At its heart, The Peculiar Path is a map of Haunted places and as I’ve recently been bringing the archive online and updating the website, there’s been a lot to consider about how to best organise this map.
When the project first began, it was simply called ‘Haunted Stockport’, and my aim was to collect and research haunting accounts in my (then) hometown of Stockport. Though I pinned them to a basic Google map, the geography of places wasn’t really on my mind much, as the area I was focused on was relatively small, extending to the boundaries of Heaton Chapel to the North, Marple and Mellor to the East, Disley to the South and Gatley to the East.
As I collected more stories, the scope expanded into Manchester which as a county is relatively large, and as I was travelling exclusively by public transport, organising them geographically became crucial to organising field visits.
The original structure involved a secondary location database in notion, linked to the haunting entry which worked great for organising but meant I was manually creating a lot of location entries which soon became more work than it was worth. As I gradually bring the archive online, organising the entries geographically, in a way that makes sense to a visitor has become a lot more crucial. Atlas Obscura, an online directory of interesting and unusual places has been a huge influence on the website and how their entries are organised and mapped to encourage exploration has inspired the current design of the website. In my head, and when describing the website to people, I always say “it’s going to be Atlas Obscura, but for ghosts”. It’s taken some time to finalise, and is still evolving but I now have a structure that works for the current state of the archive.
Counties, Towns & Villages
Historically, the ceremonial counties of England were a lot different than they are now. Though Manchester has been a settlement for at least 2000 years, Greater Manchester has only existed since the 1970’s. Mellor, originally in Derbyshire, was transferred to Cheshire in 1936 before becoming part of Greater Manchester upon its creation in 1974. In less than fifty years, the village had resided in three different counties. A lot of the material I reference therefore will transcend the current boundaries, a lot of the best folklore concerning Manchester is to be found on volumes regarding Lancashire and its traditions.
At the top level we have England and then beneath that the 48 ceremonial counties, the current scope being Cheshire, Derbyshire and Greater Manchester.
After that it gets slightly more tricky. Originally, every town, village and city within a county was at the same level but this quickly grew out of hand and I was manually creating pages for individual locations and the workload became unmanageable, and also is completely redundant for small hamlets that only have a single archive entry. The solution then, was to further divide counties into towns and cities. These typically follow post towns so the entries location is taken directly from the address, and where to place the bottom level villages and hamlets is determined by address. As an example, a location such as Stonehurst House in Marple also comes under Stockport and Greater Manchester.
Disley is a good example of where things get blurry and as it is home to the historic Lyme Park, reputed to be one of the most haunted places in Cheshire, it’s important to get this right. Though it is managed by Cheshire East Council, Disley falls under the SK postcode, and it’s address includes Stockport. My first instinct was to keep the standard post town convention and place Disley into Stockport, but this would then root it into Greater Manchester as opposed to Cheshire. In this instance then, Disley and all its hauntings exist as a separate town under Cheshire. As you browse the archive, you will notice that there is a section on each entry for nearby hauntings, so hopefully this solves the county separation somewhat as you can see the distance between places.
There will likely be mistakes, and the categorisation evolves with the project so nothing is final. However I hope that the current method makes the entries easy to navigate accomodates broadening the scope the archive.
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