Hypnogoria: Hypnogoria Halloween Advent Calendar - Door 14

Door 14 - The Librarian's Tale Part II

Further extracts from the diaries of Mr Michael Dalby, head of the the Centre for Local History Studies, Redvale Library

January 30th 2008

Still researching the Fell case, tactfully of course. There are still some surviving relatives of the victims living in the area. Of course, another problem is that no one is sure how many victims there were as Fell was guilty of multiple offences, and again, no one is sure when he really began. This will need careful consideration

August 17th 2009

I think I am cooling on the book idea. For now at least. There is clearly still a lot of strong local feeling about what happened back in 1922. And I have found a real home here. To drag it all up seems very ungracious behaviour to a little town that has been so welcoming. Besides, there is much more fascinating local history to discover and celebrate. The stone circle up on Ringstone Hill is a fabulous site. I would rather visitors came here to enjoy that, or the marvellous gardens at Haining Hall, than come for ghastly murder tours. Increasingly the idea of a book and bringing the Fell story to the world at large feels like the wrong thing to do.

October 10th 2010

I did broach the subject of a Hallowe’en display but Mrs Riddell isn’t having a bar of it . I do agree the town should not make a thing out of Dr Fell, but all the same, there are new generations who just don't care about what happened nearly a century ago. For them, he’s so far in the past that he’s blurred into the pantheon of pop culture monsters much like Jack the Ripper has, a character that sits along Dracula and the Frankenstein monster, creatures from a different age.

And every October I have a handful of kids asking for books on witches or monsters or horror movies. They see Hallowe’en stuff on the telly, and more importantly online. These kids have friends all over the country, hell, all over the world these days. You can’t shut out what is a global tradition. It’s really not fair to them.

February 19th 2012

Marvellous news. Got the go-head to set up a Centre for Local Studies. We have such a lot of documents, items and images in the library archive, it is a shame they’ve been shut away from the public for so long. Lord knows, tracing your family tree now seems to be an increasingly popular pastime and hence the Local Studies Centre will bring many new visitors into the library. It will only be using a small room, previously utilised occasionally as a gallery, but it is a start!

June 05th 2014

Moving up to a larger space at last. With Mrs Riddell finally retiring, her successor Kath has greenlit moving the Local Studies Centre to the much larger Reading Room. Sanjay has also got the go ahead to expand the E-Library. Watch out 21st century - Redvale Library is coming!

Work has now started on renovating Mordyke House into a museum. I am liaising with the project coordinator Dr Terry Rolt of Ashlington University, and I’m hoping we can arrange a permanent display space in the new museum for items from the library archives. I hope this will be a success. Although I anticipate it may well be some time before the older locals stop referring to Mordyke House as the Old Morgue.

September 13th 2015

Got the thumbs-up for doing a spooky display in the Junior Library today. I’m playing it safe with an exhibition on the theme of local folklore, so will be covering the Wyrm of Ringstone Hill, the Redpeak faeries, the Bony Grinner story, and the famous Witch of Redvale. Not quite Halloween but it is getting there. Times are changing it seems.

September 10th 2018

Well, we are here at last - we are doing a proper Hallowe’en display this year. Nothing too much of course - lots of good education history and folklore, I’ll make sure of that. Just good spooky fun!

1st November 2018

The display and activities have been a huge success. It was great to see so many people, young and old, popping in to admire the exhibition. And the turn out for the costume parade and the Jack o’lantern carving workshops were phenomenal. Mike at the radio station has been a huge help and gave us tremendous support, and consequently we had lots of visitors from outside Haggleton. Simply wonderful!

March 30th 2021

An incredible thing has happened, We received a huge donation - a massive collection of documents, books and pictures. It was assembled by a chap called George Nesbit, who was an amateur historian. He was well-known to the library staff, but we had no idea he had amassed such a huge collection. He passed away earlier this year, and his family have decided to donate this archive to us.

We gratefully accepted, for this is a real treasure trove. There’s thousands of slides, photographs he took of Haggleton and the surrounding area over the course of his lifetime, documenting the changes and growth of the community. There’s boxes and boxes of local leaflets, tickets, theatre programmes, posters and what not.

I honestly think this may take years to archive properly.

October 25th 2022

Made a bit of a funny discovery today. We have been working for months going through the Nesbit Archive, and currently we have been going through home crates marked Local Publications. So far they have contained books published by people with a Redvale connection, folk who stayed here or once lived here. So then, a fairly eclectic mix of tomes, and a good few of them small press or vanity publishing endeavours it seems.

However one crate did contain a series of monographs and chapbooks, mainly by various amateurs in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and all printed by a local bookseller who ran a small press. As you might imagine, lots of local history goodies in here. However the prize find, which raised a gasp from all present, were three monographs by one Dr Thaddeus Fell. Apparently he was something of a local historian himself, with one written on ancient sites in the local area, another tracing the history of the Chapel Hill Cemetery, and a third on the trial of Marianne Agnes, the famous witch of Redvale.

However that wasn’t all, at the bottom of the crate, in a satin lined box of rosewood, was a book bound in red buckram. Entitled Remembrances of Amon, it appears to be an expansion of his earlier monographs, and is a complex treatise on mediaeval witchcraft and magic. Published by the Sublunary Temple, I assumed this was the name to a vanity press created by Fell himself. However some research revealed it was actually a short-lived publication house operated by one Julian Karswell, a now mostly forgotten occultist, who proclaimed himself the Abbot of Lufford and allegedly invented his own presumably Satanic religion.

From a quick glance, the text appears highly esoteric, and somewhat garbled. One chapter may be a mostly sober discussion of historical witchcraft, but then the next might feature formulae, and what might be incantations, in a hodgepodge of languages and mythological names. There are also some frankly highly disturbing woodcuts done in a pseudo mediaeval style.

While it is certainly the work of an unhinged mind, it is probably one of a kind. I can’t help but wonder what insights might be gained from these writings. The idea of a book is stirring idly again. However at the same time, there is something… unpleasant in the fact that these books have turned up now, at this time, on this date. A most discomforting coincidence.

15th September 2023

Well, it is that time of year once again. I am putting together notes for the Hallowe'en exhibition and wondering how I can top last year’s display on Hallowe’en history. It is funny to think that when I first came here the holiday was pretty much ignored. Now it is becoming a part of the local calendar and events at the library and the Mains Museum are better attended every year. I am considering perhaps doing a Dark Side of the Redvale display and maybe tackle the Fell story, alongside the trial of Thomas Mordyke and the case of the Butcher of Fring. But perhaps that is too far just yet.

Instead I am leaning towards witchcraft again, in particular local witch trials. While I do not want to make it too prominent a feature, I do think we should display the books of Dr Fell. They are certainly an important find, and provided we just show them in the context of historical witchcraft in the area and not delve into the gory details, I don’t think we will upset any apple carts.

9th October 2023

First day of the exhibition. This year we have opened the display a week earlier and have put on special visits for parties from the local schools, before opening to the general public next week. Hope all goes well today!

10th October 2023

Absolute disaster of a day. I simply can’t believe it. I opened up this morning. First in as usual. Opened the Local Studies section, and I had been pottering about for about half an hour before I noticed. The Fell book was gone. The display case was still locked and the other items behind the glass were all there, safe and sound, but the red buckram tome had vanished. I immediately called the police, and then Sanj. It was his day off but as he is our go-to guy for tech stuff, I wanted him to check out the security systems.

While waiting for the police to come round, I checked all the doors and windows and could find no sign of any entry, forced or otherwise. And when Sanj appeared, a cursory check off the security camera footage revealed nothing either. The police officer who turned up proved to be worth his salt though. He soon found small scratches on the lock of the display case. As he demonstrated, these sort of locks, while sturdy enough, were quite easy to pick if you knew what you were doing. After checking the entrance points and reviewing the camera footage, he opined that it was probably swiped by a visitor, namely one of the school kids.

Unfortunately, as we had had several dozen kids in yesterday, he reckoned the chance of finding prints from the culprit among all the others was a real needle in a haystack job. But he added we were probably looking for a smart kid. Unfortunately that didn’t really narrow it down, as the classes that had been in were all top set kids. He said we would pass on details to the stolen goods circular, a list sent out to dealers, shops, collectors and auction houses, just in case it turned up somewhere. Then his radio crackled into life and he had to leave in a hurry.

I have contacted the schools in question, and I have assurances that the teachers will be conducting some inquiries - they have some suspects in mind apparently, and what’s more, they know who is likely to snitch. There is nothing left to do but wait.

11th October 2023

No real news today, and I have little hope of anything getting done regarding the theft. A radio announcement this morning explained why the constable had left so hurriedly yesterday. Apparently a child has disappeared. A teenage boy called Raymond Montague. Needless to say a missing kid around this time of year in particular has spooked the whole town.

I am less than happy about the entire situation

12th October 2023

Today was, if anything, worse. Although on the face of it, there were… positive developments I think you could say. I am not sure what happened today counts as good news.

On one hand the police reckon the missing teenager has simply run away. They expect to pick him up at a seaside resort or an amusement park. That is normally what happens, they say. That is if he does not turn up back home after what little money he has runs out.

However there has been another incident, shall we say. The long and short of it is, that this morning when I came in and opened up as usual, I immediately noticed something out of the ordinary. On my desk, nice as ninepence, was a book bound in red buckram.

Yes, it was Fell’s book. Back, safe and sound. It was undamaged, although I would swear it felt slightly damp. And there was a faint odour about it I am sure it did not possess before. An odour I am not at all keen to identify. A closer inspection revealed a few specks of what looked like blue wax, easily brushed away.

I already knew that a search of the doors and windows would reveal no sign of entry. And likewise the security footage offered nothing in the way of an explanation. I have been telling everyone that a cleaner found it stuffed behind a shelf - our teenage thief got cold feet and stashed it in a panic. That of course is rubbish. For a start we don’t have a cleaner.

No one questioned it though. And for the second time today I had pause to consider how we will all too readily accept an explanation if it reflects what is most convenient for us to believe.

13th October 2023

I am troubled. Very troubled. The book and the monographs are not going back on display. They are going in the vault, with other valuables we have in the collection. For security, of course. Some photographs of pages and a couple of the less disturbing woodcuts will take their place in the display.

Although, I fear that is merely locking the stable door after a particularly dangerous horse has bolted. Many things are troubling me, but the most bothersome is a simple bookmark. I found it tucked inside the returned volume. It is a simple thing. A length of green leather embossed with a traditional knotwork pattern in gold. But embossed on it are some initials - R. M.