Summoning rituals attached to a specific churchyard grave or tomb are a recurring type of English children's folklore, usually involving a fixed, easily repeatable action, a set number of circuits, a particular time of day or night, performed at a specific physical object that gives the story a real place to be tested against. St Mary's Churchyard in Halesworth preserves exactly this pattern: a railed tomb identified as the Devil's own resting place, and a specific instruction that running around it five times will summon him.
No identity for whoever is actually buried beneath the railed tomb has been traced in the sources consulted for this entry, and the story functions independently of any real biography, the tomb's association with the Devil almost certainly arising from its appearance, isolation, or ironwork rather than from anything genuinely known about its occupant. Five circuits is a notably specific number for this kind of ritual, more precise than the vaguer three-times-round pattern common to similar tales elsewhere in England.
Stories like this one persist less through adult record-keeping than through repeated retelling among children daring each other to try it, which makes them harder to date or attribute to any single origin point, but no less a genuine part of a town's folklore for that. It is recorded here as exactly what it is: a piece of living local superstition attached to a real, visitable grave, rather than a documented historical haunting.
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