Creepy Story 3

Not one, but three stories that happened very close to each other.

I was fourteen going on fifteen at the time. It was late in the year, around November I think. Two friends and I were at a loose end one night, having no money and not wanting to sit around in the company of parents watching the TV. We decided there was nothing for it but to go for a walk.

The estate was a modern one, but the bottom end adjoined an area that had been a village in mediaeval times. It had subsequently been encircled by the spread of suburbia and gobbled up in the general melee of tarmac and brick. It did, however, retain a little of the old atmosphere, especially around St Mary’s Road – a narrow lane largely dominated by the gothic church of the same name whose grounds occupied most of one side. That was the direction we headed in.

St Mary’s Road was poorly lit, and the churchyard not lit at all, except by what little light spilled in from the dim and widely spaced street lamps on the lane. When we reached it I dared the others to walk through the graveyard. They agreed, naturally, and so we entered and began walking along the main footpath into the deepening gloom. I was in the middle, with Barry on one side and David on the other.

We’d only walked maybe twenty or thirty yards when the others turned and fled back to the main gate. I admit I felt spooked. Now I was alone, and other people’s expression of fear can be surprisingly contagious. But I also felt triumphant, and decided to consolidate my triumph by continuing the walk. I left by the small gate at the bottom corner and made my back to where Barry and David were standing under a lamp, looking disturbed. I mocked them, of course, but they were having none of it.

‘Didn’t you see it?’ one of them asked.

‘See what?’

They told me that they had both seen a white, nebulous figure rise out of the ground in front of me and stand motionless, apparently blocking the path. I’d seen nothing; and if it had been there, I must have walked straight through it.

Now, you might be tempted to conclude that they had both been the victim of an hallucination, or that they had been playing a trick on me. The ‘trick’ hypothesis doesn’t hold water, since there had been no plan to walk through the graveyard and the impromptu suggestion had been mine. Besides, what would be the point if the joke had never been celebrated? The incident was never mentioned again. And if it had been an hallucination, I’m curious to know how they had both seen exactly the same thing at the same time. I really don’t know.

***

The following August, two classes from my school headed off to the Yorkshire Dales on a field study trip. We stayed in the Youth Hostel at Grinton in Swaledale, a building I was told had been a Victorian hunting lodge.

The lights had just been turned out one night when our attention was caught by a white disc at one end of the wall facing the window. It seemed to be a bright light, maybe twelve to eighteen inches in diameter, and moved steadily from one end of the wall to the other before disappearing. Someone asked who was playing about with a torch, but no one owned up. Somebody got out of bed to see whether there was any sign of a person with a light outside the window. That drew a blank too, and we speculated that it might have been the headlights of a car on a nearby lane.

The following morning we took a good look at the view from the window. It was obvious from the height and the angles involved that the possibility of an external source didn’t add up, not least because anything shining in would have cast a shadow of the window frame. There was none, just a clearly defined, circular light. We reverted to the likelihood that somebody in the room must have been shining a torch on the wall, but that’s impossible too. The light from a torch doesn’t throw a crisp, circular image. It takes a very expensive spotlight to do that, as I later confirmed when I used studio lighting as a photographer. And there’s another problem. The light remained circular throughout its travel. Anything projecting it there would have had to be moving along the opposite wall and running parallel to it. A light projected from a fixed point would have produced a succession of decreasing and increasing ellipses, only being circular when it was perpendicular to the source. You decide.

A couple of mornings later a classmate of mine, Michael Crawford, quietly asked if he could have a private word with me. It was obvious he didn’t want the others to hear what he had to say.

Michael was a very practical lad, but he told me he’d seen the strangest thing the night before. He said he’d woken in the night and seen me walking around the dormitory. He’d watched me for a while, assuming either that I wanted the loo and was disorientated for some reason, or that I was sleepwalking. Eventually, he said, he saw me walk back to my bunk and prepare to get back into bed. And then he saw that I was still in bed. There were two of me. The walking me slipped back into bed and the two figures became one. I explained astral projection to him and told him not to worry about it.

The next story is about the face looking into the bedroom.