Scarfolk is a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. Here in Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science; hauntology is a compulsory subject at school, and everyone must be in bed by 8pm because they are perpetually running a slight fever.
Scarfolk is the town I grew up in, because it is the town every English provincial of my generation grew up in. It consists partly of memories of crises, TV series about spooky events or sci-fi disasters, and a general sense of things not being quite right.
Scarfolk blog has some wonderfully disturbing factual accounts of life in the borough. For instance:
In 1977 Scarfolk Clinic conducted sleep experiments on a local boy known only as 'Patient #249'. He suffered from severe nightmares and developed a rare condition known as 'manifest hypnagogia'.
Symptoms include the physical manifestation of hallucinations that sufferers endure between sleep and waking states. For example, Patient #249 frequently awoke to find, sitting on the end of his bed, a syphilitic, deformed Victorian clown eating trifle and pig's liver pâté. At other times, a confused sewing machine salesman from the Midlands would appear. Patient #249's parents found this inconvenient.
Scarfolk Council not only has a blog (see above link) but also offers YouTube recordings. Here is one.
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