Chesil Beach, Dorset
September 2001
Twenty years ago this week, something odd happened to me. I wrote down the bare bones of what happened a year or two after the event and then, a bit later, carried out some additional research about the area, and… well. Have a read, and see what you reckon.
So we’ll go back to September 2001. A bright Dorset afternoon had waned to evening, and thin grey clouds had drifted in from the Channel by the time we began the drive back to Somerset. My then-girlfriend and I had been out all day, starting off at Minehead and driving over to Dunster, then across Exmoor to Lyme Regis, then on to Dorchester, then Weymouth, and finally ending up at Portland Bill. Just driving, and listening to cassettes, and being young, I suppose.
I’d promised that we’d get down onto Chesil Beach itself, to walk along the eighteen-mile-long bank formed from countless tumbled pebbles to make a loose stone barricade, neither fully land nor fully sea. Somehow I missed the turning to the main car park from Portland Bill, but I knew there was another access point at the far end of the beach. We pressed on, through the countryside’s lengthening shadows.
The small car park beyond Abbotsbury was surprisingly busy, even at the tail end of the tourist season. But it was mostly beach anglers casting from the shore, and not straying very far from their cars. Seeking some quiet, we crunched past them along the beach, soupy grey waves breaking near our feet, until they were far behind us. The amount of effort required to walk through the shifting pea-sized pebbles was surprising.
About half a mile along, we came up against a row of large concrete cubes topped with wire, rising from the waves up along the beach, and then down into the dark stillness of the Fleet lagoon behind. I guessed that they were old anti-tank blocks, left there from the threatened German invasion of 1940. We paused at the barricade, unsure whether there was still some sort of restricted military area beyond, and whether there would be consequences for pressing on further. The only feature to be seen was an old pillbox fortification, crooked and blank, half-hidden under the shifting stones. Otherwise there was nothing to see but more pebbles, stretching into a faint haze towards Portland.
Shrugging, we accepted that there was little to be gained by walking further on anyway, and so we sat for a while by the blocks, just talking. I took a few pointless photographs of the water breaking under a pale sunset, on black and white film. Hopes and fears were large with both of us; in a few short days my girlfriend would be starting at the University of Sussex, while I was heading back to uni in Belfast. The breathless excitement of the new was tempered with the wrench of separation, fear of things changing, and the unpredictability of life. Only a week or two earlier we’d watched and listened in shock as two airliners skewered into the New York skyline – reason enough for anyone to reflect soberly on how life could go fatally wrong in an instant. It felt worryingly as if we were growing up a little.
I’m not sure how long we sat talking, but it was the cold which got to us first. Rising and stretching, I realised that dusk was settling fast over the beach, though the clouds had thinned. I looked beyond the wire up the beach, now vanishing into a pale darkness. A few glimmers from Portland were visible through the vapour haze and, further out in the Channel, some distant shipping lights slowly passed. Buttoning my coat, we began to retrace our steps back along the pebbles.
Keeping close together for warmth, we walked in comfortable silence back towards the car park. Having talked ourselves out, the afterglow of the conversation ran on through my mind. The roar and suck of the waves was the only sound, besides our footsteps. As the undergrowth at the top of the beach thinned out, I could see a dull-yellow moon rising beyond the thicket.
Crunch, crunch, crunch. Crunch.
I stopped for a moment, listening. My girlfriend also stopped, a few paces on, and looked back at me quizzically. I must have looked confused. I walked on again, and then came to another halt after a dozen or so steps.
“Listen – can you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Listen.”
I took a few more strides forward through the loose scree, my trainers scrunching loudly, and then came to a stop. A similar, but softer noise continued for a few seconds, before stopping also. We both walked forward a few paces, hearing the noise of our feet sinking and rising through the pebbles, dragging stone over stone, but underlined by a softer, scuttering crunch from behind. We paused, and listened to three or four further scrunches followed by silence. She looked up at me.
“Oh, that’s really creepy. It’s like… there’s more footsteps.”
I peered backwards into the deepening evening. There was certainly no-one else around, and the sounds were directly behind us. Hesitantly, we continued. What else could we do? Our feet, moving almost in unison – and then with another, off-the-beat, step behind. Soft, but close.
Suddenly, the car park seemed very far away. We felt an urgent need to talk now; to keep words of any kind travelling through the darkening sea air. All the while, I was trying to work out what the noise was. Some sort of weird echo of our footsteps, bouncing back up through the loose stones? Every so often we’d pause and look back, again hearing the same skittering steps fade to nothing. Although there was a slight luminescence from the water’s edge which provided some greyish light by the shore, up at the top of the stones by the treeline, it was definitely dark.
Eventually, something must have clicked in my mind, and I paused with a gasp of relief.
“I know what it is. It’s the pebbles falling back into our footprints.”
To illustrate, I pushed my foot deep down into the stony surface to make a hole, and then pulled it out again. A thin, tinkling noise was just about audible, as some displaced pebbles slithered down into the depression I’d created. We laughed, to dispel the fear which had wrapped themselves around us, and experimentally made some more test holes with our toes, to reassure ourselves that this was the source of the confusing sound. It did sound like it – well, a bit anyway.
As we walked on towards the car, we admitted to what neither of us had wanted to say just a moment earlier – that it really sounded as if there was someone walking behind us, invisible but not inaudible. It sounded ridiculous, and we were glad that we could now laugh about it. Even though we hadn’t heard the phenomenon on the journey out, I assumed it was something to do with the breeze changing direction. A simple explanation.
When we reached the path to the car park, only a couple of anglers remained still huddled by the shore, just about visible now in the gloom. The car park was mostly empty: my little blue Fiesta stood alone over to the side. We laughed again at the change of sensation as we moved from rough pebble to smooth, compacted soil. My feet still retained the after-feeling of the rounded stones through my trainers. Our tread seemed so quiet after the relentless crunch of the beach, and our eyes quickly acclimatised to the electric lights dotted around the car park; looking back onto the beach now was looking into darkness. I was glad we hadn’t left it much later to walk back.
Calculating that it would be at least an hour and a half before we would arrive back home in north Somerset, I pragmatically veered off towards the small toilet block in the car park. Inside it was bright and fairly clean; a recently built amenity. The self-closer on the door squealed as I pushed it open, noticing that the room was empty, and then I strolled over to the urinals and unzipped.
I’d only been standing there for a matter of seconds, when a tremendous wallop landed on my right shoulder, shoving me forward toward the wall and causing my knees to buckle under the force.
It’s hard now to unpick just how many scrambled thoughts went through my head in less than a second. My first instinct was that my girlfriend, totally out of character, had decided to play some bizarre prank by sneaking up behind me. I immediately discounted this – not only was it so unlikely, but the blow had been powerful, and seemed to have clapped down on me from a height. My girlfriend was quite a bit smaller than me, and slightly built.
My second thought was I was being mugged. One of the fishermen, maybe, or some other lurking ne’er-do-well. But I hadn’t heard anyone come into the toilet block, through the squeaky door and across the echoing, tiled floor. Both cubicles had been clearly empty, too, with the doors wide open as I passed. I twisted my head round, trying to catch sight of my assailant.
There was no-one behind me. No-one at all.
My shoulder still throbbed with the force of the blow, and my mind was still grinding hopelessly to make sense of what had just occurred. No ideas were forthcoming.
I quickly finished up, and zipped myself up. Spinning round, I could confirm that the toilet block was definitely empty; the door still shut, the cubicles unoccupied. Yet I was certain that someone had just struck me, hard, upon the shoulder. It stung, it tingled – I could still feel it. I had heard the slap of skin on leather, echoing in the tiled room, I had felt the power behind it. It had happened. I rushed over to the door, breaking the habit of a lifetime and not washing my hands.
My girlfriend was exactly where I had left her, standing over by the car. She noticed my expression as we got in, and asked what was wrong. I started the car and wheeled it round to the laneway, brushing against the hedge as I tried to put into words what had just occurred. She struggled to rationalise what I was telling her, but confirmed that no-one else had gone near the toilet block, which had been in her line of sight the whole time. She didn’t disbelieve me, but she was equally perplexed.
As I talked, and mentally ran through any other possible explanations, I wondered whether I’d been wrong in my clever-clever explanation of the strange footstep sounds as displaced stones. Whether things had, in fact, been exactly as they had sounded to us.
Somebody – something – had been following us back along the beach. Not much made sense to me at that moment, and I have few recollections of the drive home. Somehow we made it back. In the bathroom, before going to bed, I inspected my shoulder. There were no visible marks on the skin, no redness or swelling. But it still hurt quite a lot, as if I’d received a blow from a falling fencepost.
The next morning the joint was stiff and painful, and I wondered if I was capable of imagining and sustaining such an illusion for this length of time. I felt confused, and slightly frightened. I felt like I’d had a brush with something nameless, formless, unknowable.
A few days later, I made the drive over to Brighton with my girlfriend and her belongings. Caught up in the newness of the Sussex Downs and the petty frustrations of university bureaucracy, the experience at Chesil became pushed down in my mind. By the time I found myself making the long drive to Pembroke docks in the sharp October pre-dawn, I had enough to be dealing with, emotionally. But a few hours later, with the ferry punching through the choppy waters back over to Ireland, I had time to think about it all again.
The simplest rationale was that I’d just imagined it. My brain had played some massive trick to convince me that someone had smacked me on the shoulder. A one-off neurological prank, subconsciously generated. It had been a long day, yes, and I had been weary with so much driving. This was the option which best satisfied Occam’s Razor – it was all in my head, and the intervention of some mysterious invisible outside agency could be quietly dismissed. For my own peace of mind, this was a very desirable explanation.
However, I couldn’t quite manage to convince myself. It didn’t fit the events, as I had perceived them. The footsteps behind us on the way back – well, we’d both clearly heard them. The force of the blow, striking my shoulder and causing my legs to bow to the pressure – I’d never had anything like that happen to me before. The loud thwack of a hand on my leather coat. The pain and stiffness the next day. It was possibly all in my head, but it certainly didn’t seem like it. I felt certain that it wasn’t all just a product of my imagination.
During the crossing, eventually, some kind of narrative developed. By the time the ferry docked in Rosslaire I had nailed together a vivid construct, however improbable, to make some sense of the event. So many lives had been cut short on that long pebble bar; luckless ships wrecked on the treacherous rocks while the bodies of their crew roiled and pounded in the breakers. I imagined unquiet spirits, lost and disorientated, still haunting the place of their final moments without realising that their time had gone. Perhaps such a spirit had followed us as potential rescuers, making entreaties to our unheeding ears, before finally summoning the energy to demonstrate its intense frustration by slapping me.
Like I say, no possible scientific basis in these thoughts - but it seemed to fit in a romantic way, and give me some sort of a narrative to hang the experience on, rather than let it just roll around my head forevermore.
Rather unfortunately, this theory showered me with guilt that I had been unaware of this spirit, and I’d failed to help it find release, through being scared. My sympathies went out to whatever poor lost soul had been left wandering that lonely strip of stones for an eternity. There was nothing at all I could do about it now.
It doesn’t quite stop there, though. After jotting down a first draft of this account, I checked the location and the names of the villages online to make sure that at least this story would be geographically accurate. Then, out of interest, I carried out a search for ‘Chesil Beach Ghost’, just to see if anything of interest came back.
In the search results, I was intrigued to find a thread about Chesil Beach Ghosts from a fishing forum and – on navigating to the thread – was chilled to discover that many sea anglers have reported exactly the same experience as mine; the distinct sound of footsteps pacing the half-mile stretch of shingle between the anti-tank blocks and the car park at Abbotsbury, always as dusk fades into night. Others wrote about hearing the voices of young children, laughing and playing, in the early hours of the morning near to the car park.
Some on the forum were able to offer a natural explanation for the footsteps: foxes, hares and even badgers apparently come down onto the beach around nightfall, and the tawny colouration of foxes in particular makes them become almost invisible against the stones in low light. But the pattering of their paws can be heard. This, to my ears, certainly provides a likely explanation. And yet, it still doesn’t quite ring true. I find it hard to imagine a wild animal following us all the way along the beach at close quarters without being seen. It wasn’t yet very dark when we first noticed the sound – light enough to see any nearby animals, certainly. The extra footfalls were, moreover, in a rhythm which suggested the gait of a human, rather than an animal on all fours.
And of course, nothing in this theory explains what occurred in the toilet block.
Another theory was mentioned on the forum too – the legend of ‘Herman the German’, a Messerschmitt pilot who apparently died when his aircraft came down on this stretch of Chesil Beach in August 1940. Some claim that his ghost is the source of the footsteps at dusk. For each post debunking the footsteps as nothing more than evening foxes, another forum member would describe such an event happening to them in broad daylight, or with such heavy steps that they assumed it was an anticipated friend coming to join them by the water’s edge – until they looked up to see only bare stones.
I checked Google Maps to make sure I was correct about the position of tank cubes and pillboxes, and was relieved to find that my memory had held up. Additionally, Google Images brought up scores of pillbox photos from all over the country, and I randomly clicked on an image which wasn’t really remarkable in any way.
This took me to a webpage about pillboxes and their symbolism of British defiance. I was struck by a quote at the end about pillboxes from John Hellis, a military archaeologist: '
'Thousands of people find them fascinating and they are a relic of the Second World War that shows the British spirit. I've stood near one on Chesil Beach in Dorset and thought about some poor sod cold and wet and miserable waiting for Hitler to come and had an empathy with him through these buildings. They are living history.''
I began to wonder whether John Hellis had experienced a similar encounter at the same spot; maybe he had also felt a strong impression of the ‘poor sod’ out by the beach pillbox. Maybe that cold, wet, miserable being had vented a similar rage on him. I don’t know. Maybe we’re all just imagining it. Maybe.
All I can conclude is that some things are still slightly beyond us.
