As a child whose parents both worked, a good proportion of the summer and other holidays were spent with my grandparents. As a result of this I made friends with a number of the kids who lived near them. My grandparents lived in a fairly quiet part of town where nothing much happened and the most exciting thing was the yearly street fair held a few streets away. Us kids however, were determined to make the place a bit more exciting.
Stuarts house backed onto my grandparents so a quick climb over the back wall meant that I could be into the old caravan belonging to his dad that we used as a gang hut in moments if I heard a yell from his garden. So it was on this particular day. Like most summer days seemed back then it was warm and sunny, too warm to be running around playing soldiers even with water pistols so we were slumped around the caravan, bored, slurping on a selection of Panda Pops liberated from Stuart’s mums kitchen, the stack of Beezer and Victor comics read through and the prospect of a long afternoon with nothing to do apart from go a bit hyper on the E numbers in the Panda Pops ahead of us. The trouble with being nine and bored is that it isn’t long before someone suggests doing something really, really stupid and the others instead of saying “That’s a really, really stupid idea!” all say “Cool!”
It was Elizabeth, one of the two female members of our gang who suggested that we explore the old church just around the corner. The church had probably been built in the late 18th or early 19th century when the area was not as large as it was and then as the area thrived and gained several more churches and many more houses it had become a back street chapel and then become run down and abandoned prior to WW2. It was grimy, boarded up, in disrepair and was reputed to be haunted by spirits disturbed when it was almost hit by a bomb in the early years of the war. Basically it was the place that our parents, grandparents and most of the adults in the neigbourhood warned us to keep well away from. Oh and then there were the Satanic sacrifices that a kid at Stuarts school reckoned he had found in there although according to Stuart the same kid reckoned he had been abducted by aliens, was part bionic and had discovered a secret bunker under the school playground full of guns and tanks. However, with nothing better to do we might as well check to see if the story was true. Having watched Scooby Doo we all fancied ourselves as the Mystery Mob although lacking any canine pets between us there was some argument as to who got to be the cowardly dog. The alternative was to borrow my grandmother’s pet budgerigar and put a collar on it and somehow I didn’t think that she would approve of that. So, arming ourselves with high power torches, well, okay two reasonable power torches and third that was a gift from a seaside vending machine and shaped like a fish we set off on our expedition.
Getting in to the old church was easy enough, it was a simple matter of climbing over the wall whilst avoiding the barbed wire and broken glass that someone had thoughtlessly arrayed across the top of it to keep small children and tramps out, picking our way across the small overgrown graveyard without breaking our legs, necks and other body parts tripping over fallen tombstones and slipping through a hole in the corner of the rusty and jagged corrugated iron sheet that covered one of the doors without getting tetanus.
If restless spirits were looking for a place to hang out and do the things that restless spirits are wont to do then this was it, a definite des-res for the dead and not quite shuffled off to the afterlife to get down and party. It was dark, spooky and filled with rubble and pigeon shit. Despite the warmth outside there was a noticeable chill in the air and there were strange rustlings in the corners that our frankly feeble torches could not penetrate. As we explored we heard a door banging, floorboards creaked as though someone was walking upon them and the wind sighed through gaps where the boards did not quite cover the windows.
By now four out of the five of us were thinking that maybe going into the old church was a really, really bad idea and that maybe instead of saying “Cool!” we should have pointed out how incredibly bad an idea it really was. Nervously we looked each other as dust illuminated by one of the few shafts of light that penetrated the boards swirled in strange vortices across the floor. Stuart’s brother, Nick laughed and forged ahead of us. Then came a ghastly creaking and a hideous scream of abject pant wetting terror...
...and that's when we found out that no self respecting Satanist would ever hold a black mass in there. Their health and safety executive would have had a fit if they had. The raising of demons would have been unlikely, the high priest and most of the coven plunging to their doom was a distinct probability. Nick vanished through the floorboards that had been somewhat weakened by time, hungry woodworm and a bad case of dry rot. Luckily for him it was not too big a drop, about six feet, into the void under the floor and he landed on an old and musty smelling tarpaulin.
Nervously in case he had been grabbed by ghouls or zombies lurking under the floor we crawled to the edge of the pit only to discover him lying on the tarpaulin surrounded by nothing more sinister than ancient mouse droppings and staring up at us. The distance was not that great but it took us ages to haul him out, getting ourselves covered in dust and desiccated mouse poo in the process. I'm not sure what was more terrifying, the moment Nick vanished or the telling off I got from my grandmother when I got home looking like I had just crawled from the grave myself. At least in Scooby Doo the kids always discovered that the phantom was really old Mr Brown the janitor, they did not get sent to an early bath and told to get themselves to bed and not to darken the house with their presence until the next day.
After that we gave the place a wide berth and decided that if anyone suggested an idea that sounded ‘cool’ we would pelt them with clods from the compost heap. Well, until someone suggested finding the secret bunker underneath the school but that’s another story.
Stuarts house backed onto my grandparents so a quick climb over the back wall meant that I could be into the old caravan belonging to his dad that we used as a gang hut in moments if I heard a yell from his garden. So it was on this particular day. Like most summer days seemed back then it was warm and sunny, too warm to be running around playing soldiers even with water pistols so we were slumped around the caravan, bored, slurping on a selection of Panda Pops liberated from Stuart’s mums kitchen, the stack of Beezer and Victor comics read through and the prospect of a long afternoon with nothing to do apart from go a bit hyper on the E numbers in the Panda Pops ahead of us. The trouble with being nine and bored is that it isn’t long before someone suggests doing something really, really stupid and the others instead of saying “That’s a really, really stupid idea!” all say “Cool!”
It was Elizabeth, one of the two female members of our gang who suggested that we explore the old church just around the corner. The church had probably been built in the late 18th or early 19th century when the area was not as large as it was and then as the area thrived and gained several more churches and many more houses it had become a back street chapel and then become run down and abandoned prior to WW2. It was grimy, boarded up, in disrepair and was reputed to be haunted by spirits disturbed when it was almost hit by a bomb in the early years of the war. Basically it was the place that our parents, grandparents and most of the adults in the neigbourhood warned us to keep well away from. Oh and then there were the Satanic sacrifices that a kid at Stuarts school reckoned he had found in there although according to Stuart the same kid reckoned he had been abducted by aliens, was part bionic and had discovered a secret bunker under the school playground full of guns and tanks. However, with nothing better to do we might as well check to see if the story was true. Having watched Scooby Doo we all fancied ourselves as the Mystery Mob although lacking any canine pets between us there was some argument as to who got to be the cowardly dog. The alternative was to borrow my grandmother’s pet budgerigar and put a collar on it and somehow I didn’t think that she would approve of that. So, arming ourselves with high power torches, well, okay two reasonable power torches and third that was a gift from a seaside vending machine and shaped like a fish we set off on our expedition.
Getting in to the old church was easy enough, it was a simple matter of climbing over the wall whilst avoiding the barbed wire and broken glass that someone had thoughtlessly arrayed across the top of it to keep small children and tramps out, picking our way across the small overgrown graveyard without breaking our legs, necks and other body parts tripping over fallen tombstones and slipping through a hole in the corner of the rusty and jagged corrugated iron sheet that covered one of the doors without getting tetanus.
If restless spirits were looking for a place to hang out and do the things that restless spirits are wont to do then this was it, a definite des-res for the dead and not quite shuffled off to the afterlife to get down and party. It was dark, spooky and filled with rubble and pigeon shit. Despite the warmth outside there was a noticeable chill in the air and there were strange rustlings in the corners that our frankly feeble torches could not penetrate. As we explored we heard a door banging, floorboards creaked as though someone was walking upon them and the wind sighed through gaps where the boards did not quite cover the windows.
By now four out of the five of us were thinking that maybe going into the old church was a really, really bad idea and that maybe instead of saying “Cool!” we should have pointed out how incredibly bad an idea it really was. Nervously we looked each other as dust illuminated by one of the few shafts of light that penetrated the boards swirled in strange vortices across the floor. Stuart’s brother, Nick laughed and forged ahead of us. Then came a ghastly creaking and a hideous scream of abject pant wetting terror...
...and that's when we found out that no self respecting Satanist would ever hold a black mass in there. Their health and safety executive would have had a fit if they had. The raising of demons would have been unlikely, the high priest and most of the coven plunging to their doom was a distinct probability. Nick vanished through the floorboards that had been somewhat weakened by time, hungry woodworm and a bad case of dry rot. Luckily for him it was not too big a drop, about six feet, into the void under the floor and he landed on an old and musty smelling tarpaulin.
Nervously in case he had been grabbed by ghouls or zombies lurking under the floor we crawled to the edge of the pit only to discover him lying on the tarpaulin surrounded by nothing more sinister than ancient mouse droppings and staring up at us. The distance was not that great but it took us ages to haul him out, getting ourselves covered in dust and desiccated mouse poo in the process. I'm not sure what was more terrifying, the moment Nick vanished or the telling off I got from my grandmother when I got home looking like I had just crawled from the grave myself. At least in Scooby Doo the kids always discovered that the phantom was really old Mr Brown the janitor, they did not get sent to an early bath and told to get themselves to bed and not to darken the house with their presence until the next day.
After that we gave the place a wide berth and decided that if anyone suggested an idea that sounded ‘cool’ we would pelt them with clods from the compost heap. Well, until someone suggested finding the secret bunker underneath the school but that’s another story.
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