Hit The North - City of the Dread

Reggie Chamberlain-King has spent more time than is surely healthy burrowing through the archives, his nose deep inside faded books and journals as he consults the records.

A distractible procrastinator, with a yen for the writings of Charles Fort, he’s also spent much of that time diverting down side-roads into marginalia that wasn’t entirely relevant to the job at hand.
One day, while flicking through a copy of American journalist Mary Roach’s book Spook: Science Tackles The Afterlife, he was surprised to find a reference to a story that resonated closer to home.
“It was about The Goligher Circle: a family of Presbyterian psychics operating out of a terrace house in what is now The Holy Lands, an area of South Belfast,” he says. “Dr WJ Crawford, an engineering professor from New Zealand, who lived on the Belmont Road, spent four fanatical years conducting experiments on the family to confirm his theories on post-death survival. His relationship with the youngest daughter Kathleen became very intimate and unhealthy and, in 1920, Crawford took his own life, insisting in his suicide note that the psychical work was the only thing in which he had unshakable faith. The Golighers were revealed as frauds the following year.”
After stumbling on this tale Reggie returned to the archives, keen to discover if there existed other yarns from Belfast’s past that — like the Golighers’ — had the feel of something a little bit off-message.
The result, just published, is a fabulous book called Weird Belfast. Not that Reggie is convinced there’s a strain of weirdness particular to Belfast.
“That is exactly what I had hoped to find,” he says, “but I am not sure, upon reflection, that it would really be possible to isolate such a thing. There are, of course, certain events or accounts that strike one as extreme examples or expressions of the city’s preoccupations: religious fervour and disharmony; politics; and superstition and folklore. But the weird event isn’t weird because of some influence of the city itself, it is weird because it happened there and then, not somewhere else and not now.”
Not surprisingly, given his love of dark and mysterious tales of old, Reggie’s favourite discoveries linked Belfast to Victorian London’s Ripper mystery.
“As someone with a life-long interest in Forteana, it was with no small delight that I uncovered the various Jack The Ripper connections with the city. This certainly seems to be the section that captures people’s attention. The news of a Ripper letter sent to The Belfast Telegraph was reported around the globe; the description of John Foster, arrested for the Whitechapel Murders in Ballymacarrett, was considered of great importance in Mexico, in Canada, and Australia. Three men were arrested in Belfast under suspicion of being Jack The Ripper. The nephew of the Unionist Party leader stabbed a woman to death, under the hysterical influence of the reporting of the case, and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a Holmes story — The Adventure Of The Cardboard Box — based on the Dear Boss letter sent to Belfast. However, none of these names appear in the standard Ripperology texts. Even in a science as inexact as Ripperology, they are considered too tangential, too vague, too mysterious, but they had an impact on the people involved, on their communities, and on the city around them.”
Considering the first “restrained” draft of the book came in at over 350 pages, and that stories involving Jules Verne, HG Wells and proposed tunnels to Scotland all fell victim to the inevitable edit, Reggie confirms that further volumes are possible.
“There is no shortage of material,” he reveals. “How could there be? Weird things happen all the time. What constitutes the weird is variable – there are infinite volumes lying in wait and I have already started on them.”
Which, given how terrific Weird Belfast Vol 1 is, strikes me as a remarkably sane decision.

Weird Belfast by Reggie Chamberlain-King is published by Blackstaff.