Confessions of a Teenage Ghosthunter - the St Mark's Eve Vigil

In my upcoming long short-story/novella Tomorrow's Ghosts, there is a reference to St Mark's Church in Leeds and the St Mark's Eve Vigil. This is another incident based on a real life event, when I was a student who used to camp out in graveyards late a night looking for ghosts. Never saw one then - and I still haven't seen one now - but I digress.
 
The basic myth or superstition behind the St Mark's Vigil is that if you are to sit and hold vigil within a church porch between the hours of 11pm to 1am, you will see the spirits (well technically they would be the doppelgängers) of all the people who were due to die over the coming 12 months. I confess I was a little confused as to who these people would be? Clearly not everyone in the world or even in the UK, as they'd never be able to pass through in just two hours.
 
Perhaps more locally, say within the boundaries of the particular church's parish? But what if they weren't card-carrying Christians? That area of Leeds used to have a large Jewish population. Later it had a large Asian and West Indian population and now (along with a large student population) it has its fair share of Eastern Europeans. Were they included as well, even if they prayed to different religions or didn't subscribe to the Anglican and Roman Catholic flavours of Christianity?
 
Then I found the following passage - headed Traditions and Legends of St Mark's Eve - in Chambers Book of Days for 25th April... "In the northern parts of England, it is still believed that if a person, on the eve of St. Mark's day, watch in the church porch from eleven at night till one in the morning, he will see the apparitions of all those who are to be buried in the churchyard during the ensuing year." So that was sorted then, not everyone, just those would be buried in the graveyard. There is even a piece of anonymous verse to describe the vigil...
 
Tis now, replied the village belle,
St. Mark’s mysterious eve,
And all that old traditions tell
I tremblingly believe;
How, when the midnight signal tolls,
Along the churchyard green,
A mournful train of sentenced souls
In winding-sheets are seen.
The ghosts of all whom death shall doom
Within the coming year,
In pale procession walk the gloom,
Amid the silence drear.
 
There is an example of this superstition to be found among the Hollis Papers, which are part of the Lansdowne Manuscripts, one of the earliest collections of documents acquired by the British Museum in 1807. The writer, Gervase Hollis of Great Grimsby, was a colonel in the service of King Charles the First. He said he heard the story from a minister called Liveman Rampaine, who was the household chaplain to Sir Thomas Munson, of Burton, Lincolnshire, at the time of the incident.
 
"In the year 1631, two men (inhabitants of Burton) agreed betwixt themselves upon St. Mark's eve at night to watch in the churchyard at Burton, to try whether or no (according to the ordinary belief amongst the common people) they should see the Spectra, or Phantasma of those persons which should die in that parish the year following. To this intent, having first performed the usual ceremonies and superstitions, late in the night, the moon shining then very bright, they repaired to the church porch, and there seated themselves, continuing there till near twelve of the clock. About which time (growing weary with expectation and partly with fear) they resolved to depart, but were held fast by a kind of insensible violence, not being able to move a foot.
 
"About midnight, upon a sudden (as if the moon had been eclipsed), they were environed with a black darkness; immediately after, a kind of light, as if it had been a resultancy from torches. Then appears, coming towards the church porch, the minister of the place, with a book in his hand, and after him one in a winding-sheet, whom they both knew to resemble one of their neighbours. The church doors immediately fly open, and through pass the apparitions, and then the doors clap to again. Then they seem to hear a muttering, as if it were the burial service, with a rattling of bones and noise of earth, as in the filling up of a grave. Suddenly a still silence, and immediately after the apparition of the curate again, with another of their neighbours following in a winding-sheet, and so a third, fourth, and fifth, every one attended with the same circumstances as the first."
 
But what about the St Mark's Church where Ralph, my fellow ghost-hunter, and I held our vigil in the early 1970s? (This was while I was attending Leeds University.)
 
The church, in the Woodhouse area of Leeds, was one of 600 churches built across England in the years immediately after the Duke of Wellington's victory over the Emperor Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Parliament, motivated by some distinctly mixed emotions (to mark the victory over the French plus a concern that the huge population growth in cities such as Leeds during the Industrial Revolution meant there was insufficient room for worshippers in existing churches plus a fear that following the French Revolution, there might be a similar uprising in Britain and the belief that "the influence of the Church and its religious and moral teaching was a bulwark against revolution") voted to spend £1 million (subsequently topped up by another £500,000 - in total the equivalent over  £130 million/$200 million at today's prices) in grants towards the building of what would subsequently become known as Waterloo Churches, Commissioners Churches or Million Act Churches.
 
When I last saw St Mark's Woodhouse, in 1972, it was a soot and pollution-blackened building surrounded by a churchyard filled with equally soot and pollution-blackened gravestones and memorials. Even if there were no actual ghosts haunting the graveyard (well at least none that I saw on my vigil over 40 years ago) it was a distinctly spooky place. Thirty years later, falling congregations, rising costs and, rather more worryingly, falling masonry from the church tower, resulted in the church being closed, declared redundant and added to Leeds City Council's Buildings at Risk Register due to its rapid deterioration and crumbling structure.    
 
And that could have been that - and another fine Grade II listed building falling victim to a developer's wrecking-ball - except in this case an evangelical Christian group - the Gateway Church - bought St Mark's in 2010 and, with the aid of an £170,000 grant from English Heritage, is now in the process of restoring the church with a view to reopening it as both a place of worship and a community centre later this year (2013).
 
Still no ghosts though.