Aviation & Airport Ghosts

I just stumbled across another that looks interesting.

Aviation Ghosts: Stories of Paranormal Activity Along Line SSE 165 Degrees by Kevin Desmond (Leo Cooper: 1998).​

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't curious as to precisely where that line lie and how he has managed a book's worth of material with that amount of specificity.
 
Yithian said:
I just stumbled across another that looks interesting.

Aviation Ghosts: Stories of Paranormal Activity Along Line SSE 165 Degrees by Kevin Desmond (Leo Cooper: 1998).​

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't curious as to precisely where that line lie and how he has managed a book's worth of material with that amount of specificity.
Click to expand...
Ooo I read that book years and years ago, in my younger years I really enjoyed it, I cannot remember any details sadly and I suspect my present day self would not be impressed.
 
Has there been a reference in this thread to the excellent Frederick Forsyth novella The Shepherd? (Spoilers at link).

Forsyth himself is an ex-RAF pilot, and the book bears the hallmarks of his experiences.

Synopsis:

“The Shepherd relates the story of a De Havilland Vampire pilot, going home on Christmas Eve 1957, whose aircraft suffers a complete electrical failure en route from RAF Celle in northern Germany to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. Lost in fog and low on fuel, he is met and led (or shepherded) to a disused RAF dispersal field by the pilot of a De Havilland Mosquito fighter-bomber of World War II vintage, who has apparently been sent up to guide him in.”

It’s been years since l read it, but l remember enjoying it greatly.

maximus otter
 
Yithian said:
I haven't read anything very Fortean beyond these boards for quite a while and I noticed that the title below is being reprinted in September of this year. The author is a British pilot from Bomber Command and served in the second world war - he died a few years ago now. I've read one of a trilogy of books he has written on his service during the Second World War and it was fantastic in tone and content, which gives me great hopes of this one:

UK Publisher:
http://www.crecy.co.uk/echoes-in-the-air
US Publisher:
http://www.specialtypress.com/echoes-in-the-air-a-chronicle-of-aeronautical-ghost-stories.html

Of course, it may turn up cheaper at Amazon or elsewhere.
Previous edition here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Echoes-Air-...=1434214325&sr=1-1&keywords=echoes+in+the+air
Click to expand...

Amazingly, I'm still waiting for this endlessly delayed reprint that never seems to arrive (now scheduled for this autumn)!

In the meantime, there is now a slightly improved version of the author's short documentary on the haunting and haunted locale of the RAF East Kirkby airfield :

 
Anonymous said:
I can't give sources right now, but there is supposedly a haunted runway at London Heathrow - the figure of a man in business suit (and bowler hat, if memory serves), who has been seen by flight-deck crews preparing for takeoff. When the 'nutter' has been reported to the tower, investigations have turned up no-one. Well, that's the story.
Click to expand...

Just came across this thread again today and thought that I'd see if could find further details about the Heathrow runway ghost. From memory it seemed to me that it (he?) was associated with a specific event. I found the following:

Stay alert for Heathrow's ghostly visitors this summer

Supposedly dates back to the 1948 Heathrow crash.

There's also mention in the above article of Dick Turpin and another ghost at Heathrow.
 
CALGACUS03 said:
There's also mention in the above article of Dick Turpin and another ghost at Heathrow.
Click to expand...
Dick Turpin eh. I'm sure all the ghosts of other highwaymen are well pissed off about that. "Gah everybody always thinks it's him." He wasn't even from round there?? Besides, wasn't Heathrow just some backwater in the end of nowhere before the airport turned up? Hardly a lucrative spot to be robbing rich people? A highwayman is a remarkably strange figure to claim to see... though undoubtedly he would stand out in his tricorn hat amongst all the holidaymakers. I expect they all wore tricorn hats of course. Whilst wielding pistols. Hang on, how would you even know you were looking at a ghost of a highwayman unless he explicitly asked you to stand and deliver?! Ghost stories eh, I shouldn't try to fathom them really but just enjoy them.
 
Eponastill said:
Dick Turpin eh. I'm sure all the ghosts of other highwaymen are well pissed off about that. "Gah everybody always thinks it's him."
...
Besides, wasn't Heathrow just some backwater in the end of nowhere before the airport turned up? Hardly a lucrative spot to be robbing rich people?
Click to expand...

I totally agree regarding every ghostly highwayman being identified as Turpin! From my understanding he wasn't even much of a highwayman - more of a general thief (with more than a little 'home invasion' in his background). He was actually eventually hung for horse theft.

But I believe that Heathrow airport was built upon what was once part of Houndslow Heath, and therefore was likely to have once been the haunt of highwaymen. Although not necessarily Turpin.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the heath was notorious as the haunt of highwaymen and footpads, being crossed by the Great West Road and the Bath Road.[2][3][4]
Click to expand...

The Wikipedia article about Turpin does much to dispel any romantic notions that one might have about him:

For a time Turpin stayed at Whitechapel, before moving to Millbank.[20] On 4 February 1735 he met John Fielder, Samuel Gregory, Joseph Rose, and John Wheeler, at an inn along The Broadway in London. They planned to rob the house of Joseph Lawrence, a farmer at Earlsbury Farm in Edgware. Late that afternoon, after stopping twice along the way for food and drink, they captured a shepherd boy and burst into the house, armed with pistols. They bound the two maidservants, and brutally attacked the 70-year-old farmer. They pulled his breeches around his ankles, and dragged him around the house, but Lawrence refused to reveal the whereabouts of his money. Turpin beat Lawrence's bare buttocks with his pistols, badly bruising him, and other members of the gang beat him around the head with their pistols. They emptied a kettle of water over his head, forced him to sit bare-buttocked on the fire, and pulled him around the house by his nose, and hair. Gregory took one of the maidservants upstairs and raped her. For their trouble, the gang escaped with a haul of less than £30.
Click to expand...
 
Eponastill said:
Dick Turpin eh. I'm sure all the ghosts of other highwaymen are well pissed off about that. "Gah everybody always thinks it's him." He wasn't even from round there?? Besides, wasn't Heathrow just some backwater in the end of nowhere before the airport turned up? Hardly a lucrative spot to be robbing rich people? A highwayman is a remarkably strange figure to claim to see... though undoubtedly he would stand out in his tricorn hat amongst all the holidaymakers. I expect they all wore tricorn hats of course. Whilst wielding pistols. Hang on, how would you even know you were looking at a ghost of a highwayman unless he explicitly asked you to stand and deliver?! Ghost stories eh, I shouldn't try to fathom them really but just enjoy them.
Click to expand...

The Old Bath Road from London to, well you guessed it, ran along the northern boundary of Heathrow Airport. The Old Bath road was itself based on the Roman road from London to Silchester, and Heathrow airport sits on an old Roman camp. More crucially:

"The flat marshy landscape of pre-airport Heathrow seemed to have had a mound of some sort, as the area where the camp was discovered was known as Shasbury Hill (or Schapsbury Hill on some maps), although hill is probably overdoing what was barely a slight rise in the ground.

Maps aside, the oldest known reference to the mound was in 1586, when William Camden’s Britannia mentioned a “Roman camp; a simple work and not large”.

The name attributed to it could be a derivative of robbers hill, as it was likely to be overgrown, and its mildly elevated location close to the main Bath Road an ideal vantage point to watch for coaches to rob."

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2017/03/27/the-lost-roman-camp-underneath-heathrows-runway/
 
Worth noting -

RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk, the airbase next the forest in which the Rendlesham Forest Incident allegedly occured had a history of ghosts. One of which was a man in flames who would be seen stumbling about on the deserted runways at night.


High strangeness.
 
A friend grew up on the Grahame Park estate, located on the site of the former Hendon Aerodrome in North West London.

In the 1980's he saw a headless man dressed in a bomber jacket walk across his room into a wall and disappear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendon_Aerodrome

The site of the aerodrome is now occupied by the Grahame Park housing estate, Hendon Police College and the RAF Museum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grahame_Park

This site lists two fatal crashes at Hendon, from 1948 and 1952, with a total of five fatalities.

https://www.baaa-acro.com/city/hendon
 
Last edited:
One of the gates is considered bad luck at Heathrow because it was the flight that crashed over Lockerby that left from there.
 
FelixAntonius said:
Before RAF Hendon became a museum, there was supposed that some nights, when people could hear the sound of a very low flying aircraft, then as it grew louder & closer & everyone was begining to panic, the sound would suddenly stop!
Click to expand...

More about the RAF Museum at Hendon and ghost sightings there supposedly linked to a fatal plane crash.

"The first fatal accident at the RAF Museum occurred on June 30 1934," said Kevin.

"The pilot Mr Lea was injured and his observer Squadron Leader Stanley Collett, the son of the then Lord Mayor of London, was killed. Their aircraft crashed due to engine failure."

https://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/6491351.those-supernatural-men-and-their-flying-machines/
 
A radio programme about the hauntings at Bircham Newton airfield (which was turned into the National Construction College). It contains tape recordings from the Haunted Squash Court. Who knows what they are, but it's very spooky. The programme is rather old (70s?) and as such does not suffer from the hysteria one might expect from more recent productions. The bit with the mediums at the end is a bit silly. But I think you'll like it.
 
An appeal for help:
Does anyone have a copy of volume 2 of "Haunted 2nd World War airfields" by Chris Huff, and could look something up for me please?
 
Another appeal: does anyone remember the edition of Nationwide and the Jack de Maneo shows that featured Bircham Newton?
 
DrPaulLee said:
Another appeal: does anyone remember the edition of Nationwide and the Jack de Maneo shows that featured Bircham Newton?
Click to expand...
Both broadcast presentations apparently occurred in 1972.
There are several more haunted wartime airfields that are worth a mention here. Bircham Newton Aerodrome on the empty wastes of East Anglia, for example, made national news in 1972 when the strange events happening there were featured on Jack de Manio’s morning radio show and BBC TV’s news programme, Nationwide. Originally constructed in 1914, the airfield had been abandoned in the inter-war years and then brought back into active service in 1939 as a base for RAF, Australian and Canadian pilots. Following the end of hostilities the base was converted into a hotel - and the haunting began in an area that had been turned into a squash court. Players suddenly became aware of being watched by a man in RAF uniform who disappeared through the walls as soon as he was approached.
Click to expand...
SOURCE: Mammoth Book of True Hauntings
https://archive.org/stream/CreepyStories/MammothBookOfTrueHauntings_djvu.txt
 
DrPaulLee said:
Another appeal: does anyone remember the edition of Nationwide and the Jack de Maneo shows that featured Bircham Newton?
Click to expand...
According to this account the incident(s) and recording occurred in 1970 or maybe 1971. It can be read to mean the tape had been submitted to the radio show in 1970.

In 1970, a film unit began work on a management training film. On Friday December 12 in the following year, the Lynn News and Advertiser ran a story about a haunting experience which befell several members of the crew and led to the recording of a truly eerie piece of taped footage. ...

The crew left after two weeks of filming and sent the tape to the BBC Jack de Manio programme where it was played over the air one morning, prompting a host of readers to report that their pets had been driven mad by the recording, as if they were picking up something human ears were unable to hear.
Click to expand...
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/weird-norfolk-raf-bircham-newton-citb-1462468
 
Is that the radio programme I've linked to immediately above, then?
 
Unfortunately with this case, there's so much BS that I have tried to use original source materials. There's a lot of embellishment and downright lies.
 
Eponastill said:
Is that the radio programme I've linked to immediately above, then?
Click to expand...
It's not clear whether it is or not. Multiple ghost hunters claimed to have investigated the squash court at Bircham Newton after the first / original Denny Densham tape surfaced, and some of them indicated they made their own recordings. It's not clear how many tapes there may be.

The original (Densham) tape was marketed back in the 1970s / 1980s on a cassette that included an audio recording related to the Borley Rectory haunting.
 
Elements of the Densham tape appeared on that C60 tape, along with some portions from one of the BBC broadcast and a fair amount of guff from the psychic and medium. That tape came out in 1977.
I'm now pretty sure that the Densham tape was made in August 1970. The two psychics visited in mid December 1971 and if the story is correct, the team from the Jack di Manio show visited that same day. I'm sure the edition was broadcast before the years end. I have no idea when Nationwide was shown but a friend says that this show has a very poor survival statistic amongst BBC shows. He thinks, without proof, that it might have been broadcast close to Halloween that year. I think it was much later, probably December but again, no proof.

I gather Andrew Green wrote about the case in "Our haunted kingdom". Does anyone have a copy?
 
DrPaulLee said:
Elements of the Densham tape appeared on that C60 tape, along with some portions from one of the BBC broadcast and a fair amount of guff from the psychic and medium. That tape came out in 1977.
I'm now pretty sure that the Densham tape was made in August 1970. The two psychics visited in mid December 1971 and if the story is correct, the team from the Jack di Manio show visited that same day. I'm sure the edition was broadcast before the years end. I have no idea when Nationwide was shown but a friend says that this show has a very poor survival statistic amongst BBC shows. He thinks, without proof, that it might have been broadcast close to Halloween that year. I think it was much later, probably December but again, no proof.

I gather Andrew Green wrote about the case in "Our haunted kingdom". Does anyone have a copy?
Click to expand...
I think I have it somewhere...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top