Shades and Spectres

This video documents the quiet handling of a forgotten foundation text: Shades and Spectres, compiled in 1978 during the first year of the Devon Folklife Register.

It is not a ghost story collection in the modern sense.
It is a register, a working archive of places, reports, and beliefs recorded before folklore became entertainment.

There is no narration guiding interpretation, no attempt to resolve contradictions, and no effort to dramatise what was collected. Pages are turned slowly. The document is allowed to speak for itself.

What emerges is a glimpse of how belief once occupied the landscape: roads avoided, houses left empty, spirits bound to boundaries, guilt measured in distance rather than time.

This is not about proving or disproving hauntings.
It is about preserving how people once understood the world to be ordered — and haunted.