The first of my psychic investigator short stories
When I saw the Ripper's victims
The story I am about to tell you happened a long time ago! It was not long before the last war, and I had just finished my studies at the London school of journalism. One day, when I had just had yet another unsuccessful interview in Fleet street I decided to take a walk deeper into the East End of London, a city I didn’t know that well, coming from Yorkshire as I did! It was early September 1938; a date that at the time I had little reason to think was to mark me for evermore.
I must state that until this moment I had little or no knowledge of the paranormal, and had not thought that spectres or phantoms existed, so for what was going to happen to me I was totally unprepared! In fact I was unprepared for everything that was going to happen to me that day. It all started as I began to walk towards Whitechapel, not having read much about London I had forgotten the sinister goings on in this area of London 50 years previously. So I was walking along Whitechapel Road when the first incident occurred.
I had decided to walk down one of the alleyways near several old looking pubs, when I saw her. I didn’t know what I was seeing first, as it looked just like a pile of old clothes slumped against a wall, and an old bonnet lying beside the pile. Suddenly the pile moved, and I saw the rather plain face of a woman with a look of shock, penetrating shock, fixing me! Then I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of blood around her as if she had been ripped open! “He did it!” she said and promptly vanished. It was more the fact of her vanishing that shook me, as living in the country I had seen a lot of animals being slaughtered, so the sight of blood was not that abhorrent to me. I turned and ran along the road a little further to try and calm myself from the sight of this vanishing woman, (whom I later discovered was Mary Ann Nichols).
I found myself a little later near Spitalfields market at Hanbury Street. There I once again walked into a dark alley, to this day I know not why, and saw another body, another woman, lying with one hand on one breast and her head at an almost impossible angle, as if her head had been nearly severed off. “It was Jack!!” came from the air, I still do not know if it was Annie Chapman that said this or if it was the fiend himself! At this point I was beginning to think I should head back to a wider road, so I turned back towards Whitechapel Road.
Near Berner Street I came across I rather plain and thin woman dressed in black. She pointed to a large gash in her throat and mouthed something. I could feel in my head what she was saying, “You won’t want to see Cathy………….. Long Liz is enough!!!!” What could I do, I wondered, should I leave the area? Why was I seeing all these women, and what were they trying to tell me? It had not occurred to me that when I was walking around this area of London it was the 50th anniversary of the crimes of Jack the Ripper.
I still wonder this to this day, why was I chosen to witness these poor women? What could I do to help them? It is perhaps for this reason that I have become interested in the paranormal to the extent of trying to help these poor tormented souls to go on, away from “this mortal coil”! These poor women have created a dedicated paranormal investigator, who will perhaps regale you with more of his investigations if you ask him kindly.
Bravo
Do tell more
Hunter
Ok here's another :
A visit that saved my life
It was a few years after my previous encounter that fate gave me the appearance that I have today, one false hand and one eye covered in an eye patch. You will be wondering what that has to do with the paranormal; well in fact, it has everything to do with it.
The war was nearly over, it was 1944. I was serving my country in an RAF station luckily not too far my home in Yorkshire. With my writing skill being much more prolific than my mechanical skill, and my fear of heights forbidding me from flying I served my time in the control tower of RAF ____________ . This did not mean to say that I did not frequent the pilots and ground crews on the base. On the contrary I was considered “one of the lads” as we say nowadays, for I used my time trying to write a diary of life on the base, of course not mentioning any of the missions, but mostly describing how we kept each other sane!
One of the fine group of men that I served with was a rear gunner by the name of Albert Crick. He was a Liverpudlian with a wicked sense of humour, and a rather booming laugh. We got on well, as he was a good storyteller. He told me of a few interesting ghost stories from his part of England and more often than not laughing about them kept telling me, “If ever I’m not around and something happens to ya, I’ll be sure and give you a hand!”
Of course, at the time, all of us scoffed at this, saying that if he was not there how could he help. Albert, however, just smiled and said, “You’ll see!” What could any of us think otherwise, then, than he would really do this. I remember laughing heartily at Albert’s maudlin attitude upon his saying this, and the others, too, seemed to take his remark with a pinch of salt. We were after all in the RAF, and should not have any fears, or so we kept saying to ourselves.
Not long after this one particular evening, we were scrambled and the planes all flew off to take part in a secret mission. As usual, those of us in the control tower were on tenterhooks as to how many of our ‘good men and true’ would return to us and if so would they be in one piece. The number of planes was beginning to dwindle as Hitler’s Luftwaffe kept cutting us down. Gradually as the day wore on our lads started to trickle back, in one’s and two’s. Soon we were only two planes down, one of which was the plane in which Albert was rear gunner.
This of course was worrying for our squadron leader, as he liked to think that his men should all return from each mission unharmed, no matter how unrealistic that was in the long run. We all kept our eyes peeled to the sky and our ears open, to try to hear any engine noise on approach to the aerodrome. What more could we do than wait?
Suddenly I myself heard the noise of a plane on approach, a noise that even to me, a neophyte as regards engine noise, sounded very unhealthy. I looked up, as I was standing on the control tower roof, and saw the plane seem to lose engine power and be heading directly towards me!
“Everybody run, they’re heading right for us!!!!!!!!” I screamed, and pelted down the stairs as fast as I could.
Unluckily I was not fast enough and I saw the diving plane heading straight into the building. Bricks came flying towards me. Unspent ammunition that was on board, started to fire off and bullets flew in my direction seeming to hit me, just as a part of a wall came down towards me.
I felt someone dragging at me and pulling me away from the rubble. I looked up and saw Albert, who said, “Don’t worry Andy old chap, I told yez I’d help you if you were in danger”.
At this point, the pain in my arm and head was too much and I lost consciousness.
Several weeks later, in my hospital bed, I received a visit from my commanding officer. I had been told previously, that upon falling, the wall had crushed my hand beyond the capacity of the surgeons to save it, and they had had to remove it. In addition, some shrapnel from the exploding ammunition had burst my eyeball, so I had lost an eye as well.
“Well boss,” I said, “I think if it hadn’t been for good old Albert Crick, I wouldn’t be here now!”
“What do you mean Andy?” he asked.
“Well he pulled me out before the wall completely fell on top of me! He told me that I knew he’d help if I was in danger!”
“Andy, Albert’s plane never came back! They were shot down over the channel and went into the drink! There were no survivors!”………………………………………………………..
To this day, I think old Albert is looking after me every time I go on a paranormal investigation. I do get the feelings in my hand and eye every time a spirit is about, but also from time to time I hear “Don’t worry Andy old chap, I told yez I’d help you if you were in danger”.
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I know you can say this is just a reworking of an old story, but..................
Bravo
That's an interesting story indeed, though there are a couple of flaws in the research side of it (I only know as WWII is a hobby of mine), however the story telling is wonderful.
Do you have any more?
Hunter
Here's another part :
Case study
This particular case study is based on an investigation that I and my team took part in, in North Yorkshire in the 1950’s. And it is I Andrew Caughton who took notes at the time. The basic history of the hauntings were discovered through documentaion and through our group’s medium.
Edna O’Roarke was a kitchen maid for the Women’s Training School in R___________, as it was called at the time at the turn of the century. She was a rather small young woman, of about five feet tall, with a very pretty face, which made her the target of lots of young men in R_________ on her days off work. She had started to frequent William “Billy” Johnson one of the gardeners boys where she worked, and her colleagues began to see that the relationship could be leading her into “trouble”.
Often on her days off she met young “Billy” at the largest public house of the town, “The Black Bull”, where they both tended to over indulge in porter, as Edna was not really that happy being away from home in Ulster. She had been sent over to England to earn money to help keep her widowed mother and five brothers and sisters out of poverty. She was lonely, and perhaps it was this and the attentions of the handsome William Johnson, that caused the downfall of the pair of them.
It was the time of the Zulu Wars. Young men started to volonteer to fight in Africa, some for the glory, and some, like William Johnson to see other countries, for he was of a wandering nature, being a garderner, and felt that he had no real attachment to anyone in R________. It came soon that the moment approached when he would have to leave. He said goodbye to Edna, in a way that would be their downfall, as he took away her virginity for them both to remember each other. Then he went off to the War…..
Edna, of course, was even more lonely, now that her Billy was no longer there, and her fellow maids began to notice that she moped around the buildings, her happiness having, it seemed to them, to have evaporated. They were not far wrong, as the one night of passion our two young people had taken together resulted in Edna becoming pregnant. She did not know what to do, as it was unseemly for a young girl without a man to be pregnant. She became more and more maudlin, walking the corridors at night with a lighted candle, and mumbling, “What am I gonna do ?”
Soon afterwards rumours were spreading of a horrible battle in a place called Isandlhwana, and another called Rorke’s Drift. Stories were told, that the Durham Light Infantry, the regiment in which William served, had been completely wiped out. Edna, who by now was beginning to show her condition, felt she could not go and see the Johnson family to see if they had news of her Billy, she knew that this would be the only way she could find out, however, as neither she nor Billy could read or write.
One day, she plucked up the courage to go and ask the head gardener if he had heard any news of Billy. Now the head gardener, a man called Arthur Wilkins, was jealous of Billy, and had had his eyes on Edna for quite a while. So he lied to her and told her that he had heard that Billy had been killed, all this in the hope that she would turn her affections in his direction if he could comfort her.
However, on hearing this Edna began to think of the scandal she would create trying to bring up a baby without a father, and she felt, also, that her mother would not be pleased with her for having created a child out of wedlock. So that night she climbed onto the roof of the main building and threw herself off, not making a noise in the hope of avoiding too much scandal.
Her body was found the following morning crushed to pieces at the foot of the wall.
Now comes the even sadder part of the story………
William came home two days later. Having been injured before the battles mentioned previously he had not taken part in them, so came home totally unaware of the drama that had happened. Upon hearing from the head gardener that Edna had left service and gone home to Ireland, he had no knowledge of the truth of her actions. As he did not frequent the other servants he did not hear the truth for several days……………
In fact the truth came to him in a way that made us want to investigate this happening. One night, after having worked hard in the gardens all day he had fallen asleep near the tool shed, and woke up not long before the fatefull hour that Edna had ended her life several days before. Something made him look towards the building at that precise moment at which he saw Edna, or what he thought was her, as he did not know it was her shift, fall soundlessly from the roof. He rushed over to where he saw the body land, and found nothing. This, of course , confused him, as he had expected to find his love lying dead on the ground. He ran into the building calling after her, waking up one of Edna’s co-servants. This young woman then told Billy what had happened, and why she had done it.
Billy ran screaming out of the building, went to the tool shed, took a rope, and went to the tallest tree in the parkland gardens. He threw the rope over a branch, tied it to the tree & hung himself.
Why have I taken such pains to give the history of the manifestations ? This you will see !!
We were told before investigating that certain manifestations had particular timings, so I will enumerate them as we discovered them :
1. A candle flame moves up and down one of the corridors at 11 pm and a non descript mumbling seems to occur at the same time. Our medium felt it was Edna asking herself what she should do.
2. If one descends alone the “golden staircase” at midnight and one looks towards the large mirror on the landing, one can see someone running behind you down the stairs. Apparently several people have been knocked down by this apparition. Could this be Billy ?
3. Daily at half past midnight a sort of ectoplasmic form seems to float down the wall just outside the main college entrance. One has the feeling of great distress, not from the fact of the form’s falling, but it seems to exude sadness.
4. From time to time a scream can be heard in the grounds.
5. A tree in the grounds sometimes gives the impression that a rope is hanging from one of it’s branches, and nothing seems to grow around it’s base.
6. A shadow wonders around the grounds on certain days. Our medium seems to feel it is Arthur Wilkins as a great sense of shame can be felt.
What more can be said about these manifestations ? We have not been able to find any proof otherwise than that these manifestations are the results of the sad story I have recounted, as none of the aforementioned appearances can be explained away other than that they are ghostly apparitions.
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The basis of the story is a legend that surrounds manifestations in the old Ripon Campus of St John's College York. The campus no longer exists, but I must say I myself saw the falling ghost, and i had friends that saw the candle flames & the shape in the mirror. the tree bit & the scream are artistic licence !! Also I have to say that the historical research as regards the Boer war is once again just artistic licence !
