Canterbury Cathedral
This is a special ghost edition of Eve Loves Things: Canterbury Cathedral! This way for 100% real ghosts and ghost photographs which are in no way a result of a smudge on my camera lens.
My friend had finished her MA and was heading back to the States, so we decided to go on one last day trip to Canterbury. It was full of old things and old creepy ghost feelings, as you can see in the 100% authentic ghost photography which is, I repeat, not a drop of water that landed on my lens when it was raining.
So much scrolling! Listen, Canterbury in incredible. I've seen a lot of gothic cathedrals, but this one was so huge and impressive it was terrifying. Because the crypt is above ground, the cathedral has several floors in the centre, and because they don't get any light it feels outrageously dark and spooky, which if you ask me is half the point. Granted, the point of many gothic churches was to fill them with light by using so many windows and light-coloured stone, but also I think it adds to the whole life and death vibe of a Christianity that communicated more through imagery than text. When you had lots of illiterate churchgoers, you had to remind them what's what by putting gargoyles and stuff on your already horrifyingly large church-tomb.
Also, Canterbury is actually for REAL haunted with important Christian ghosts. Thomas Beckett was the archbishop of Canterbury and was having a tiff with king Henry II about the churches' rights. The king sent some soldiers to the cathedral and they cut Thomas' head off where he was kneeling to pray, which is a pretty cheap shot. After that he became a huge Christian martyr and saint, and tons of people made pilgrimages to Canterbury to see his relics and hope that some of their voodoo magic rubbed off on them, cause you do NOT mess around with relic-magic.
Anyhoo, remember when you had to read The Canterbury Tales in high school English and probably regretted your entire life? They were written about people coming to the Cathedral to hang out with the crypt of Thomas Beckett. People came to the cathedral for hundreds of years, until Henry VIII destroyed Beckett's shrine when he was generally pillaging all the Catholic churches in England, because he was a JERK. I mean, take their money if you want, but leave the super old crypt for posterity at least!
I have to say, my favorite part of any medieval cathedral is the cloisters. I'm fairly sure I was a monk/nun in a former life because when I walk around cloisters I feel like I belong there. This also happens in libraries, which is where you spend most of your time if you're a fancy monk copying manuscripts. And I would have been the fanciest monk, dammit. Or actually, the apothecary monk, because you were basically a witch, and I think I was also a witch.
Coming back to reality, the cloisters were gorgeous and the sun was very polite and came out when we were walking in them. The grass was VERY GREEN, and I think you aren't allowed to walk on it to preserve the greenness. The cloisters must have been hard place to live but also a relatively safe one, since the church more or less protected you and fed you and such, although I can't imagine things were champagne and caviar unless you were the archbishop and you probably ignored most of the rules about humility and poverty and just threw DOWN at monk parties whenever you had the chance. At least that's what I am led to believe after reading The Name of the Rose, which I definitely recommend if you like reading murder mysteries, stories about monastic life, and if you don't mind having obscure mystical text titles in Latin thrown in your general direction whilst you read.
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