So You’re Moving To Pagham-on-Sea: Doing the Groundwork

I’m taking a short break from my Goth posts to blog about my own work, and read a few more modern Gothic fic stories that I can review in the Goth is [not] dead series.

So, without further ado, here’s a few fun things about Pagham-on-Sea where my contemporary novels are set!

N. B.: Pagham is a real town near Chichester in East Sussex, which is a total coincidence: mine is called Pagham-on-Sea and further west than the real one.

East Sussex

So you’ve done it! You’ve finally tired of hiding your true self from the neighbours and taken the plunge to move away.

Good for you, As-Yet-Unspecified-Supernatural!

There were a few locations to consider, but you’ve found and bought your dream place in a ‘quaint’ coastal town on the East Sussex coast! You’re pretty sure the neighbours at No. 5 are ‘regular’ people, but the ones at No. 7 are just like you, you’re 99.9% sure.

What’s not to love about Pagham-on-Sea?

It’s situated between Pevensey and Bexhill, below the A259, a commuter town with high speed trains to London which take just over an hour.

It has a good bus service, and two train stations (Pagham Town, local stopping service to Bexhill, Hastings and Eastbourne, and Pagham Parkway, trains to London and Ashbourne International).

What can you expect in your lovely new forever home?

Let’s start with some basic seasonal safety tips!

Living In An Undead Paradise

Don’t plant what you don’t want to grow

A quaint agricultural saying, or good advice?

No one is buried in Pagham-on-Sea anymore, not since the parish church burned down (Read: got torched with Greek Fire) in the 1960s. Most graves in the cemetery have had iron cages fitted and look like this (and it’s not just to deter body snatchers):

Victorian barred grave, WikiCommons, St Edmund’s Church, photo credit: Evelyn Simak

Although if you’re ‘planting’ something that wasn’t quite human to begin with, there’s probably nothing for it but incantations and napalm.

Eldritch abominations aside, the soil in this area is uncommonly fertile.

Is this because of the natural energies from ley lines?

Something to do with the 5000-year-old long barrow in Barrow Field?

A sinister meteor crash in the Roman era near the site of an ancient ironworks?

Or the mysterious secret society of local farmers who met at Fairwood House in the 1880s?

Either way, every year around springtime, new life gets breathed into more than just the plants.

Don’t panic, though: the Crematorium is open 24/7 from 01 March to 31 July during “Rising season”. No appointment necessary in an emergency, but please come prepared to beat your own corpse into submission if there is a longer-than-usual queue.

Stay tuned for more!