ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the North/Northwest uplands, covers the moorlands and fells of Cumbria, Yorkshire, and the Peak District, before moving south, utilizes the railway cuttings carved across English countryside and stopping off in some haunted gardens, before reaching our terminus at the seaside. Helen Pleasance, writing about the murders, notes that the children who return as ghosts on the moors are specifically children of the poor, urban working classes of Manchester and its environs. The very act of considering the relationship between ghosts and geography reminds us of how miniscule an individual human lifetime is in comparison with landscape. Whether moorland, fell, cutting, coast, or the gardens that dissemble in their apparently idyllic but perilous cultivations, landscape shapes our fears, raises our ghosts, “snags, bites and troubles” us in the realization of our diminution.
