Among the spooky places in northern England (see blog post here.) is Heptonstall Church, which I visited in 1989. The village is charming and its Church of Thomas a Becket fascinating, purely because of its ruinous state. As a complete sidebar to the visit I learned that the church graveyard held the remains of Sylvia Plath, whose book “The Bell Jar” was on my English-literature course in high school, as I’m sure it was for millions of other impressionable youths of the day, many of whom must have wondered like me how it managed to sneak past the prudes. Not that it’s in any way racy, of course – but it is revolutionary, in the anti-establishment sense.
So while ghost-hunting on Google Earth’s behalf recently I also assembled the following pair of placemarks on Plath, at opposite ends of England. God bless her for her intolerance, and save her from it too. The Google Earth post is here.

Fitzroy Road, London
American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963, in her apartment on the upper two floors of 23 Fitzroy Road. She had rented it the previous November, returning to the Primrose Hill area where she and her now-estranged husband, the future poet laureate Ted Hughes, had lived, around the corner at 3 Chalcot Square, from early 1960 to mid-’61. The new flat had once also been the home of WB Yeats.
Although her soon-to-be-famous novel “The Bell Jar” was published to mostly positive reviews on January 14 (under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas), her children were ailing in the midst of one of Britain’s worst-ever winters and Plath was severely depressed.
An au pair summoned help when she was unable to enter the flat at 9am on February 11. Sylvia had sealed herself in the kitchen and placed her head in a gas oven.

Heptonstall churchyard
Sylvia Plath was buried here in the Yorkshire village of Heptonstall, in the “new” cemetery of historic St Thomas a Becket Church, following her suicide in February 1963. Her husband, English Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, was born in the nearby village of Mytholmroyd, and his parents are buried not far from Plath, although Hughes was interred in London after his death in 1993.
The inscription on Sylvia’s tombstone reads, “Even amidst fierce flames the Golden Lotus can be planted”, which Hughes credited to the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita but in fact comes from the 16th-century book “Monkey” by Wu Ch’Eng-En, in which Monkey is taught the way of longevity.
Construction began on the original church not long after the Archbishop of Canterbury for whom it was named was murdered on the order of King Henry VIII. Built low to withstand the gales that batter the region, it was nevertheless destroyed by one in 1847 and a new church, St Thomas the Apostle, was erected across the yard. This one was struck by lightning in 1875, and the falling masonry caused further damage to the old ruins and tombstones adjacent.