9 Comments
Aug 19Liked by Tom Cox

Wow, You draw people into your tales so well. Used to stay every Autumn on a farm below and between Easdon Tor and Grimspound so I can picture it. Such a sad location but also very sobering; you really feel it necessary to honour the grave as you walk past.

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Got chills reading this

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Aug 21Liked by Tom Cox

Never been. Can't say I'll ever have the means to visit, but you write so I can *feel* the weight of the silent fog, the stillness of night air, and the sad eerieness of this place. And that's your magic.

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Aug 19Liked by Tom Cox

The hair on my arms is standing on end, and a pinprick of ... fear, maybe? ... jabbed me in the back of the neck!

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That was fucking fantastic. Perfect story and old magic for the night before Halloween.

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It's 37 years since I visited Jay's Grave. I had co-founded Dartmoor Magazine with a friend and as co-editors, we spent many hours walking the moor photographing items of interest. When I visited, I spent some time photographing Jay's Grave but felt or saw nothing strange, so I envy your experience.

I think it was the same day when we drove slowly past a Stone Cross which caught our eye so we parked up and walked back to photograph it. We were quite amazed to find it was not there. We wrote up our experience and sent it to a lady who ran the Devon Folklore section of the Devonshire Association. She was very intrigued.

I spent from 2014 to date exploring Lancashire cemeteries and graveyards collecting stories and blogging about them. I would read all the inscriptions and whenever I came across, for example, the grave of a Victorian policeman killed when trying to stop a runaway horse or a man who cut the throats of his wife and several children, before cutting his own [The family are buried together and tens of thousands of people came to express their sympathy] I would photograph the grave, research the deaths and tell the story of it. Lots of interesting stories were found which probably explains why I have shot 190,000 images so far.

Surprisingly, I never encountered anything unusual until I was standing among some Victorian headstones in a Bolton Cemetery when a voice shouted 'Hey!'. I looked around and saw no one. I still can't believe I didn't reply.!

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Wonderful !. Clapping 👏

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Eerie. And yes I wonder if photographing everything dilutes the energy -- but perhaps it gets topped up again at night, when it’s alone and dreaming.

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