# **28. "Silence in the Wandering Dunes of Holkham" – A Story of Those Who Disappear Unheard**

On the north Norfolk coast lies a vast, seemingly endless expanse: **Holkham Gap** and the surrounding dunes. It's a beautiful yet treacherous place. It seems peaceful, but people say it has a consciousness of its own.

That the sand there thinks.

That it hears.

That sometimes it calls.

Holkham has had a vague reputation for centuries—a place where people disappear, and their last sound is… **nothing**. Absolute silence. As if the world were tuning them out, pulling them out of reality.

### **I**

In 1891, a young cartographer, Edward Rawley, moved to the nearby town of Wells-next-the-Sea. Passionate about maps and landforms, he had one goal: to create the most precise map of the entire Norfolk coast. However, he had heard warnings about Holkham.

People said:

"You can't go there alone."

"The dunes are moving."

"You can go five minutes into the depths and an hour back... if you come back at all."

Edward, like many scientists of the time, didn't believe in local superstitions. He laughed at the stories of the **Wandering Dunes**, as the locals called the region.

"It's just the wind," he always replied. "The dunes change shape, it's natural."

But when he first stood on the sands of Holkham, he felt a strange twinge of unease.

The dunes were indeed moving—but not because the wind was shaping them.

They seemed to ripple, like the breath of a creature sleeping underground.

### **II**

The first night, Edward set up a small camp at the edge of the dunes. As dusk fell, the silence was absolute. There was no sound of the sea, even though it was close. There was no sound of birds. Even the wind had fallen silent.

It was as if the dunes had swallowed the sound.

Edward wrote in his journal:

> “The silence is thick here. As if it were watching.”

In the middle of the night, he awoke to the feeling of someone standing over him. He opened his eyes and saw… nothing. Just the slightest tremor of the tent, as if something very heavy had passed by, but without the slightest sound.

In the morning, he found fresh footprints near the campsite—large, unnaturally deep, human-shaped, yet as if deformed by a weight too heavy for a human to bear.

The footprints led deeper into the dunes. Then they ended abruptly, as if their owner had been lifted upwards, straight into the air.

### **III**

The second night was even more unsettling.

Edward decided to go deeper. He wandered for an hour, but the landscape didn't change a jot. The same curving walls of sand, the same patterns of ridges, as if he were walking in circles.

He began to make markings in the sand, but as he retraced his steps, the marks disappeared. They weren't buried—they vanished completely, as if they had never been there.

And then, for the first time, he heard **Silence**.

It wasn't just silence.

It was something alive.

Something that had depth, like a hollowed-out corridor in the void.

Something that pulsated like breath.

Edward stopped and felt true fear for the first time. Behind him, among the dunes, he saw a thin, tall silhouette.

Motionless.

Too long to be human.

Too thin to be corporeal.

And when he blinked—it was gone.

### **IV**

The last entries in Edward's journal were incoherent:

> "They are here...

> they cannot see with their eyes...

> they only hear silence...

> in the silence they are gone...

> in the sound they awaken..."

The next day, his camp was empty.

Only his shoes were found—standing perfectly in the sand, as if their owner had evaporated. Beside them lay a map of Holkham, completely blurred, as if someone had run their hand across it and erased the lines.

The dunes looked the same as always.

But in the air, you could feel a pulsing, dull presence.

### **V**

After Edward's disappearance, the locals stopped going into the dunes.

People began reporting seeing something tall, thin, standing at the top of the sand ridges at night.

Always motionless.

Always looking towards the village.

Always completely silent.

They said that sometimes, when someone gets lost in the dunes, they return… changed.

They don't remember anything.

They don't speak.

And their shadow is longer than it should be.

### **VI**

In 1972, a group of students from the University of Cambridge came to investigate the phenomenon of "vanishing sound." They installed measuring equipment and spent a night in the heart of the dunes.

In the morning, their tents were overturned, their equipment dented as if by a tremendous force, and everyone in the group sat on the sand—in a neat circle—with their eyes wide open.

None of them uttered a single word for the next six months.

Their memory of that night was blank.

Each tried to describe the silence they heard there.

None could.

One of them finally wrote:

> "Silence is a being there.

> It watches… it waits… it listens…

> and if you hear it—

> it hears you."

### **VII**

Today, Holkham is still beautiful—vast, bright, and peaceful.

Tourists come, take photos, and stroll along the sand.

But the locals know that after dark, the dunes come alive.

Sometimes, you can see elongated silhouettes, as faint as shadows, on their peaks.that have no source.

Sometimes a dog disappears, or a lone walker.

Sometimes at night, the wind carries towards the town… not a sound, but its absence.

A wave of absolute, suffocating emptiness.

And then everyone closes their windows.

Because in Holkham, silence is not the absence of sound.

**Silence is the voice of a being that should not exist.**

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