of shoes. She bent over me, frantic with guilt. Then her shrill cry when I opened my eyes.
I brought her with me.
Looking down at her now, I wondered why I did that. For the first few miles, she tugged and twisted in my grip. She had battered by shoulder, kicked my shins. She even tried to bite me.
I think she realised then that my flesh was cold.
Then the pleading, the threats, the promises, the tears.
For the last hour, crossing rutted fields and flooded meadows, she’d been quiet. I’d forgotten about her. But there she still was: dangling, snivelling, tripping and falling. Her clothes were as filthy and torn as mine now.
I hauled her upright. We had arrived.
The village sagged under mildewed roofs. The church spire, darker than the night, soared into the solstice sky. The chime that had drawn me here rang out again.
There was light from one building, the hotel, The Sedge: I entered.
There were two women waiting: one of them, older, cupped her hand to her mouth at the sight of my helpless companion. The other was younger: her unblinking eyes gleamed faintly, a sign she was already changing.
“Help me,” my motorist called out to them.
The older woman looked distraught.
“Courtney?” she said to the younger one, who ignored her, pulling upon the doors to the function room. A smell rolled out: dense and sour, the smell of fen slime and slow rotting.
I shuffled inside, moving one mangled leg than another. The other guests turned their lamp-like eyes in my direction. They hissed through cold grey lips.
Each of them was sodden, mud-caked, shirts and dresses torn by the stumbling journey here. Dirt was under their nails where they had clawed their way out of the soft earth.
The doors slammed behind me and I tipped my companion onto the floor.
I had brought a midwinter gift to share.
Happy Birthday from Deeping St Jude
The trope of waking up and it was all a dream but, oh-no! you're repeating everything you did in the dream!!! Yes, it's an old trope, but it checks out. I saw it first when, as a child, I watched 'The Dead of Night' (1945) on late night TV. I remember a memorable version in 'Rude Awakening' (1980), an episode of the Hammer House Of Horror in which poor Denholm Elliot keeps murdering his wife.
It was my birthday, by the way …
The train sighed and shuddered. I awoke, confused, with my face pressed against the window. Outside was a platform and the sign: ‘Deeping St Jude.’
I was alone on the carriage and alone on the platform when I alighted. No ticket office; just a single flickering overhead light. A gravel path led towards the village. A solitary steeple rose accusingly against the evening sky.
I wondered if this was a mistake: should I get back on the train? Then the church bell reverberated through the dusk. It sounded melancholy, but with a ghoulish delight in its own grimness. I didn’t like it at all.
I resolved to find lodgings.
The lane emerged facing a small hotel, ‘The Sedge,’ which was the only building with lights on. The rest of the village drowsed under sagging thatch roofs. The only thing more troubling than the sullen silence was the thought of that bell chiming again.
An old receptionist greeted me inside. She smiled, I thought rather painfully.
“If you would sign the guest ledger, sir,” she said when I enquired after a room.
Her fingers shook as she handed me the pen. I noticed her nails, bitten to the quick, and bruises on her wrists.
“Do you serve dinners?”
“The buffet is in the function room, sir.”
Double doors nearby were hung with a limp banner, bearing the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY in dated lettering. A solitary balloon trailed limp and wrinkled from the ceiling.
I said, “There’s a function tonight?”
She smiled again and I realised most of her teeth were gone.
“Courtney will show you in.”
A young woman in dishevelled clothes emerged and opened the doors. No makeup could hide the shadows under her eyes.
The room beyond was in darkness.
I asked, “Whose birthday is it?”
“Why, yours,” said the receptionist.
“Mine?”
She pointed a quivering finger at my date of birth in the guest ledger.
“The other guests,” said Courtney in a cracked voice, “are waiting.”
I stepped into the room. I was not alone in here. The door clicked shut behind me. Shapes moved towards me. Lips smacked and the exhalation of their rank breaths was a rattling sigh.
Like the sighing of a train as it shuddered to a stop. I awoke in confusion with my face pressed against the window.
Outside was a platform and the sign: ‘Deeping St Jude.’
I had arrived at my destination.
A Wedding in Deeping St Jude
General Witchfinder Ross Cleaver reads this story. You can support General Witchfinders on Patreon or find them at www.generalwitchfinders.com.
This tale is really a variation on W.W. Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw (1902) where the wish to bring a dead loved one back from the dead misfires terribly, although in Jacobs' original story the grieving couple cancel the spell before the reanimated corpse can enter their house.
You are invited to the wedding of Maxwell and Anastasia …
Max and Annie had been crazy about each other since University. Asking me to be Best Man, that was a given. The haste was surprising. But the venue? Some tiny village in Lincolnshire. Max was from Sidcup. Annie’s Dad was from Belarus. What was going on?
“I read about this place,” said Max, as we drove past the sign welcoming us to Deeping St Jude. “It’s got a … an interesting history.”
We were a bit the worse for wear after last night’s Stag. No time for anything fancy, like strippers in Prague or a boat party in Riga. Just a pub crawl, then off to the Fens.
“So you thought, I’ll get married there, did you?” I said, “While writing your boring dissertation on 17th century witchcraft?”
But Max wanted me to pull over, so he could throw up into a ditch.
Deeping St Jude had one hotel, The Sheaf, with a receptionist named Courtney, who looked like she’d slept in a hedge. But we cleaned up and changed. There was a pavilion on the Green. The guests were waiting.
“Have you seen my daughter?” Annie’s Dad asked me, in his Bond Villain accent.
“Haven’t you?”
“Not a word.”
“Mister Zhuk, I’m sure she’s here.”
“But I’m her father,” he protested, looking lost and afraid.
I went to ask Max about Annie’s whereabouts, but the Vicar had arrived.
If he was a Vicar. Black robe and one of those shiny scarves with symbols on it, but he wore a ferocious mask. Or perhaps it was grinning.
“It’s a local tradition,” explained Max.
The guests were seated. The sun had dipped to the shadowy horizon. A procession approached: villagers in odd robes, wearing masks, and the Bride, in thick veils, stumbling like a drunk.
Annie – if it was Annie – reeked of soil. There was mud under her fingernails. She stooped, as if her spine twisted unnaturally.
“It was a motor accident,” Max whispered. “I walked away unharmed but Annie … I read about people buried in Deeping St Jude, how they come back …”
“Wilt thou have this flesh,” intoned the Vicar, in a voice like snakes uncoiling, “and commit thine own flesh unto her…?”
“The ring,” hissed Max, “quickly!”
But I stood, transfixed, as the Bride lifted her soiled veil, disturbing the host of flies that nested within.
Deeping St Jude Class Reunion
There's some inspiration here from Laird Barron's Mysterium Tremendum (2010), a truly demented Lovecraftian short story with a touching same-sex relationship at its core. I've purloined the closing scene, of the lover with the gun he won't use awaiting his boyfriend's return, but sprinkled some Deeping St Jude goodness (if that's the word) on top.
Last week, Howard came to the house. I saw him, from the top of the stairs, framed in the moonlight. I recognised his face. Not the face I knew at college. His real face.
I waited for him to call my name.
“Yad.”
That’s how he said it, as I passed him in the Student Union. I recognised him from Anthropology tutorial. He was tall and blonde and impossibly good looking.
I hadn’t come out yet.
“Yadid. Join us.”
It was easy. I joined Howard’s table. Later, we shared a kebab and kissed in the moonlight.
He was my first boyfriend. My first love.
Family drew us closer: we neither of us had one. At least, not one that accepted us. My parents were British-Pakistani: relaxed about wine but not about sex. Not same-sex anyway. Howard was from some backwater village in Lincolnshire, Deeping St Jude. The only one of his family to get an education.
“I escaped,” he joked. “I outran the dogs to get here.”
Neither of us went home at the holidays. We had each other. It was a sort of heaven.
Until Howard got sick.
It was a flu-bug that didn’t shift. He stayed in bed, with curtains closed, wearing shades and a face-mask.
“Don’t look at me,” he said.
His face was changing. I didn’t realise how much, until the night he left.
The bed was cold. There were noises outside. I opened the window and saw him, framed in the moonlight. I saw his new face. His real face. Then he left, with the others.
They had come to take him home.
I graduated. I blogged and freelanced. I met Rusul, who advised rich people on data security. We bought an old farmhouse together. It wasn’t heaven, but we were happy.
The first time I saw Howard, standing in the fields, watching the house, I persuaded Rus to buy a dog.
Then Howard appeared in the lane. No one knows what happened to the dog. I surprised Rus by getting a shotgun licence.
Now, on the nights when Rus goes away, I sit in the house, with a loaded shotgun on my lap. Or did. Until I saw Howard in the hallway and he called my name.
“Yad.”
So, I wait, with the shotgun leaning against the bed and the cartridges scattered on the floor.
I’m finally going to meet his family.
Deeping St Jude is a Neighbourhood Watch Area
It’s about time someone stumbled into Deeping St Jude who might actually be dangerous. Here were have a bunch of gangsters on the run with a car full of drugs and a duffel bag full of guns. It won’t do them any good, of course …
We bounced through the pot-holes on Dead Man’s Drove. Wojciech turned the car into a lane. We waited for the police to speed past.
I asked, “Where now?”
Scott pointed to the steeple beyond the trees.
It was a good place to lie low: some Fenland village with a single hotel called The Sheaf. Wojciech studied the mean cottages and sagging roofs under the threatening shadow of the church.
“Is like Poland,” he said.
We dragged the bags – 64 kilos of heroin! – up to the musty-smelling room and closed the thin curtains. Scott brought a duffel bag of iron; Ukrainian Sig Sauers and a Skorpion machine pistol.
I asked, “What we do now?”
“Relax.”
Scott flicked on the old-fashioned TV, but it showed only static.
“I’m hungry,” said Wojciech and he stomped downstairs, ignoring our shouts.
Wojciech was gone for ages. I kept watch on the silent street. The setting sun lengthened the church’s shadow.
“Where is everyone?”
“At home, watching football,” said Scott, kicking the hissing TV.
Wojciech returned and sat down heavily.
“What’s on the menu, Woy?”
The big Pole picked at his teeth then gripped his stomach.
“Cold meats,” he said. “Strange meats.”
He didn’t look well, but I was distracted by movement outside.
“Scott, there are people arriving.”
A crowd had assembled.
“We’re rumbled,” said Scott. He snatched up the Skorpion. “Woy, come with me.”
But Wojciech only bent over and threw up in the wastepaper basket.
“I’ll chase them away,” said Scott, loading the gun, “then you bring down the gear. We’re leaving.”
I refilled the bags with heroin bricks. Wojciech watched me.
He said, “I’m hungry.”
“You just ate.”
I tweaked the curtain. The crowd was hard to make out in the dusk. There was something weird about their faces.
“Is that …? Woy, come here!”
“I’m hungry.”
“Shut up about that! Scott’s down there, in the crowd.”
Scott’s face stared up at me, but his eyes were strangely altered.
“I’m hungry.”
“There’s a Twix in the car. Come on!”
Wojciech blocked the door when I tried to leave.
He said, “Everyone hungry.” I noticed how dirty his teeth were and how long. “I ate last of the meat.” His eyes sparkled. “But now, is more meat.”
I picked up a gun and backed away. Down below and on the creaking stairs, footsteps approached, many footsteps, the whole village convening for a long-awaited feast.
Lockdown Ends for Deeping St Jude
Is that the last tale from Deeping St Jude? It feels appropriate that the ghouls should break out, even discover the joys of parenthood (though what exactly they need a live healthy baby for is another matter).
“It has to come down.”
The scarecrow was one of a half dozen on Magdalen Farm, all facing St Jude Fen and the accusing church steeple beyond.
“You don’t want to go moving ‘em,” our neighbour Wilkins had told us. “It’s in the lease, it is, keeping them scarecrows up, seeing as you’re right near them,” and he tilted his head towards Deeping St Jude, the village that the locals refused to discuss.
I had better plans: cash crops, a quick sale and back to the city. We weren’t settling here. Barbara wasn’t a farmer’s wife, a “breeder” as we liked to joke. We pulled down three scarecrows in an afternoon. I was on the ladder, wrestling with the fourth.
“Help me out, Barbara!”
She stood at the ditch where our field ended. She seemed to be listening.
“There’s something …” Barbara replied, “something I just need to …”
She stepped into the fen and the coiling mists. The Deeping St Jude church bell chimed. The oppressive note throbbed in the air.
I built a bonfire for all the stinking scarecrows. Night fell and the phone rang in the hall. I expected it to be Barbara, wandering lost on some country lane.
“You bloody fool!” It was Wilkins’ voice, cracked between anger and terror. “You’ve let ‘em loose! They’re in the fields. They – !”
The line went dead.
I startled at a rapping on the door.
Even in the gloom, I could see Barbara’s clothes were filthy. There was dirt in her hair.
“You look like you’ve been buried alive!”
“Invite me in, Robert.”
Her voice sounded odd, like she was eating. I imagined something dropped from her lips. A worm.
“What? Of course you can come in!”
I held open the door and flicked the light switch, but the house stayed dark. Power cut?
Barbara stepped inside. She unbuckled her jeans.
“Barbs, what – ?”
She kicked them away and pulled off her soiled sweater. Her skin was grey in the moonlight and crusted with earth.
“You took down the guardians, Robert.”
I backed away. She advanced until she stood naked and cold as old rags in my arms.
She whispered, “We need a baby. A healthy baby.”
She pressed her lips to mine. Something slipped across my cheek. A worm.
“Make a baby, Robert.”
Far away, across the unwatched fields, the church bell tolled, insistent and demanding, on and on.