Secret_History

Chapter 8: The Culture of Stones 269
with whom the old lady was quarreling were unaffected. Lethbridge was
convinced that the “spell” had rebounded on the old lady in some way. But, it was
this event that led to an important insight for us here, which is why we have
recounted the story.
Sometime after the old woman’s death, Lethbridge was passing her cottage and
suddenly experienced a “nasty feeling”, a “suffocating sense of depression”. His
curiosity aroused, Lethbridge walked around the cottage and discovered a most
interesting thing: he could step into and out of the “depression” just as if it were
some kind of invisibly defined “locus”.
This reminded Lethbridge of a similar experience he had had when walking with
his mother as a teenager. It was in the Great Wood near Wokingham, on a nice
morning, when suddenly the two of them experienced a “horrible feeling of gloom
and depression, which crept upon us like a blanket of fog over the surface of the
sea”. They left in a hurry and only later discovered that the corpse of a suicide had
been discovered lying just a few yards from where they had been standing.
Some years later, Lethbridge and his wife went to the seashore to collect
seaweed for their garden. As he walked on the beach, he again experienced the
sense of depression, gloom and fear descending on him. Resisting this influence,
Lethbridge and his wife began to fill their sacks with seaweed. After a very short
period of this activity, Lethbridge’s wife, Mina, came running up to him
demanding that they leave saying, “I can’t stand this place a minute longer.
There’s something frightful here”.
In a discussion about the phenomenon with Mina’s brother the following day,
the brother mentioned that he had experienced something very similar in a field
near Avebury, in Wiltshire. When he said the word “field”, it clicked in
Lethbridge’s mind and he remembered that field telephones often short circuit in
warm, muggy weather. “What was the weather like?”, he asked.
“Warm and damp”, replied the brother.
Right there, the idea began to shape itself in Lethbridge’s mind. Water. On the
day he had been in the Great Wood, it had been warm and damp. When they had
been at the beach gathering seaweed, it had likewise been warm and damp.
Experiment was obviously in order!
The next weekend, Lethbridge and his wife again visited the bay. Again, as they
stepped onto the beach, the same bank of depression and gloom enveloped them.
Mina led him to the spot where she had experienced such an overwhelming
sensation that she had insisted on leaving the place. At that spot, the sensation was
so powerful that they actually felt dizzy. Lethbridge described it as being similar
to having a high fever and full of drugs. As it happened, on either side of this spot
were two streams of water.
Mina went off to the cliff to look at the scenery and suddenly walked into the
“depression” again. She actually had the sensation that something or someone was
urging her to jump off the cliff! When she had brought it to the attention of
Lethbridge, he agreed that this spot was as “sinister” as the spot on the beach
between the streams.
As it turned out, nine years later, a man did commit suicide from that exact spot.
Lethbridge wondered if there was some sort of “timeless” sensation that had been
“imprinted” on the area via some sort of “recording” principle. It seemed that,