Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

A funny thing I am noticing as I am growing older about the recollection of childhood moments is that, they are not so much real memories but stories that are so deeply ingrained in me that I cannot recall a time that they were not there. Moments that are spoken of so many times throughout the years that you know really did occur but when you think of the actual moment you get nothing. It’s like they have become more like folklore than history.

This is one of them.

When I was a small child my father worked at a mock pioneer village. You know the kind where they uproot all types of old buildings from here and there and scatter them around a few empty fields before they open the gates and the parents and children come flooding in soon to arm themselves with cotton-candy and toffee apples.

Anyway, there was (and still is to my knowledge) an old jail house there. I begged my father to take me. For weeks I hounded and pressured him. And eventually he gave in and agreed to take me.

I cannot tell you what the weather was like that day, or what I ate for breakfast, but I can tell you about something quite strange that happened.

I was terribly excited, the typical over zealous child. I burst into the old jail house and tore down the hall that lead to the cells, pushing an elderly couple out of my way as I went.

I disappeared into the dark jail cell. Screamed. And then ran out sobbing in hysterics.

Life returned to normal for the next week. My father rode to work each day on his vintage 1940′s BSA motorcycle, my mother pottered around the house and looked after myself and my baby sister.

One evening (I think it was evening anyway) he asked what I had been so afraid of, what had scared me so much it had reduced me to tears.

I replied “I saw a man hanging”. He left it at that. Or I had thought.

The next night he returned home from work and informed my mother that he had spoken to a colleague that day about what I had told him.

His colleague had told him that, when it had been a fully functional jail house, there was an inmate there who was hung out the back from an apple tree.

I did not find this out until my Mother told me many years later.

Sent in by Benjamin Blake, Copyright 2010