Cemetery Sunday #2 - St Helen’s, Hangleton, East Sussex

Hangleton had been coming up in conversation again and again. Not in any particularly obvious way. Just enough times for me to notice it, so I decided that was where I was going next.  I looked up and there is only really  St Helen’s Church. So I drove there, deliberately without doing any research beforehand.

I wanted to meet the place first, not knowing its history or any stories so I could just feel into the place.

I parked a little way away on St Helen’s Drive and sat quietly for a while. The first thing I noticed was the energy coming from the green and the land around the church.

It felt strong. not frightening exactly, but heavy. There was something in it that felt connected to death, illness and sadness. At first I assumed that was simply because I was sitting beside an old churchyard. But then something else happened.

I saw a man, not physically, in my mind's eye. A hooded figure walking back and forth along the road beside the church. I understood the road to be Hangleton Way.

There was something very particular about him.vI didn't feel threatened.Instead, I had the sense of someone who had been misunderstood.

Someone people had been frightened of but what came through to me was something different, he was a protector.

I didn't know who he was or I didn't have a name. Just the image of this hooded man walking the road beside the church. I made a mental note of it and carried on.

And this is where Cemetery Sunday gets interesting.

Because I don't research the place beforehand, I feel first, then I go home and start digging.

THE CHURCH THAT FEELS SEPARATE FROM TIME

St Helen's is strange in the best possible way. The modern houses of Hangleton have grown up around it, yet the churchyard still feels somehow removed from them.

As though the old landscape has refused to completely disappear. That wasn't just my impression. The Church of England describes the church as occupying a commanding position on a steep slope, surrounded by open grassed space which has retained something of the rural village atmosphere of the ancient church and churchyard, despite the surrounding twentieth-century suburb.

And that makes sense when you stand there. It doesn't feel like a church dropped into a housing estate. It feels more like the housing estate has grown up around the church.

I walked around the small churchyard, acknowledging the graves as I went. Some were beautiful, some weathered almost beyond recognition. There were cross-shaped memorials which had a distinctly Celtic feeling to me, although I wouldn't want to impose a historical interpretation on them without knowing more about each individual monument.

And then there was the tomb, a striking tomb covered in intricate mosaic.

I couldn't go inside the church that day, it wasn't yet open, so I left with more questions than answers. Which, as it turns out, was rather appropriate.

And this is where the story became much stranger. St Helen's is Grade II* listed. The nave contains fabric dating from around the 12th century, the tower from the 13th century, with a chancel dating to around 1300. There are also surviving traces of medieval wall paintings.

So this isn't simply an old church, it is an extraordinary survivor. But the story goes deeper. The church once stood within the medieval village of Hangleton, and that village largely disappeared. By the 15th century, Hangleton had become what archaeologists describe as a deserted or depopulated medieval settlement. The reasons aren't certain. The Black Death may have played a part, alongside other social and economic changes.

The village didn't simply move, it kind of vanished and yet the church remained.

And suddenly that feeling I had sitting there, that strange sense that the church was somehow separate from the modern world around it made much more sense.

I was sitting in a place that had survived the disappearance of the community that once surrounded it. A church that remained long, long after the village had gone.

This was the moment that stopped me, because after writing down what I had experienced, I began looking into local ghost folklore.

And there he was. The Hangman of Hangleton.

Local ghost stories tell of a hooded male figure associated with the area around Hangleton Road, Hangleton Way and the old gallows and gibbets. The figure is traditionally identified as Thomas Kypper, a 17th-century hangman.

According to local accounts, Hangleton was once a place of execution, with gallows and gibbets in the area. Kypper is said to have been an unusually brutal executioner who eventually found himself on the wrong side of the law and was hanged himself.

The ghost story describes him as a tall, broad figure in ragged or dirty clothing, with a black hood over his head. Some accounts say he carries a staff and others describe a wooden leg.

There are stories of people seeing him along Hangleton Road, between Old Shoreham Road and Hangleton Way. Some reports even describe sounds associated with his appearances, a heavy thud and tapping noises.And suddenly I was sitting there with my notebook thinking:

I saw a hooded man walking back and forth along Hangleton Way.

Before I knew any of this, that doesn't prove that I encountered Thomas Kypper.

I wouldn't claim that, there is a very important difference between an experience and an explanation. But it is exactly the kind of coincidence that makes me want to keep researching. Because my impression of this figure wasn't of a brutal executioner, this was of someone who was misunderstood. Yes, someone people were afraid of but someone who had somehow become a protector. And that doesn't fit neatly with the folklore which makes it even more interesting.

Was I sensing the same figure described in local stories? Was my mind picking up something from the landscape and translating it into an image I could understand? Was it something entirely different? Or was the hooded man simply my own symbolic language for something the land was showing me? I don't know, and I'm comfortable with not knowing fully, this is why I love doing this…

THE LAND OF DEATH

The more I researched Hangleton, the more the theme of death kept appearing, the old village, the church, the churchyard, Medieval burials, the gallows and gibbets associated with local folklore, stories of executions, ghost traditions and even the stories of hauntings around Hangleton Manor, which is not far from the church.

There are also local memories of children experiencing apparitions in the churchyard — including one account from the 1950s describing children attempting to “conjure” a ghost over a grave before witnessing a whitish figure emerging above one of the larger graves.

Again, these are local memories and folklore, not historical proof. But they form another layer of the place and that is what interests me. What has happened here, what was witnessed here?  What has been buried here, physically, emotionally and culturally? What happens to a place when the people who once lived there disappear, but the church remains? What does a landscape remember?

AND THE MOSAIC TOMB

The beautiful mosaic tomb I noticed before doing any research also had a story. It belongs to Edward Vaughan Hyde Kenealy, the barrister and politician best known for his involvement in the extraordinary Tichborne case. His tomb, beside the church, is made of black marble and decorated with intricate coloured and gold mosaic.

I knew none of this when I stood looking at it, I simply noticed it. Another little thread to pick up later. That's becoming one of my favourite parts of Cemetery Sunday. The things that catch my attention before I know why.

And then there is another question. How old is this place really? The physical fabric of the present church points towards a medieval foundation,  particularly late 11th or early 12th-century work. But historical research suggests something potentially much older.

One historical record cited by Heritage Gateway says that St Helen's may have existed as early as the 960s. There have even been suggestions that its origins could reach into an earlier British Christian landscape.

But this is where I want to be careful. That is a scholarly suggestion, not proof that this was a pagan sacred site. There is no evidence I've found that allows me to say that. But it does make me wonder. What was this landscape before the surviving church? Who gathered here? What did the land mean to the people who lived here before the records we can access? And how many layers of human experience can sit beneath one apparently quiet piece of grass?

QUESTIONING

This is why I don't want Cemetery Sunday to become a series about proving ghosts. I'm much more interested in the layers and then the experiences I have myself.

Sometimes they line up and sometimes they don't, sometimes there is an extraordinary coincidence and sometimes there is simply a mystery.

The hooded man at St Helen's is one of those mysteries for me. I went there knowing nothing. I saw a hooded figure walking the road beside the church. I felt him as misunderstood and protective. And only afterwards did I discover the centuries-old landscape of death and execution surrounding Hangleton and the local stories of a hooded figure said to walk those very roads.

I'm going there to listen, feel, research and question and I have a feeling Hangleton isn't finished talking yet…