Witching Spiders from Suffolk August 13, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
This witching story from the late seventeenth-century is interesting for two reasons: first because it is inherently weird and creepy; second because it may be the source for one of the greatest twentieth-century horror stories. Frightened of spiders? Then go click away.
At St. Edmund’s Bury, in Suffolk, Sept. 6, 1660, in the middle of the Broad Street, there were got together an innumerable company of Spiders of a redish colour, the spectators judged them to be so many as would have filled a Peck; these Spiders marched together and in a strange kind of order, from the place where they were first discovered, towards one Mr. Duncomb’s house, a member of the late Parliament, and since Knighted; and as the people passed the street, or came near the spiders, to look upon so strange a sight, they would shun the people, and kept themselves together in a body till they came to the said Duncomb’s house, before whose door there are two great Posts, there they stalled, and many of them got under the door into the house, but the greatest part of them, climbing up the posts, spun a very great web presently from the one post to the other, and then wrapt themselves in it in two very great parcels that hung down near to the ground, which the servants of the house at last perceiving, got dry straw and laid it under them, and putting fire to it by a suddain flame consumed the greatest part of them, the number of those that remained were not at all considerable; all the use that the Gentleman made of this strange accident, so far as we can learn, is only this, that he believes they were sent to his house by some Witches.
And the story? When Beach read this he thought immediately of M.R. James ‘the Ash Tree‘, one of James’ very, very best. Published in 1904, the AT describes the revenge of a witch on an Suffolk family who had had her killed. The witch gets her own back by marshalling a series of kitten-sized spiders that live in an Ash Tree and who go and kill the family heirs. The story is set at Castringham Hall that is just outside Bury St Edmunds. Either James had read this story (in original or copied out) or there are a body of legends around Bury involving witch’s spiders: can anyone help, drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com.
It appeared first in Mirabilis Annus Secundus (1662); it was then taken up into County Folk-lore for Suffolk: Suffolk was repeatedly used by James for his stories.
PS in finishing this Beach finds that the great Jacqueline Simpson got to it first.
