What has made this sleepy Suffolk town the satanic capital of Britain?

Behind the Green Dragon bar is a pentagram.

Because dark forces are apparently at work in the ancient city of Bungay, a serene place in sleepy Suffolk.

Ringed by the River Waveney overlooking lush meadows and dotted with historic buildings, the market town has just been named the UK’s Satanist capital.

Recently released official figures from the 2021 census show around one in 120 locals answered ‘Satanism’ when asked about their religion, 100 times the national average.

Local politicians and residents insist they have never seen any signs of nefarious activity and suggest it could be a hoax. If so, a lot of people are involved.

And Green Dragon’s bartender, Jake Feasey, doesn’t seem too concerned.

About the size of a 50p piece, the pentagram, a symbol associated with paganism, witchcraft and devil worship, could have been a dark amulet secretly worn by the gambler who left it behind. His current home, hanging from the neck of a small plastic action figure on a shelf behind the bar, has made him less threatening.

“Bungay might attract these people, but they don’t go out there and say ‘I’m a Satanist,'” said Mr Feasey, 44.

The city certainly has the spooky credentials for those who choose to embrace Satan.

According to folklore, the devil took the form of a black dog, Black Shuck, who terrorized worshipers at St. Mary’s Church in the city in August 1577.

The fearsome apparition is said to have burst through the 12th-century church doors, accompanied by a mighty clap of thunder.

He then ran down the nave, killing a man and a boy and causing the bell tower to collapse through the roof, before attacking a congregation in a nearby church.

Chilling verses record: ‘Throughout the church in the midst of the fire, the infernal monster flew, and passing towards the quire, killed many people.’

To this day, this snarling hound supposedly haunts dark alleys and lanes with howls that “make the listener’s blood run cold.” [but] their footsteps make no sound’.

St Mary’s, last used in the 1970s, also claims a boulder called the Druid’s Stone in its churchyard. Some say that the Devil can be invoked by dancing 12 times around him.

Bungay Castle, built in 1100 by Roger Bigod, whose son Roger was a key player in a period in the mid-12th century called Anarchy, when civil war raged in England and Normandy. Who knows what atrocities their owners may have committed.

The site, with its dramatic curtain walls and twin towers, was the setting for a 1796 Gothic novel, Elizabeth Bonhote’s Bungay Castle, which shows characters searching the haunted structure. So far so wicked. But what do the locals think?

Betty Warnes, a member of the Friends of St Mary’s, suspects “pranksters” are behind the census figure, but she can’t be sure. “I would have thought it would be a sale,” she said. There is a rumor of ley lines and nude dancing around the Druid’s Stone in the city. However, nothing that I have seen.

The Bungay City Council also denied any knowledge of the dark arts, but is taking the matter seriously enough to consider putting it on the agenda for its next meeting. Secretary Rosalind Barnett said: ‘This number in the census is a mystery. Devil worship has never crossed our radar.

Mayor Tony Dawes added: “I wonder if people who had nothing better to do during lockdown decided to write down on the census that they were Satanists.” Census figures released by the Office for National Statistics show that 5,054 people in England and Wales claimed to be Satanists out of a population of 59,597,300. Of those, about 70 are in Bungay.

The next highest count of Satanists in the country is in the Brondesbury area of ​​north London, which has 20 of them, despite having a much higher population than Bungay.

But what exactly is Satanism? Dr David Robertson, senior professor of religious studies at the Open University, says it’s nothing like Hollywood’s version of animal sacrifices, hooded dresses and stripped-down orgies.

“You’re looking at the propaganda put out by conservative Christian groups in the 1980s and 1990s when there were fears of satanic abuse, which history shows to be totally false, a fabrication.”

Instead of worshiping the Devil, it’s typically young, rebellious types who “deliberately challenge the hegemony of Christianity by association with Satan,” he claimed. Few indulge in formal ‘ritualistic activity’, though there is a disturbing streak in the imagery, including inverted pentagrams, Baphomet the goat-headed man, and circles with occult symbols.

“I hope this is some kind of group of people who are laughing or making fun of the local church,” Dr. Robertson said of Bungay.

However, there are signs of hidden rituals in the UK, including five animal hearts left in a circle on Stagbury Hill in the New Forest, Hampshire, which a walker stumbled upon last month.

Three years ago, a sheep was stabbed and doused with pentagrams in the nearby village of Bramshaw, while hidden markings were painted on the village’s 12th-century church.

Chaplain Leopold, a London-based undertaker who co-heads the Global Order of Satan UK, said there has been a 200 per cent increase in membership in five years.

He said that “young people do not want to be identified as part of a prescriptive dogmatic religion and rather want to be identified as their own beliefs and self-realization, which is what Satanism offers.”

So where does this leave Bungay? Those who think twice before visiting the city can perhaps take heart from its motto, ‘Moribus antiquis pareamus’ – ‘Let us always hold fast to the ancient virtues’.