Fortean Times: It Happened to Me vol.1 Read online

  Kayti Ooi, Milton Keynes, Bucks, 1994

  GHOSTLY LADYKILLER

  In 1944, when I was a child, my family had a big old house called Balgownie in Prestwick, near Ayr. The house had a ‘presence’ that walked up the stairs and into one of the bedrooms, which unfortunately happened to be the one where my elder brother Eion and I slept. It put the fear of God into us. Rex, the family dog, an enormous and extremely fierce animal, a cross between an Alsatian and a Labrador, was normally scared of nothing. Indeed, my mother kept him partly as a guard dog, as my father was away. However, whenever the presence walked he was terrified and became a trembling wreck and hid in my mother’s bedroom.

  At first she used to rush out to confront the intruder, dragging the terrified dog with her, then when the ghost walked straight past her, she would run into our bedroom and drag Eion and me out. Soon she moved us into another bedroom and the presence walked past the door of our room and into our old one through a closed door. I never actually saw the ghost, but the room became freezing cold and it was very creepy. Being a child, I just took it as a normal event. It was only later that I realised how strange it was.

  After about a year, the Templetons, a local lawyer and his wife from nearby Ayr, came to live with us, to fill the house: otherwise, as it was wartime, strangers could have been billeted on us by the council. Mother gave them the ghost’s room, but said nothing. A few weeks after they moved in, she took Eion and me to Glasgow to stay with relatives.

  The very first night away, she had a phone call from Mrs Templeton who was in a terrible state. She was standing on the front doorstep with the phone on a long lead and refused to go back into the house. Her husband had made her go back inside and fetch the phone while he waited in the garden. As was its habit, the ghost had walked upstairs and into their bedroom through the closed door. They fled and refused to re-enter the house until mother returned. That night, they slept on the front door step. Shortly after this, my mother became ill and kept passing out for no apparent medical reason. Her condition grew worse and her doctor diagnosed appendicitis. They operated on her, but it made no difference and she became very ill; but still the hospital could find nothing wrong.

  The war ended and she arranged the sale of the house and prepared to return to England. One day before we left, she was in the front garden when some neighbours passed by. They stopped and talked and she told them she was moving south. Then they told her that some 35 years earlier the owner of the house had committed suicide in the room where my brother and I had slept. His ghost was returning to the scene of the crime. He had apparently had marital trouble. Every woman who lived in the house after his death had become ill and died for no apparent reason. Their symptoms were all similar to my mother’s.

  Donald Crighton, Branksome Park, Dorset, 2004

  THE CRYING GIRL

  Late one evening at the boarding school where I teach a boy burst into the dormitory office looking pale and shaken. He managed to splutter something about the chapel and “the ghost”. Somewhat taken aback, as this was a boy who normally displayed little emotion of any kind, let alone sudden expressions of childish nighttime fears, I told him to stop being foolish and go back to bed.

  The first lesson any student learns on their incarceration here is of the broken-hearted girl who eternally walks the halls. A century ago, when these old buildings housed nuns and their young acolytes, the doomed girl was taken in against her will. Her parents had worried that she might forsake her honour with a certain local youth. Unable to cope, the poor child leapt from a vestry window and died.

  “Please sir, just come and listen,” the boy pleaded, nearly beside himself. Annoyed and not in the mood for such late-night foolishness, I followed him. Many boys were up, standing about in the corridor. Several huddled around the entrance to the chapel.

  “For goodness sake!” I shouted. “Do you know what time it is? You’re like a bunch of little girls!”

  Someone nearly in tears said, “Sir, listen.”

  “To wha...”

  Then I heard it. Faintly, but unmistakeably, from somewhere in the dark chapel, came singing. It was a girl’s voice, sad, softly wailing. The sound was horribly moving. For a few moments I listened, utterly captivated. It took every shred of composure I had not to whimper like the children around me.

  “Now listen boys,” I said, hoping my voice didn’t betray the fear I felt, “whatever is going on here has a rational explanation. Ghosts don’t exist. I want you all to go back to your rooms please. I’ll investigate this in the morning.”

  I did investigate it in the morning. For two years I’ve tried to find “a rational explanation”. I have failed to do so.

  Matthew Salt, Sidmouth, Devon, 2005

  Phantoms of World War II

  NAZI APPARITIONS

  In 1992, as a private soldier serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps, I was transferred to a new unit, 1st Armoured Field Ambulance, based at Hohne in Germany. The unit was accommodated in Glynn Hughes Barracks, a former wartime German barracks quite imposing in appearance, with carved swastikas and other motifs still visible in the sandstone facing, despite numerous attempts to obliterate them by sandblasting. After each such attempt, everything would look smooth for a few months, and then the outline of the decorations would begin to return, as though indelibly imprinted on the ‘spirit’ of the building.

  Also in the barracks was a wartime mortuary, used in the 1990s as an annex to the Quartermaster’s Stores. Inside there remained a large marble slab, and one of the walls was decorated with a glorious Aryan warrior proclaiming it was “better to have died for the fatherland than lived a coward”, or some such phrase.

  The atmosphere within the camp was one of all-pervading gloom. Morale among the troops was low, and it was generally considered to be one of the worst postings you could get. Just prior to my arrival, a group of soldiers had been killed in a road accident, and during my (fortunately brief) stay, there was one accidental (not fatal) shooting, another fatal car crash, and an officer was killed when he fell from the roof of the nearby mess.

  The site of Belsen concentration camp was a short walk away, and it was widely accepted that Glynn Hughes Barracks (named after the first medical officer to arrive at the liberated Belsen) had housed the camp’s SS guards.

  In such circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the place had a spine-tingling, spooky feel to it, but I was unaware of all this when I arrived from the UK. It turned out that I knew a couple of the lads from training, and was billeted in a room with one of them, a clerk known as “Indy”. Sometime in the early hours of the morning, I was woken by shouting. I recognised the language as German, but at the time my linguistic skills were limited to ordering a beer and “Achtung! Spitfeur!” etc. I leapt out of bed, as the speaker appeared to be in the room, and hit the light switch. Instant silence, and, predictably, no one in the room apart from myself and my sleeping roomie. It had seemed so real, but I chalked it up to dreaming, and went back to sleep. The next morning I mentioned my ‘dream’ to Indy, who replied, “Get used to it - we all get it...”

  I don’t know how, but I did get used to it. It became commonplace for newcomers in the unit bar, after a few drinks to loosen their tongues, to confess to hearing German voices during the night, or, less often but rather more chilling, the sound of children crying. Generally, it wasn’t spoken about, and when it was, you could see the fear in the faces of those who had experienced it.

  There were a couple of wagers on offer - to spend the night locked in the old mortuary carried a hefty reward of 1,000 DM, and up until the day the barracks was closed and returned to the German authorities no one ever claimed it. Dutch courage would lead to boasts of how a few were going to sit in the vast cellars beneath the camp and use a Ouija board, but again no one ever actually carried out the deed. At night, the camp sentries would sprint through the cellars on their rounds, not even stopping for an illicit cigarette.

  Around six years later, while se
rving in Colchester, I was in conversation with an “old and bold” sergeant, and while listing previous units he mentioned he’d served in Hohne. I hadn’t thought about the place in years, and had never related my experiences to anyone in the new unit. I asked him if anything strange had ever happened to him there. He told me that on his first night he’d been woken by voices and in the gloom had seen a figure wearing the distinctive German ‘coal scuttle’ helmet. He reached for the light switch and the figure vanished. It transpired that we’d both lived in the same room.

  Neil Fielder-Mennell, Salisbury, Wiltshire, 2000

  LINGERING GERMAN

  One misty day in October 1952, when I was 11 years old and attending St George’s Junior School in Notting Hill Gate, west London, my friend Jimmy and I bunked off in our dinner hour to explore the bomb site off Campden Hill Road. Of Tor Gardens only one shattered house remained, on a corner; the rest of the street had been totally flattened in the Blitz, along with large sections of Sheffield Terrace and Hornton Street. The area was a wasteland of rubble amidst bleak avenues of cadaverous, blackened houses. Rebuilding didn’t get under way until late into the 1950s.

  We entered that house in Tor Gardens and climbed a rickety flight of stairs that led directly into a room on the first floor. Leaning out of the window, I felt a strange sensation: everything seemed to have retreated into the distance, as if I had become incredibly small. This weird spatial distortion intensified until it became hardly bearable. I was on the verge of saying something about it to Jimmy when footsteps sounded on the stairs below, steadily approaching. We looked at each other, frozen with terror.

  A man appeared in the doorway, aged about 25 with a fresh, clear face and cropped, blond hair. He was neatly dressed in a pale grey polo-necked sweater (rarely seen in the early 1950s), a light brown sports jacket, and dark grey trousers. In his right hand, firmly trained upon us, was a Luger pistol. I had seen Lugers in war comics and considered them a very stylish, superior-looking weapon.

  “Vat are you doing here?” he enquired in a thick German accent. We were speechless as his eyes glared from one to the other of us.

  “We’re not doing anything,” I finally blurted out, “We’re just looking around.”

  “You should not be here. This is my house. You vill go now,” he ordered, waving us towards the door with his gun.

  We descended the stairs cautiously, not looking back, careful not to make any hasty moves that might invite a bullet, until, rounding the stairway on the ground floor, we legged it at full pelt back along Tor Gardens. At the corner of Campden Hill Road we paused to look at the upper window, but didn’t see him.

  My parents thought that Jimmy and I had been the victims of a prankster, who had patiently lain in wait for us just so he could go into his routine. Our friends, on the other hand, thought we had flushed out a German spy - a lone insurgent lurking in a ruined house plotting to overturn the Nazi defeat of seven years earlier.

  Later, in my early twenties, a woman I knew mentioned, apropos of nothing, that she had moved into a block of flats in Tor Gardens. Neighbours had told her that the flats were haunted by the ghost of a young German who appeared on stair landings and in corridors, announced that he was lost, and then vanished without trace. The general theory was that this might be the ghost of a bomber pilot who had crashed onto Tor Gardens, his planeload of bombs creating the widespread devastation. I asked her about the location of the block where she lived, and it turned out to be on the corner of Tor Gardens and Hornton Street, where the lone bombed house had stood.

  Malcolm Dickson, Derby, 2005

  Ghosts on record

  BLOTTED OUT BY A BABY

  Some years ago, a friend of my sister’s moved into a new apartment. During the move, another friend took a Polaroid photo of the woman standing in her still-empty living room, which photo eventually came into my sister’s possession. I was told that it was at first perfectly normal, but that over the course of a week or two, the image of the woman was gradually overlaid with a close-up of a baby’s face. By the time I saw the photo (some years after the event, I think), this had reduced the image of the woman to a vague outline in the background. I still get the shivers when I think about it.

  That baby in the picture had a vaguely Victorian look about it, and I seem to recall that, though the original subject of the photo was in colour, the baby had a sepia tone. I certainly don’t know of any way this photo could have been faked, and my sister isn’t the type to make up spooky stories.

  Peter Zolli, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1999

  VEIL OF OBSCURITY

  On 16 July 1994 I gave a reading at the Bridewell Theatre, a converted printers’ institute in Bride Lane, off Fleet Street, London. The reading was part of a three-night ‘Disobey’ event arranged by Paul Smith of Blast First Records and writer Ian Sinclair, featuring Derek Raymond, Kathy Acker and Peter Whitehead.

  My performance, scheduled for the last slot on Saturday night, was an attempt to combine poetry and ritual magic. The notion was to lead the audience through imaginary space by means of words and pre-taped ambient sound, starting with a stroll through the imaginary, mythical counterpart of the physical London that exists inside our minds and gradually moving on to less familiar mental spaces. Part of the verbal journey through the idea of London was a recounting of legend and history surrounding the building we were performing in and its environment, including St Bride’s Church right next door to the theatre, where the first of Jack the Ripper’s victims had been married in the 1860s.

  Turning up on Saturday morning for a truncated rehearsal, I sat at the wooden table from which I would conduct the reading while my accomplice, David J, wearing a white mask, ran through some of the mimes he would be performing while I read. His prop during the rehearsal was a small, round mirror.

  Seated in the front row and providing more or less our only audience for the run-through was my partner, comic artist Melinda Gebbie, who was taking snap shots. The picture above was among those returned from the lab.

  Only myself and David J were on stage when the picture was taken. The hand visible behind David in the right background is not one of his, which are both raised to hold the mirror near his face. Neither was there any gauze or veil of any kind on stage at any time. The veil seems to be blowing outwards towards my seated figure from a point just behind David, extending over the right front corner of the table, where a stitched hem appears to be visible. Lower down, behind and to our right, there are a couple of horizontal stripes which, if interpreted as the layered hem of a Victorian skirt, would seem to suggest the figure of a woman, although it appears a lot less clear and substantial than the hand and veil.

  After developing the pictures and lending me the sole print of this photograph, Melinda found that the packet containing the negatives had seemingly vanished from her house. I had a negative made from the existing print and ran off copies including the one you see here. Shortly after this, the packet of negatives turned up in a drawer at Melinda’s house that had been searched thoroughly three times. The reappearance, however, did not include the original negative, which is still missing.

  Alan Moore, The Twilight Zone, Northampton, 1995

  Don’t panic

  A feeling of unease can escalate into incomprehensible terror for no apparent reason; the Ancient Greeks attributed such gut fear to the god Pan, and even today people occasionally sense the presence of the Cloven-hoofed One; others feel their dread relates to some past horror in the locality. Equally disturbing can be a temporary disorientation, making the familiar seem suddenly strange...

  The Great God Pan

  ENCOUNTERING PAN

  My first experience of a panic attack, which seemed extremely real to me, occurred at the age of 13. I was born into a working-class, Methodist family in Gateshead. It was a tightly regimented religious household and from an early age I was well acquainted with the Bible and especially the New Testament, though I knew nothing of ancient mythical deities.
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  I was very interested in biology, and liked nothing better than to go on excursions into the Northumberland countryside in my father’s van. I was especially keen on roving round looking for new samples for my pressed flower collection.

  On one such trip I wandered off into the empty, friendly countryside by myself, in search of collectable flowers while the rest of the family had a little picnic. I was on my own and enjoying myself, when I suddenly came upon a dead tree, in the branches of which sat a group of cawing crows. As I stood before it I was overwhelmed by a sense of dread, foreboding and evil, such as I had never experienced, even in the air-raid shelters of a few years previously. It was something I’d never felt in the countryside. I had to flee at once from this fearful place, and I was really terrified, though I heard no strange noises, except the cawing of the crows and the moan of the wind. I wanted to go straight home and my parents could not understand what was wrong with me.

  In an English lesson with the long late Joe Howe, English master, for reasons I have forgotten, we touched on this subject. This was shortly afterwards and I was astonished when I heard him talk about this sense of terror that can befall people for no reason. I told him about my experience, which my parents would have considered some mental aberration. He looked at me intently and said, “Robinson, you have just encountered the ancient God Pan.” I was rather taken aback by this statement, coming from an educated person, for as far as I knew educated persons were sensible and Christian. He then went on to use my experience as the basis of the derivation of the word ‘panic’.