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.
Children of that age get bored very quickly and usually use an excuse to go to the toilet to escape the adult’s company. But on this dark winter’s night none of us were in any hurry to leave the light of the house.
Grandma’s house in Belvoir Street consisted of a terrace of four properties: three houses and a shop, and viewed from the front, grandma’s house was at the left end, on the corner of another street. Because of its position, the view from the back of the house was of the blank gable end of the house in the next street. To either side of the back yard were six foot high brick walls. Altogether this made for a very dark yard at night.
Eventually the call of nature was too strong for us, and we three boys decided that we had to go to the toilet.
The thought of having to cross that yard with its dark blanket of night to go into that even darker place was not overcome by boyish courage but of necessity.
Staying closely together we nervously set off across the yard to go to the partially open, black shadowed doorway that lay before us. Looking back now, I know it was only a short distance, but on that night it seemed endless.
We reached the doorway and as my youngest brother squeezed through the doorway and into the darkness, we other two started to push the door open wider to allow us all to fit in and to let in what little light there was.
Suddenly the door was ferociously slammed shut in our faces, with a loud bang and almost knocked us over.
We screamed and ran for the house, realising too late that we had left our youngest brother trapped in there with the fiend.
Dad came running out of the house to see what was the commotion was all about.
He forced open the door and dragged the monster off my brother, who shot out of there faster than a bullet from a gun.
The monstrous ghost that had so terrified us?
A top heavy stepladder that had been leaning against the wall behind the door, and as we had pushed the door open we had pushed the bottom of the steps back against the wall causing it to fall forward and slam the door on us.
Don’t feel cheated that in this particular story there was no ghost, as the title and introduction so invitingly promised.
Believe me, that on that particular dark night, for three little boys, for a few moments, there had most certainly been a ghost waiting for them in that outside toilet.
Also by this writer:
10 Offbeat, Bizarre and Wacky Facts
In the Shadow of Jack the Ripper: The Lambeth Poisoner
The Incredible Story of Strange Fruit
The Mystery of the Screaming Man
The Mystery of Bedlam Revealed
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