Vaults and cars

Could “the curious vaults at Staunton, Suffolk” with their moving coffins [ have been not at Stanton, Suffolk, as often suggested, but at Santon Downham, Suffolk, in what’s now Thetford Forest up against the border with Norfolk? Santon Downham has a church, St Mary’s, parts of which are Norman. While I’m not aware of this church having vaults or a crypt, it has many features showing signs of having being “filled in” duringVictorian restoration. The Norfolk border would have been a lot further away in 1815 – in those days, all the land as far north as Thetford (now in Norfolk) was part of Suffolk. Santon Downham is now the headquarters of the Forestry Commission for the East of England, although today’s extensive Thetford Forest – England’s biggest lowland forest – hadn’t been planted back in 1815, at the time of the earliest known report of the moving coffins of “Staunton, Suffolk”.

There is also the Suffolk village of Sproughton (pronounced

spror-ton), which could have been garbled to “Staunton.” It lies on the western extremity of Ipswich and has a 14th century church whose eastern end is entirely a Victorian restoration job. The village is on the River Gipping and still has an old watermill. It’s best known for the Wild Man pub, named after a wildman who appeared in a nearby wasteland and terrorised the 15th century builders of the inn.

I’ve found several examples of fortean events recorded as happening at mystery Suffolk place names that can no longer be traced. One of the witchcraft suspects convicted of “using imps” during the Witchfinder General’s East of England reign of terror in 1649 was a man from “Steak, Suffolk”, although we’re none to wiser as to where “Steak” is. Present-day Stoke by Clare? Stoke by Nayland? Or Stoke St Mary, now the Stoke Park neighbourhood of Ipswich, where Ipswich railway station stands?

The Proceedings of the Bath Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club for 1824 (p287) describes the discovery of live, entombed lizards dug out of a chalk pit in “Eden, Suffolk,” although no such place is known today. It could be a very garbled reference to Elveden in the west of the country, best known for England’s tallest war memorial, with the right geology for chalk pits. But there’s also an Eden Park in Suffolk County, Virginia, in the US, which could somehow have got transposed to Suffolk in the East of England in this case.

And Fiery Mount, the house in the parish of Ufford, Suffolk, where Miss Walpole’s sister reported to the Fairy Census hearing fairy harps in the 1930s [ Ft321:46-49], seems itself to have done a fairy vanishing act. Ufford’s Parish Clerk told me they could find no record of there ever having been a Fairy Mount in their parish.

Re the Hoodoo Car legend attached to the car in which Franz Ferdinand was a passenger that fateful June 1914 day in Sarajevo [ Ft352:43-44]: I recall reading yet another version of the story in about 1976 when I was nine or 10. It was in a thin Pan paperback

with the word “Strange” in the title, containing many stories it claimed were true. There was a section on cursed items, pieces of jewellery that brought misfortune on their aristocratic owners and so on.

One “curse” was that of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s ‘unlucky’ car. In this version, the bomb hurled at the motorcade by Young Bosnian assassin Nedjelko

Čabrinović, bouncing off the bonnet of Franz Ferdinand’s car, exploding under the car behind and wounding 16 people, (an incident which actually happened) was as a result of the ‘curse’ of the car. This somehow acted with an evil intelligence to deflect the bomb off its bonnet and injure lots of people elsewhere. The car’s driver taking a wrong turn down a Sarajevo street and bringing it within a metre or two of bumbling assassin Gavrilo Princip was, naturally, attributed to the curse as well, rather than the confusion that followed the first assassination attempt.

There followed the usual string of accidents to people who drove the car (I vaguely remember that in one of these, something catastrophic happened around it when it was requisitioned to the front in World War I.) What I remember most vividly from the story was that it ended with the car, in its museum inVienna, taking a direct hit from Allied aerial bombardment in the final months of World War II, which naturally completely destroyed the museum and the car with it. This, of course, was part of the curse, which only ended with the complete destruction of the cursed car itself.

Except that it was untrue. WhileVienna’s Heeresge-schichtliches Museum was almost completely destroyed by bombing in 1943, then its ruins fought over by the advancing Red Army, Franz Ferdinand’s car and most of the then extant collection had already been evacuated in 1938 and restored to a rebuilt museum by 1955. Matt Salusbury Dunwich, Suffolk It might interest readers to note that the registration number of the Graf & Stift open-top touring car in which Franz Ferdinand was shot was A 111 118. Some choose to see this as a nod to the date of the Armistice that ended the conflict: 11/11/18. Graeme Donald Cheshire