THIS IS A police statement, but they said I could tell it in my own way. So I’m not writing it down, I’m dictating it into the desk sergeant’s laptop, like he even knows how to operate it. He sticks Post-It notes on the lid, the keys are filthy and there’s software on it from before I was born.
I’m not worried. I’m going to get out of here because there’s someone coming who can prove what really happened.
They want me to put everything down, so first I have to explain about the hill.
The boundary line between Devon and Cornwall is dotted with small villages that pretend they’re towns, but they’re not. For a start, everyone who lives in them is either really old, over forty at least, and has lived there all their lives, or they’re from London and only come down at the weekends. The locals all hate them, although my Dad says we should smile as we charge them double, like the French do. There’s no one of my age to hang out with here, and nowhere to go if you do find someone. If you travel to one of the bigger towns with your mates, there’s a good chance you’ll get beaten up just because you’re from somewhere else.
My folks are obsessed with getting fresh air. “Let’s go for a walk and get some fresh air”, like there’s ever anything else to do. “Let’s go up to the hill.” We live in a village called Trethorton Hill. It consists of a short high street, about a hundred and twenty houses, two pubs and a hill. That’s it. There’s nothing even remotely interesting about the hill, it’s just a huge pimple of grass and scrub with a single white rock set in the top, not even a proper standing stone, and when they get up there hikers say things like “You can see all the way to Dartmoor from here”, as if that’s a good thing. I hate hikers, with their billycans and red knees and woollen hats, and their rulebooks and guidebooks and hard little eyes. But that’s what everyone around here does every Sunday. On Saturdays they go to Liskeard for their shopping, and on Sundays they go up the hill. I used to think that was boring until I realized that people actually come here from other towns to go up the hill, and what does that make their villages, if it’s more interesting here than staying where they are?
The locals think they’re cool and that they’ve been around, but they haven’t. I heard some old guy in the supermarket telling the cashier that he’d just been up North, and she was reacting in amazement, like he’d just told her he’d been to Alpha Centauri. Then he added, “Yes, I went all the way to Tintagel”, and I realized he meant North Cornwall. Jesus.
I have an older sister, and she got out while she could. I say “got out”, what she did was get pregnant by some docker who’d gone to work on container ships out of Liverpool, so now she’s stuck in Swansea with two bulldog-faced kids, in a hell of her own making.
Not for me. Once I get a job offer you won’t see me for dust. I’m smart, I’m awake, I’ve got a mind. But it doesn’t pay to be too clever in a village. People get suspicious of you. Best to keep your mouth shut and stay indoors mucking about on the internet, talking to smart people on the other side of the world. Someone asked me if we had Wi-Fi, and I had to explain we don’t even get decent mobile phone reception here. The internet stops you from getting too lonely, because there are people in places with exotic sounding names, and they’re just as bored as you are, so it makes you feel better.
I made one friend but he’s not my friend any more, a kid called Daniel who came from the next village. I met him at IT club, and then at the Trethorton Charity Climb – we weren’t taking part, we were just hanging around – and I thought, “We’re alike. He’s awake too.” Daniel lives in a damp shadowy dell called Crayshaw. It’s a village which loses its sunlight before lunchtime even at the height of summer. Daniel’s parents are rich – his old man had invented rubberized flooring for factories and had sold it all around the world. So Daniel got an amazing allowance but had no one to share it with, because he had a gimp leg which meant he couldn’t play football, and the flybrains at school treated him like dirt because he was from the wrong village and couldn’t do sports. He never told them he had money, but he told me after I stuck up for him in a fight.
Daniel got excused from double games on Fridays (he only did the midweek swimming) and I didn’t go because I hated it. I once forged a doctor’s letter to Mr Phelps the gym teacher saying I had a defective heart valve and couldn’t do contact sports, and the moron never even bothered to check it out with my folks. So every Friday afternoon we kicked around Trethorton Hill looking for ways to annoy the hikers. Once we tied fishing wire over the grass and filmed them, all falling over, on our phones.
Although Daniel had money he couldn’t really spend it. He was only allowed to catch the bus as far as Liskeard because of his leg, so it wasn’t like we were going to whip off to Ibiza for the weekend, but we bought stuff online, and for a while we had a lot of fun hanging out together.
My old man says when things go wrong there’s always a woman involved, and in this case it was a girl called Tara Mellor. She was in our year and had been suspended twice for wearing incorrect school uniform. She was tall and thin with cropped blonde hair, and I was nuts about her, but for some incredible reason she seemed to prefer Daniel. But at the start the three of us hung out together a lot.
The lardy desk sergeant just came by, saw what I was writing and said could I get to the point. I wanted to say, “Could you get to the gym?” but he’d already waddled off.
I think the problem was that Daniel and I kept trying to impress Tara. To his credit, he never flashed his cash at her – he was too cool for that – and besides, she wasn’t interested in money. She wasn’t like the other girls we knew from school, who spent all their spare time planning shopping trips to town on Saturdays. She read a lot, and was interested in ancient history. The trouble started on the day she dragged us to Liskeard’s “Man, Myth & Magic” Museum. The locals wanted to get rid of the word “man” because they said it was sexist, and rename it “The Liskeard Early Civilization Centre”. We wrote in to the Liskeard Gazette with a suggestion of our own, but I guess they worked out that the acronym we suggested would be pronounced “Dogs’ Cocks” and they didn’t run our letter.
We were in the museum and there was a section on local legends, the usual guff about ghosts, human sacrifices, phantom hounds and highwaymen, and Tara said there was no proof that any of the stories were true, they were just made up by drunk old publicans, and she pointed out that Trethorton Hill didn’t even have any decent legends attached to it, that’s how lame the place was, and that’s when we decided to make one up.
We decided it had to be a believable legend, something with evidence to back it up. It also had to be something that could scare the hikers off the hill. So Daniel said how about aliens, and I said no because crop circles had been discredited years ago, all you needed was a couple of dopeheads armed with a piece of rope and a plank. We needed something more sophisticated. I thought we should create a plausible unsolved mystery, so we decided on a desperate sailor who had come ashore after murdering his violent captain in a mutiny, and who for some unknown reason dragged a local girl up the hill and cut her throat. Then we added a supernatural element that would provide proof of the legend, a ghostly wailing you could hear on certain nights when the air was still.
PC Porky just came by again and asked me if I was writing a novel, and I told him if I was I’d let him know so he could hire someone to read it to him.
Daniel knew quite a lot about sound technology, and figured we could rig outdoor speakers around the hill, running from two synced-up MP3 players. We decided to record the ghost crying and phase the sound so that it appeared to circle the hill, and preset the time so that we wouldn’t have to be there when it happened. I didn’t involve Tara in this because I wanted to surprise her, to show I was interested in myths and stuff. We ordered the components we needed on Daniel’s Paypal account, and when they arrived we tested everything in the fields beyond Trethorton, down near the river.
Next, we needed to record the sound of the crying woman, and Daniel said he had a bit of software that could replicate the human voice but also distort it. We aimed for something between a child in pain and a fox at night. It had to be haunting and other-worldly, and after a weekend of experimentation we had mixed it to perfection. The effect was so spooky it made the hairs on my arms stand up.
Then it was time for the trial run.
Late one night we loaded the equipment into our backpacks and set off for the hill. It took over three hours to set up the sound parameters because we hadn’t allowed for the wind noise up there, but we eventually got it so that the crying echoed from one speaker to the next. The effect was subtle, so that you weren’t aware you were being directed between the speakers. And Daniel had recorded it a dozen times, switching the equalizer settings so that you never heard the same sound arrangement twice. He was also able to vary the start times, so we set the switch-on at different hours between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. We figured the battery charge on the MP3 players would hold for a long time because they were only being used for a few minutes at a time. Then we sealed the players in plastic bags and buried them. The four speakers were more of a problem because we needed them to be above ground. We put one deep inside a hawthorn bush and another in a wet ditch, after first making sure that the connections were all covered. The other two we hid in clumps of grass, hoping that no one would stumble across them.
Then we went home to write the letters. We targeted both of the local papers, the Gazette and the Chronicle, and used false names. We assumed different identities, becoming hikers and pensioners, fathers and kids, and varied the content of the letters. One said he’d heard a sound like a trapped animal on the hill, another said it sounded like a woman being tortured, and so on. Daniel thought there was a risk the paper might check the senders’ addresses, but I said why would they? Two weeks after the first letter appeared, we hooked our first outsider – some old guy had been walking his dog and heard the sound for himself, and wrote in to the Gazette.
After another two weeks had passed and a handful of letters had been published, describing the eerie sounds on the hill, we hit them with Phase Two – the legend. This letter appeared to have been sent from a retired schoolmistress, now living in Wales (I got my sister to post it, but I didn’t let her read the contents). The schoolmistress explained the source of the strange sounds on Trethorton Hill. She repeated the bare bones of our legend about the sailor and the girl, and the Chronicle published it as their star letter of the week.
I know what you’re thinking. How bored did we have to be to do this? Pretty damn bored, I guess, but it was fun winding up the locals. Soon, the hiking club members were taking turns to check out the ghost of Trethorton Hill, and created a chart detailing exactly when and where the ghost could be heard, according to which direction the wind was coming from. They put it up in the village hall and asked others to add to it with different coloured marker pens. Hikers like stuff like that.
The main thing, from our point of view, was to get everyone in the village to believe in it before we exposed the whole thing as a hoax. It was our revenge on everyone for being so boring and sheep-like. With each passing week, the letter pages became more polarized between huffing walkers who refused to believe the legend, and others who said they’d heard it for themselves.
Daniel and I went up the hill at the weekends and found whole groups of drunk Emos hanging around waiting to hear the cry of the murdered woman. We thought they’d start poking about, trying to find out where the sound was coming from, so Daniel periodically turned off the system from his remote, because we were worried they might start digging up the ground and tearing the bushes apart, but most of them seemed content to lie around on the grass drinking and making out. I think they really wanted to believe.
The week after this, Tara suddenly became much more friendly with me, and was cooler around Daniel, to the point where it seemed like she didn’t want to see him. They’d obviously had some kind of falling out, but neither of them was prepared to talk about it. Maybe he’d tried it on with her and she wasn’t having it. Daniel acted like he wasn’t bothered and it didn’t affect our friendship, and then I realized that Tara and I were kind of going out, so everything was OK.
Hang on, the sergeant is waving his stubby sausage fingers at me.
It turns out he just wanted to offer me a cup of tea. Bless.
So. Then one Friday – this was about six weeks after the whole thing had started – I opened the Chronicle to find a letter from a genuine schoolteacher – some retired guy in Portsmouth, citing precedence for the legend.
Dear Sir,
I have been following the discussions about Trethorton’s Sobbing Woman with great interest. When I was a child, I well remember my late father taking me to the top of the hill to hear the cries of this poor tortured soul. He told me that she was a local Liskeard girl who had been murdered by her swain some time in the 1800s. Whenever I think of my holidays there, the memories of our trips to the “Black Hill” send shivers down my spine.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur Parkyn
Schoolteacher (retired)
Black Hill? It was never called the Black Hill. What was he on about? Not to be outdone, a builder from Liskeard wrote in and put a lot more meat on the bones. I still have the cutting here.
Dear Chronicle Letters,
Concerning the legend of Trethorton’s Sobbing Woman, the name of the victim was Ennor Maddern. From the age of eight she worked at what was then called the Anchor Inn (demolished in 1893), where she eventually met and fell in love with a sailor named Carne Greenway. Carne was a sailor on board the HMS Sans Pareil. He served under a cruel, violent captain named either Sambourne or Sanborn, and led the mutiny against his captain in March of 1827. The captain was killed and thrown overboard to general approval of the long-suffering crew, but as Greenway was the leader of the mutineers, he was hunted by the local sheriffs as soon as he set foot on land.
The horrors of the mutiny affected this young man dreadfully. He was hounded from one county to the next and became a smuggler in order to survive. When he was finally able to make his way back to see his beloved Ennor, he discovered that she was about to marry the corrupt town magistrate. Carne came calling at her window one wild night, and she pretended to be thrilled to see him, and arranged to meet him later at Trethorton Hill. But when he arrived there Carne found that Ennor had betrayed him, and had rallied a gang of ruffians to join with her from Portlooe, where HMS Sans Pareil was docked. These men sought revenge for the death of their captain. In the ensuing fight, Carne took the girl as a hostage, and as the men came at him he took a knife to her throat as punishment for this act of betrayal.
The ghostly cry that can be heard on the Black Hill is not the sound of Ennor’s death, but her sobbing in contrition for her own foolishness in ever doubting her beloved. It resonates from the standing stone which appeared after her death, placed there by villagers in commemoration, although there are those who believe her spirit resides within it. I hope this clears up the mystery surrounding this phenomenon.
Yours,
James Talbot
Liskeard
Needless to say, Daniel and I were pissing ourselves. The following week brought another letter, this one from a vicar who added a new detail to the story. He said “When a local magistrate identified the disguised sailor, Greenway kidnapped his daughter and brought her to the Black Hill, demanding that the magistrate deliver money and a horse, but the magistrate betrayed him, and in desperation Greenway killed the woman he loved”.
It was inevitable that this point of view should be quickly revised. A woman called Dr Megan Stander, an academic from University College London, wrote in. I didn’t keep a copy of her letter, but it said something like: “Typically, Mr Parkyn twists an important piece of local history to a patriarchal viewpoint in which Ennor Maddern takes the hag-role of the traditional Cornish witch or siren, luring an innocent sailor to his doom, and Carne Greenway is whitewashed to become the dominant male-hero of the story.”
Another letter agreed with her, pointing out that Parkyn had reversed the legend, as the cruel sailor had in fact kidnapped Ennor and raped her on the hill, cutting her throat in a state of frenzied blood-lust. Meanwhile, the myth was taken up by a local reporter in the Gazette who reckoned he’d uncovered the truth about the “Sobbing Virgin of Trethorton Hill”. According to records she had indeed been “cruelly violat’d upon the Tor” and had cut her own throat with a straight razor out of shame. He suggested the town should erect a statue to her on top of the hill.
It was all too good to be true. Daniel and I could see that everyone was just getting in on the act, each challenging the next to come up with a new addition to the story, but I wondered: was there a possibility that they actually believed what they were saying?
The Gazette’s reporter was the worst; he kept adding all kinds of details to the myth, citing unspecified “local records”. But even he never explained what this girl was doing on top of a hill at midnight with a straight razor in her pocket, or why she’d become known as the Sobbing Virgin if she’d been violated. It was the most exciting thing to happen in our village in years. Even Tara became fascinated by the legend; it gave us something in common to talk about. I was dying to tell her the truth, but I decided to wait until the time was right.
The next time Daniel and I went up to Trethorton Hill, we realized that the time had come, because the entire hill was covered with people. The white stone had been roped off by the council, and there was an incredible party atmosphere; kids were selling beer from cold-bags and there was even a guy serving overpriced hot dogs. So, early the next morning, before anyone was around, we went there again and dug up the speakers. We had to go in daylight because my mobile didn’t have a flash. I took shots of every step, the unearthing of the wires, the MP3 player being removed from the plastic bag, then we wrote a long letter to both the Gazette and the Chronicle about how we’d done it, and how we’d wanted to prove that people were gullible enough to believe anything. We included pictures of us removing the equipment.
The only thing I forgot to do was tell Tara about the hoax.
That was when things started to get weird. I don’t think either of us had realized the effect of what we’d done. The first sign of trouble was an editorial in the Chronicle, which was now engaged in a circulation war with the Gazette, thanks to each side’s determination to get to the truth of the legend. The piece was entitled; “Local Youths Deny Historic Past”, and pointed the finger of blame at me and Daniel. I remember one section vividly. It said; “The story of Ennor Maddern and Carne Greenway has touched the hearts of everyone in the South West. Their tragic romance stands as a symbol of an extraordinary time in our history. It has proven to be both inspirational and instructive. For some, it is a tale of honour and oppression, a classic example of machismo and the subjugation of women, for others it is a dire warning about the way in which class and status corrupts innocent lives. And yet in these celebrity-obsessed times, it seems that whenever new light is thrown on our past, someone tries to push into the spotlight by refusing to believe that it ever happened.” The article named us and printed our pictures, saying that we were using the legend to try and claim some fame for ourselves.
It didn’t stop there. So many people swore they’d heard the sound of the sobbing woman – and, of course, they had – that the story was picked up on the national news, and even more visitors arrived to see what the fuss was about. The next Saturday night, Daniel and I went back up on to Trethorton Hill and found dozens of people still up there, waiting to hear the climax of the legend being played out. And even though the speakers were no longer hidden around the stone, several of them swore they’d heard her crying. The legend was out of our hands now. It was bigger than us, and all we could do was sit back helplessly and watch it grow.
The next morning I answered the front door and was punched in the face by some mad hiker who swore at me for “trying to ruin the reputations of the Trethorton Three”. I’d read somewhere that this was what they were now calling the legend, as it was suggested that there had been a love triangle between the captain of the HMS Sans Pareil, the sailor and the woman who loved them both. One school of thought was that Ennor Maddern had killed herself for the love of the captain Carne Greenway had killed. The legend was open to so many different interpretations that you could fall in with a group standing for any one of them.
Overnight we became outcasts in our own village. My parents had their car defaced. Someone spray-painted the word LIARS over our garden wall. Daniel’s father stopped his allowance after some people accused him of conspiring with his son at a PTA meeting. But worst of all, Tara came around one evening to tell me that she didn’t want to see me anymore.
“I identified with Ennor Maddern,” she told me. “As soon as I heard her story, it was like something inside me became more complete, like I’d discovered a sister. I could feel her pain.”
“I don’t know how you can say that, because she doesn’t exist,” I told her angrily. “We made her up. There’s no such person.”
Tara shook her head, close to tears. “Why would you lie like this?” she asked. “I know Ennor was real. I researched her life, I even saw her picture.”
“Where?”
“There are websites dedicated to her story,” she told me.
“Yeah, and they’ve all been put together by the kind of stoners who lie on the hill at night thinking that passing satellites are space ships. Believing in something doesn’t make it come true. They’re just trying to make their lives more interesting.”
“That’s not fair,” she said. “You can’t disrespect us by calling us stupid. I don’t know why you would want to hurt us all like this.” And she walked away from the front door without once looking back.
I had to prove I wasn’t going mad. I searched the websites and found a number of them using a coloured lithograph of a baby-faced girl in a linen smock, labelled “Ennor Maddern, aged seventeen years, just before her tragic demise.” It took me a couple of evenings to trace the picture back to an old painting of a French peasant girl which hadn’t even been produced in the right country or the right century, but that didn’t seem to matter to anyone. A bit of proper research should have cleared the whole matter up, but no one wanted to do it. I thought about pointing this out in another letter to the press, but decided against it. I knew that anything I said now would just make people angry.
Then Daniel got beaten up by a couple of kids in masks who stopped him on the way home from school. He came out of Liskeard Infirmary with nine stitches in his face, and said he’d had enough. We decided to make one last-ditch attempt to clear our names by sending the CD with the recording of the sobbing woman to the press. We posted it to the Chronicle and the Gazette, and sat back to see the result. I think we believed that in the worst case they’d just say we were making it up again, trying to get our names in the papers. But I had this pathetic fantasy that some smart young journalist might show enough initiative to get a few witnesses together who’d agree that this was what they’d heard, and then discredit the recording by having it broken down into component parts.
I think, on the whole, I over-estimated the intelligence of the press.
What happened instead was something entirely unforeseen. The journalists were happy enough to believe that the transcription was genuine, and had us both taken into custody. According to them the sound is real, and it’s a series of callous real-time recordings of a girl being raped.
Both my parents and Daniel’s have admitted that to their knowledge the only girl we ever hung around with was Tara Mellor, so now it’s down to her to clear our names. I’m sitting here in Liskeard police station with this shitty computer and my father outside smoking himself to death, waiting for Tara to come and provide a witness report.
OK. The sergeant says I have a chance to amend my statement now, in the light of what I’ve just heard.
All I can tell you is that I don’t know why Tara would say this – that Daniel raped her. She says that the week after we saw the Emos on the hill, we took her up there and Daniel pinned her down on the stone, and begged her to have sex with him, and when she turned him down he held her by the throat and raped her. She says she thinks I must have been there as well to record the sound, which makes me an accessory. She says I covered up for Daniel because he was my best friend.
Part of me knows she’s lying because I wasn’t there, and because Daniel has a gimp leg and she’s tall and strong enough to look after herself. Besides, he just wouldn’t do something like that, even though he can be strange and difficult sometimes. Also her timing is out, because why would I be recording the sound if we were already playing it to visitors by that time? She says I was trying to replace the recording with a more realistic version, like that makes any sense.
But part of me also remembers how she changed toward Daniel around that time, and started to shudder whenever he came near her, like she was scared of him. And I can’t get rid of the feeling that perhaps he did do something bad to her.
The worst part was in the last section of her statement. She says that ever since then, she’s been going up on Trethorton Hill at night and she hears the sound of the crying woman, and the sobbing is real, and she can’t tell if it’s the anguished cries of Ennor Maddern, or if it’s her, and it was her all along.
I don’t know if Tara was raped or not. I don’t know who are the deceivers any more. But there’s an easy way to sort it out. Take me up to the hill at night and I’ll show you where the speakers were planted, and you’ll hear there’s nothing there now except the wind. Going up the Black Hill is the only real way to prove my innocence. Even though part of me is terrified that I’ll hear the sound of crying.