Seaton Delaval Hall

A signficant return to Seaton Delaval Hall. I dreamt about it only a few nights ago, when I drove past with my wife and daughter on our return to Whitley Bay. It's time to take note when a location recurs so soon. The haunted hall, much like it used to do in real life, offered the rooms out to guests for the night, so they could enjoy a spooky experience. As we were still holidaying in Whitley Bay, we decided to visit the hall to see what it was like inside. There were only two rooms available to stay in, both in the central building, on the top floor.

The main room, and the one in which most people stayed, was an expansive loft, with rough wooden floorboards and splintery beams. Guests were expected to bring their own tents to the unfurbished space, which would typically be set up in the middle of the floor. This attic was pitch black, lit only by whatever light the campers brought with them, in this case, a small paraffin lamp. There were no windows, yet around the circumference of the loft, the floor ended, falling away into blackness. And black it was readers, blacker than anything I had ever experienced in dreams or the waking world. A malevolent presence hung about the place, and it was said that many a visitor experienced terrors beyond their wildest imaginings.

The loft was reputed to be the site where the White Lady had originally comitted suicide, after discovering that her baby was dead, throwing herself from a window, which had since been boarded up. Part of me knew I was dreaming, so, beckoned by the irresistable darkness where the floor fell away to meet the sloping roof, I threw myself into the void. My reasoning was that I would die and respawn. But panic filled me as I fell, into the soft, musty darkness. Down, down I went, into the fabric of the house, inside the walls, irretrievable and choking, sinking into the ashes and dust and fouling tar. It was a horrible situation, and an awful way to go, as my wife and daughter waited above. 

I inhaled mouthfuls of the noxious blackness, filling my lungs and hoping for a swift death. I've never died in a dream before, but this time I did. My death was so traumatic, my unconscious brain dragged me out, back to the loft. I did not experience relief, but rather fear that my daughter might accidentally fall in next and experience similar suffering. Her small body would never be found, not even if the entire hall were to be demolished, so deep and claustrophobic were those shadowy recesses. It was like the out-of-bounds, liminal sections in video games, uncoded and inaccessible. A Nutty Putty hell.

We left the horrific loft to check out the other room available to guests. This one was a proper room, with a double bed, curtains, and some furniture. It was a small room, designed for less adventurous couples who wanted a more comfortable stay. There was a large round window with spokes, such as might be found in a clocktower. Despite the admittance of light, and the domestic comforts, the close proximity to the loft exuded enough evil energy that we had no desire to spend the night or remain a moment longer. I told Li how terrifying it must be to stay in those quarters. On the way out, I wrapped myself in an old fashioned night dress and pretended to scare our daughter as the White Lady.

Osgood Tarsiers

Osgood Smiths is a confectionary warehouse in Colchester where I worked for a large part of my teenage years. I continued working there during my first year at universisty to pay for my fees. It was a miserable place, with tedious, backbreaking work assembling sweet, crisp, drink and cigarette orders for local newsagents. I still dream about the place now and again, and the dreams are always just as boring as the reality. Last night I was back, post university, pursuing the same relentless, mindnumbing order assemblage. This time there was a difference, in that Sam Hearn, a former university friend, also had a job there. We were communicating through headsets, despite it being his day off. 

A typical shift would involve taking a paper order from the tray on the boss's desk and having to hunt down the items in the warehouse, keeping them on a pallet ready for packing They would then be strapped up into bundles on a machine, shrink wrapped, then labelled, scanned, and entered into an invoice on an old LED computer with a black screen and green letters. There were now animals in the warehouse, primates and parrots, which customers could order to buy. I was going through my rounds when I noticed an order for two tarsiers on my clipboard. A tarsier is a small, nocturnal primate from Southeast Asia. I found the ones I was looking for in a corner of the warehouse, near the Coca Cola bottles. They were clinging to a long wire branch, covered in cobwebs and clumps of their moulted, woolly grey fur.

I was a little bit scared of these bug-eyed, scratchy-clawed critters, so rather than attempt to pick them up directly, I took hold of the wire branch they were clinging to and carried it back to my pallet. On the headset, Sam Hearn was talking about how his favourite animal order to assemble was a 'blue monkey.' My sister, Fallon, was hovering near my pallet, slacking off, and she came over to inspect the tarsiers. We noticed that they had shed their tails. These were eventually found on the dirty warehouse floor, like little brushes. I was able to re-attach them to the primates, as though with velcro. The tarsiers leapt onto my chest and I began to wonder how I was supposed to get them ready for packing. I did not want to ask In the Corner, the giant boss who ran the warehouse.

Return to Whitley Bay

This year, all going well, I plan to take a short holiday at Whitley Bay, in Newcastle. I lived there for four years when I was young, and although I do not have many pleasant memories of the place, it was after all, a coarse and anti-intellectual coal-mining community back then, it does feature as a prominent location in the novel I'm writing. I therefore plan to return for research purposes. A few nights ago I returned there rather earlier than I had anticipated, in the land of nod. 

In the dream, I drove there with my wife and daughter, a long journey from the south coast. My parents are planning to come with us in real life, but in the dream, I had forgotten to make plans with them. I was sending them Whatsapp messages to the family group, throughout the dream. The first recognisable location we drove past was Seaton Delaval Hall. I explained to my wife that as a boy I was driven past this foreboding mausoleum on my way to school every morning, eels twisting themselves into knotted nerves in my belly, for it was a grey and vicious school, and I hated it. 

Each morning, as we approached the gravel drive, where we would have a brief glimpse of the estate, walled in by trees, we would crane our necks and frantically scan the many windows, seeking a glimpse of the fabled White Lady. Like so many of these stately homes, she was reputed to haunt the grounds at night, and could often be seen by locals standing at an upstairs window. None of us ever did see her, but that didn't curb our enthusiasm. I explained to my daughter on the back seat that there was a ghost in the building, passing on the excitement to the next generation.

Our glimpse of the hall was over, and we were on the stretch of road that led to my old secondary school, Seaton Sluice Middle School. A terrible place if ever there was one, but I wanted to see it again. It was a weekend and the school was closed, but the gates were open and we were able to go in to explore. We explored the canteen, a place I don't have any memory of, but in the dream, I was surprised to see that nothing had changed from my 'dream memory.' The old plastic tablecloths were still draped over the table, showing their age, a polar theme stamped upon them, ice floes and seals. 

We left the slightly creepy canteen behind and reached the seafront, where there resided the iconic Spanish City, a former amusement park with an elaborate entrance resembling a Sultan's summer palace, bleached white. The place had seen better days, and now resembled a crumbling ruin with chipped paint and exposed meshwork. The whole promenade was dead, a forgotten glimpse into a past that had not moved on. Lonely, bleak, and utterly uncompromising in its melancholia, I watched the tired sand dunes as we drove farther up the coast, seeking out our budget hotel.

Cooksbridge Condors

It was a grey sort of day, and I was looking at the garden through the patio windows when I noticed two rather large birds in the field beyond the fence. You know how your eye is instinctively drawn towards anything out of the pale? Well it was this scenario. "Li, come and look at these weird birds!" I called to my wife, who came over. The birds were larger than pheasants, the birds we're used to seeing in the field, and far more rotund, almost like turkeys. Their feathers were speckled brown, like a hen's, but their heads and necks were bald and wrinkled. Sexual dimorphism indicated that a male and female were present. After pecking around in the ditch, they waddled up the bank and into our garden. It was then I could identify them as condors.

Condors are large birds. The Andean condor has one of the largest wingspans of all flying birds, and the largest of all raptors. I do not know what species these were, but as they drew nearer to the glass doors, I realised there was something monstrous about them. I got my phone out to take photos, but as is always the case in dreams, the camera wouldn't work. The condors had spotted us, and rather than take off, as most birds would, they came closer still, right up to the glass. They had long, hideous crocodilian snouts, brimming with sharp teeth. Their snouts clattered against the window as they tried to bite us. Eventually, when they realised they weren't getting through, they wandered off.

Next to visit our garden was a huge fuzzy Procoptodon, a kind of prehistoric kangaroo. It bounded into the middle of the lawn, turned to look at me with its bear-like face, then leaped away again. I think I may have managed to get a photo this time. Later on in the dream, more exotic creatures made an appearance in the field. They were peafowl-like birds, equipped with razor spurs and shimmering, metallic tail feathers. Quite a curious assemblage.