Ghosts of Kinloss

I have returned from Scotland now, four days where the weather shifted from a gloomy grey to a constant rain. There were a few interludes of sun, but nothing indicating warmth or an indian summer. Monday and Tuesday were the worst - constant soaking rain. Went for a walk along the River Ness on the Tuesday, and on the Wednesday, a bus ride to Loch Ness. No lake monster alas.
On Wednesday, we went back to Kinloss. Or rather, I went back to Kinloss, and Emily went for the first time.
I lived in Kinloss from the ages of 5 - 10, before moving to the nearby town of Forres, where we lived until I was 13 and we moved down to London. Everything anyone does is locked in their childhood, some writer said, and Kinloss, by dint of it being geographically remote (on the north east coast of Scotland), locked away even more for me. It wasn't able to become a normal place as I never saw it - couldn't see it - and it remained (and remains) a place of absolute mystery and fascination. I went on a return visit before - over the summer of 2005 - and since then, the places where I spent my childhood  have only increased their capacity to haunt. A salient word, haunt, as childhood was marked by ghost hunting expeditions and myth making on an oddly epic scale. We populated the area with a pantheon of ghosts and demons and legends, our own folklore, our own Lord of the Rings inspired by ghost hunting books, 1970s television shows like Doctor Who and Sapphire and Steel and the remote locale we found ourselves growing up in. I've written about it before, and I will again... but I'll cut to the chase (and what a sinister and seemingly nonsensical phrase that is) and write about my return there last week.
I don't think I'll be going back again. The place felt like it was fading, becoming not mine, as all places - particularly childhood places - should do, and there was... something else too.
Em and myself walked from Forres to Kinloss, along the new (well it wasn't there thirty years ago) cycle / pedestrian route - a walk of about three miles or so. There were moments of sun, then moments of rain. An unsure day, gloomy, bright, and the light feeling somehow cold, as if the rain had got into that as well.
I remember walking over a bridge, passing the Welcome to Kinloss sign, and there, across the fields, and through the trees, the white houses of Burnside (the married quarters for the officers who served on the air base, and we where we lived for that last happy year in Kinloss from 1981 - 1982).

It was an oddly familiar feeling, seeing those houses again, mixed through with a lacing of something else, a slight feeling of portentousness perhaps. We walked past the Abbey Inn and the Spar, looking all closed up and shut down (it wasn't though) and looked across those fields to the crumbling abbey (haunted by monks and vandalised by devil worshippers). We saw the bus stop where I realised I missed the last episode of Sapphire and Steel over the summer of 1982 because my watch had stopped.

At the end of that road, we took a right, headed toward Burnside, kept the woods where we played to our left (that used to be the entrance to the woods... those houses weren't there then). There was a door in the stone wall that bordered the trees that wasn't there when I was a kid, and neither was it there when I went back seven years ago. Then there had been a gap to slip into the wood itself, but now there was a door / gate blocking the gap. I didn't try the door / gate, but it looked locked. The first indication that something was wrong. A shiver of concern.
We paused at the small river, the burn, from where Burnside took it's name. The river seemed crowded and tangled, the embankments slippery and treacherous. We would be quite happy clambering amongst here when we were kids... until the day we found a stone with part of a name carved on it. We thought we had discovered a tombstone - one of the victims of the werewolf (King Hairy) that we said lived in the woods.

. Burnside itself was deserted. A dead square of white houses - though there was indication that the houses were still lived in, they didn't feel lived in. There was an odd air over the place, a feeling of abandonment (and that line from T.S.Eliot's Prufrock recurs, about those half deserted streets). The green at the centre of Burnside seemed smaller (that playground wasn't there either) and the gardens that backed onto the field now had higher wooden fences, keeping onlookers like myself away. I didn't take any photographs inside Burnside itself - I felt too self conscious to (though wished I had now - Burnside isn't up on Google Street View). I had some vague anxiety that if I took photographs I might find myself in some unspecified form of trouble. Were these houses still owned by the M.O.D? RAF Kinloss was no more, but the air base (to the North of Burnside and the woods) had been taken over by the army. Did soldiers now live here? Would they think I was a terrorist? .
We passed by our old house, number 47. I sneaked quick glances in the kitchen window, the pale angles of a kettle in a dark room.. There was a car parked outside. I saw a quick glimpse of the garden over the back gate. There seemed to be more trees now, almost a wood, I said to Em. 
I took a photograph of Em stood in the road. You can see the car outside our old house.

  These trees - lining the path out of Burnside - we called The Guardians of Burnside. In our myth making ghost hunts, these trees came to represent a benign force that sought to protect Burnside from the dark forces that would gather in the woods and surrounding fields. We imagined them to be an encouraging element - all except one tree (I can't remember which one) and this was a dark tree, one that would work with the malevolent forces we imagined were ranged against us. This dark tree would have debilitating discouraging effect on us to abandon our ghost hunts and investigations.

Going through a gap in the fence took you to the entrance to what was Abbeylands Primary School, which I attended from 1978 - 1983 when I then went to Forres Academy. Abbeylands was a school for the children of servicemen and women of the air base. It closed down and then was reopened as a private school, sometime since my last visit, the Abbey Rose school. Looking at it now though, it seemed abandoned and closed. A dead place. Maybe the summer holidays... No. It was the end of September. It didn't look open at all, and around the building there was an odd air of decay, of something fading...

If you took the path to the right, and round the school, it would take you to Southside, the married quarters estate for the sergeants and their families, where I lived from 1978 - 1981. Southside is now not owned by the MOD and the houses privately sold. I felt too self conscious to explore the labyrinthine alleyways and cul-de-sacs of Southside, almost repeating the recurring dreams I've had since that first return visit seven years ago, where I'm walking through Southside, trying to get to the heart of the estate and I'm not sure if I am allowed to be there or not. At least in the dreams I actually got inside Southside. In real life I just walked down the end of the ragged path, strewn with leaves and rainfall detritus that only increased the raggedy post-apocalyptic aura of the place.

I walked to where the path turned left, went to the fence (Kinloss was always a place of fences) and took a photograph across the fields, of the distant clump of trees we called a wood by the railway line. We used to stand at the edges of Southside, fingers curled around the fence wire and peer at the dark and fascinating undulating mass. We imagined the trees were haunted by an apparition we called The Black Phantom, a cowled monk-like figure. We convinced ourselves we could see it amongst the trees. The hysteria spread, whole playgrounds of children would come to that fence, and in an ecstasy of terror someone would shout that they had seen something move and we would all scream and run back to the Abbey Crescent playground where we would discuss what we had seen. One boy said that the Black Phantom had come right into Southside and had pointed a stick at him. Another boy said that, one night, he had climbed the fence surrounding Southside and had walked to the wood where he had found a wooden box covered with moving lights. I could not imagine anything more terrifying at the time. The hysteria was repeated with the incidents involving The Green Hand. This was a stone carving on one of the tombs in the abbey (The Old Abbey as we soberly called it). The teachers told us that if you touched the hand then you would have nightmares for a week. We imagined the hand had come alive and was haunting the school. One girl thought she had seen it on a lamp post, waiting for her as she walked home from school and had feinted, having to be carried back to the school by the slightly sinister caretaker Mr Wright. An assembly was called. We were promised very serious trouble if anyone mentioned the Green Hand again.

 So I didn't go into Southside but walked the opposite way up to the woods to the north of Burnside. Well, we called them woods, but they weren't really large enough to be called a wood, just a U-shaped curve of thickly clustered trees, where there was an old  manor-like building where my sister went to nursery and brownies, and a street of MOD houses called Northside that led off from the main road from Kinloss to Forres.
The path up to the woods was shorter than I remembered - though seemed longer when I was a kid because
I spent so much time running away from the woods, from King Hairy, from living skeletons we called the Urglie-Burglies, from Mutoids and The Strangling Tree, and it's darker cousin The Nightmare Tree, from a vanishing purple car (the ghost of another victim of King Hairy) and from one inexplicably scary story that a friend told me on a snowy January night in 1982.

      The woods were accessed by a bridge across the burn. The first photograph in this post shows me stood on the bridge. Once you crossed the bridge, you turned left and into the woods.

But there was something wrong. There had been something wrong right from when I first saw the woods from the other side. The woods were fenced off for one thing. Access denied. I couldn't actually get into the woods. Peering into the thinned woods themselves I saw other fences where there used to be no fences, and piles of trees cut down, waiting to be shifted out. A horrible possibility began to occur to me.

The woods were being destroyed. Some of the gardens of Northside were being elongated to take over patches of the wood, and an awful lot of trees were being chopped down. The place had a thinned out, dying quality to it. I remember the woods thick with trees and paths and possibilities.
It was around this time that a curious feeling began to creep up on me. The interesting thing was that I wasn't consciously aware of it at the time, but it took me over unaware,  like the coming of autumn or an afternoon sleep. A slipping by degrees into something else. There was a damp and haunted quality to the day as I took photographs of these childhood places, a feeling of... not exactly being watched, but more a feeling of not being welcome, a cold, unfriendly aura you get sometimes in certain streets in rough areas. A feeling of barely-there panic. I continued taking photographs, Tried to ignore that feeling of being followed that was starting to grow.
The feeling reminded me of something else. .
That story told to me on that night in January 30 years ago, up behind The Astra, a tiny one-screen cinema on the edge of the woods. From the outside it looked so small as to be impossible to even conceive of a cinema being inside. On the last day of school before the summer holidays, as a special treat, we watched Looney Tunes cartoons here. I remember watching Star Trek The Motion Picture here, nearly being thrown out because the two friends I was with were misbehaving - a fate that terrified me (would I be sent to prison?) We came here this night because of the path that ran behind the Astra, following the line of the woods.

Back when I was a kid, the path behind the Astra was considerably more sloped than in the photograph above, so sloped in fact, it was possible to sledge down.
Now, the winter of 1981 / 1982 was full of snow. We had spent the Christmas at my Nan's house in Wolverhampton, a stay that had increased by a number of days - maybe even a week - because the snow had closed down the railway lines. When we had returned to Kinloss, the snow was still as thick as ever - and winters that far north are bleak, remote things anyway. Serious winters full of ridiculously early nights where the day never gets fully light, and in the depths of December doesn't really get light until 10'o'clock in the morning..
This one night, we decided (myself and a friend from Burnside) to sledge on the slope behind the Astra. This was a serious proposition. This meant being by the woods after dark, all alone, something which was usually not even considered. There could be no talks of ghosts or ghost hunts or anything of that nature. I don't remember walking from Burnside to the woods, but I can imagine it, that growing tension in the air, that refusal to look into the dead space of the woods. I remember taking turns sledging down that slope, trying to get as near (and not near) the woods as possible - imagine falling into the woods this late at night. Our summer ghost hunts didn't then seem so funny then, not at all... There was a darkness to the woods that was very serious indeed. We ignored it and tried to continue sledging. Tried to have fun. That feeling crept up on us - crept up on me anyway - that feeling of not being welcome, not being wanted, and that we really shouldn't be there at all, that strange idea that we were being followed. Then the friend I was with stopped, and some kind of seriousness came down. He was going to tell me something I didn't want to hear (the cold, the wind through the woods, the black sky, the snow). He began by asking if we had returned at any point during the month or so we had been away at Wolverhampton - or at if my Dad had. I said we hadn't, then he said that at some point over Christmas he had seen out car - a green Mazda - parked in our driveway and thought we had come back. I said it definitely wasn't us.We had stayed in Wolverhampton the whole of Christmas. That was it really. Nothing scary at all. A car mistaken for my parents car. Someone using our drive when we weren't there. Nothing scary at all. Not even a ghost story.
It was the most terrifying thing I had heard in my life.
Then that silence. We looked at each other. That acknowledgement.
We didn't speak another word until we had made it back to Burnside. I remember the blue sledge bumping against my legs as we ran through the snow. As far as I can remember, we never spoke of that panic that had over taken us ever again.
There were werewolves to hunt after all.
And now here I was, thirty years later, and that same feeling was stealing over me.
You shouldn't be here at all...

We walked away from the woods, passed by Northside. There was only one last place to look before we headed away from the melancholy, haunted air of Kinloss, and that was Kinloss House, located on the other side of the woods.
Kinloss House always looked haunted - even more so now, all boarded up and amongst the felled trees. Em stayed near Northside as I walked to the front of the building. There was a workman about - possibly connected with the felling of the trees. Despite the fact that Kinloss House looked so stereotypically the haunted house, I don't remember having any ghost stories connected to the place.

Behind me, there was more evidence of the woods being destroyed.

That was it. My return to Kinloss.
As I said, I don't think I'll go back again. Maybe the woods won't be destroyed, (though they might be changed beyond recognition), but I don't think so - I think that if I went back again, the woods would be mostly gone, and there would just be a space, an absence where memories used to be. The whole of Kinloss had a strange air to it anyway, an oddly comforting feeling of decay, as if it was slipping back into the wilderness on which it was originally built.
Em and myself walked to Findhorn (a fishing village a few miles from Kinloss) and caught the bus back to Forres, and then the train back to Inverness where we were staying.
On the train back I thought about Kinloss, and how glad I was that I wasn't there now. I was glad to have gone, and not to have to breathe that melancholy ghostly air, full of a dreamy, not entirely unpleasant disquiet.
Memories are haunted places after all.