What happened when I visited the UK’s three most chilling ghost villages

What propels this continuing desire to lurk amid places long abandoned is not ghoulishness or a desire to see another yellow curtain pulled by persons unknown across a cracked window pane. It’s my conviction that ghost stories and hauntings aside, the atmosphere in the ‘villages of the dead’ that populate the lesser visited nooks of Britain tells us so much about ourselves.

These silent, empty, vacated places show our commitment to fixed patterns and entrenched ways of life. The pathos…