Confessions of a Childhood Ghost Hunter I: Southside

After living for a year at my grandfather's house in the tiny village of Stone in Worcestershire, my Dad, a sergeant in the RAF, was posted up to Scotland. So, in January of 1978, we moved to a village called Kinloss on the Morayshire coast. It was far up north, on a level with, and about a half an hour drive away from Loch Ness. The village was small, no-one there really but RAF personnel and their families. We moved to Southside, the sergeants married quarters, just outside the base itself.
Southside consisted of houses and playgrounds, nothing else. Surrounding Southside was farmland and distant forests. We were out in the middle of nowhere. Apart from the north edge of Southside, the whole place was surrounded by a high wire fence. At the back of our house was a railway line. The whole house used to shake when a train passed by.
My interest in the fantastic was already well in place. I was addicted already to such programmes as Doctor Who, Star Trek and Space:1999. There was the incident of the cowled monk-like figure I had seen at my grandfather's house the year before, and that ever so fascinating documentary on ghost hunters I had seen.
Our house looked out onto a playground, a death-trap collection of slides, swings, tunnels and logs, all on concrete. Wouldn't be allowed these days. At night 'Big Kids' would gather on the swings and under the slide, singing songs of the day. 'Mull of Kintyre' by Paul McCartney was one. 'Sailing' by Rod Stewart was another.
My best friend, Carl Haslam, and I, had any number of early dealings with monsters and ghosts. We were convinced that the logs in the playground were home to a sinister collection of entities called 'The Beaming Eyes', and then there were the mysterious 'Dizzy Lights'. The latter were street lamps that could be seen from our school, Abbeylands Primary School. Over winter mornings, if it was dark enough, and that far north it usually was, the lights would still be on, exerting their maleficient rays upon us. Helplessly we would spin ourselves around, under control by these mysterious woodland lamps until we fell over.
Then there was the case of 'The Green Hand'. Maybe it was something to do with the isolation in Kinloss, but rumours would spread like fever. I can't remember how tales of The Green Hand started, but I well remember when these stories were in full swing. There were sightings of The Green Hand all around school. One girl feinted as she walked home, convinced that The Green Hand was waiting for her on a lamp post. i remember Mr Wright, the sinister caretaker, having to carry her back into the school. This Salem Witch fever of Abbeylands came to the attention of the teachers. An assembly was called, and we were absolutely forbidden to mention, or even discuss, The Green Hand. Strangely enough, in later years, it was the teachers themselves who fed into the Green Hand legend. It was a sculpture on a gravestone in the Old Abbey, a crumbling building a thousand years old or so. If you touched this sculpture, the teachers said, you would have nightmares for a week. Oddly enough, on a return visit to Scotland over the summer of 2006, I found the gravestone, and couldn't quite bring myself to touch it.
Then there was the legend of The Strangling Tree. It was said that if you blinked your eyes 30 times, then you would see an image of The Strangling Tree imprinted on your eyelids. I never had the courage to try.
Back in Southside, Carl Haslam and myself would forever be trying to climb the green wire fence that surrounded the houses. After another failure to scale this fence, maybe in the late summer of 1979, we stood at this fence, gazing at a small wood -nothing more than a clump of trees really- by the railway line. I pointed out to Carl that I could see something in the wood. A patch of shadow surprisingly human shaped. Watching us. A ghost! It was obviously the cowled monk figure I had seen at mny grandfather's house! What was it doing here? Why was it following me?
More delighted rather than scared, this ghost was quickly named 'The Black Phantom'. If you stared at it long enough, it seemed to move... Carl and myself would stare at the woods, until we thought we had 'seen it move', before running away to the safety of the playground, where we would discuss, quite seriously, 'the hauntings'. This was obviously too good to keep to ourselves. I remember one probably summer day when I managed to get 30 kids to follow us to the wire fence. We would stare dutifully at the Black Phantom until someone would scream 'it's coming!' and then we would all run back to the playground again. Huddled under the slide we would discuss what had happened. One boy, who was 'bad at running' and was therefore, last back, said The Black Phantom had actually come into Southside and had 'pointed a stick about'. Another boy claimed he had once climbed the fence and actually gone into the wood, where he had discovered 'a box covered with moving lights'.
I was very pleased with all the hysteria I had caused.
At some point Craig Mackenzie joined us in our ghost hunting team. We began to formulate ideas that maybe the whole of Southside - even the whole of Kinloss itself - was haunted. My Dad told me The Black Phantom was 'probably a rubbish bag' caught on the branches of the tree. I think even this is optimistic. No more than a patch of darkness in a small clump of trees. Not that this, or my Dad's explanation, meant anything to us. One day we asked the farmer whether or not the wood was haunted. He said yes it was! This was evidence of course, proof of the existence of some malign influence!
Over the three and a half years we lived at Southside, my interest in all things paranormal was cemented. In the late 1970s, there seemed to be any number of ghost books and ghost hunters guides aimed at children. Television also seemed to be full of ghosts and supernatural dramas; 'The Clifton House Mystery', the utterly terrifying science fiction / paranormal series 'Sapphire and Steel', and one day, when I was sick and off school, a short adaptation of an M.R.James ghost story, 'Mr Humphries and his Inheritance' aimed at children. I only found out the origins of this programme when I was studying for my dissertation (on the Victorian/Edwardian ghost story) in 1999 at Worcester University College.
Most of our games centred around ghost hunting. We would feed in whatever television programme we had been watching at the time; Scooby Doo, Doctor Who, Blakes Seven... One time my sister came up with the idea that the evil force responsible for all the hauntings was something called 'The Energy Beast' from the Godzilla cartoon. 'It must be the Energy Beast, it must' I remember her saying, in all seriousness. Carl Haslam, for a time, became convinced that a secret river we could hear, not see, on the other side of the railway line was responsible. He had seen a girl we knew, who was 'in a trance' or 'hypnotised' standing in the spot where we thought we could hear the stream. I had no idea what 'trance' or 'hypnotised' meant, but they sounded very sinister anyway.
One night my Dad took me ghost hunting in the Old Abbey (as it was called). This place was rumoured to be haunted by a procession of ghostly monks, and the churchyard was a magnet for 'devil worshippers' - bored kids scrawling satanic graffiti on the tombstones. We found nothing, of course, but our dog, a lovable orange (!) mongrel called Bruno, became quite alarmed at the sight of a stone angel, barking at this white figure in the darkness.

(An interlude. As I'm writing this a strange memory is coming to mind. Strange because I've not thought about it for years, decades even. It was a story that Craig Mackenzie told us. A stone angel in the churchyard, deep red jewels for eyes... some luckless child plucking out the jewels... Then what happened? I can't remember. Was the angel supposed to scream, or was the angel found bleeding from it's now empty eye sockets? Ghost story stigmata, a malevolent Mother of Christ...)

I wonder if my recurring dreams of small woods in the middle of fields, have anything to do with that clump of trees by the railway line. That fascination at seeing something, but being unable to go there.
Fingers curled around the wire fence, watching for movement in the shadows of the wood.
In my dreams, it seems I am still watching, waiting for the secret, the forbidden mystery, to show itself.

We left Southside in the summer of 1981 whn my Dad was promoted to an officer. Burnside, the officers married quarters were just on the other side of Abbeylands School. Carl Haslam fell from my life, replaced by Martin Griffin, and my career as a childhood ghost hunter was far, far from over...