“To Whomesoever it May Concerneth”

We’re delighted to report that despite only being on the web for a few months, letters recounting people’s fond remembrences of Essex Terror have been trickling in.  And inevitably, amidst genuine well-wishing from former subscribers, that grand bugbear of correspondence has finally chosen to rear its malformed forelimbs and twitch them at at us: The Chain Letter.  I am not going to reproduce it here — not because I refuse to take its warnings of supernatural calamity seriously, but because it has reminded me of a greater threat; and one I learned through none other than the hallowed  pages of the original Essex Terror…

The Tale of Gin Susan

In the late 1700s, under cover of darkness, a publican’s daughter by the name of Susan Tines is said to have snuck out of the Swan and Bender Inn, Colchester, clutching tightly to her person a letter she had written only that evening.  Her intent was to deliver it (the recipient unknown) before the nearby churchbells sounded in the new day; for if she did not, she would be condemned to die young and in agony. Where had she learned of this terrible fate? In another letter received that very day, demanding that if she was to live she must pass on its curse. It is quite possibly the earliest recorded example of the chain letter phenomenon, and an 1848 copy is on display at the Chelmsford Museum of Antiquities (attributed to Thomas Chatterton, given its pseudo-medieval stylings).

Sadly, so the story goes, fate was not on Susan’s side as barely a few yards from her home she ran into a friend of her father’s and was quickly apprehended, returned, and locked away in her room. The pressure of these events appears to have snapped Susan’s fragile, womanly mind, as on the following day she drank herself into a gin-induced stupor and fell down a drainage ditch; whereupon her still-warm body is supposed to have been devoured by blind, piglike creatures rumoured to live underneath Colchester.

That is not the end of the story, however. For it is said that if any who know this tale choose to propagate any sort of chain letter, Gin Susan’s bloodied, half-eaten specter will appear by their bed and drag them off to the Colchester tunnels.

The tale of the tale does not end there either. In the late 1960s, an Essex medium operating under the name of Madame Cravatsky (real name Enid May Beake) claimed to have contacted the spirit of Gin Susan, and offered to give a public demonstration of her talents to a small audience at the recently opened Civic Theatre. The ensuing spectacle involved much wailing and over-consumption of gin, after which Blavatsky manifested a pool of ectoplasm before passing out completely.

Whatever the truth behind Gin Susan’s tragic tale, this writer at least shall be held in check by it whenever a chain letter should happen to arrive in the post. Perhaps you will now, too.