The past couple of weeks I’ve offered up Halloween Treats & practiced my potions stirring up some Witches’ Brew in anticipation of Halloween.
This week I’m digging up some literary inspiration for a table from a ghostly tale set at Highgate Cemetery in London. . .
Her Fearful Symmetry *** by Audrey Niffenegger
“Her Fearful Symmetry, a haunting tale about the complications of love, identity, and sibling rivalry~ opens with the death of Elspeth Noblin, who bequeaths her London flat and its contents to the twin daughters of her estranged twin sister back in Chicago. These 20-year-old dilettantes, Julie and Valentina, move to London, eager to try on a new experience like one of their obsessively matched outfits. Historic Highgate Cemetery, which borders Elspeth’s home, serves as an inspired setting as the twins become entwined in the lives of their neighbors. Niffenegger brings these quirky, troubled characters to marvelous life, but readers may need their own supernatural suspension of disbelief as the story winds to its twisty conclusion.”
“The gravestones turned white and seemed to be edged with silver; they hovered, tooth-like amid the ivy.”
“Highgate Cemetery was dense with dripping trees slushy gravel paths. Crows flew from graves to low branches, circled and landed on the roof of the Dissenters’ chapel, which was now the cemetery’s’ office.”
“He liked Highgate Cemetery best at night. At night there were no visitors, no weeds to pull, no enquiries from journalists—there was only the cemetery itself, spread out in the moonlight like a soft grey hallucination, a stony wilderness of Victorian melancholy.”
“. . .a dense clamour of large, tilting graves, crowded and encroached on by trees and greenery.”
“Beyond the wall, Highgate Cemetery spread before them, vast and chaotic. Because they were on a hill, they might have seen quite far down into the cemetery, but the density of the trees prevented this, the branches were bare, but they formed a latticework that confused the eye.”
“Hundreds of crows rose into the air as one. Even through the closed window they could hear the rush of wings.”
A History of Highgate Cemetery:
“In the early decades of the nineteenth century London was facing a major crisis. Inadequate burial space along with a high mortality rate resulted in a serious problem – not enough room for the dead. Graveyards and burial grounds were crammed in between shops, houses and taverns, wherever there was space. In really bad situations undertakers dressed as clergy performed unauthorized and illegal burials. Bodies were wrapped in cheap material and buried amongst other human remains in graves just a few feet deep. Quicklime was often thrown over the body to help speed decomposition, so that within a few months the grave could be used again. The smell from these disease-ridden burial places was terrible. They were overcrowded, uncared for and neglected.”