The Old Ghosts

By Barbara Hayes

The British Isles are the most haunted places on Earth. Ghosts shimmer through stately homes and humble cottages alike. They linger at lonely crossroads and walk the ancient trackways. But few people know much about them.

In the stories in this book Barbara portrays exactly how Boggarts, Banshees, Co-Walkers, the White Lady and the Old Hag really behave.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bretwalda Books
• Release date: Aug 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9781907791154

Barbara Hayes

Barbara Hayes worked on the editorial staff and spent many years writing stories and picture strip scripts for the Amalgamated Press, situated in Farringdon Street, which is round the corner from Fleet Street, London. Later Amalgamated Press became Fleetway Publications and subsequently part of the Daily Mirror IPC publishing group.Barbara was just in time to work with some of the old Fleet Street hacks in all their drunken glory before the move away from Fleet Street to modern technical respectability.She got advice straight from the lips of Hugh Cudlipp, the famous editor of the Daily Mirror, and became married to an Amalgamated Press editor, Leonard Matthews, who rose to be a managing editor and then an editorial director.Over the years she has had some 80 books and about 7300 scripts published by companies from England to Australia to South Africa to Florida and back to Holland.She likes to think of herself as an old hack writer who succeeded mainly because she always got her work in on time and the right length - but if you read on carefully you might find quite a few other hints to help you.

Book preview

The Old Ghosts

by

Barbara Hayes

Published by Bretwalda Books at Smashwords

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Copyright © Barbara Hayes 2010

This book is available in print from www.amazon.co.uk

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ISBN 978-1-907791-15-4

Contents

Introduction

The Young Ghosts

The Boggart

The Agony Aunt and the Co-Walker

The Banshee

The Black Dog

The Phantom Armies

The Wild Hunt

The White Lady

The Old Hag

My Guesses

Introduction

The British Isles are the most haunted islands in the world. Ghosts shimmer through stately homes and humble cottages alike. They linger at lonely crossroads and walk the ancient trackways. There are whole categories of spirits, visitors from other worlds as well as ghosts of the once living. We have vaguely heard of them — Banshees — Boggarts — and so on, but few people know much about them.

In case you should ever meet one it could be useful to know how to recognise a Banshee or to know about the behaviour of Boggarts, or understand why White Ladies appear.

If you hear and see the Wild Hunt you can but hope it is not chasing you. Should you be afraid if you see a mighty Black Dog loping along an ancient trackway? Most probably yes. And what about the mysterious Co-walkers or Doppelgangers?

Don’t you think you should know about all these things? Better safe than sorry.

In the course of research for my other writing work I spent hours and days in the library of the Folk Lore Society and ferreting along the shelves of the second hand book shops which used to fill the Lanes at Brighton and the back streets of all the old English cities. I found many faded battered volumes. These were collections of weird stories recorded in dairies and records of old manor and family houses. The books, manor houses, collectors of the stories and the publishing houses of the books themselves are long gone, as are most of the second hand book shops. However I kept such books as I had room for in my present little Grandma-sized house and I kept my notes. Members of my own family have seen White Ladies and I myself was visited by the Old Hag.

In the stories in this book I portray exactly how Boggarts, Banshees, Co-Walkers, the White Lady, the Old Hag and others are said to behave.

So if you ever meet one — and if I met one then so can you — you know what to expect.

Apart from the ghostly information, all the other background facts in the stories are as true as my research can make them. The Roman Armies did march on the left. People with certain blood groups do seem to be prone to certain diseases. Prehistoric pottery beads from the south of France have been found on the ancient Ridgeway track near Marlborough, England. The air-raids described from World War II are exactly as I remember them. No second-hand book dealer I ever met — and I have met quite a few — ever read books. And in the far off days of my youth I did spend several years answering readers’ letters sent to a mass market woman’s magazine published in London.

***************************

The Young Ghosts

These ghosts came so unexpectedly.

They ran up the stone steps at the front of the house, with the sunlight tossing in their hair and the wind fluttering their shirt collars.

They smiled at me with young laughing eyes.

Ghosts aren’t supposed to do things like that.

There were only two of them at first — Ron and Tony. They mingled in with a group of my grandson’s friends as they slammed their car doors and bounded up the steps all set for tea and coffee and watching Dr. Who on the DVD till one in the morning.

Ron and Tony were in amongst them as they surged up the steps. And as they chattered into the hallway, Ron and Tony were gone.

The usual blur of five, ten or fifteen faces, depending on whether the universities were up or down, greeted me with the polite nothings suitable to say to a grandmother. My daughter and her husband went away on business a lot, so I had moved in to mind their house — and their boisterous son and his friends. The house was central to the homes of the group of school friends and it had a big drive where they could all park their cars — so the house was used as a meeting place.

And then the gang settled themselves in the TV room clutching their Chinese takeaways, while my grandson went through to the kitchen and made the required cups of Keemum, Lapsang Souchong or instant coffee.

We are big on tea, but not big on coffee in our house.

I went and sat in my granny flat and thought about Ron and Tony for the first time in years. Ron, who had been shot down flying with the R.A.F. over Germany and Tony, who had been killed in an air raid.

I had been a kid at the beginning of the war, but Tony and Ron had been grown up men — all of twenty.

The same age as my grandson now.

They had been neighbours older than I, but they had let me tag around when they needed a ball boy for tennis or a fourth to play monopoly on a table on the lawn on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

They had been dead for more than sixty years, but they had been on the front steps earlier that evening.

I saw them quite a few times after that — always mingling with a group of youngsters as they came to the house. Ron and Tony faded in and out in the sunlight and the shade — like a bad television picture trying to adjust to the right frequency.

They wanted to get here, but they weren’t doing things quite right — not yet. And they were mixing in with the other youngsters, just as if they didn’t want to be noticed — but I’d seen them.

Then I saw Peter clear as a bell.

I had been watching out of the window for my grandson to arrive home. The DVD of that old Will Hay film that he had bought on Ebay had arrived and I wanted to show him before I went out to do my shopping.

Peter had been waiting for the youngsters to arrive too. As soon as the two car loads disgorged on to the drive, he mingled in with them.

If I had looked out two minutes later I might not have noticed him. But I had looked out early and I had seen him standing quite alone at the entrance to the drive — slim and young and casual and still a bit teenage spotty, just as I remembered him, before the army took him to North Africa and he never came home again.

Peter, a friend of my cousins, had been a whizz at radio. No wonder his image was clear and bright. No wrong wavelengths for him.

After that I saw all three of them together — quite clear. Peter must have had a word with the other two about how to materialize. But I saw them only for brief moments, mingling with the crowd of chums coming up the long steps to the house.

It was as if Ron, Tony and Peter were making sure of the way in.

One evening they got as far as the front door before they twisted away into the shadows and were gone.

Then I realized what was happening.

I realized why I hadn’t given Ron or Tony or Peter a thought in years — and now here were their ghosts padding around in the front garden.

They weren’t ghosts at all — they were memories.

My grandson and his friends were just at the same age as Tony and Ron and Peter had been when I last saw them. And just such nice well-behaved, good natured lads.

The timbre of the voice, the carefree turn of the shoulders, the laughter, the optimistic air of pretty youth that was around me in my grandson and his young friends had triggered off the memory of those boys who had had their youth stopped in its tracks so many years ago. Memories long buried in my subconscious had been dug up and my mind was putting images of the past before my eyes.

My cousins who had survived the war and been great friends of Ron and Tony and Peter never reminded me of the long dead. How could they? They were nothing like them any more. They were like me, old and experience-worn and quite different people.

But youth triggered memories of other youth.

That was it. That was all. The ghosts were just visual memories — disturbing ones. I wished they would go away — but they didn’t. Never mind.

They would be bound to go away as my grandson grew older and his friends variously married and drifted away to far flung jobs.

Carefree youth would no longer breeze laughing into the house to wake memories better left to sleep.

I put on my make-up ready to visit my doctor for the result of that check up.

I wouldn’t worry about the ghosts any more. I had the explanation.

But things were a little different this afternoon.

Neither my grandson nor his friends were around, but I saw Ron leaning against a tree at the side of the driveway — waiting. Just leaning idly — but I knew he was waiting.

When I drove back from the doctor’s the whole group of them, Ron, Tony and Peter were laughing and chatting by the garage doors.

They broke apart and fell silent as I drove up and got out of the car. They still didn’t speak to me. It wasn’t time yet.

I stopped and looked straight at them. I caught Ron’s eye. I knew why they had come — just at that time — and he knew that I knew — now — after that trip to the doctor’s surgery.

They all three turned away and avoided my eyes and went and sat on the wooden bench on the front lawn. Soon they fell into the casual attitudes of youngsters filling up the time with boys’ talk. Just pretty young folk passing the time — waiting.

I turned away and went indoors and sat quite silently in an armchair by the living room window. It slowly grew dark. I didn’t need to move yet — still plenty of time left to get supper — well, today anyway.

I thought about the boys outside — waiting for the right moment to come up the steps and in through the front door.

It was nice of them to remember me and to drop by when I needed them.

But they always had been such nice boys. They’d looked out for me when I’d been a nuisance kid.

Now I knew exactly why they were here. My visit to the doctor had made that quite clear.

They weren’t here because my grandson and his friends were just at their age and reminded me of them.

They weren’t figures from my triggered sub-conscious.

They wouldn’t go away as my grandson and his friends grew older.

They would go away quite soon now. In a few weeks perhaps.

And when they went they wouldn’t ago alone.

They had come to fetch me.

***************************

The Boggart

Elsewhere in the world they call them poltergeists. In Scotland they call them Boggarts. This sounds cosier, but the reality is not.

Young Charles was a dealer in antiquarian and second hand books. His home was on the outskirts of London. It was an old Victorian house with a cellar and attics and many rambling rooms between. Charles had inherited the house from his parents, along with his father’s collection of books.

Charles’ father had been a collector. Charles was a dealer. There is a big difference.

Collectors usually earn their money at some other trade or profession and collect books as a hobby. For some reason lost in the far recesses of their minds, they are compulsively attracted to books about one certain subject, like Napoleon or Colonel Custer or railway trains. Maybe they collect books illustrated by a certain artist or books still retaining their paper jackets, or books published in one particular year.

The books on subjects attractive to many people are expensive. Books coveted by merely a few are cheap, regardless of any intrinsic merit. Collectors are almost exclusively men. Perhaps women do not collect because they are the ones who have to clean the groaning shelves, or maybe there are deeper reasons.

Who cares about collectors’ reasons? Charles would think. So long as they have money in their pockets and they walk into my shop, they are good enough for me. Most dealers are similarly broad-minded. Freedom from prejudice is a wonderful thing.

Book dealers work entirely on experience of the market. If they know there is a demand for a certain type of book at a certain price, they will buy it in at a percentage which allows them to cover their overheads and make a profit.

You can show a dealer the most beautiful and interesting book in the world, but if he does not know that he can re-sell, he will not buy.

One thing that collectors and dealers have in common is that they never actually read their books. Collectors pore over books and boast about them to other collectors. To dealers the books are commodities, like planks of wood or pounds of butter.

Young Charles’ girl friend, who knew nothing of the book trade, once went with him to a book fair in a grand hotel in London. Exhausted by two hours of searching along grubby shelves, craning her neck to read titles on the top row, or grovelling on the floor to read the names of the books on the bottom level, she had slumped into a chair in the biscuit and tea area. Charles had introduced her to a couple of dealer chums.

The girl had been well-brought up and, tired as she was, had at once attempted to make conversation which she thought would be of interest to the pale-faced men sitting across the table. Book-dealing is an indoor profession. She was a pretty girl, so at first they paid attention to what she said. She looked at the books on the table in front of the dealer in a dusty brown sweater and jeans.

I have a copy of that book, she smiled. I did enjoy reading it. That author’s other books are amusing too. Have you read the one about his time in Paris?

She saw the dealer’s eyes glaze over with disinterest.

Charles leaned forward.

Dealers never read books, sweetheart. They check the condition of the cover and whether the illustrations are all there and whether or not it’s a first edition and they buy them and they sell them, but read them — never! If you want to talk to people who read books, you should mix with — er, he looked at his chums rather at a loss. "I