New Haunts

The luminous fireball of a low winter sun dropped like a bomb behind the whispering copse, and like a nuclear bomb released a dark rising fug. Not a nuclear winter; just an ordinary west midlands winter. Day surrenders to night and the city’s inhabitants hide beneath their hats and scarves; becoming silhouettes, ghosts even. Then of course, there were the real ghosts convening in that copse outside Birmingham city centre.
It was a big night for the Brumagem spooks, hosting the Spectral Council for the first time since the debacle at Warwick Castle a century ago. Tonight, one issue took precedence. Lucius Younghusband, an associate of the Lunar Society cruelly denied a knighthood by a murderous drunk on a penny farthing just as he was about to invent something good, spoke with jowl-wobbling passion, ‘Frankly, if I may speak frankly, I am frankly haunted by these new developments.’
Several minutes (feeling like several hours) of life-sapping rhetoric later, The White Lady, formerly of Aston Hall, tugged at the arm of his heavy outer coat.
‘Can you just get on with it,’ she sourly chided.
Lucius threw her a disdainful glance and continued unbowed, ‘Hummph! Well, ladies, gentlemen, hounds and horses, if I may address you as ladies, gentlemen …’
This time Hieronymus Hockley, municipal clockmaker, barked, ‘Get on with it - now!’ and kicked him up his ample backside. Lucius, censured, blurted out, ‘What are we going to do about them!’
‘Send ‘em all back where they came from,’ boomed Ramrod O’Nions adjusting his highwayman’s mask then placing a hairy hand on the pistol tucked into his waistband.
The White Lady spoke, ‘It’s bad enough I’ve been evicted from my aristocratic seat while they’re putting in a big dipper and dodgems. Now look at me, having to share a tiny room in an unlisted building with a Lady in Black, a Grey Lady, and Ellie Carmichael: tragic Dickensian servant girl. We can’t take any more of them.’
Ramrod drew his flintlock, ‘Only last week I was planning to give some poor soul the jeepers’ creepers on the Coventry Road. Larks-a-Mighty, there were fifteen Dick Turpin-a-likes queuing up in front of me. And what’s more, not a single real highwayman. These were any old brigands – and sailors.’ He discharged his pistol and a spurned Edwardian school mistress poisoner muttered, ‘It’s Warwick Castle all over again,’ and vanished into the copse.
‘Sailors,’ Ramrod continued, ‘on that well known shipping route – Edgbaston Roundabout. I’d have offed the lot of them if they’d been mortal.’
The problem stemmed from a steady influx over the past few years of phantasmic migrants. The old ghosts were troubled. Work was harder to find. Scares were getting scarce.
‘It’s a poor time for our sort,’ announced Lucius, ‘everywhere you go the old haunts are being pulled down, oily walls turned to rubble and dust, and in their places these shiny new buildings devoid of history.’
Albie, a bootneck boy unspared the Somme, warmed to the debate, ‘I went to this stately home last month, felt like sneaking up behind someone in the drawing room and giving ‘em the cold bayonet treatment. Blimey, when I got there the place was teeming with children waving those small telephones that take photographic pictures. They were looking to catch a ghost as part of a school project. Scared the life out of me they did.’
Hieronymus understood, ‘I think I speak for everyone when I say we don’t photograph terribly well. I appeared in my local paper once. I looked like a blob of discarded chewing gum.’
Similar experiences were recounted throughout the assembly. Then, all eyes turned to the figure in the chair. The chairman pursed his lips, raised his eyebrows, clasped his hands, and sighed deeply. Gestures befitting politician Barnaby Erdington-Smythe, a Whig who made iron wheels in Digbeth until a wayward Hansom Cab despatched him. Dangerous roads they had in those days.
The former right honourable member addressed the Spectral Council, ‘While it is only natural we, the unnatural, should seek to protect our eternal haunting grounds, and by all means let’s continue to make old oak staircases creak come the witching hour, and by all means let’s appear glowing before weary travellers lost in mist on country lanes. But … these new ghosts in this new world created by the horrors of Srebrenica, of Mogadishu, of Kandahar. I fear we cannot prevent the living from waking up in cold sweat and seeing their own ghosts.’
Barnaby Erdington-Smythe paused for political effect and concluded, ‘You see we don’t choose which people we haunt. They choose us.’