Ghosts at Sea and Elsewhere
by Published on 13th February 2021 01:58 PM
Because the seas and oceans are so vast and lonely it is inevitably that tales of ghosts, ghostly apparitions, and ghost ships will be told by mariners. I’m a bit skeptical that the stories are true and that they are only figments of someone’s imagination.
Although I wrote a novel about ghosts haunting a ship, and I have had some encounters with unexplained visions and noises, I really should not doubt other people’s experiences, there are too many to discount.
My earliest recollection of ghostly apparitions was when I was a youngster. The attic of the old house I lived in was formerly a Dame’s School, where legend had it a little boy got accidentally hanged on a rope swing attached to the principal rafter. (Dame Schools were small privately run schoolrooms, usually in areas of poverty, in the 19th century). Every single night in the bedrooms below the attic you could hear the distinct sound of a pencil dropping and roll across the floorboards. The piano would tinkle a tuneless tune, my mum said it was just mice. We had a dog that literally refused to go up the attic, you could not drag it up the stairs. But the most reveling thing to indicate the old house was haunted, was one Sunday morning. My brother Frank, who was about 3 or 4 years old, came running down the stairs crying, “Peter has scared me.”
My mum said, “Peter is at church.”
Frank said, “Well that boy upstairs scared me.”
Of course, there were no boys upstairs, but Frank had definitely met someone up the attic.
The next experience I had with the unexplainable was at sea on the MV Dartmoor (Runciman’s of Newcastle) I was sleeping in the Cabin Boys cabin, when around midnight I felt a cold heavy hand on my face. Feeling around my face and head. I jumped up thinking it was one of the sailors messing about, I switched on the light to find the cabin empty and the cabin door shut. This happened to me three times! I never mentioned this to the other crew members, I didn’t want a nightly visit from the sailors trying to scare a cabin boy, so, I told no-one.
Later, Captain Rowe offered me a job on the deck so I left the cabin boy’s cabin to sleep in the sailor’s accommodation. The boy who replaced me was a Scot. (Sorry I’ve forgotten his name; I’ll call him Jimmy.) One midnight I was in the seaman’s mess room brewing up for the off coming watch when Jimmy came running down the alleyway absolutely terrified, sobbing that there was a hand in his pillow. He was really scared. He explained in vivid detail exactly what had happened to me earlier. Anyway, later we were in Japan, where another company ship was in port, the ‘MV Innismoor’. Our two crews met up in a bar. I got talking to one of the engineers who had previously sailed on the Dartmoor. He said, without prompting, “Do you know the Dartmoor is haunted?” He told me the cabin boy’s cabin was haunted and that boys refused to sleep in the cabin. The engineer told me a story about a cabin boy and the mate, I don’t want to repeat the story in case the boy is still living, I suppose he’ll be in his 80s now. But that cabin was haunted, I can still feel the cold hand on my face. I know some of our members have sailed with Runciman’s. Do you recall this story?
The last incident that happened to me was when I worked as Night Porter in the Oaks Hotel, Burnley. The old Victorian mansion was reputedly haunted by the ghost of a woman, she had been seen by one or two staff, and the occasional guest over the years. I never saw this ghost as I patrolled the hotel and the unoccupied top floors in the middle of the night, except at 5am every morning the temperature in the lounge dropped markedly, you could literally feel the cold air creep up your leg. It was the night when the clocks went back one hour. At 4am two taxis called at the hotel, one to collect a passenger for Harle Syke, the other taxi to pick up a passenger for the town center. At the time there were ‘taxi wars’ going on in Burnley, one taxi firm against another taxi company, sending drivers on false calls, stealing fares, and so on. The two drivers were Pakistanis, I told them no-one was moving about in the hotel and I had not called for the taxies. So, after a few minutes of waiting, we decided it was a malicious call. The first taxi drove away. The second driver standing with me on the entrance steps shrugged and went to get in his taxi. I looked in the back seat and there was a woman. She was covered in white garments. I thought it was a Pakistani woman dressed in a *****. I thought, why would the driver bring along his wife. When I looked again, the white veil was actually long straight white hair of a woman. I stepped closer as the taxi turned, I could see clearly a woman sat in the middle of the back seat, her face as white as chalk she had long pure white hair hanging over her shoulders – how she managed to get inside the taxi unseen was really creepy. I said to myself, well if the hotel did have a ghost, she has left in a taxi!
Are there any more ghostly tales to be told?
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