The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  “As I looked down from my cockpit, I saw the face of a beautiful girl mirrored as it were in the water beneath. I could scarcely believe my eyes, especially as the face turned in my direction as I passed over it. She was even more beautiful than the ‘Lady of Shalott’. I was so impressed that the following day I took up my squadron-leader to have a look.”

  Neither Jacoby nor his senior officer saw anything on that second September day – but such was the Flight-Lieutenant’s conviction about the ghostly figure that he had seen that he began to research the local history for any kind of clues. It was not long before he discovered that there had been reports by other pilots, which indicated that the face was only visible from between 450–600 feet up and in the minutes just before the sun dipped into the west. The story had also been a tradition since long before the invention of flight.

  From local people Jacoby learned that Barton Broad was a place they would avoid after sundown because a beautiful young girl had been murdered there hundreds of years ago and every so often, reappeared briefly from the waters at sunset looking for her lover. According to William Storer, a local boatman, the girl had been trying to escape from her father in a boat with her lover when the old man had shot at them both with his crossbow. The pair had drowned in the lake. Historian Charles Sampson, author of Ghost of the Broads (1931), says the ethereal girl had also been seen leaving the water at sunrise and occasionally moving sorrowfully around the edge whenever a mist settled over Barton Broad.

  That same month of September 1916 saw the first ghost of an airman reported at one of the new airbases at Montrose in Scotland. The events that created the haunting had occurred two years earlier on the morning of 27 May 1913 when a pilot stationed at Montrose had crashed. The man was Lieutenant Desmond Arthur of Number 2 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps (later to become the RAF). He had been flying his BE2 biplane and was in the process of making an approach to landing at a height of about 4,000 feet when his starboard wing suddenly collapsed, causing the aircraft to dip into a steep dive. As the BE2 fell, Lieutenant Arthur’s seatbelt snapped and he was pitched out of the cockpit. With no parachute to save him, the hapless aviator fell to his death in front of his horrified ground crew waiting for him to land.

  Officers from the Royal Aero Club who subsequently investigated the tragedy pinpointed the possible cause as one of the BE2’s wings on which a broken spar had been repaired with a crude splice. They debated whether the accident was the result of a botched service – or perhaps a deliberate attempt to kill the young Irish aviator. The argument went as far as the House of Commons where answers were demanded by several MPs with vested interests in the future of flying.

  Three years later, with no conclusion having been reached, strange things began to happen at the Montrose airbase. They were noticed by a number of the airman, as historian Thomas Fletcher wrote in an article about the strange episode for The Scotsman in June 1956:

  “The events began in September 1916. One of the officers twice followed a figure in full flying kit approaching the mess, only to see him vanish before reaching the door. On another night, a flying instructor woke to find a strange man sitting beside the fire in his bedroom. When he challenged the intruder, the chair was suddenly empty. On a further night, two other men woke simultaneously convinced that there was someone in their room. Major Cyril Foggin, one of the senior officers, also claimed to have seen the figure no less than five times. All of them were convinced Lieutenant Arthur had ‘returned’ to get the mystery surrounding his death resolved.”

  Finally, just before Christmas, the chairman of the investigators, Sir Charles Bright, released the findings of his team: “It appears probable that the machine had been damaged accidentally and that the man (or men) responsible for the damage had repaired it as best he (or they) could to avoid detection and punishment.”

  The ghost of Lieutenant Desmond Arthur was reported just once more in January 1917. The figure was now said to be happier. Indeed, the legend has persisted that the dead pilot seemed to sense that he had been cleared of causing the crash and could rest in peace.1

  One of the twentieth century’s earliest authenticated sightings of a ghost aircraft occurred in 1934 on the Wirral peninsula of Lancashire. A bus driver approaching the town of Hoylake on the coast was suddenly aware of an aircraft above him that seemed to be in difficulties. He pulled up the vehicle and calling his conductor, pointed to the drama going on overhead. The two men watched in horror as the plane “swooped down to the sea and disappeared beneath the waves”, to quote the driver’s own words to the Liverpool Echo which ran the story.

  According to the Echo, the two men immediately reported the accident and a lifeboat was despatched from Wallasey to the spot where the plane had vanished. Not a trace of the machine could be found. Even two RAF aircraft that were called to fly over the area were unable to find anything. After two days of fruitless searching – and not a trace of any wreckage coming to the surface – the hunt was called off. There the episode might have been forgotten, wrote G P J L Estrange in Prediction magazine in June 1942, if a similar accident had not been reported in the same neighbourhood less than a year later. He explains:

  “Once again a prolonged search took place without result. The same thing also happened when, a few months afterwards, a woman informed the police that she had seen an aeroplane fall into the sea at that very same spot. Is it possible that all the people who reported this occurrence were witnesses of the ‘etheric reflection’ of an air disaster which had certainly taken place in that district a few years previously?”

  The question remains unresolved though ghost hunters have regularly returned to the beautiful Wirral headland in the hope of seeing the phantom once again fly into oblivion.

  A story with striking similarities was also told by Elliott O’Donnell in that same year of 1942. The ghost hunter said that a rumour reported in the national press in January of a phantom aeroplane very like a Nazi Messerschmidt ME2 that had been seen and heard to crash in a field close to an aerodrome in a south-east county of which nothing could be found, had reminded him of an experience he had undergone less than a year earlier in the Thames Valley. He was returning to a hotel on a cloudless night after visiting some friends. Everything was so peaceful, O’Donnell said, that it was difficult to believe the country was at war. Then he heard the unmistakable sound of an aircraft.

  “It sounded to me like one of our planes. Searchlights were sweeping the sky all round, but there was no alert. The droning rapidly increased in volume. I looked up into the moonlit sky and saw a plane coming, very low, towards me. There were fields on either side of the road and I wondered if it was going to land on one of them. Getting lower as it flew, it passed almost immediately above me. When it had gone a little way it suddenly nosed downwards and I realized to my consternation it was out of control and falling. There was a whirring and a spluttering as it shot towards the earth and then a crash, curiously hollow-sounding and reverberating. I started running towards the place where it lay, but when I was a few yards from it, it vanished abruptly and inexplicably. I was looking at it one moment and the next staring in wide-eyed amazement into space. The plane – or whatever it was – was no longer there and a stillness that was uncanny in its intensity succeeded the terrible crash.”

  O’Donnell, the man who had seen many strange and inexplicable things in his life, admitted he walked the rest of the way to his hotel “a little jarred and much puzzled”. The following day, though, he was determined to discover if there was any explanation for the events he had experienced. The answer was not without surprises:

  “As a result of my enquiries, I was informed that about ten years previously a Captain Schofield, when flying towards an aerodrome not very far from Shepperton, had crashed in the very spot where I had seen the phantom plane crash, and been killed. Periodically, at about midnight, ever since then a ghost plane, believed to be that of Schofield and his companion, had haunted the Thames Valley in the neighbourhood of
Shepperton. Many people have seen it. I was the latest.”

  There was another brush with the supernatural for the crew of an RAF bomber a couple of months after this. According to historian Nigel Doughty, a badly shot-up Lancaster was struggling back to base after a mass raid on Germany, which had already seen the loss of a number of planes. Several of the bomber’s crew had been killed in the raid and the pilot was badly wounded. To make matters worse, most of the navigating instruments were malfunctioning and the radio was all but useless. Just as the bomber was nearing the coast of England, lumbering through a dense fog, something totally untoward happened, as Doughty describes:

  “Suddenly, the air-gunner, who had had to take over, saw a light flashing ahead. It was spelling out the identification letters of the flight commander. The delighted air-gunner followed the ‘light of salvation’ through the swirling fog. After a while, it started to drop gradually down. He followed it. The cloud broke – and there they were lined straight up on their home airfield runway. Scrambling out, the gunner called a cheery greeting to the ground staff, ‘Thank God the flight commander led us back!’ ”

  In relating the story, the gunner said that he noticed the little group were looking at him oddly. One of the men finally shook his head and whispered with a puzzled frown, “The flight commander was shot down in flames over the target.”

  Perhaps, though, the most curious haunting of that traumatic year occurred at RAF Fairlop in Essex. One night in November 1942, the airbase was suddenly put on alert when a report from control said that an unidentified aircraft had been seen approaching the base. As all the Spitfires of No. 603 Squadron were on the ground and accounted for, it had to be a German raider. When a dark shape hove into sight, searchlights raked the sky and the ack-ack battery beside the camp buildings opened fire.

  Moments later, a mystified RAF officer was shouting to his men to cease-fire. The fingers of light had revealed what was unmistakably an ancient bi-plane that seemed to be flying completely unscathed through the hail of gunfire. According to the station log, the aircraft remained in view of the officer and gun crew for several moments before disappearing as mysteriously as it had appeared. No one in the unit was in any doubt that the plane was of a type unseen for almost a quarter of a century – a Sopwith Camel fighter, one of the most successful planes flown during the First World War.

  A subsequent enquiry into the mystery established that a squadron of Camels had been based at Hainault Farm – the earlier name of RAF Fairlop – some 25 years before to counter the attacks of German Zeppelins and Gotha aircraft. A total of 1,294 enemy aircraft had been destroyed by these sturdy little fighters between the summer of 1917 and the Armistice on 11 November 1918.

  In particular, several of these Camels had been converted for night fighter use – curiously referred to as Sopwith “Comics” – and had proved very effective. One of the leading pilots of this group had been Lieutenant George Craig of 44 Squadron. The description of the mystery plane in 1942 with its relocated cockpit, petrol tank under the centre wing section and guns mounted above the upper wing section that were attached to a separate Foster rail-mounting, matched that of Lieutenant Craig’s “Kite” precisely. The story of the “return” of the First World War ace soon became a legend in the RAF and it has been retold several times, notably in Ripley’s Believe It or Not series as a True Ghost Story, “The Winged Phantom” in 1969.

  Another of the famous aircraft of the early part of the twentieth century, a Tiger Moth, also made an ethereal appearance not long after the end of the war. This story concerns a Royal Navy pilot who undertook his basic training at Plymouth. Flying a de Havilland Chipmunk, the man’s navigation exercises took him along the coast as far west as Lands End, before he turned for home across country to base. Later, insisting on anonymity, the pilot recounted his strange story of what happened to him on one particular fight to Chilling Tales (2001).

  He was on the return leg to Plymouth and was just about to cross Bodmin Moor when he saw a great mass of dark clouds ahead of him. Calling up the control tower, it was suggested that he change his flight plan to an alternative airport. But the thought of trying to land on an unfamiliar runway filled him with anxiety, as he explained:

  “By now I was flying above the cloud which stretched in three directions as far as I could see. I was about to begin the turn towards my new landing site when, about 200 metres ahead, a yellow-painted Tiger Moth emerged from the enveloping cloud-base. I could plainly see the leather-helmeted and goggled pilot as he turned in his open cockpit, first giving me a ‘thumbs up’ then an unmistakable downward jab that indicated I should follow him.”

  Startled, but deciding to follow the instructions of the Tiger Moth pilot, he flew down through the swirling cloud on the tail of the yellow aircraft. Suddenly he found himself breaking out of the cloud and perfectly positioned for a landing. There was no sign of his rescuer, however. He touched down with a mixture of relief and bewilderment. His explanation for returning to base rather than seeking the alternative landing spot was not taken well by his instructors – who barked at him in disbelief that no Tiger Moth had flown in this part of the country since the Second World War.

  There are several other stories of veterans of the war being seen long after the last examples of their kind had become museum pieces. In 1985, for example, Molly Baker was returning from a holiday with her daughter and son-in-law who lived in Italy on a British Airways jet from Bergamo to Gatwick. As the plane was crossing Germany, it ran into an electric storm and Mrs Baker suddenly found herself being reminded of her husband, Harry who, forty years earlier, had flown a Lancaster in the Pathfinder Force providing lighting for bombing raids on the Nazis. When the lights on the aircraft suddenly went out and there was a distinct smell of burning, she had an inkling of what it must have been like for her late husband. Unbeknown to her, the jet had suffered damage to several of its navigation instruments, which was going to make the homeward journey and landing difficult. As she sat anxiously in her seat, Mary Baker happened to glance out of the little window beside her. What she saw made her wonder if her eyes were playing tricks, she later told the Sunday Express of 22 December 1985:

  “There was something to the left and a little ahead. Another plane, silhouetted black against the whiteness, flying swift and straight below. It was like a Pathfinder and suddenly I felt Harry was near me. I knew that Harry was down there in his Lancaster and would see us home safely.”

  Later the pilot, Captain Alan Toland, would also admit to the Express that he, too, was suddenly aware of another aircraft as they neared Gatwick. The paper describes his emotions at this critical moment:

  “As he braced himself for the touch-down he saw it clearly just for a second, silhouetted against the lights: a big black bomber flying 500 feet in front of him, the rear-gun turret canopy gleaming between the twin tail fins. He saw the great wings rock in a gesture of farewell. And then it was gone and he felt the tyres kiss the runway.”

  Captain Toland said he tried to convince himself he had imagined the whole incident, so concerned was he for his damaged aircraft. He knew that no Lancaster could possibly match the speed of a modern jet. But when he heard the story of his passenger, Mary Baker, and her Pathfinder husband, he realized like many pilots before him that not everything in flying could be explained by the rational or the normal . . .

  The mountainous and picturesque Peak District is an area of the British Isles that has a particular reputation for the sighting of ghost planes. Here, in an area bounded by Sheffield to the east, Glossop to the west and Buxton to the south, over 300 people have lost their lives in more than fifty crashes during and since the Second World War.

  Typical of these sightings was the one experienced by David and Helen Shaw in October 1982 when they saw a Lancaster bomber fly overhead while they were visiting Ladybower Reservoir. Enquiries revealed that a Royal Canadian Lancaster bomber had crashed in the nearby Bleaklow Mountains on 18 March 1945 killing the entire crew of s
ix.

  In the same area on a sunny afternoon in May 1995, a man walking his dog saw a Second World War Dakota flying very low and about to crash although it was making no sound. Tony Ingle hurried to the field where the plane had appeared to go down but could find nothing. His dog Ben reacted badly as soon as the pair reached the field and refused to go anywhere near it. Here again research established that the plane could have been the ghost of a USAF Dakota that had crashed on 24 July 1945 resulting in the death of the five-man crew and two passengers. The site was less than fifty yards from where the Lancaster had fallen.

  Stranger still was the experience of crash investigator Gerald Scarrett while he was up on a 2,000-foot shelf known as James’ Thorn in 1995. He was showing a group of aircraft archaeologists the site where a US Superfortress had crashed during a routine flight on 3 November 1948. He was also investigating claims that a ghost plane had been seen flying overhead. According to a subsequent report of what happened in the Sheffield Star, the visitors spotted a man in flying gear:

  “He was standing behind Mr Scarrett and they asked who he was. When Scarrett turned round, there was no one there. Could it have been the apparition of Captain Landon P Tanner, the pilot of the doomed Superfortress?”

  The first ghost of an airman to be rigorously investigated by the Society for Psychical Research took place in 1918. The apparition was that of RAF Lieutenant David E McConnel who was killed in a flying accident on 7 December and seen by one of his fellow officers, Lieutenant James J Larkin. The facts were sent to the SPR by the dead man’s father, Mr D R McConnell, who explained that his son had been flying a Sopwith Camel from Scampton airfield near Lincoln to Tadcaster just over 60 miles away. He had left at 11.35 a.m. accompanied by an Avro plane – a two-seater – which was to bring him back after delivering the Camel to the base.