There is something evil lurking at the bottom of your garden... It waits patiently, as it has waited for over a hundred years. Children play around it, climb it, even swing from its branches. It watches them - as a wolf might watch an elk. Now it is ready to strike! But of course, in reality no such horror exists... Or does it? If you go visit Stowlangtoft Hall in Suffolk (now a nursing home), there is such a beast. You could say it is the ugliest beech tree in the world - or the scariest! A 70ft monster with large eyes, an open mouth and crooked teeth.
Like something out of a horror movie perhaps...?
At the bottom of your garden children will play, how are they to know that the tree shall eat its prey?
(Yes, I wrote that! - Al Ash)
Of course, it just goes to show how our own imagination plays a part in determining what is scary and what isn't, as www.metro.co.uk points out in its own article. David Garnham, the gentleman who brought Jack the Tree (as I have decided to call it, evoking images of dark Victorian London and possession, as young women walk a mysterious garden) to the Media's attention, even suggests it reminds him of Edvard Munch's Scream painting.
Before becoming a nursing home in 1969, Stowlangtoft Hall was originally built for the Maitland Wilson family, in 1859. Read more about it on the official Stowlangtoft estate website!
Personally I like to think it's laughing because it is so happy to be around such lovely folk at the Hall!
source : http://nebula-one.blogspot.com/2011/06/jack-tree-and-mystery-of-stowlangtoft.html