The Ghost House (Chapter3)

I had actually seen a real  ghost before ,  when I was 9 , in 1972, so had ‘one up’ on Alan. Dad and me were helping put up Christmas decorations in the church where I sing in the choir. I like the atmosphere of the church, the lit candles, and the murals of the wall of Jesus and angels, and saints wearing halos, which looked sort  of like a lit-up hat.  I was looking up at them when I saw a shimmering bright  figure walking down one side of the church , the  ‘ south aisle’ , I was told later.  He wore robes , like a priest , and looked see-through,' transparent' was the word for it, said Dad, it wasn't  like the ghosts in comics or cartoons, which always looked like a person dressed in a white sheet.  At first Dad said it must be my imagination playing tricks on me, but then he told me that there was a ghost in this place when he was a lad back in the 1940s, ‘The Blue Lady’ , they had called her. He told me that the ‘Blue Lady’ was the ghost of someone who tried to climb up on the church roof in the mistaken belief she would be able to fly down like an angel. I was never sure if this was true or not, but at least Dad had believed me when I told him about the ghost I had seen, and that was good.

I had never told Alan this , as I thought he would laugh at me, even though he was my best friend. I wondered how Ally Harrison would be if he saw a real ghost. We would soon see.

The Ghost House was often visited by folk from school playing dares , but nobody had taken it over as a den. My cousin who lived on the edge of Aberdeen in Cults, told me of a den , that kids in his area visited, an old air raid shelter left over from the Second World War, that folk had called ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ , a few folk from our school had dens , sheds  or 'gang huts' in their gardens, the Donalds who lived next door to Alan , had a den which basically looked like a bunch of planks nailed together to form what was a small shed, the Donalds ‘gang hut’, where Sandy Donald and his two brothers discussed what mischief they were going to visit upon the rest of the kids in Kings North, Alan had told me that the Donalds were as bad as the Harrisons , though none of then had been in borstal, yet.

Alan and me planned to take over the Ghost House as our den, a place we would tell ghost stories by torchlight , and scare any unsuspecting strangers. Once the snow had gone, in March, and it was getting warmer outside, we started going to the place after school. We decorated the entrance with last year’s Hallowe’en masks and ‘Wear-Em, Scarems ‘ which we had collected by saving up Tudor Crisp bags and sending them away to a place in Middlesborough, along with a postal order for £1.00. There were a whole set of  ‘Wear’Em Scarems’ to be collected, a heap of scary faces and masks for kids like us to waste our money on as Mum and Dad said.  Alan of course had the whole set and I only added the Voodoo and Aztec masks to our display.  Alan gave the Werewolf, and the Vampire, and I also painted a heap of ghosts on the door with Airfix paint which I had bought to paint a model aeroplane a while back.

It looked good, now we had to tell everyone at school about our den, our gang hut, to make everyone jealous, especially Ally Harrison.

I thought about all of this as I played the radio on Sunday night, the Radio 1 charts started with a new entry ‘ There’s a Ghost in My House’, by R.Dean Taylor, a ghost in the Ghost House, I thought.

Old Sam stirred again, was this some sort of coma, a limbo he was in? There were folk in the house again, bloody kids, what were they wanting, but it was still like he was watching himself from the outside, what was it they called it , an out of the body experience?. Maybe this was what it was like to be a ghost.