The Wreck of the Lodewijk and Other Ghostly Stories

By George Knight

Gloucestershire author George Knight makes his fiction-writing debut with these four brief, haunting tales in the highest traditions of the English ghost story. From the Tube to the crypt of a country church, from the North Sea strand in East Anglia to the stormy shores of the Hebrides, there are powers beneath the earth and in the air and upon the waters which bode not well for the unwary. It were wise not to look behind you at this season, from All Hallows to Christmastide, when revenants and worse do prowl....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bapton Books
• Release date: Oct 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370696574

George Knight

George Knight lives and works in Gloucestershire and has for many years loved the Middle Ages, Central Asia and the Silk Road, Rudyard Kipling, books old and new, lightly worn learning, Chinese tea, classical music (especially Bach, Vivaldi, Albinoni, Mozart and Beethoven), BBC Radio 4, cookery (although more with enthusiasm than skill) and Islay single malt whisky.He has long been an enthusiast for the ghost stories of M. R. James and still remembers the effect of first reading the Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories and the work of Jorge Luis Borges.He would love to be able to move to Italy and write in the sunshine, like Ernest Hemingway.

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The Wreck of the Lodewijk and Other Ghostly Stories

George Knight

Bapton Books

Copyright © 2016 by Bapton Literary Trust No 1 (for George Knight)

All rights reserved

Smashwords Edition

First Edition

Book design by Bapton Books

A note to the reader: it is the aspiration of this imprint, small though Bapton Books be, to have as few errors and literals – 'typographical errors', misprints – as occur in any average Oxford University Press publication (which, alas, in these thin and piping times, gives us a margin of perhaps five or ten). Any obliging corrections shall be gratefully received.

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Acknowledgements

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my mother for encouraging me to get back into fiction writing; she is, however, not to blame for what follows… I'd also like to thank the wonderful Katie for her support. My thanks to Gervase Wemyss and Markham Pyle at Bapton Books for their patience, support, and good advice. And last but not least, my thanks to J&C McCutcheon Collection for permission to use the image on the front cover.

Contents

The Wreck of the Lodewijk

St Oswald's

Underground

Sutherland Star

The Wreck of the Lodewijk

The church stood on the landward side of the little coastal town, an early Victorian creation on the site of another, earlier building that was commemorated on the signboard that stood by the dark wooden lychgate, and in the difference in the ages of the memorials in the churchyard, the carving on some rougher and considerably less legible than on others.

An ancient yew stood in the far corner and dropped its thin leaves onto a mound just beyond the wall. The laminated one-page history of the church that he had found a copy of on a table at the back of the nave described the mound as supposedly being the grave of a notorious local highwayman from the seventeenth century.

The memorial was a rectangular structure of white marble, with a weeping angel standing on top, and stood by the wall at the edge of the churchyard. The name of the ship, a Dutch name, Lodewijk, the date, and the names of the lost crew members were engraved into the stone on the front; the letters had been filled in using black paint or something similar so that they stood out