Fact or Fiction? - Plus SWC for Jerry Banfield's competition

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The story Here

Again, every bit of it is

TRUE.

Trev and I worked together in our businesses for a number of years. Sometimes (often) 16 hours a day.

The machine was unloaded using the hydraulic lift on the truck (Hiab) - we just had to lug it into the garage.

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This is a story I'm entering for @jerrybanfield's Supernatural Writing Contest too.

I’ve written about ghost-walks and all-night vigils in spooky places. A few of the walks were nothing more than interesting because of the history of the place we visited.

Because of my interest in the supernatural and, I suppose, my open-mindedness, plus the fact that I write about my experiences, I used to get invited to quite a number of these events.

The one that sticks in my mind as the most scary was at The Trip To Jerusalem – the pub, in Nottingham is reputed to be the oldest in England – a pub that was the meeting place for the Knights Templar back in the crusades.

The tour included around an hour and a half of wandering around the area surrounding ‘The Trip’, with history and a few spooky tales - for example:

As they were building the highway called Maid Marian Way, which runs through part of Nottingham, an ancient graveyard was discovered and had to be moved. The graves were outside of the time restraints we have on having to keep them in situ and so it was deemed legal to move them.

That all complied with legislation – except that the bones, the human remains of the people buried there should also have been moved with their corresponding gravestone and to save money, the bones were disposed of.

The bones were allegedly ground-up and added to the cement used in the buildings at the side of the highway.

Because of the disturbances to their final resting place, or perhaps because of the disrespect in the disposing of their remains, the buildings were said to be troubled by the spirits of the dead. Sounds could be heard late at night outside the buildings, in the courtyard and especially inside the building.

People left their jobs because of the uneasy feeling inside the building and the businesses that were situated there never seemed to prosper.

Dusk was encroaching upon our little group as we listened to the story told by the guide and I noticed more than a few people looked up at the building to the side of the courtyard, where the talk was finishing off.

People dispersed, wrapping their coats a little tighter around themselves and shuffling off and our little group of four went across Maid Marian Way to ‘The Trip’ where we were to finish off our night of spooky delights by visiting the cellars beneath the pub.

Nottingham itself is built on sandstone which is fairly easy to excavate – you can tell that fact by the number of caves that lie under the city – Nottingham is fairly riddled with them!

‘The Trip’ used caves as the cellar for their ales and beers. That is where we were headed.

Down the ancient wooden stairs we went. The staircase was narrow – far narrower than I had imagined because I couldn’t believe the casks of ale and barrels of beer could be moved up and down those stairs.

“They weren’t,” the guide said. “The barrels were pulled up through the floor in the bar. There was a pulley system and you can see where it was situated if you know where to look.”

We went down two flights of stairs, past a large hole in the wall that had orange webbing across it, ‘to stop people falling in’ – allegedly.

We were invited to look down into the hole – pitch black of course, but if you listened carefully, you could hear the trickle of water.

As we were high above the level of the River Trent, I would assume that water was a long way down and if anyone fell in, they would be there a while before rescue arrived – even in these days.

We were invited into a room which had a rock ledge hewn into the wall, all around the room. That had once been the storage for barrels and sometimes used for illicit meetings. The guide told us about the times when the room would be used for those meetings and the warning that police or the King’s officers had arrived would be given by dropping a pebble through one of the holes in the roof. The term ‘The penny dropped’ comes from those times.

Then we moved further down.

As we descended into the bowels of the earth, the temperature dropped considerably and I wondered why the difference was so marked.

“Not because we’re close to the water, we’re not near any water yet,” he said. “It’s because of the inhabitants of these cellars. We aren’t able to bring visitors down here more than two or three times in a year because too many things go wrong.”

“Go wrong?” someone asked.

The guide looked at her and grinned.

I took a step back because his face had kind of twisted and looked nothing like the man that we were being guided by. The guide had a clean-shaven face, tidy eyebrows and a trendy hairstyle. The man that grinned back at the woman was bald, fatter of face, scruffy stubble with a clear piece across the lower jaw that looked like a scar and his eyebrows were wild and bushy.

In a moment, the visage had gone, but the woman that had asked the question asked to leave immediately.

The tour was ended abruptly because the guide had another tour to take – or so he said.

We were a little bemused by it all and we discussed it later and only two of us out of the four had seen the change in the guide.

Did we see a ghost superimposed upon the guide?

I still wonder about that night and I do mean to go back and see if we can go under ‘The Trip’ again, but I’ve not seen any of that kind of tour advertised since then.

So, truth or fiction? Tell me in the comments.