Since hallows eve and dark hours lengthen with days of grey mist, a feeling I can’t quite define, seems to whistle and wend its way through the dark narrow streets where the tall houses stare at each other, casting a shadow -filled pathway below.

But I know beneath my feet run smuggler’s tunnels and I know -because I have been told (and I have watched enough Scooby Doo episodes) – that in fact the stories of ghosts were inventions to keep uninvited interest away from the smuggled goods. I know these things rationally- but try telling my body not to shiver or to hold back my subconscious fears which chase me up the darkened clifftops away from the roar of the sea, towards my home.

‘We have our own ghosts’ I tell my bi-annual visitors blown in from smart city lives to access the lung of the Norfolk coastline. I know how odd I appear and join in the jests- the isolated Norfolk life I now lead immersed in the landscape, detaching me from reality – but we do. Have ghosts I mean. The screaming terror of the kids has died down and ‘a live and let live/die?’ attitude prevails. Husband nonchalantly reports the child ghost singing on the landing and scampering up the stairs and son is becalmed by my explanation that the ghost he saw looking at him over his bed is his guardian angel/spirit guide – pity the cat isn’t so easily reassured- she trembles and quakes when in that room. The orbs caught on camera also explain the cats’ weird staring at ‘nothing’ behaviours.

It seems there are indeed a few reported sightings of child ghosts in Cromer, (or Crowmere or Shipden or Shipden-juxta-Felbrigg -the names apparently Danish in origin). These reported sightings are unsurprising I suppose, as Cromer’s past superimposes itself on the present not least through the same recurring events. Over time the sea devours the coastline choosing Cromer to eat up lighthouses, grand houses, even whole villages. The church itself has existed 3 times – the first Shipden Church as recorded the Doomsday book, was washed away by the middle of the 14thC into the sea and the third is built on the remains of the second church.

A ghost child is said to have appeared to a caretaker clearing away the rubble from the damage done to the church by a Luftwaffe attack. The girl child rose high above him trailing white robes, the poor petrified man’s ears filled with her eerie sighing and moaning as she slit her throat- red blood gushing and running down into her white clothing. The townspeople were glad when that particular path across the graveyard was closed for good. And so with many tales left yet to tell of this raw brutal and unforgiving landscape, it is little wonder that people of past times thought of piers and horizons as ‘gateways’ to other worlds.