The Ghost Of The Abandoned House

The Ghost Of The Abandoned House

By Paul McCann

Every day Dennis would leave Butler Street school with me to have lunch . went to  my Grandmothers house in 38 Jamaica Street and Dennis went to his own house in Brookfield Street  . Dennis had a small gang from the streets around Butler Street and I became friends with him  after we had a fight one day in the playground . I wasn’t looking to join a gang and Dennis  loved his gang .

I loved going to my Grannies house for lunch because there was so much to explore on the way to and from her house back to school . I was always late coming back to school but I could make up stories and usually got excused  .

There was a weightlifters club house , which was inside an old tin hut on the spare ground behind the old Holy Cross girls adjacent to the bottom of Butler Street . Some days the door was left open and  I went inside to have a look around  . Once I nearly got my ears rapped for doing so but I was fast and escaped before he got his hands on me  . Inside the wee hut there was some equipment lying around . There was also some boxes that were there but I wasn’t able to have a rummage through them because I was spotted by your man who nearly had a fit when he saw me .

Not far away from that hut there was a scrap metal yard where I loved to scale up the mountain of wrecked cars . I knew my way over and under and through every single car on that scrapyard heap and whenever I reached the summit I felt like I was King of the heap . On the other side of the scrapyard was Jamaica Street and when it rained I loved to walk on the secret path of stepping stones along the wee stream that run between Jamaica Street and Etna Drive .

Finally when I go to my grannies house she would be sitting there in her arm chair and my Granda Frank would sitting in her wheel chair with a great big grin . He always made me laugh , He took the two poker from the stand near the hearth and used them a drumsticks tapping a beat upon the wheels of the wheelchair and singing  a wee tune of reciting a poem to me .

My Aunt Rita always had my lunch ready and placed it on a coffee table with a glass top and underneath the glass was the picture of Venice and all these gondolas .My lunch was the same every day , a  bowl of corn flakes and an apple . Granda Frank told me stories about the houses that were hit with bombs that had incendiary devices on them during the  war and the people who lived there and had nowhere to return to  .  Granda used to work at the docks and was known as Yank McCann . He had to pick men from a line up to unload the potato boats that came from America . He had some great stories to tell about the house he lived in down in Great Patrick Street . He lived upstairs and downstairs lived the Carsons , Frank Carson the comedian was only a very young boy then . Granda often got into fights with the peelers . To me he was the kindest man ever but for some he was a terror .

One day after I finished my lunch I was making my way back to Butler Street school   and I decided to take a wee look at an abandoned house at the bottom of Butler Street  . As I was making my way to the old house I saw Dennis and one of his gang  Danny / They were already in another derelict house going through some of the rubble around the front door trying to get inside but they never seen me so I thought I would play a wee trick on them for a laugh .

Som I went around the back of that house and spied a hole that once held a window pane . I climbed inside and heard Danny and Dennis still trying to remove the rubble at the front door . On the floor I saw a rusty old paint tin and I grabbed a small iron bar that was there and started to rattle the tin and make an scary howling noise saying ,m

‘Keep out of my house Danny and take that skinny freckled face Dennis with you and if I ever see you here again I’ll make you sorry you were born “

You should have seen them . Both of them screamed and run all the way up Butler Street like scalded cats .

I sat there in that old house on the floor of a room that would have been a kitchen at one time . I upturned the paint tin and sat down on it . Pretending to be the man of the house making myself heard

“Is this what you call a dinner . two slices of bacon and a cold cup or tea”.

Then I tried to imagine the kind of people might have lived in the house and what kind of things might have happened there .I wondered if maybe their house had been hit by one of those bombs with an incendiary device  .

The sun shone down through a small hole in the roof and reflected dust in the shaft pf sunlight . In the hallway opposite I saw some ivy vines and leaves growing wild.  . On the other side  of the room was a door frame that seemed to go to a parlour .

 In my imagination I saw a family of four young children running around playing and suddenly I remembered I should have already been at school and  run . Making my way through the hole at about the same speed as Danny and Dennis I ran up Butler Street school .

When I got there I saw Dennis and Dannys parents there collecting them from school and soon discovered that they had told everybody they say a ghost in the ruins of an  old house . They were so frightened that the teacher had to send for their parents as they were too upset to stay in class for the rest of the day . I had to laugh but I dared not tell anyone the secret I knew . Danny and Dennis were taken away by their parents after they listened to the teacher who said they were disrupting the whole class . With all the commotion the teacher never even seen me sneak inside the classroom . I sat at my desk and opened my reading book .

When the school bell rang at the end of the day I was glad to get home but told no one about what I did to Danny and Dennis .

Two days later Dennis and Danny returned to school .  Dennis was made to  read a page from the book we were reading at school . Everybody seemed to believe the story Dennis and Danny told about the ghost except me .

By Paul McCann