Believe it or not, I am the least likely person to have mounted the current exhibition here at the museum. I am the last person to want to sit by an open fire and share ghost stories! I have no desire, ever, to make myself scared.

How come, then, that I got involved in this? Well, it goes back to July 2023 when I came in with a tote bag from Falmouth University’s Haunted Landscapes conference. I’d given a paper at the conference on JMW Turner’s Haunted Seascapes, and somehow the discussion in Museum Towers ended up with me volunteering to explore the idea of Haunted Cornwall as an exhibition. And that obviously would be ideally suited October, right?

The exhibition explores the question, based on a newspaper article that I came across from 1920s, what makes Cornwall seem so haunted? The exhibition looks at different elements of landscape, moor, mists, coast, seas and leans into the haunting images of wrecks. There are stories throughout the exhibition, the great Cornish ghost story of Jan Tregeagle at one end of history, and a ghost story written by AI, coached by me. What we’re trying to do, also, is shift away from the tropes associated with the ‘so called’ spooky season and the drama of Halloween. But you’ve got a ghost trail, you may be saying. Yes, we do. We also want to engage with our younger visitors, and we know that these things matter to this audience.

What I didn’t really have the space to explore was a different theme, the idea (from Stephen King’s son, David Hill) is that places aren’t haunted, people are.

When you are haunted, it isn’t something you think. You don’t think to yourself, oh, I’m haunted! There might be a scream caught in your throat. You might have screamed out loud. Your heart might feel like it’s beating so darn hard that someone else can hear it. You might even want to run away from something. Haunting is a personal response. It’s a bodily response.

Our Haunted Cornwall exhibition was never intended to be spooky or scary. The story of Jan Tregeagle (brilliantly narrated by Will Coleman) on loop in the gallery space isn’t scary, it’s built out of a folkloric tradition. However, I’ll hazard a guess that if you were standing out on Bodmin Moor in the dark, with the wind screaming, you might imagine the devil and his hounds are chasing down the hapless Tregeagle.

Over the summer, I talked to my 11-year-old grandson, George, about the exhibition and describing some of the places we mention to him. In the way that memories work, I’d told him about Pistil Meadow and misremembered that Charlie Johns (another volunteer) had said that dogs won’t go in the field. George immediately wanted to go there, with my dog, Bessie. A very sweet black labrador. I teased him that he wanted to experiment with the well-being of my dog! I asked him what he’d do if she refused to go in. Or ran away. He shifted uncomfortably but had no answer.

We took George and his younger sister, Megs, to Kennal Vale, in daylight. There is a display board in the exhibition about Kennal Vale. George went in all the spooky decrepit buildings, trying to lure the dog in, and his sister screamed – a lot. As we were leaving, I asked him if he would go there at night. He looked up at me, smiled, and said, ‘probably not, Granny.’

On Tuesday 29^th October, Marie Macneill, co-editor of 13 Cornish Ghost Stories, came to the museum to read a story that she’d written especially for us at the museum. Longshore Drift: The legend of Loe Pool had its first audience. Marie had crafted a story that began at the museum, with a researcher and her Boss talking about the legend of a mermaid in the Loe. Was the mermaid real? The researcher was obsessed with this idea, but it was also tied with the recent death of her mother. The action of the story was in the Loe. She’d learned to dive to investigate the legend, with the local lore of ‘the pool takes someone every seven years’ ringing in her mind… Did she find the mermaid? Where were the spooks? No spoilers here, as the story will be recorded for BBC Sounds with Tiffany Truscott. However, what followed was a wonderful discussion that explored the story.

The initial question was what makes a good ghost story? Does it have to be scary? The verdict, not necessarily – but it needs to be unsettling, suspenseful. The audience enjoyed that it was local, the reference to the narrative about Loe Pool. Marie acknowledged that she’d made up about the mermaid (Ed: she is a storyteller). She talked about where she wanted to go with the story. Marie didn’t want to dramatise the tragedies of the local people who had drowned. These were real tragedies, very close in time. We talked about that it was easier to make ghosts of the long-distant past – like Jan Tregeagle – when living memory has faded. The museum crowd were a caring one!

We talked about what haunting felt like. Two members of the audience shared their experience – one man his dearly missed sister who he felt, and another a lady who lived in an incredibly old (15^th century cottage) who had felt a presence in her bedroom but hadn’t seen anything. Neither of them were scared but had felt something there. Marie talked about her main character, exploring her ideas that she was haunted by the death of her mother, it was unresolved grief, tying her to the past, and the mermaid was entangled in her freedom.

Who knows whether there are ghosts, let alone what they are or represent. It is a subject that fascinates us today, as it did in the early 1900s. This is when the rituals of Halloween as we know it today emerged (altered again in the last 10-20 years in a kind of Disneyfication), and why the newspaper article from the 1920s homed in on Cornwall. A cultural trend, with headlines (click-bait of the day) to draw in readers.

Culturally, we have a deep fascination with ghosts, with stories and the traditions that we now have. It’s why it has made for a fascinating exhibition. The exhibition finishes on 16 November. Catch it while you can.

Julia Webb-Harvey

Volunteer Researcher