The Ghost House (Chapter 1)

It was around Christmas 1973, at the time Alan and I used to take our radios to school on the day of the Radio 1 Top 20 rundown, when Slade were at the top spot with ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’.

I had received the radio for my tenth birthday and had sneaked it off to school in my anorak pocket every Tuesday to catch the Top Ten and the Number One at 1pm, just before we returned to school after lunch.

I liked listening to music on the radio, and liked Showaddywaddy’s ‘Hey Rock’n’roll,’ and Mud’s ‘Tiger Feet,’ which my dad said sounded like ‘rock and roll ‘music to him, but not as good as it was in ‘my day.’ The girls in my class really liked the Osmonds, and ‘fancied’ Donny Osmond. To me, and my friends, they were rubbish, except for ‘Crazy Horses,’ which was excellent!

I was being bullied a lot by the ‘Fighties’ as we called them, otherwise known as the Harrison family, who lived in our street, their dad was said to be in jail and their mum, Sandra, was scary, she could be heard shouting and swearing at her children from across the back gardens behind the infant school. Pamela, her daughter has scary dark eyes, and blonde hair that looked like straw, in fact she looked like a scarecrow, or so Alan said.

Pamela was always fighting with other girls in the playground and getting into trouble with the teachers. Her brothers Ally, Jim and Kenny were said to be ‘evil incarnate,’ had served time in Borstal, and even took pot shots at birds in their back garden with their air rifles, according to Mrs Reid, who had lived on our scheme, in Kings North, since it was built in 1947.

The ‘Wifie’ Reid, as we called her, was what my dad called a ‘busybody,’ or a ‘besom,’ she was a gossip and knew the life stories and business of most of the folk who lived in Kings North Row, our street, which sounded very posh but was not by any stretch of the imagination.

I was clever for my age, and one of the top pupils in the school and was constantly bullied for this, and folk called me a ‘swot’, ‘specky bastard’ and the one that annoyed me most; ‘Four Eyes’, it wasn’t my fault that my eyesight was bad, I had worn specs since I was 6, which was just over four years now!

Ally Harrison, one of the ‘Fighties,’ was the biggest offender in this area, he pushed me around in the playground, and if I fought back, he would start imitating Frank Spencer from ‘Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em’ and using his ‘Frank’ voice as if it were mine and calling me a ‘specky bastard.’ I started walking a alternative route  to school, to avoid Ally, and that seemed to work, some of the time, but as soon as I had passed the playground with the swings, near our school, Bishop’s Hall Primary, he would appear, as if by magic. I would walk past the graffiti covered wall which I passed every day, then I would hear the fake Frank Spencer’s simpering voice chanting ‘specky bastard, specky bastard, four-eyed -git, four-eyed git’ like one of those rhymes the girls clapped along to in the playground when they were skipping. I was grabbed by the throat, and pushed to the ground, I tried to fight back, but Ally had me held down. I could feel the cold stone of the ground on my back as he pressed down on me. Then I heard the bark of an approaching dog; this would scare Ally off. As the dog drew nearer, I heard another voice, that of old Mrs McKay who lived beside us, her dog Lassie had jumped on Ally and sent him on his way

. As folk often said, you could not see him for dust, as he ran off in the opposite direction, he was afraid of dogs, that was his ‘Achilles heel,’ as Dad often said.

‘Are ye ok, son? she said.

Aye, Mrs McKay, I’ll be ok, just bruised pride that’s all, I said, putting a brave face on, as Lassie drew closer and licked my hand.

‘Those Harrison boys are trouble, my friend Elsie Reid often tells me stories about them and their dreadful family,’ you’d do well to avoid them,’ she added.

I told her I knew this extremely well, waved her goodbye and made my way to school.

This was the day when Alan told me about the Ghost House, I had been obsessed with ghosts and all things scary since my accident earlier in the year, March to be exact when I was in a car accident on the way to school. A man in a Blue Volkswagen Beetle, as we called them, ran me down, I went flying across the car bonnet scratching the paintwork with the zip of my anorak. I had awoken, stunned, in the janitor’s house, with his dog, Simba barking at me. I wondered what was happening, Mr Forrest, the janitor, his wife, and my dad were in the room and the klaxon sound of the approaching ambulance could be heard from outside. Someone was saying that it was a ‘hit and run,’ and the guy had not stopped to see if I was ok.

He was gone before the police got here, I was told, for what that was worth.

I was taken to hospital and checked over, my legs were heavily bruised, so I was to be off school for a couple of weeks, so I could read the Fontana Horror Books I had received last Christmas, which would be ‘ace’ as Alan often said.

So, when I was absent from school, Alan , and Gogs  another friend from school came to our house and brought comics with them, one of them really grabbed my imagination by the throat, if that is possible, ‘Dracula Lives,’ from the Marvel Comics people, this was it for me, ‘Dracula Lives’ was brilliant , more scary than Dr Who, or ‘The Birds’   or anything I had seen before. Alan was a huge fan of ‘The Birds,’ which he thought was ‘aceic,’ in fact he got to watch whatever he wanted on TV and said that he stayed up until midnight most nights, even on school nights. He watched ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ and such things, that I was never allowed to watch, as Mum and Dad said that ‘it was not suitable for children.’

At the time, our class at school had Miss Tolland, a student teacher, she was weird with long dark hair, and dressed, as dad would have said ‘like a hippy.’ She looked a bit like Kathleen Stephen, who worked with my dad, she had what we called ‘granny glasses’ and wore them low down her nose. Miss Tolland had set us a project on witches and wizards, which my mum and dad thought odd, but which I loved. Witches, wizards, ghosts, vampires, which were my favourite and horror stories, though I was not allowed to watch horror movies on TV, as they were ‘unsuitable for children ‘. Some of the adverts on Grampian TV were really scary at the time, the public information film with kids playing on wasteland, where one of them falls into water and drowns, the black cloaked figure in the background saying that the ‘unwary, the showoff, the fool’ would likely meet their demise in such places, was my favourite with the man from the James Bond films  doing the voiceover.  I drew a picture of a graveyard with several ghostly figures flying above the gravestones, with the legend ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here,’ and Sellotaped it to my bedroom door, much to Dad’s annoyance, as it ruined the paintwork, his pride and joy. Dad was a DIY expert, it would save money he said, he did all the painting and repairs around our house, as we did not have much money. I do not think anyone was rich in our street, apart from Mr Watt around the corner, who was going to work on one of the new oil rigs out in the North Sea. That was ‘where the money was,’ according to Dad, and Mr Hardie, our next-door neighbour.

Anyway, as I was saying, the Ghost House, was a house next to the infant school round the corner from our house that folk said was haunted. The Wifie Reid had told my Mum that the ghost of a murdered child haunted the place and that it lain empty for years, ‘you would have thought that the council would hiv deen something about it by now,’ she had said.

The only thing was they had not, the place had been empty for years, the windows were all smashed, crows and pigeons lived in it, and the odd drunken tramp every now and then. Gang graffiti telling the world who ruled ok were all over the walls inside and out, so Wifie Reid said anyway, so it must be true.

Alan had suggested that we lure Ally Harrison to the Ghost House, and see how scared a so-called ‘hard man’ would be faced by that challenge.

( To be continued)