Withdean Hall

Yea, and it spake to me thus mockingly:
"Resist me not, with me there is no strife,
Dids't thou not call upon me, I am come
To be the Guardian Angel of thine home,
To be a light to lighten all thy life
Henceforth we will dwell together, thou and I."

Today I took a brief excursion out from my work at the University to once more go on the cemetery tour.

I learned two important things:

1) Blowing on a dandelion will tell you the exact time time to the minute (3pm it turned out). It was a very accurate clock...

2) In the extra-mural cemetery a man is buried. A man who wrote of vampires and werewolves in Victorian times. A man who "has been described as 'the first Goth' and 'the Quentin Crisp of the 1890s'." A man who used to live in the hall at the bottom of my road. The hall with the inverted pentegrams. At last I have the answer to the question I have idly wondered for so many years...

Back to work now... But with thoughts of mad mad Count Stenbock...

Towards the last the Count was mentally as well as physically ill. At Withdeane Hall he terrified the domestic staff with his persecution complex and his delirium tremens so scared the young Mowatts that they had to be moved to more distant rooms. On his travels he had been escorted, and with him went a dog, a monkey and a life-size doll. He was convinced that the doll was his son and referred to it as 'le Petit comte'. Every day it had to be brought to him, and when it was not there he would ask for news of its health. The Stenbocks believed that a dishonest monk - or perhaps a Jesuit - had extorted large sums of money from him under the pretence of paying for the education of 'le Petit Comte'.

Madness.