Haunted King’s Lynn

The west Norfolk coastal town of King’s Lynn is a place to go looking for ghosts in the bleakness of early new year.

Centred around a hub of antique buildings, the older houses on its windswept streets are characterised by stylish crow-stepped roofs more reminiscent of Bruges than any other East Anglian scene. Established at a river mouth, it carries a sense of marginality during the winter months, bordering upon the great estuary basin known as the Wash, which empties out into the North Sea. To the south, east and west, King’s Lynn was once surrounded by treacherous marshlands and quaking fens now temporarily tamed by modern drainage, with the river links down to what were once the flourishing ports and islands of Littleport and Ely. These connections enabled trade with northern European countries, leading to the formation of the Hanseatic League with the Baltic states. Formerly known as Lynn in the early Middle Ages, the town commemorates its now faded wealth and its royal status granted in 1204 by King John. Perversely, the very situation which ensured its mediæval prosperity betrayed the infamous monarch a dozen years later, when, in 1216, his jewels and treasure were lost irrevocably through his baggage train being engulfed during a crossing of the perfidious sands of the Wash. The same sea remains deceptively glittering and lapping around these shores, periodically transforming into irresistible tides accelerated by wind and storms that go on to wreak havoc upon the land.

The last centuries have witnessed