Stone, Ghosts and my Grandfather's House in Stanklyn Lane

My Grandfather's house, a semi-detached red brick council house in the tiny village of Stone, lay deep in the Worcestershire countryside, somewhere south of Kidderminster. My grandparents were the first people to live in the (then) new house, sometime in the 1950s. Previously they had lived on a farm in Harvington, where my grandmother met my grandfather (my step-grandfather really, I never knew my real grandfather) over the course of the second world war. He was an Italian POW, captured in Ethiopa, and stayed in England the rest of his life, dying in early 1994, ten years after my grandmother.
The house, 116 Stanklyn Lane, runs like a spine through my life, a knobbly backbone of a thing, pushing its bony intrusions into my dreams and memories. Haunts me, perhaps, more than any other place, probably because out of anywhere in my life it was the one I knew the longest, 22 years. My father was in the RAF and we moved about a lot when I was a child.
Perhaps there are other reasons too.
We lived there for a year in 1977, after we had returned from my father's posting in Malta. I went to the small village school, and shared the back room with my sister, and it was here that I saw a ghost, perhaps sparking off my lifelong interest in ghost stories and the paranormal. I think my interest in such things was probably inevitable though, but my experience in that house certainly deepened my interest. Well, I was five years old, six by the time we left, already deeply impressed by such things as Doctor Who, Star Trek, Space 1999 and Scooby Doo (a great influence on my childhood ghost hunting epeditions...) One night, I had a nightmare, bizarrely enough about Sesame Street. It featured the Count Dracula character, in a darkened room. He was counting dragons, the outlines of which could be seen on the walls. As he loudly counted each dragon ('One dragon! Two Dragons!') each dragon lit up, accompanied by a flash of lightning and a clap of deafening thunder. I have no idea what was so frightening about this nightmare, but the whole dream was terrifying. When he reached 'four dragons!', I woke up in a fit of terror and relief, pleased that my nightmare of the Count Dracula and the dragons were over. I opened my eyes, and there at the end of my bed was a figure, sideways to me, looking out of the window. It was dressed all in black, some kind of long robe, such as a monks habit. The hood covered its head, obscuring the face from me. I remember I screwed my eyes up tight, pulled the blankets over my head and promised myself that I would never open my eyes at night again.
Rationalist explanations abound of course; a dream, an hypnopompic hallucination, that it was my mother, misidentified as I woke from sleep. But. There is always a but though - Hooded figures are common in ghost sightings, and where would I, as a child, have discovered this? I had seen a classic ghost, long before I had started reading about them. But. There was an advert at the time, showing a grim reaper figure, warning children to stay away from ponds, that bore a remarkable resemblance to 'The Black Phantom' (as I ended up christening it). But. My sister claimed she had seen it too. But. She was probably influenced by mt telling of the tale. But. I found out that my cousin had also... and so on and so on, ad nauseum. Notions of truth in any ghost sighting become irrelevant in the end, it is more the nature and effect of the experience that is important. Ghost stories are an integral part of human experience.
Another important influence on me that year was a documentary on the television about ghost hunters. I remember watching it on the television in my parents room, the same room I was enrapt by the Doctor Who story 'The Horror of Fang Rock' ('I've made a terrible mistake Leela, I haven't locked the creature out there, I've locked it in, with us...'). The documentary was about ghost hunters, they investigated an old church, recorded strange noises in the darkness, found secret rooms and hidden weapons. Perhaps because of this documentary, I associate grey, windy afternoons with ghost stories, the weather when I was watching it, the light fading to evening, that feeling, that resonance of a far more mysterious world beneath our own...
After 1977 we moved to the highlands of Scotland, where my interest in the paranormal crystallised into a lifelong fascination. We lived there until summer of 1985, and my childhood there is a history of ghost and monster hunting investigations; the strangling tree, the old abbey, werewolves, vanishing cars, mutants that lived in the river (or the 'burn' as we called it), a school haunted by the green hand, the blue mist and the Bloody Mary. This fascination has never really left me.
Because we lived so far away, trips down to England were a rarity, usually once a year. A week at one set of grandparents, then a week at the others. There was a certain wildness about my grandfather's house. Nowadays small villages are associated with second homes, picture-postcard serenity, small tea shops and affluence. I don't remember Stone being like this. It was surrounded by farming country, and my grandparents worked, until they retired, in the factories in town. Gypsy country, rural mafias, remote farmland dramas, lost in their own obscurity...
I remember a dream my sister had that has always stayed with me. She dreamt one night that my grandfather's house was under siege by rabbits, only these rabbits were armed with knives, and used ladders to try and gain access to the house. She sdaid that the rabbits had come from the fields that my grandfather's house backed onto. I think this dream was triggered by the discovery of a dead rabbit in the coal shelter at the front of the house. There was no central heating in the house, just a coal fire that was used for years, then replaced by a wood fire. Hours spent in long evenings watching the flames in the grate, creating burning empires out of the miniature infernos. because of this, the upstairs of the house was always cold. A panoply of blankets, pulling them over you, not to ward off ghosts, but to ward of the cold. When the bed was suitably warmed, often with the addition of a hot water bottle, it became the most comfortable and longed for place in the world.
There were few street lamps in the village, so when night fell, it felt like some great natural disaster. The use of the word 'village' is somewhat out of context too. It denotes some sense of community, but the houses were scattered too far apart to have a sense of community of warmth; streets split by woods and field, forgotten strips of bushes, and signs on fences warning that 'trespassers will be prosecuted'.
There was a shop, somewhere, in the village, a church on the hill, with adjoining churchyard, a school across the lane from the church where I attended in 1977. I had an overactive imagination as a child, and became convinced, for some reason, that a Tyrannosaurus Rex, whilst piloting a Spitfire (!) had become trapped in the tower of the Tudor building that was our schoolhouse-

(I'm actually writing this at work, and apparently I have work to do; proof reading scripts, calling customers who can't speak English, call to monitor. Going to have to continue this later. Forgive all the typographical errors...)