Ghostly goings on and boarding school 

So who round here believes in ghosts? It’s a tricky one. I definitely believe in something,  though not the  ghoul in a white sheet variety. Which reminds  me of a strange thing that happened when I was at boarding school. Not ghostly but more creepy because it involved  real people , at least I assume it did, although the mystery was never solved.

Our all girls boarding school had large grounds and the older you got the further you had to walk through them to get to the place you were sleeping in. In this particular case a large  Victorian house called St C’s where the lower  sixth lived and then the more modern mews block where we had bed sits in the sixth form. To get to these you had to walk out of the main building, past the science labs and the guinea pig hutches ( there as pets not as experiments) and then down a long pathway with bushes on one side, a lawn on the other and past the ancient copper beech tree. All this was done with the aid of one light placed on the corner of the Biology block. So basically, not much. It’s worth pointing out that as an all girls school with extensive, easily accessible grounds and absolutely no security we did have more than our fair share of ” weirdos”.  It  was not unusual  to see gentlemen revealing themselves while we were playing tennis, or hanging about in the bushes looking hopeful. Bizarrely it never felt frightening or scary, more hilariously funny, which can’t have done much for their morale.  Then again you have to be pretty tragic to get off on exposing yourself to a pack of teenagers who are laughing like hyenas

One evening two of my friends had nipped outside to the bushes behind the guinea  pigs for a cigarette.The equivalent of the bike shed as we didnt have one.  In those days you could buy single cigarettes for about 2p and everyone smoked Players number six, though for a brief  period it was fashionable to smoke Consulate, a hideously foul menthol monstrosity. Then the rumour went round that they made you sterile , so everyone went back to Players,  with a brief and misguided  flirtation with Cocktail sobranis which we mistakenly all thought were the height of cool.

Anyway, they were both puffing away in the bushes sitting on the pile of logs the gardener ( who we called Ganglion on account of an unpleasant growth on his neck)  had stacked there,  when one of them heard a noise.  They turned to see a man step out from behind one of the trees wrapped in white bandages with a painted white face and painted genitals.  The pair of them fled in terror appearing screaming hysterically  in our common room. And so began the saga of the white man. For the next 6 months or so he was seen off and on around the same area, always in the dark, always to groups of two or three. When some of the teachers finally saw him they started to believe the rumours and put up more lighting. From then on we were made to walk in large escorted groups. Eventually he disappeared but nobody ever found out who he was.

I had my own strange encounter while I was at school. During a lesson our music teacher had forgotten to bring her briefcase and asked for a volunteer to walk over to her study and fetch it. The teachers lived in the same boarding houses as the pupils and she lived in St C’s  ( in white man territory ). She gave me the key and I set off.

Though it was over 40 years ago I can still remember the feeling of silence and calm as I let myself in through the front door and into the spacious hall, almost as if I was having a dream. As I turned the corner  I noticed an old man slowly making his way up the stairs. He turned and smiled at me and carried on walking to the landing and through a door. I skipped up the stairs after him but less than a minute later when I reached the  top he had completely disappeared. A couple of years later I lived in St C’s and the weird thing was that the door I remembered him walking through that day was simply not there. Apparantly before the house was taken over by the school an elderly couple lived there. Various other people had seen the old man throughout the years, though I did not find this out until afterwards.

Two inexplicable things happened the year after Tim died. One morning I got up and the house felt very cold. No hot water from the tap and the heating that usually clicked into life of its own accord was silent. I noticed the main switch that operated the boiler had been turned off.  I opened the fridge, no light came on. In those days our large fridge freezer was in the far corner of our kitchen. The plug socket for it was right behind it and the only way to get to it was to pull the fridge right out from the wall, no mean feat. I managed to manoeuvre it out and lo and behold it too had been switched off. 

The second was even stranger. I got home from work and let myself in. I could hear loud music coming from the attic which is where I sleep.As I got nearer the music faded away. When I got into my bedroom the Velux skylight was wide open and rain was pouring on to my bed. As you probably know,  these skylights require a fair bit of manhandling and there is no way they open themselves. And no way I opened it myself that day.

So you there you have it. Strange but true. I promise.