Across the Pond: Psychically repelled from a 14th century monastery

I walked the half mile to Katherine Philips whom I was researching at the biggest libraries in Great Britain. What I expected to feel when I reached the priory was: welcomed. I expected the spirit of Katherine Philips to hover joyfully about me, perhaps giggling with delight in a voice only I could hear. I expected to be welcomed into her home. After all, I’d spent months reading her poetry. I’d developed two consecutive independent studies to create a bibliography of literary criticism concerning her over the course of 300 years. I’d traveled to Chicago and Washington, D.C. I’d traveled across the pond to London and to Aber and now to Pembroke and, well, my, I thought she’d be happy to see me.

You may think I’m joking, or over-stating my case, or just describing a fantasy. But I am not. I expected to be WELCOMED when I got to the priory.

I was not.

The doors, swinging open to the public, seemed closed to me. Closed to me personally. There seemed an aura of the forbidden and an aura of foreboding. Others didn’t seem to notice. I felt it intensely.

A sense of danger. Of support beams swinging down upon corridors to crush an unsuspecting visitor. Of walls crumpling, unleashing plaster dust to fill your lungs until you choked to death on the dry flakes. Of floors with damp, weak spots lurking to eat an unsuspecting ankle.

It overwhelmed me.

I went around to the back of her house. There was a large lawn. I went to the very edge of it and sat on the stone fence, perhaps three feet high. Beyond the stone fence was a river, and to the north, a rocky outcropping – to rocks and rivers, not to thee, complain – I recalled.

I ate my packed lunch on the stone fence, feeling tired. Bone tired. I looked at the priory and noticed the glass windows, thick with age on the bottom and thin to breaking at the top. Original windows. Her windows. I looked at the cemetery of monks who had made this place their home in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I thought morbidly of the coffins beneath the crumbling gray headstones.

I sat. I could not go into the house. I took pictures of Pembroke’s rocks and rivers.

Finally, I took a stone from the fence as a keepsake and headed back to the bus stop. I felt worn. I felt dirty. “A good night’s sleep is what I need,” I thought. I was returning to London the next day. I tried to focus my thoughts on that.