Ghost House (Chapter 7)

A week later, the second week of my grounding, I was watching ‘The Brady Bunch ‘on TV , just after school , when the phone rang.

It was the ‘Wifie Reid’ wanting to talk to my Mum urgently, I didn’t like her so I didn’t speak, no doubt she would be spreading gossip about some of the neighbours as usual.

I shouted on Mum, and she came through from the kitchen, the smell of cooking permeating the house.

It was a long conversation, the Brady Bunch had finished, and John Craven’s Newsround was on the latest ‘shenanigans’ going on in Parliament, as Dad often said.

‘That’s Elsie Reid on the phone, she was saying that your Ghost House has been demolished, and the workmen have what they think are human bones on the site’, said Mum.

‘It’ll be in the papers tomorrow, or maybe on the Grampian News later on’, she added.

It would be the talk of the playground tomorrow.

This was exciting, I thought, no more Ghost House, but the ghost had been the owner of the bones, a dead person buried in the foundations, my mind raced with this possibility, there had been supernatural phenomena in the house after all. I was reading Dad’s library books now , those by Colin Wilson, and was learning about actual  poltergeists and real hauntings, when I should have been doing my homework, things about ghosts were far more interesting to me , and more than a craze that I would grow out of as Mum thought.

It was in the local newspapers, ‘The Empress’ reported the whole thing, Wifie Reid had been right, they were believed to be those of Samuel Middleton, who had been the first janitor of the school, back in the 1940's.

He had gone missing at the time the school and the Kings North estate were built in 1947.

Middleton had been a well-known figure in the area, a ‘weel kent’ face, as they say and a pillar of the community. He had looked after his elderly mother for years and was well thought of by all. The thought that he would steal his mother’s life savings was a big shock to the community, but this shock soon disappeared when local convict Alistair Harrison was arrested drunk and disorderly in the city centre, an alcoholic  ne'er do well,  Harrison was someone for whom terms of imprisonment were the ‘norm’, and on the day he was arrested police found him to be in possession of hundreds of pounds, in his pockets. When questioned, he admitted the theft of the money from Samuel Middleton, when asked about Middleton’s disappearance, he made no comment on the advice of his solicitor, Mr Dingley -Jones. The police charged him with theft, and he was sentenced to 40 days imprisonment when he appeared in court from custody the following day. The article went on to say that Harrison had hanged himself later that night, after a visit to the prison chaplain, where he had expressed extreme contrition  for his actions. Whether he had confessed to the murder of Middleton, was not mentioned.

I put down the newspaper, and as Dad often said, ‘the penny dropped’, that Alistair Harrison was the Harrisons’ granddad, who was never mentioned. If he had killed Middleton, it would never be known, meantime Samuel Middleton’s remains were buried, and a belated funeral service was held for his remaining relatives.

So that was it, Alan and I didn’t really get out chance to solve the mystery of the Ghost House, like the characters on Scooby Do, or ghost hunters from the works of Colin Wilson, and Life as we knew it carried on in Kings North estate as it had before, and perhaps always would.

2022.

I look back on those times fondly, as I type up my stories, still just as a hobby writer, having eluded any financial success or critical acclaim . I have published lots of genre fiction ( crime, romance, poetry)  under my various pseudonyms, Callum McCallion, markp, and Lynda Denning, but my favourite genre remains  that of the ghost story. Mum was woefully wrong; I never grew out of that ‘ghost nonsense’ as she called it. I regularly revisit the Fontana Ghost Books, all in various states of disrepair, yellowing with age, but still thoroughly enjoyable, even after all this time.

I have lost touch with most of the people from those days, as you do, you know how it is. 

Alan did well in the oil business in the ‘80s, got married and moved abroad, I believe to the USA, the Harrisons did a moonlight flit, apparently due to arrears of rent, and general misbehaviour,. at the time of the Ghost House’s demolition, they were believed to be in the Central Belt. I now live in a palatial top floor flat which I jokingly refer to as my ‘Garret’. It looks over the beautiful, scenic Victoria Park, which was the imagined location for a vampire tale I once wrote, but that, as they say, is another story for another day.