Continuing the theme of local ghost stories, I today turn to Hamilton and a story about a ghost who scared a few local lads stiff!
Ghosts that walked in a
Hamilton house
Original story appeared
in the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miner’s Advocate-August 1949
Photo: Newcastle University Cultural Collections
Walking out of
Beaumont Street into Lindsay Street Hamilton one night about half a century ago
a man chanced to look up at the attic window of a house.
In
that instant he felt as though every ounce of blood had been drained from his
body. He began to tremble. Then he turned and hurried back into Beaumont
Street.
The
house was empty. Yet at the attic window he had seen something move – something
vague and spine chilling – in a sudden strange glow.
He
had seen ‘the ghost’.
Night
after night people who dared gathered on the Beaumont Street corner where they
could look across to the window and gasp as the filmy aura fading and
reappearing time and again moved across the pane.
Fear
and suspicion went with them. Nobody really believed in ghosts but if ever a
house was haunted this was it, they said.
After
sunset when the gaslights were lit in the streets few cared to venture past the
house. People who lived in Lindsay Street detoured around the block to get to
their homes.
Mr
Ralph Maloney of Broadmeadow Road, Broadmeadow, one of the men who laid the
ghost for us said, “One night two local lads named Woolley and Mowett undertook
to take the ghost on. A big crowd gathered to watch them. One of them armed
himself with a pick handle and the other with a spade. They went into the house
and started upstairs to the attic”.
“I
don’t know which one it was, but the front one fainted with fright on the
stairs and landed on the other’s shoulder. He had to be carried out.”
“The
house was opposite another place on the site of Fettercairn Hospital,” he said.
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