Radical histories...Soul journeys...Time Travel...Night Creatures... All you need is a phone and headphones to unlock the stories of the only surviving Elizabethan churchyard in London.
Start point: Archway with the lantern, The Old Church, Stoke Newington Church Street, N16 9ES.
Please follow the pink pathway shown in the map to the right, because the monuments are fragile.
'Are you a Ghosthunter?' was commissioned by The Old Church in Stoke Newington, along with the personal essay below, and won the international locative media award 'Soundwalk September' in 2022.
Read the Grand Jury's Review here
Creative producer, writer & map designer - Laura Khan Mitchison
Sound designer - Gareth Fry
Illustration - Joanna Layla
Oral history voices: Abstract Benna, Jean Sprackland, Sam Lee, Nana Fani-Kayode, Tania Aubeelack, Charles Foster and Stoke Newington High School Students.
Music: Sam Lee performs 'Bonnie Bunch of Roses' - a Napoleonic ballad originating with a Romany singer called Freda Black - and 'Lay This Body Down' - a spiritual originating from the South Carolina Islands.
The inspiration behind 'Are you a Ghosthunter?'
When things get too much for me, I put an audio recorder and a handful of cashew-nuts in my pocket and wander in one of London's old graveyards. Some are cities of the dead, some are gardens of sleep, some are forests of stone, but only one resembles "an old lady wrapped in a jumble of patchwork clothes", as the poet Jean Sprackland says in this Audio Trail. That's the Old Churchyard of St Mary's where Ghosthunter N16 unfolds.
I follow an overgrown path into the interior of the churchyard, where the sounds of Stoke Newington are softened by yew-tree and holly. Celtic crosses. Box tombs. Gaping family vaults that threaten to swallow careless walkers. Sunken headstones flanked by skulls. An alderman here. An abolitionist there. Inscriptions polished by the centuries. Legions of unknown and unknowable dead.
Invariably, after a couple of hours in here — looking at gravestone designs and peering at epitaphs and scaring pigeons out of the long grass and reflecting on the end that awaits me and awaits us all — my spirits lift, I become quite cheerful, and I finally go home and sleep.
Most days the Old Churchyard is deserted, but I knew other wanderers were out there somewhere. Night creatures like me. Singers like Sam Lee. Poets like Jean Sprackland and Abstract Benna. A veterinarian like Charles Foster, who gives voice to the fox-cubs burrowing deep into the unsealed vaults. These people are the narrators of Ghosthunter N16.
I was visiting a lot last year, when secondary school students seemed to be the only guardians of the Old Churchyard. They admonished the occasional heavy-footed rambler who was trampling over graves. The teenagers also kept track of paranormal activity. "Excuse me, are you ghosthunting? I love a ghost! I love ghosts!" they shouted, as a Skepta grime loop pumped out of their Bluetooth speaker. I gave them the first and last word in this Audio Trail.
I concede that my audio recorder — Zoom H4 — is a little like a Ghost box and that sound has a sinister resonance. It is our way of tapping into the world of invisible forms, of the recent past, of the distant past, of the imagination.
With that in mind, our sound design allows you to listen in on aspects of the old churchyard that may be inaudible now. The church door creaking open. The folk-song of Sam Lee echoing round the fretted steeple. The floodwater beneath St Mary's carrying away the coffins as if they were lost boats on the river Acheron. The wind whispering through the leaves of the evergreen oak. "The deep hollow note of the church bell breaking each hour the stillness of the day", as Edgar Allen Poe wrote, from a time in his boyhood when Stoke Newington was still a village.
And that's the mediumship of the audio trail-maker. We can drape many gossamer-light layers of sound over the present visual environment; different decades, different tones, different textures. With a little deft signposting, we can take listeners back and forward in time, towards the metaphorical and back to the real again. And, because sound is always emerging and vanishing, with one voice decaying into another, it is the perfect ghost.
Ghosthunter N16 features the voices of real people drawn, like me, to the Old church, not professional historians nor thespians pretending to be dead Georgians. For the spoken content, we drew on personal sense memories and life experiences that connect the narrators to the dead.
In the remotest corner of the churchyard, through a crooked gate, lies a most unusual monument:
ELIZABETH PICKETT / Died 11 December 1781 Aged 23 years / In consequence of her / Cloaths taking Fire / the preceding Evening.
Jean Sprackland shuts her eyes in front of Elizabeth Pickett's tomb, until she can almost picture her own grandfather pulling the paraffin heater in from the garage. A winter evening, a fire hissing and popping in the grate, a young woman. You can hear the reverie in her voice:
"Sometimes it's so still and quiet here that you feel as though you're not quite in the present day anymore, and I imagine Elizabeth Pickett at the age of 23, standing by the fire, maybe reading a letter or maybe just thinking her own thoughts. And it's as if a door has swung open on the past and I can see her there. Just for a moment, time is kind of suspended. And then a car goes past, and that door slams shut, and I'm back in the present."
The final part of the Audio Trail highlights the tomb of James Stephen — the main English lawyer associated with the abolition of slavery — and that of Anna Barbauld; a poet, a feminist, and a fellow abolitionist. We make it clear that James Stephen took his inspiration from black activists such as the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint L'Ouverture. This place full of dead Europeans is made up of relationships to elsewhere; connected like the mushroom roots below ground.
“Dead people never stop talking and sometimes the living hear them”, says Abstract Benna at the finale. Without the voices of absent others, we could not speak, much less make audio trails or write poems. Our whole language enacts a stunning resurrection of the dead, just as we ourselves hurtle towards death.
We could see the headstone of Anna Barbauld as the last page of the last chapter in someone's story, or we could see it as a portal into something else. As Barbauld herself wrote, “Say not goodnight, but in some brighter clime bid me good-morning.”
by Laura Khan Mitchison
