This is my story. It is the true story of one dark night and how as a child, together with my two younger brothers we confronted that which was beyond our worst nightmares: the ghost in the outhouse in my grandmother’s back yard.
When I was five years old my parents moved the family from our old town of Wigan to a new home in Preston. Both “towns” are in the North-West of England, not far apart, and since those days Preston has become a city.
Wigan had been home to our family since at least the middle of the 19thcentury. It is a town that had built its history on coal mining and industry, and the housing at the time of this story, typically, consisted mainly of streets of terraced housing, with the fronts directly onto the pavements.
Around this time, of the early to mid 1960’s, many of the houses, although far removed from those hovels described in George Orwell’s The Road to WiganPier some 25years earlier, were still without inside bathrooms and toilets. The toilet was at the bottom of a stone paved yard in a small brick built outhouse with a wooden door and latch handle. We are not talking about earth closets or some old fashioned thunderbox, but a proper porcelain toilet with an overhead cistern and chain flush connected to the public sewerage system. Being house proud, in the case of my grandmas, they were always clean and tidy. However, with no electric connection out there, on a winter’s night they were a cold and dark place.
Mum and dad had a car, so it was not often that family came to visit us, but more of us going to visit them. Usually this meant going to both grandmas, with a quick visit to aunts, uncles and cousins thrown in for good measure.
Both grandmas were still alive then, as well a one granddad, my mum’s father. He was married to “big” grandma and my dad’s mum, who lived alone, was “little” grandma.
The big and little referred, not so much to height, but more to width.
On the evening in question, we were having an evening meal at little grandma’s. There was grandma, mum, dad, me aged around nine or ten, my middle brother who was two years younger than me, and my little brother who was two years younger than him.
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