Brackish Imaginaries: Supernatural Folklore and the Making of Coastal Space in Nineteenth-Century Cornwall

Introduction

This article draws upon nineteenth-century Cornish folkloric narratives to explore how littoral spaces were made, experienced, and challenged by those who shared such stories. It argues that coastal environments form distinctive affective landscapes and spatial cultures that are performed and negotiated through the construction of place-lore. ¹ To explore an environment defined by the interaction of land and sea, it introduces a new brackish conceptualisation of spatial cultures. Emphasising the aquatic rather than terrestrial qualities of the coast, it develops and employs an interpretative brackish analogy based on the liminal, co-mingled state where salt and fresh waters meet, mix, and co-exist. It advances a claim that, in the context of coastal hauntings, a brackish analogy offers greater analytical potential than the more familiar and arguably over-used idea of entanglement. A brackish reading not only allows us to appreciate how folklore articulated the affective environment of coastal spaces but also furthers our understanding of folklore’s soft power in the formation and subversion of coastal imaginaries. As such, this article advances our understanding of both coastal spatial cultures and the operation of supernatural folklore within coastal imaginaries.

The article is divided into three sections. Section one outlines the merits of exploring coastal imaginaries through a brackish analogy rather than entanglement. This is developed through theoretical approaches drawn from developments in cultural geography, critical theory, and folkloristics. These include relational and affective landscapes, performative space- and placemaking, ecosemiotics and the supernatural narrativization of place. Section two illustrates the application of a brackish conceptualisation of spatial cultures through examples of nineteenth-century coastal folklore from Cornwall, an area of Britain both rich in tales of coastal haunting and with a strongly defined spatial imaginary. Section three considers the soft spatial power politics of folklore, exploring how ghosts and haunting could subvert Cornish spatial imaginaries while recognising factors that contributed to the uncertainty of their construction as collective counter-narratives. Through its brackish conceptualisation, the article advances an understanding of how affective coastal imaginaries help destabilise some of the rigid, terrestrial biases and conceptual binaries and boundaries that inform how we imagine littoral space.

Conceptualising Space and Haunted Coastal Imaginaries

The way we conceptualise the operation of cultures necessarily inform the interpretations and insights we derive from them. Since the turn of the century, the notion of entanglement has become a popular way of framing complex cultural relationships. While usefully indicating inextricable interconnection, accumulation and complex agency when enmeshed in relationships that lack clear self-contained independence, it still emphasises the entwining of fixed entities. ² Coupled with this is its tendency to obscure the operation of inherent power inequalities between those entities. By shifting from a solid to a fluid conceptualisation, and specifically a brackish one, we can greater appreciate the cultural importance of blurring and co-mingling, the co-existing within one another of qualities or things that entanglement might treat as distinct, insoluble entities. Just as coastal mangrove swamps adapt to exist at the brackish confluence between salt and fresh water, so too do coastal imaginaries. Building upon Nicholas Allen et al.’s useful conceptualising of the shore as an intensely active ecotone, ‘a hybrid space where two ecosystems meet and overlap’, this article emphasises the analytical potential in permeability and the intersection and collapse of boundaries. ³ This will be demonstrated through folkloric accounts of coastal hauntings and ghosts, entities ontologically defined by their liminality. A brackish emphasis on the permeable encourages us to consider coastal space less as hard borders or terrestrial fringes, and more as an interstitial state that merges land and sea, nature and culture, the natural and supernatural.

While Edward Said’s work on representational power discourses in relation to spatial imaginaries continues to inform much cultural geographical scholarship, since the turn of the twenty-first century there has been a growing trend towards alternative approaches. ⁴ Doreen Massey’s conceptualising of space as something fluid, emergent, and ever becoming was indicative of a move away from mere representation to more complex forms of co-constructed relationality. This can be understood as a progression from Edward Soja’s concept of ‘thirdspace’, a lived space that is the product of the dynamic combination of the material and imagined, an ever-changing, negotiated site of lived experience. ⁵ Both Massey and Soja’s formulations speak to notions of the brackish as shifting and blended, a combined dynamic mix of factors that form distinct spatial qualities. More than mere material, geological features, spatial localities are imbued with affective potential negotiated and articulated through the imagination. These developments can be situated within what has invariably been termed the ‘affective turn’. ⁶ Notable here is David Crouch’s notion of ‘spacing’, an idea that can also be framed through a brackish or estuarine conceptualisation. For Crouch, space is not fixed but rather a ‘continual process’, one ‘constantly open to change and becoming’, where landscape is understood as something ‘relational, dynamic, negotiated . . . it can be affected and can affect’. ⁷

Topography, environment, memory and imagination all combine into specific types of affective landscape. ⁸ Consideration of how the interaction and co-mingling of these things operate in a littoral space requires an appreciation of coastal spaces and therefore coastal imaginaries as distinctive. As Victoria Hunter notes, the shoreline is ‘a kinetic site . . . a particularly active and energised place’ compared with inland, a place of broad horizons, shifting tides, sands, sea mists, and winds. Such a place necessarily generates a different and distinct register of affects to those found inland or out at sea. ⁹ Respondents to a rather eccentric 1899 survey on attitudes to water suggested being near large bodies of (coastal) water also inspired certain mental states. Some mentioned feeling happy but restless, yearning for the horizon, while others were left with ‘uncontrollable feelings of longing’ and sadness. By contrast, actually being on the sea invited a more elemental confrontation, a sense of the sublime and of the presence of forces that reiterated one’s insignificance vis-a-vis nature. ¹⁰ Both coastal and what could be termed psychothallasic engagements differ considerably from terrestrial (and predominantly urban) psychogeography’s fondness for identifying palimpsestic spatial affinities, something difficult to facilitate in a marine environment. ¹¹ As such, the coast will be considered as a distinctive spatio-cultural environment defined by its instability and co-mingled, boundary-defying hybridity.

To explore the brackish and affective aspects of coastal spaces this article draws upon folkloric storytelling as a means of articulating the distinctive ‘poetics of spacing’ in littoral zones. ¹² In considering place as something constructed from the interaction between nature and culture, folkloric supernatural stories will be examined as performative discourses and performed experience, rather than merely a representation of surrounding scenery. As Lisa Gabbert indicates, a site’s performativity is fashioned from the convergence of terrain, narratives, and the behaviours informed by them. ¹³ Such approaches move us away from the cause-and-effect idea of stories as simply responsive to environment, viewing them instead as integral to the co-production of spatial meaning. Gabbert’s notion of ‘performative landscape’ nicely illustrates this more reciprocal relationship between landscape and story: ‘The narrative makes the landscape mean, and the landscape gives evidence to the story. [A feature of the landscape] ‘holds the narrative, grounding it in place, while human behavior brings it to life’. Rather than entangled entities, this speaks to a brackish confluence of elements that co-exist within and rely upon one another for their distinct identity and meaning. As Gabbert notes, landscape is an active participant in ‘an emergent and synergistic reality’ that is ‘greater than the sum of its parts’. ¹⁴

This brackish interpretation finds parallels in Lona Pall’s work on the ecosemiotics of place-lore. Highlighting the symbiotic relationship between nature and culture, she notes how place-lore narratives ‘are shaped at the convergence point of ecological sign systems and tradition-based cultural sign systems’. Environment shapes the events, characters, and underlying emotions of a narrative while narratives mediate the distinct spatial qualities of an environment and how they are perceived, understood, and experienced. ¹⁵ Importantly, Pall draws attention to our situational relationship with the environment, or what she refers to as ‘extra-narrative reality’ (granting primacy to narrative, against which the physical environment is defined). This situational relationship recognises that when and in what conditions and context a narrative is told can alter what and how it is relayed. This in turn serves as a reminder that environments, especially coastal ones, are never static but ever shifting. ¹⁶ Despite the brackish affinities suggested in the interplay between environment and narrative, with place-lore emerging as the distinctive product of their interaction and convergence, Pall suggests an implied stability to the way environmental semiotic signs are interpreted. This article will query this through outlining examples of ways in which spatial understandings could be disturbed and subverted through narratives of hauntings.

As a vernacular sense of storied placemaking, supernatural folklore not only indicates how the environment was read and understood, but its affective play on the mind. Hauntings infused and disturbed locations that had been deemed natural or ordinary, generating uncertainty, unease and enchantment around sites that comingled the boundaries between the living and dead, the mundane and marvellous. As Ruth Heholt has noted, ‘haunted landscapes . . . have a tendency to deconstruct any familiarities, assumptions or certainties’. ¹⁷ Haunting is itself brackish in nature and operation. Just as brackish water embodies an altered state in terms of its salinity compared with sea and fresh water, so the presence of the supernatural marks an alteration to the composition of space from within. That alteration is informed by a haunting’s mingling of the past in the present, of presence and absence, generating a non-sequential blurring of temporalities that cannot be extracted from one another. Indeed, hauntings collapse and merge many structuralist boundaries, including the natural and supernatural, the animated and dead, fear and attraction. Adopting an aquatic analogy, Heholt observes, ‘Boundaries, borders and spaces themselves dissolve in fluid reconfigurations as that which haunts, moves in and out, here and there, in-between and nowhere’ (italics original). ¹⁸ It is from this brackish in-betweenness and uncertainty of states that haunted locations obtain their power to disturb, charge, and change the affect of landscapes and coastlines. This has been explored in a growing body of littoral supernatural scholarship by the likes of the current author, Jason Marc Harris, Jimmy Packham, and members of the Haunted Shores network. ¹⁹ Their work serves as a reminder that affective coastal environments are frequently articulated by the affective potential of supernatural stories themselves, especially their ability to infuse space with alterity, a brackish quality of in-betweenness that disrupts our sense of the known, fixed and certain. The following section examines this through examples of coastal folklore and its relationship to affective landscapes and the co-construction of littoral space. The final section develops these ideas in the context of the soft power politics of supernatural coastal imaginaries.

Cornwall’s Brackish Folklore: Hauntings and the Affective Coastal Environment

Coastal folklore provides us with oblique but important ways of appreciating the littoral zone as a brackish space that merged and co-mingled affective environment, imagination and spatial understanding. Local legends and folklore offered reflections on the environmental features and concerns that were most distinctive to or prominent in the minds of those living in such a location. ²⁰ For example, coastal communities in England and Scotland held a range of folkloric beliefs based around the ebb and flow of the tide, that quintessential action of coastal waters. The incoming tide was generally understood to have positive effects, the outgoing tide negative. Most babies were said to be born when the tide was in, whereas people were thought to die as the tide ebbed. Conversely, death was protracted by an incoming tide, while the child born on the ebbing tide was believed to have a life of hardship and bad luck ahead of them. If a person was unwell, the likelihood of recovery was increased if they could hold on until the incoming tide. Writing in 1884, Reverend Walter Gregor noted the belief around Rosehearty, Aberdeenshire, that bathing on the rising tide was good for one’s health, while doing so on the ebbing tide could be ‘injurious’. ²¹ Such beliefs indicate how the rhythms of coastal dwellers’ lives and deaths, good health and bad, were syncopated to the rise and fall of tidal waters. More broadly, coastal or brackish folklore articulated a sense of liminality and interaction between the land and sea, the natural and supernatural. Coastal folklore narratively embodied this co-existence and in-betweenness of states in tales of hybrid entities. While ghosts as dead-but-alive, and merfolk as amalgam of human and fish were most frequently encountered on the shoreline, it was shape-shifting Selkies that perhaps best exemplified the coast’s unfixed, co-mingled nature. ²² Capable of taking seal and human form, they always held the potential of the other in whichever identity they adopted. ²³ Such boundary-defying characters were imaginative embodiments of brackish confluence, of the known altered and containing differences that made the combination distinct.

To enable a focussed study of these issues, this article will explore coastal folklore from nineteenth-century Cornwall. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, Cornwall exists as a well-developed coastal spatial imaginary, defined from both within and beyond the county. This has been evidenced in recent scholarship that has drawn particular attention to its Gothic and Celtic dimensions. ²⁴ Secondly, and linked to this, a strong Cornish sense of place was articulated through a rich body of coastal folklore, captured in nineteenth-century compendiums by the likes of Robert Hunt, William Bottrell, and Enys Tregarthen (or Nellie Ellen Sloggett). ²⁵ Shelley Trower has explored how Hunt, a geologist and folklorist, combined his interests in his presentation of a distinctive Cornish identity. Focussing on geological and ethnic differences, Hunt noted that Cornwall was made of granite, unlike much of the rest of England, and that its rocky terrain informed a sense of the county as primal, wild, and ancient. ‘Othering’ rural and coastal communities through associating their lore with remote geographical fringes of society was a common trope in the writings of nineteenth-century folklorists. A Devonian by birth, although later settling in Cornwall, Hunt framed the county’s folklore as the product of an ‘irrational, superstitious and passionate’ Celtic people, their isolation on the Cornish peninsula having made them ‘strongly resistant to progress’. ²⁶ This depiction could be situated in the context of Cornwall’s nineteenth-century loss of its once leading role in tin mining and a perceived industrial decline from the 1870s. It also spoke to a Cornish culture of nonconformity. Evidenced in things like the development of Methodism in the county, it was also informed by a perception of close-knit former mining and fishing communities and Cornish associations with the smuggling trade, an activity that also went into decline from the 1830s onwards. Yet such an image of traditional isolation was selective, for even as its former mining and smuggling industries wilted so Cornwall’s coastal scenery began to attract a nascent tourist industry, aided by the development of a modern railway network from 1859. ²⁷

Cornish coastal folklore reflected and perpetuated deep unease about the potentially dangerous littoral environment in which many local communities lived and worked. In terms of environmental affect, the most powerful was fear, and particularly the fear of drowning. At the coast, the cries of spirits were often understood as warnings of misfortune. Known as the ‘hailing of the dead’, the spirits were said to call the names of those who were soon to join them. Tragedy at sea had its own haunting taint on the shoreline. If on the beach at night, Cornish fishermen would avoid walking near where vessels had been wrecked, fearing the spirits of the dead still dwelt there. ²⁸ These folkloric concerns do not sit easily alongside Cornish coastal communities reputed association with wrecking ships, or at least salvaging whatever cargo drifted ashore. ²⁹ Yet, reflective of their brackish nature, these coastal hauntings merged the natural and supernatural, the (potential) infusion of the latter into the former disturbing spatial understandings and blurring epistemological boundaries so that neither could be clearly defined from the other.

Not all coastal ghost tales were so sinister. The emotional bonds between seafarers and their loved ones who stayed ashore informed familiar coastal ghost story tropes, most commonly the spirit of the drowned mariner who returns to a coastal home their lost corpse could never reach. For example, in a romantic tale from St Levan, a Cornish fishing village, a young couple planned to marry when the prospective husband, a sailor, returned from sea. The sailor did not return, and eventually news reached the village that his ship had sunk with all hands aboard. The grieving woman spent long days wandering the cliffs and gazing longingly out to sea. Then, one night, amid a fierce storm, she heard her name being called above the crashing waves and roaring winds. Outside her coastal cottage stood the ghost of her lost lover. He was drenched, pale faced, with seaweed in his hair. Neither the storm nor the fact that he was dead prevented the woman from swiftly joining him outside. The dead man led her to a cove where she got into a waiting rowing boat. The revenant then rowed them out through the churning waters. Although never seen again, it was said they had gone to live in a cave beneath the sea. ³⁰ Such tales spoke to the power of wish fulfilment engendered by the longing and grief of loved ones left ashore.

As a narrative expression of and response to the physical coastal environment, this story reiterates the way in which the haunting effect of the past in the present was constantly re-enacted through the sea’s interaction with the coast. Things thought lost, gone or confined to the past re-emerged, washed up on the shore. Transformed by their time in the sea, bodies, cargo, and wrecked vessels might all be returned, the in-betweenness of their uncertain fate finally resolved, the unknown tragedies of the past exposed to the present. ³¹ Here too we see a brackish mingling of not just temporalities but also states; the dead but animated sailor, the grieving lover who the story leaves strangely suspended between life and afterlife beneath the waves. As Jimmy Packham has observed, as the intersection between different environments littoral space also serves as a ‘meeting-point between life and death’, a site ‘where the illusionary nature of supposedly fixed boundaries is rendered most starkly visible’. ³²

This brackish blurring of states and assumed environmental boundaries was evidenced in other folkloric accounts of Cornish haunting. William Bottrell’s tale of a ghostly ship’s bell merged the maritime into the terrestrial so that one uncannily exists within the other. In St Levan’s churchyard was the grave of Captain Wetherel, a mariner who drowned after his ship sunk near the Rundlestone, a rocky pinnacle in dangerous waters off Land’s End. Blending affects, the grave was a renowned site of ‘fear and wonder’ as many people had claimed to hear a phantom bell beneath the earth, striking the hours as aboard a ship. It was clearest at midnight, close to the time when Wetherel’s ship had sunk and he, having got his crew to the boats, had gone down with it, sounding the bell eight times as it went under. It was said that those who heard the bell would suffer misfortune for ‘to pry into ghostly doings that don’t concern them’ was a transgression of the boundary between the living and the dead. The brackish blurring of time and states seen in the story above also occurs here. When a sceptical young sailor goes to the grave to test the tale, he returns to his companions ‘looking as pale as a corpse’ and confirms he had ‘heard “eight bells” struck in the grave, and wouldn’t go near the spot again for the world’. The description of him resembling a corpse heralds his drowning at sea on his next voyage, suggesting his present and future had already become blurred and mixed, this taint of death-in-life transforming him into an in-between state that was neither wholly one nor the other.

Both the permeability of land and sea boundaries and the ill-fortune inflicted on observers of spectral phenomena were echoed in Robert Hunt’s account of the spectral ship of Porthcurno Cove. Illustrating Pall’s point about situational relationships and setting the environmental scene for supernatural intrusion, the valley thereabouts was described as ‘in every respect a melancholy spot, and during a period of storms, or at night, it is exactly the place which might well be haunted by demon revellers’. Hunt purports to have been told by an eyewitness from Penberth of the spectral ship that came in from the sea and sailed overland. Drawing attention to coastal environmental influences, the ship was:

said to have been observed frequently, coming in from sea about nightfall, when the mists were rising from the marshy ground . . . It passed steadily through the breakers on the shore, glided up over the sands, and steadily pursued its course over the dry land, as if it had been water. She is described to have been a black, square-rigged, single-masted affair . . . No crew was ever seen. It is supposed they were below, and that the hatches were battened down.

The ship sailed on to Chygwiden [Chegwidden], where it vanished. As such the uncanny ship dissolved spatial boundaries and merged marine and terrestrial states, passing effortlessly overland ‘as if it had been water’, and then changed state when it disappeared ‘like smoke’. Like the bells at Captain Wetherel’s grave, witnessing this floating ship came at a personal price. Hunt declared, ‘Many of the old people have seen this ship, and no one ever saw it, upon whom some bad luck was not sure to fall.” ³³ Through a brackish reading, such omens created a distinctive temporal confluence, the inevitability of future misfortune already co-existing within the present observation of the spectral phenomena.

These examples of the affective littoral environment and brackish folklore all contain elements of what Mark Fisher termed the weird and eerie. Defining both in spatial terms, Fisher distinguished the weird as ‘that which does not belong’, that ‘brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lie beyond it and which cannot be reconciled’. ³⁴ In terms of a brackish reading, such a definition corresponds to the merging of two distinct types of water into a third that combines both but in ever-shifting, unfixed quantities that distinguish it from either. As the phantom ship of Porthcurno Cove and the ship bells ringing beneath the ground in St Levan’s churchyard indicate, the weird is also evoked when the phantasmal collapses the assumed boundaries between land and sea, rendering them into a brackish state that strangely merges the two into the sea ashore. These supernatural elements also induce an eerie affect, described by Fisher as an ‘escape from the confines of what is ordinarily taken for reality’. He adds that ‘we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human’, its power generated from the uncertainty about the nature and presence of the agent and agency in such a space. In the context of affective coastal landscapes, that agency can be understood to reside in the littoral environment itself, ‘in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces’, among which we can include both the natural and supernatural. ³⁵

The marine environment informed the nature and constraints of ghosts found at the coast. Denied a proper burial, the spirits of the drowned came to possess something of the unfixed, kinetic nature of the sea itself. As the story of the Cornish lovers showed, ghosts or revenants who returned ashore were usually denied any rest there. It was only in a cave beneath the sea where they were able to live out their (after)lives. This is echoed in popular ballads where the ghost of the drowned man, returned home, disappears or leaves when dawn breaks or the cock crows. ³⁶ For all their efforts to reach land, theirs was a brief foray ashore and time never permitted them to leave the coast. As such, coastal spaces fostered specific types of ghost narratives generated by the distinct nature of the littoral environment and its strong links to seafaring. ³⁷ The show of determination in returning ashore and walking to their old homes distinguished coastal ghosts from less purposeful inland phantoms. Belonging to the sea rather than any particular location, they may not have possessed sufficient agency to stay, but nor were they passively tied to haunting a specific spot.

While haunting has been described as ‘a dialogue of affect’, the meaning-seeking in storytelling grounded in a particular environment did not reflect an ‘open’ or direct affect. ³⁸ Rather it was translated and performed through narrative and emotional patterns, patterns that were often informed by narrative genres or familiar folkloric structures. This is especially the case given such tales were usually vicarious encounters with the coastal supernatural. Usually, neither teller nor audience had been present at the events recited. As seen above, Hunt’s account of the spectral ship was his interpretation of what a supposed eyewitness had told him. Yet as these stories indicate, even when mediated through familiar story patterns and located in imagination rather than experience, the disturbing power of the affective environment was still present. Folkloric tales involving ghostly mariners or ghost ships showed how loss, death, and the callous nature of the sea impinged on the minds of Cornwall’s coastal communities. Such tales were not simply a reminder of the precariousness of mariners’ lives or the coastal economies that were dependent upon them. The performance of the ghost’s return to shore or the ringing of phantom bells that had marked the final act of a doomed seafarer also articulated an understanding of the Cornish coast as an emotional site that churned together torturous uncertainty, hope and grief. In Cornwall’s fishing communities a sense of guilt might be added to that mix, with loved ones ashore likely living with the knowledge that they had played some part in encouraging the unfortunate family members out to sea. ³⁹

As these readings of Cornish coastal folklore suggest, substituting the overused notion of entanglement for a fluid, brackish analogy enables us to appreciate more subtle and sophisticated nuances in the interaction between affective physical environments, mental states and responses, and the narratives that articulated them. Applied here, it is particularly useful for teasing out the merged and co-mingled temporal, spatial and emotional aspects of hauntings. More broadly, I would argue it also helps facilitate an understanding of coastal cultural distinctiveness beyond what can often feel like rather glib, unreflective references to a littoral liminality based purely on the meeting of land and sea.

Subverting and Constructing Spatial Imaginaries

The construction of spatial meaning is inherently performative and, because it is contested, is imbued with power relations of assertion, subversion and resistance. Simin Davoudi defines a spatial imaginary as a ‘deeply held, collective understanding of socio-spatial relations that are performed by, give sense to, make possible and change collective socio-spatial practices’. ⁴⁰ In doing so, competing narratives arise over how places and spaces are conceptualised, perceived, and experienced. As David Crouch has highlighted, ‘landscape has been aligned with stability’, marking ‘the imprint of power on the design of land’. ⁴¹ This passive notion of landscape, one understood as stable, inert, its interpretation long settled, is itself part of a power discourse that is embroiled in issues of narrative dominance and occlusion. ⁴²

Jeannie Banks Thomas has claimed that haunted places enable an ‘altered awareness’ that ‘facilitates feelings of transformation and difference’. ⁴³ The interrelationship between an affective coastal space and the supernatural narratives that articulated it disturbed received spatial imaginaries founded on more mundane interpretations. When viewed through a brackish conceptualisation rather than an entangled one, we are better able to appreciate the cultural dynamics of hauntings’ infusion and subversion, its ability to disrupt and transform the known and familiar through the presence of supernatural otherness. Rather than the rigid either/or suggested by competing spatial imaginaries, we can consider hauntings as co-existent spatial understandings that always have the potential to exist within more mundane imaginaries. Hauntings suggest the brackish fluidity of time and space for, like the mixing of differing waters into a distinctive but unfixed third form (neither wholly salt nor fresh), their co-mingled qualities of past-present and presence-absence inform their very nature and are therefore insoluble. As Ruth Heholt notes, ‘a haunted landscape is not a stable one’ for ‘an emplaced haunting [is] constantly dissipated and then re-made’. ⁴⁴ Coastal folklore, in Cornwall and elsewhere, tended to populate natural spaces – caves, cliffs, coves – with otherworldly visitants, causing them to be ‘narratively re-loaded’ or at least infused with the supernatural. ⁴⁵ In this way, and as Jimmy Packham has observed, this does not merely represent a destabilising of place but also ‘generates an epistemological uncertainty’, causing ‘processes of perception and memory [to] become . . . unfixed or unmoored from certainty’. ⁴⁶

While this suggests an element of implicit spatial subversion in any telling of a ghost narrative, there are suggestions that some among Cornwall’s coastal communities explicitly fabricated such narratives to infuse the mundane with the supernatural. Operating at the coastal fringes where foreign contraband was brought ashore, Cornish smugglers arguably had a vested interest in bays, coves, caves and cliffs, places that served a very practical purpose in transporting and concealing goods, having supernatural associations. This seems a reasonable explanation for the ‘Lady of the Lantern’, a nineteenth-century Cornish tale recounted in Robert Hunt’s Popular Romances of the West of England. The lady of the title was a ghost who haunted the coast near St Ives. It was a tragic tale of a woman who had survived a shipwreck in which her baby had been lost. After she died, the distraught mother’s ghost continued to search among the rocks of the shoreline with a lantern, looking for her child. Other tales suggested flittering lights on coastal rocks at night were the spirits of the drowned hoping to discover their corpses had been washed ashore by the tide. ⁴⁷ Such tales not only explained mysterious lights sighted on the shoreline at night. As with the phantom ship of Porthcurno Cove, appearances of the Lady of the Lantern were taken as a portent of misfortune, usefully keeping people from the locality she haunted and possibly the illegal activities conducted thereabouts. ⁴⁸

Yet when examining folklore’s place in the construction, subversion, and contestation of spatial imaginaries the local power dynamics are fraught and uncertain. As ‘weapons of the weak’, the ability to resist was based on the subtle perceptual changes created by imbuing a local sense of supernatural otherness into a known space. ⁴⁹ This tended to be tacit rather than tactical subversion. Such stories could also be limited in scope and random in transmission. Our impression of Cornwall as a location rich in supernatural folklore is encouraged by literary compendiums by the likes of Hunt, Bottrell and Tregarthen. At any given location within the county, locals may have only known a few such stories, not those across the entirety of Cornwall. That tended to be the purview of the folklore collector. There were means of broader transmission in the form of nineteenth-century Cornwall’s travelling droll or storytellers who performed in local farmhouses. One such individual, ‘Uncle’ Anthony James, plied his craft on the Lizard peninsula in southern Cornwall, telling tales of ‘ghosts, witchcraft, and . . . many other things which were equally wonderful and fraught with interest to us simple folk at the Land’s End’. ⁵⁰ Yet William Bottrell suggest there was an increasing reluctance to openly discuss such topics among local communities by the 1870s. He recorded, ‘Although the belief still holds, yet most West Country folks are become shy of mentioning Captain Wetherel’s bell, or of talking on kindred subjects, except amongst ourselves, from the ridicule with which it is now fashionable to treat such matters, even in St. Levan.’ ⁵¹ We have limited insight into how such stories were told or received. While some of the tales explored above could articulate grief, loss, and longing, we should not lose sight of the fact that ghostly tales were also a cheap and enjoyable entertainment intended to frighten and thrill. As such, nobody could direct the purpose of such narratives, nor necessarily control how others responded to or interpreted them.

This suggests the operation of ghost stories, their brackish tainting and transformation of spatial imaginaries from within, tended to remain implicitly subversive. Their disruption and challenge were based on the existence rather than the explicit articulation of their alterity. While not necessarily rising to Davoudi’s definition of spatial imaginary as ‘deeply held, collective understanding of socio-spatial relations’, the brackish co-mingling of place and narrative suggests it was not so important that a story was believed as that it could resonate with the affective environment in which it was told. As such, a brackish analogy proves useful in appreciating the potential for subverting coastal spatial imaginaries through supernatural narratives. Its altered, unstable quality based on shifting levels of salinity captures the nature of haunting as a subversive spatial affect, one that is present but unfixed, sensed but elusive, possessing an alterity within but inseparable from the mundane.

Conclusions

The brackish interpretative framework explored in this article is a response to a number of ideas and concerns raised at the creation of the Coastal Studies & Society journal. It builds on the call to explore the hybridity between coastal environments, communities, and their activities, and to develop fresh approaches to and thematic experimentation in the critical interpretation of littoral spaces and cultures. ⁵² The shift to a watery focus, and particularly the distinctive, co-mingled but unfixed liminal state of brackish water, is a conscious attempt to move our thinking beyond inherent terrestrial biases. As an original approach, a brackish analogy has proven insightful in the service of analysing supernatural coastal folklore in nineteenth-century Cornwall. It has shown how folklore offers valuable insights into how coastal communities articulated the distinctive affective environment in which they lived, enabling us to better understand the interaction between environmental and cultural influences in the (co-)creation of littoral space and spatial meaning. A brackish reading of Cornish coastal folklore has drawn attention to the dramaturgical and subversive dynamics of haunting, its unsettled and unsettling mix of past-present-future and its uncanny combination of presence-absence disturbing the assumed temporal and spatial boundaries through which we structure our coastal imaginaries. Often blending environmental hazards and the mental anxieties and uncertainties of coastal communities, a brackish reading of supernatural folklore also reveals not just a distinctive ‘cultural coast’ but also a powerful psychological and emotional environment too. ⁵³ Through that, this article has also sought to advance a case for the important evaluative potential of littoral folklore, an understudied and still undervalued aspect of coastal culture.

Finally, a brackish conceptualising of spatial cultures and narratives has been presented as an alternative to the recent overuse of notions of entanglement. Entanglement’s emphasis on the messy entwining of fixed entities tends to result in a rather static presentation of the complexity of spatio-cultural interactions, with the operation of unequal power dynamics becoming obscured in the mesh. By contrast, the brackish gives us access to a different, more dynamic register of ideas and relations. Its emphasis on the fluid combining of differing qualities into a distinctive but unstable hybrid entity, its notions of flux and unfixed alterity within littoral spaces (and cultures), suggest both a more animated and subtle conceptualisation that might help move us beyond some of the inherent limitations of entanglement. In the case of coastal imaginaries, a brackish conceptualising of littoral space returns us to a need to think differently at the coast. More than simply ‘the edge of something else’, coastal space requires us to abandon our rigid terrestrial framings, among which we might include layered or palimpsestic stratification and entanglement. ⁵⁴ As demonstrated here, the brackish encourages us to appreciate ways in which our familiar structuralist binaries and boundaries – nature and culture, the natural and supernatural, land and sea – might become merged and co-mingled in the littoral zone. In doing so, it emphasises the fluid dynamism at work in coastal imaginaries, distinctive brackish formulations created from the ever-shifting interaction between an affective, interstitial environment and the shared cultural and psychological concerns of the communities that dwell within them.