Confessions of a Childhood Ghosthunter II: Burnside and the Myths of the Dark Force

We moved to Burnside, the officers married quarters, over the summer of 1981, when I was 9 years old. This was a great event in my not-yet-decade; the houses were older and larger, the gardens were bigger, my bedroom was huge in comparison to my old one in Abbey Crescent, Southside. Burnside itself was smaller than Southside, about a third of the size, judging by Google Maps. It was a large square of houses really, and in the middle a large green, lined by crab apple trees and bushes.
At the back of the house there was a marshy area, inevitably called the Burnside Marsh. There was another secret stream here. When our garden fence was being repaired Craig and myself explored this swampy area. We spent a pleasant few days playing amongst the strange rushes, until the farmer's son came over and told us not to play here or we would be in 'very serious trouble'.
Surrounding the marshy area were farmers fields, and in the distance, cottages, the railway line, Monaughty Forest. A vast panoply of sights that greeted me each time I looked out of my window.
I would play by myself in our garden, looking across the fields to Southside, and think to myself it was a 'terrible little continent'. I'm not quite sure where I got this phrase from -I must have read it somewhere, or heard it from the television. It seems a remarkably precocious phrase to use, but Southside did seem so paltry compared to Burnside. The year and a half I spent living there were without doubt the happiest in my life, certainly the times I am most fond of.
To the North of Burnside was a small wood, lined by what we called the Burn, a small river. The wood, tiny as it was, contained more RAF Housing (Northside) a mansion, also owned by the RAF, where my sister went to her Brownies meetings, and a small playground, where much discussion and planning of our ghost hunting expeditions occurred.
It was a magical place to us, this U-shaped wood. I remember spending most of my time at Burnside here, usually with Martin or Craig; building bases, playing Secret Agents (on those rare occasions when we had grown bored of ghosts - I think a book in the school book club was responsible for this 'The Secret Agents Handbook, full of codes and tips for would be spies). There was a rivalry with the kids from Northside, though there were often truces, shifting alliances, gangs formed and destroyed, dramas and heartbreak.
Most of it would be forgotten by the next morning.
Craig had lived for a time in the nearby town of Forres, but had moved back over the long winter of 1981. Whilst in Forres, he had formed a gang called The Efrafa (named after the Nazi inspired rabbits in Watership Down for some reason), and the Efrafa (a highly organised gang) had spent most of their time ghost hunting. The hauntings were, it seemed, far more serious than we had first envisaged, and actually originated in Forres. The controlling power behind the hauntings was something named The Dark Force, an invisible malevolence that lived deep within The Black Woods - the large wood that dominated the hill the town was built around. He told us of running battles the Efrafa had with living skeletons that rose up from the graveyard just inside The Black Woods.
I was 9 years old, old enough to know better really, but I think I really believed it. I say 'think', because the notion of truth is a curious thing. Did I really believe that Craig had been chased by living skeletons? That there was an evil presence controlling everything called The Dark Force? It is impossible to tell. I try to reach back through the years, and I can't believe I believed, but I can't believe I didn't believe either. There was a suspension of disbelief, that dizzying feeling that life had strange undercurrents beneath the surface.
Perhaps I didn't question it because I was just too young to. I was ten before I stopped believing in Father Christmas, so perhaps living skeletons weren't too difficult to believe in.
Notions of belief aside, there were far more enthralling things happening in Burnside. We discovered that the Woods (The Burnside woods, not the Black Woods) was home to a werewolf! I'm not entirely sure how this werewold first came to our attention (I think Craig probably had something to do with it), but it had it's lair beneath a tangled pile of branches in the corner of the woods we went least to. This creature we called King Hairy, and it worked voluntarily with The Dark Force - it's agent if you will. We took our werewolf hunting very seriously. One summer evening, I remember Martin being severely admonished by Craig for not wearing gloves - the sight of bare skin might alert the werewolf to our presence! An ex-Efrafa member, Stuart McMichan, sometimes joined us, and one Saturday, we discovered what we thought to be the werewolf's print in the mud. This so terrified me that I had to return home early, on the basis that I had to 'tidy my room' even if it was a Saturday.
There were occasional ghost hunts involving the mansion, but all that seemed to happen was that we would hide in rhododendrum bushes, and watch the graying structure from a distance.
The old image of The Strangling Tree was also incorporated into this Burnside mythology. It transpired that The Strangling Tree had actually opposed The Dark Force. One night though, before the three of us had lived in Kinloss, there had been an apocalyptic fight between King Hairy and The Strangling Tree. The Strangling Tree had been destroyed and now existed only as a ghost!
The school was no longer haunted by The Green Hand, but a new entity known as The Blue Mist, a wispy thing that lived in the ventilation shafts. Bored during maths lessons, I would imagine I could see it's tendrils in the gratings fixed into the ceiling above me. There was something we called The Nightmare Tree in the woods. If you rode bikes underneath it, then, much like The Green Hand, you would be visited by dreadful nightmares for an undefined period.
It was a strange world we lived in, an all encompassing fantasy, our own mythos that stretched right over the seven years I lived in Scotland. There were serious arguments over whether or not one of the living skeletons (which acted as kind of stormtroopers for The Dark Force) could actually become allies, and one afternoon at school, I was convinced that The Dark Force was trying to possess me, (Images of black shadows in dark woods, something brooding and ancient). One time, when Nanny Mole visited, and I accompanied her to the newsagents, I was quite concerned at our path leading through the Woods - might she be attacked by King Hairy?
It's strange, but as I write, I remember more and more. This mythos we created and at least half-believed, seems so complex now. Compared to the relative greyness of adult life -unfulfilling jobs, money anxieties, mundane days, I am not surprised that people (including me) romanticise their childhoods, no wonder childhood flings its long light down our lives like some kind of inverse darkness.
That intense alive-ness of childhood is something hard to replicate after puberty, perhaps impossible, which is why we must return to our memories, our own myths, our intimate legends.
There were tales from Burnside of course, but I think I'm going to split the Burnside chapter of these ghost hunting confessions in two, else this post will be as long as the shadows our childhood seems to cast.