London Fortean Society presents: 'The Haunted Landscape' (filmed at Conway Hall on 20 November 2021).
Jeremy Harte - A Stake in the Landscape
Until 1823 it was the law that suicides should be buried in public disgrace, their bodies shovelled under the roadway and pierced with wooden stakes. Even at the time, this inhumanity looked baffling. Was it a survival from some more primitive time, with superstitious locals trying to pin down and exorcise a potentially harmful ghost? The old folklorists liked to think of suicide burial as something archaic, kept going by peasant ruthlessness and legal inertia into later, more merciful times. But they were wrong.
Jeremy Harte is a researcher into folklore and archaeology, with a particular interest in landscape legends and tales of encounters with the inhabitants of other worlds. His book 'Explore Fairy Traditions' won the Katharine Briggs award of the Folklore Society for 2005, and his other publications include Cuckoo Pounds and Singing Barrows, and The Green Man. He is curator of Bourne Hall Museum in Surrey.
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