Confessions of a Childhood Ghost Hunter IV: Forres and The Black Woods

Shortly after Craig had left Kinloss, in the November of 1982, my family moved to Forres. It was only about three miles away from Kinloss, but it felt like a lifetime. I knew no-one in Forres, so ghost hunting expeditions were less a part of everyday life, and more a special occasion.
Our house, a newly built three bedroomed semi-detached house was in a new estate, consisting of one road; Drumduan Park. It was pleasant enough I suppose, but Forres seemed a much more dangerous place than Kinloss. For one thing, there weren't only air force families around us now, and Forres was larger and unknown, a fact that caused great consternation to my 10 year old self.
Our House, number 89, was built at the bottom of a hill. The garden sloped upwards steeply. Over the other side of the garden fence, there was a small lane, then a low wall, and then, The Black Woods.
The Black Woods, if you remember, was where Craig had told us that the Dark Force, that all powerful malevolent spirit, originated. Looking from my bedroom window up at the Black Woods, I was impressed, and not a little frightened by how powerful the trees seemed; ancient, inscrutable, and timelessly deep. I would sit on my bed, and watch it get dark, and be convinced that the woods did indeed hold something dark.
They fascinated me as much as the small wood by the railway line in Kinloss. When it snowed, the white showed more of the interior of the Black Woods. Over the winter of 1982 I would stare into the depths, as if trying to figure something out.
Martin stayed over, and we made efforts to penetrate the mysteries of the Black Woods. The Black Woods lived up to their name, and in some ways, Craig had been right in naming them so, for there was something dark about them, particularly the section that our house backed onto. The section of the wooded hill that sloped down into the town of Forres proper held a graveyard - the same one that Craig claimed his gang, the Efrafa, had been attacked by living skeletons. There was also a tourist attraction in the shape of Nelson's Tower. I can't remember any of the history of Nelson's Tower, but I think it was well over 500 years old. These weren't the Black Woods proper though, they were the section at the back of my house.
The expeditions into the Black Woods weren't exactly fun. The further you penetrated into the dense trees, the more and more remote it seemed - and dangerous. You seemed constantly on the verge of panic. Just inside the woods was a small electricity sub-station. This has always puzzled me. What was it doing in the woods? Fingers clasped around rusted railing, I noticed that someone had scratched something into the concrete. Arcane typography. It gave me a shiver when I read it; 'Satan. Mine Humble Home'. We called it the Pet Cematary of course. Further round the perimeter of the Black Woods, next to a huge mansion owned by the new age community at Findhorn, was a seemingly vertical slope, covered in ivy. There was an old tree trunk we used to make a base in. We enjoyed playing there until one day we discovered the bones of an old dog, lost and forgotten under the leaves.
I shall never forget one day though. My sister and myself decided to go for a picnic in The Black Woods. So, taking food with us, we penetrated the depths of the wood far further than we ever had before. Eventually we came across a clearing, deep, deep in the woods. We decided to have our picnic here. We settled down to eat, both of us trying to ignore the gathering uneasiness around us. The clearing held scraps of debris; the remains of an old iron bed, the rusting skeleton of a motorbike. Piles of old clothes. The remains of a fire.
A wind started up. It was the wind of course, but this breeze through the trees sounded like voices. An inhuman moaning, more a sighing really, that sounded as if it had once been human. It bought curiously disturbing images to me; an old, old thing, something that somehow defined the feeling of being lost, an ancient malevolence.
Finally; The Dark Force, and we were alone with it, and we weren't meant to be here.
We didn't run back, and this was somehow worse. If we had run, it would have signified we were still enjoying ourselves, as we had in Kinloss. We made our way back though, as quickly and quietly as possibly. Quietly for one reason; we didn't want it to follow us. It felt like we were being hunted.
We never went as deep into The Black Woods again.
The year afterwards, we left the pleasant confines of Abbeylands Primary School for the local comprehensive, Forres Academy. At the end of the first year, Martin and his family were posted down to Cornwall. I remember, sometimes though, lying in my bed at night, and being far too aware of those woods at the top of our garden, that I was glad Martin and Craig had gone, because it meant I would never have to go into The Black Woods again.
My last year in Scotland, leaving in the summer of 1985, when I was 13, was a strange one. I hated secondary school, full of bullying and violence, and, with Martin gone, very isolated. I made new friends of course, but these new friendships were fractious and untrustworthy things. There were still occasional ghost hunting phases, but though, I was, and am, as interested in the paranormal as ever, they had begun to lose their charm. Maybe I was growing older but it felt more and more like we were just fooling ourselves. Killing time.
What I most remember about that last year in Scotland was a growing sense of melancholy and darkness. Sundays sitting on my bed, listening to the Top 40 on a mono-radio, looking up at those ever watchful Black Woods, trapped in the house, and feeling ever more trapped within myself. I would feel a painful nostalgia for Kinloss, and felt like a shadow had passed into my life.
Looking back on it, I can see my time in Forres, particularly that isolated last year, as a fertile breeding ground for the depression that was to develop during my ensuing adolesence, blossoming into that hated, if controlled -sometimes anyway- chronic condition that I still have today.

I didn't really enjoy Forres.

We left in the summer of 1985, when mt Dad was posted down to West London. I wasn't sorry to leave, though frightened of starting a new school, which I was to discover, was far, far worse than Forres Academy. We spent a summer at my Grandfather's house in Stone, before moving, first to Northwood for a few months, and then to Ickenham for the next 7 or so years.
By the time we had lived in Ickenham a year, I was to change a lot. Childhood was dead, and after a year there, I had kissed a girl, swapped Adam and the Ants for the delights of underground thrash bands such as Sodom, Voivod and Kreator, visited London regularly without my parents, and had my arm broken in the school playground when someone picked my tiny frame up and threw me to the concrete ground (the snap of my arm, and the pure blue sky as I lay there moaning, everyone laughing at me).
My interest in the paranormal was only to grow however, and our house on Woodstock Drive in Ickenham, more than anywhere else I have known, was, whatever it means, haunted. Certainly in that house, I experienced something (and it was only a mundane thing really) that I have never been able to rationally explain.
But that's a story for another time.
And this is the end of the confessions of a childhood ghost hunter.