I’ve always been interested in the way our direct physical environment might affect our psychology, and the possibility that concrete realities may act on us in such a way as to create a sense of the weird and the eerie, possibly thereby making us more susceptible to the suggestion of supernatural agency.
As I said in the last post – Highgate Cemetery seems very atmospheric to me, but maybe no more inherently weird than any other place we dispose of our dead. Oddly, it’s Swain’s Lane - the public road running up the east side of the western section – that pushes my weird buttons.
For London at least, it’s really quite steep. It’s also narrow, and the cemetery wall abuts directly the road edge, there being no path on that side, which, again ‘feels’ kind of odd, and a maybe a little bit oppressive; it’s quite easy – walking up the lane towards Highgate - to find yourself thinking it might have been designed to keep something in, rather than keep the wanderer out.
It strikes me that Swain’s Lane itself – the actual road, rather than the general area - is also the actual locus of several sightings that are attributed to Highgate Cemetery – and it makes me wonder if the lane had a haunted reputation before the cemetery, or even if the lane itself has been the haunted place all along, and the burial ground just stole its thunder.
The cemetery is built on the grounds of the old Ashurst House, and I think - from checking out a couple of old maps - the line of the wall has been around since that time. And possibly even parts of the original wall remain.
Even if you took the site away from the context of its famous neighbour - the steepness, the narrowness, that close set high wall - I wonder if that all might trigger some sort of atavistic response in the night-time traveller that makes them prone to having the wits scared out of them.
