Confessions of a Teenage GhostHunter: Keeping the St Marks Eve Vigil and Looking for the Ghost of Sir Walter Calverley
When I was a student Leeds University, in the north of England, (this was in the early 1970s) I used to go on nocturnal ghost-hunting forays with one of my flatmates, a medical student called Ralph. I had the notebook and a typewriter. He had the Pentax 35mm camera. We both had flasks of black coffee.
ST MARKS MYSTERIOUS EVE
One of our first ventures was to camp out in the graveyard of St Marks Church in Leeds to keep the St Mark’s Eve Vigil. The folklore behind the vigil holds that if you sit in a churchyard or church porch between the hours of 11pm to 1am on St Mark’s Eve (25th April), you will see the spirits (technically they would be the doppelgängers) of all the people who were due to die over the coming 12 months.
The following passage in Chambers Book of Days explains it in more detail in the section headed Traditions and Legends of St Mark’s Eve... “In the northern parts of England, it is still believed that if a person, on the eve of St Mark’s Day, watch in the church porch from eleven at night till one in the morning, he will see the apparitions of all those who are to be buried in the churchyard during the ensuing year.”
There is even a piece of anonymous verse to describe the vigil...
Tis now, replied the village belle,
St. Mark’s mysterious eve,
And all that old traditions tell
