Cobra Mist was part of an over the horizon radar system used to monitor Soviet (and possibly Chinese) activities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The system had noise problems and was decommissioned in 1973. The BBC World Service now transmits from the site.

Even if we entertain the notion that no extraterrestrial spacecraft is concealed at Orford Ness, the area is still of curiosity to ufologists. During the 1970s, two men (one the son of a former worker for Cobra Mist) watched a pair of lights hovering close to the surface of the sea. As they approached to get a better look, the lights darted off at incredible speed. More recently, witnesses have seen strange lights at night swimming around under the water.

The lighthouse on Orford Ness has been named (blamed?) as responsible for the Bentwaters UFO sighting by Holt et al in December 1981, their alien craft nothing more than the lighthouse beam passing through the tree line of Rendlesham Forest that stands a few miles away.

Some have reported that electrical equipment malfunctions on Orford Ness; batteries quickly drain, computer monitors flicker before failing, and cameras refuse to work until back on the mainland. If this is the case, then we were fortunate – all our video and still camera equipment worked fine throughout our visit.

Many of the buildings on the island remain closed for visitors. Glass litters the floors, rusting metal juts out from all angles, and lead paint peels from the walls. Guard rails have gone, leaving sharp drops into yawning hollows partially filled with decaying waste from the last sixty years.

While much of the inner workings of the pagodas have been removed, the artefacts that remain hanging from the wall take on the form of Christian icons. Man-sized crucifixes stand high and rust, and although the contemporary Ark of the Covenant has been removed, the casing of an A-Bomb is still on display.

We have our UFOs and we have our cryptozoological surprises, but are there haunting entities on Orford Ness? The environmental ambience is strong enough to suggest so, but actual reports are sparse. The lack of reports could be caused by the many years of top secret activity here, and that now the area is an Site of Special Scientific Interest, visitors are few. While a few ghost stories have dribbled out recently, most of these tend to be quite vague, only hinting at strange presences felt in the derelict buildings or the lighthouse.

Before we know it, our time has run out and we return to the mainland. My morning on the remote shingle spit, albeit brief, reinforces my belief that Orford Ness stands firm as one of the true fortean places in Suffolk.

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While blood spilled in Europe, another type of laissez-faire commerce was in the ascendant in Suffolk : smuggling. Groups of audacious smugglers had expanded the trade of contraband to the extent that customs authorities, even with military support, were no match for them. Lord Orford had once commented that the only man in Orford who was not a smuggler was the parson (surely not!), and the intricate tributaries of the River Blyth a little way up the coast provided ideal routes for cargo.

A detachment of the Fourth Dragoons, who had fought in the 1740-48 war, was posted to Blythburgh in Suffolk to prevent the spread of smuggling. Fresh from battle, the dragoons resented their placement on the bleak Suffolk coast, and soon became unpopular with the locals.

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One summer night in 1750, a local girl, Anne Blakemore, was found dead by the marshland near Blythburgh village. The finger was pointed at Tobias Hill, who some villagers claimed had raped and strangled the girl after being kicked out of the White Hart in a drunken stupor. He pleaded his innocence, but was found guilty and hanged on 14th September 1750, his body left swinging from the chains of the gibbet as an example for others. The Ipswich Journal described Hill as “a black, one of the drummers in Sir Robert Rich’s Regiment” – and it is here that we begin to wonder if a racially-motivated miscarriage of justice occurred. Just like Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird, Hill had been charged without a shred of evidence to link him to Anne’s murder. In fact, given that there were no suspicious marks on Anne’s body, there was no evidence to suggest she had been murdered at all.

As the Foxearth and District Local History Society notes, even in death Tobias Hill was allowed little dignity:

“To cover up their activities, smugglers made the dead dragoon the subject of a number of ghost stories, including the common one of being a headless driver of a phantom black coach drawn by four headless black horses. Certainly, the thought of ghost of Black Toby kept many of the superstitious indoors at night whilst the smugglers were at work.”

The story of Toby Hill’s ghost is still popular in that part of the Suffolk coast. Some living people claim to have seen him. But the story appears to have been created to gloss over an unpalatable truth: the murder of an innocent man by a rancorous rabble.