Nearing Doncaster the two planes ran into fog, at the sight of which the pilot of the two-seater decided to make an emergency landing. Lieutenant McConnel opted to go on to Tadcaster. The fog grew increasingly thick and it is believed the young pilot was near to exhaustion when he finally neared his destination at around 3.30 p.m. McConnel senior explained:
“As he at last approached the Tadcaster Aerodrome, the machine was seen approaching by a man in the road about a quarter of a mile distant from the camp, who reported the fog to be extremely dense. During the evidence at the inquest a girl, or young woman, said she was watching the plane and saw it apparently sideslip then right itself. It flew steadily for a minute or two, then mounted and suddenly and immediately nose-dived and crashed. The girl ran to the spot and found the officer dead.”
However, a letter to Mr McConnel after the crash from Lieutenant Larkin turned the tragedy of his son’s death into another extraordinary example of the intervention of the supernatural in human life. Larkin described his experience in carefully measured words:
“I was sitting in front of the fire at Scampton when I heard someone walking up the passage. The door opened with the usual noise and clatter that David always made. I heard his, ‘Hello, boy’ and I turned half-round in my chair and saw him standing in the doorway, half-in and half-out of the room, holding the door knob in his hand. He was dressed in his full flying clothes and he was smiling as he always was. In reply to his greeting I remarked, ‘Hullo, back already?’ He replied, ‘Yes, got there all right, had a good trip.’ He then said, ‘Well, cheerio!’ closed the door noisily and went out. I went on with my reading.”
According to Larkin, the time was between a quarter and half-past three. Shortly afterwards a Lieutenant Garner-Smith entered the room and asked what time McConnel was due back as “they were going into Lincoln that evening.” The seated man replied, “He is back, he was in the room a few minutes ago.” Larkin himself went into the city that evening – and walked into the biggest surprise of his life.
“In the smoking room of the Albion Hotel I heard a group of officers talking and overheard their conversation and the words ‘crashed’ and ‘McConnel’. I joined them and they told me that just before they had left Scampton, word had come through that McConnel had crashed and had been killed taking the Camel to Tadcaster. As you can understand, Mr McConnel, I was at a loss to solve the problem. There was no disputing the fact that he had been killed whilst flying to Tadcaster, presumably at 3.25, as we ascertained afterwards that his watch had stopped at that time. I tried to persuade myself that I had not seen him or spoken to him in my room, but I could not make myself believe otherwise as I was undeniably awake and his appearance, voice and manner had all been so natural.”
Another “moment of death apparition” – as they have become categorized by the SPR – took place in 1942 to Flight-Lieutenant Francis J Pain while he was stationed with a fighter squadron in the Western Desert. He later described the events to Michael Duball in Life Beyond The Grave (1957):
“On the morning of 3 July, my squadron took off to intercept a wave of Stuka dive-bombers, with a top cover of ME 109 fighters high above them. After the squadron was separated over a large area of sky, we made our way back to base in ones and twos. I landed and strolled over to the mess tent about a hundred yards away. Flight-Lieutenant Ginger Turner came towards me from my right. ‘Some party, Derna,’ he said. ‘I never saw them until they hit us.’
Flight-Lieutenant Pain says that “Derna” was a nickname that only Turner used for him. He then offered his colleague a cigarette:
“For the first time since I had known him, he refused, saying, ‘No thanks, old boy, I don’t need one now.’ He branched off to his tent, which was ten or twelve yards away on our right. I continued to the mess. Squadron-Leader James came into the bar and said to us, ‘Bad show about Ginger. They cut him to pieces as he pulled out from under the tail of a Stuka.’ ”
The supernatural intervened in an equally extraordinary way in the life of Joseph D Westheimer, a navigator in the US Army Air Force stationed at Haifa in 1944, who would later become famous for his Second World War novel and film, Von Ryan’s Express (1964). He was based at a small airfield at Ramat David, in what was then Palestine. It was so small, he would recall later, that it did not even have its own radio transmitter. Planes flying missions over the Mediterranean had to find their own landmarks when they returned – which could be difficult at night.
After one particular night bombing operation, Leroy Williams, the pilot of Westheimer’s B-24, found himself in low cloud and unable to spot any landmark that would enable them to reach the base. Instead, Williams followed the normal emergency procedure and made contact with Lydda Field near Tel Aviv and asked for a directional bearing to Lydda. Westheimer explained:
“We knew how long it would take to fly from Lydda to Ramat David and when we’d been in the air that long we dropped down to look for the field’s lights. But there was no field, only rugged mountains, which would have made it impossible for a big bomber to land. So Leroy decided to try again and we headed back to Lydda to repeat the whole procedure.”
By now, though, the B-24 was running low on fuel. Leroy Williams made a quick decision and informed the crew he was going to land at Lydda, where they could refuel and return to Ramat David the next morning. Instead, though, something inexplicable happened, as Westheimer recalled:
“We homed in on the Lydda signal and made a safe landing. But we weren’t where we were supposed to be at all. We had landed at Ramat David – the field without a radio. We had followed a signal, no doubt about that – even though there was no signal to follow. Something had brought us back to safety, but we never found out what.”
Another celebrity who served in the Second World War and had several brushes with the unknown was Michael Bentine, one of the founders of the legendary Goons radio show, who talked about this side of his life to Mark Kahn of the Sunday Mirror in August 1981. Bentine had, in fact, been fascinated by the paranormal since he was a child, as his father had been a medium and spirit healer. The older man conducted many experiments in his quest to prove that a parallel form of life existed and Michael had been present at a number of these, witnessing examples of levitation and ectoplasm. Turning to the war years he explained:
“During the war I was an RAF Intelligence Officer and one of my jobs was briefing bomber crews before they set off on missions. I already knew I had the gift of ESP and could sense when people were going to die. Again and again I would see the faces of one or another of these people turn into a skull in front of my eyes and I knew they would die that night. There were times when I prayed that this gift would be taken away from me.”
Bentine survived the war, but was reluctant to use his psychic powers. However, in 1984 he took part in a twelve-part series about psychical and spiritual powers for Channel Four and was haunted by his wartime memories once again. He explained:
“We went to this airfield which had been used during the war by Polish airmen. The place was abandoned and deserted and they asked me to see if there were any psychic forces still there. I was very nervous and not sure I should do it. But I did manage to make contact with several of the dead flyers and I was relieved to find they were at peace. In a way it helped me to exorcize those faces I had seen over forty years before.”
Not all ghostly airmen have been benign, however. In his exhaustive Gazetteer of British Ghosts (1971), Peter Underwood tells the story of an airman who was charged with murdering a woman and child in a house next door to a derelict hall in Ealing, Middlesex and hanged for the crime in 1943. A few years after the war, a photographer who rented the hall and restored it as a studio found his work being disturbed by supernatural occurrences. Underwood writes:
“Lamps hanging from the ceiling swung in unison, footsteps sounded on the unfrequented floor, people were touched, voices were heard. Convinced that the place was indeed haunted, the photographer and his staff held séan
ces at which a dead airman purported to communicate, spoke of an aircraft which at the relevant date was on the secret list and insisted that he had not been guilty of the crime for which he had been hanged.”
Underwood found the story convincing. He believed the photographer – who had been a young boy at the time of the events – could not have had any direct knowledge of either the murder, which was described in some detail, or the secret aircraft.
In 1978, a young Surrey couple approached the SPR to complain that the ghost of an RAF pilot dressed in a Second World War leather jacket, helmet and oxygen mask was plaguing their home in Croydon. Four times he had materialized in the house and – poltergeistlike – tossed around a number of Second World War souvenirs. When investigator Brian Nisbet visited the property he discovered that the husband was a collector of military regalia and it was a tailor’s dummy dressed in an SS uniform and several other Nazi souvenirs that had been subjected to the spirit’s wrath.
It seemed to Nisbet that the ghost was angry at finding reminders of the enemy in the house. Following this piece of intuition, the SPR established that the house was on the site of the old Croydon Airport, which had been operational during the war. Still, though, Brian Nisbet remained puzzled by the haunting, concluding his report: “I have not been able to explain any of the things that have happened to these people.”
An evil wartime spirit was also believed to have been the cause of disturbances at another house built on an airfield at Great Waldingfield in Suffolk, used by both British and American aircraft. Richard and Angie Richardson, who lived there in the 1980s, said their nights were regularly disturbed by rattling and banging sounds and an “evil-looking shadow” that would flit across their bedroom. Angela explained:
“There was a story that a plane had crashed on returning from a raid over Germany and the pilot had been incinerated in the blaze. After that people crossing the spot were said to get the impression of an eerie presence and the locals avoided the area at all times. Some of them were very surprised when the airfield was developed after the war. In the end we decided to sell up and leave. It was not a happy time for us – and probably not for that tormented ghost either.”
In contrast, the News of the World reported a phantom airman who seemed anything but tormented in 1979. He was apparently known as “Fred” and was to be found in the aircraft museum at Cosford in Shropshire. A retired RAF engineer, John Small, who looked after a Lincoln bomber in the collection, has seen him on several occasions. Small said the figure wore a blue battledress and a white polo-necked sweater. He explained:
“The first time I saw him I was speechless. He was sitting on a toolbox inside the Lincoln. Then he vanished. I’ve seen him again in the plane or in the hangar and so have most of the staff. He doesn’t look eerie, though, but quite normal. We think he was a wartime flier.”
There are several more haunted wartime airfields that are worth a mention here. Bircham Newton Aerodrome on the empty wastes of East Anglia, for example, made national news in 1972 when the strange events happening there were featured on Jack de Manio’s morning radio show and BBC TV’s news programme, Nationwide. Originally constructed in 1914, the airfield had been abandoned in the inter-war years and then brought back into active service in 1939 as a base for RAF, Australian and Canadian pilots. Following the end of hostilities the base was converted into a hotel – and the haunting began in an area that had been turned into a squash court. Players suddenly became aware of being watched by a man in RAF uniform who disappeared through the walls as soon as he was approached.
After being disturbed by several appearances of the ghostly pilot, they decided to leave a tape recorder in the court overnight. The following morning the tape was found full of weird sounds including a strange, groaning voice and the drone of aircraft. When Jack de Manio replayed the recording on his programme it caused a sensation – and generated numerous ideas about the cause. It was suggested a man named Wiley who had committed suicide in the Officers’ Mess during the war could cause the haunting. Alternatively, the figure might have been one of the victims of an Anson that crashed on a nearby church, killing the three-man crew, Pat Sullivan, Gerry Arnold and “Dusty” Miller, all of whom were said to have been keen squash players. When a TV crew set up their cameras to try and film the mysterious figure, they were subjected to a number of unnerving noisy incidents and the sound of hurrying footsteps. Andrew Green investigated the story for his book, Our Haunted Kingdom (1973) and relates one particularly fascinating incident:
“During the height of the investigation, a BBC woman interviewer from the Nationwide programme decided she would stay the night in the ‘haunted court’ with a tape recorder and was, at her request, locked in. She described later the intense feeling of cold, the sounds of banging doors opening and closing and the peculiar fact that the recorder stopped without any reason at 12.30. It was only when she returned to the studio that she was able to get the machine going again. No fault was found with it. The hotel was demolished later in 1972 leaving the mystery of the haunted squash court so far unanswered.”
Another phantom airman with the ability to walk through solid objects was first reported in 1965 at the new Teesside International Airport, built on what had been a military airfield until the previous year. One winter’s evening a young apprentice was suddenly disturbed by a man dressed unmistakably in the uniform of a Second World War fighter pilot. When the youngster asked, “Can I help you, sir?” – a later account in the Ripon Gazette and Observer reported – the figure walked straight through a corrugated sheet wall. On a second occasion, the figure disappeared through a solid wall, causing the newspaper to speculate that the ghost “is believed to have been an airman of 264 Squadron stationed at RAF Leeming during the war.”
Although ghosts in general have a tendency to be solitary, several distinctive figures believed to be wartime pilots have been observed at Martlesham Heath in Suffolk, which was a major base and is now occupied by Suffolk Police Headquarters and a shopping mall. Since 1978, several police officers have reported weird happenings and the owners of one of the shops have claimed to have seen a “detached human shadow” outside their building. At the former RAF base at Metheringham near Lincoln the ghost seen wandering around the perimeter track is undoubtedly that of a woman. She was a local girl, Catherine Bystock, who was killed in a motorcycle accident during the war. She apparently returns at around 10 a.m. to flag down motorists on the road and ask them to help her boyfriend who is lying injured nearby. She vanishes as soon as any vehicle stops, though. Also in Lincolnshire at RAF Manby near Louth a Second World War pilot wearing flying gear and a long coat regularly returns to his old stamping ground. Several reports during the 1980s have added the information that his appearances have sometimes coincided with the droning sound of aircraft engines on the old runway.
In fact, tales of “phantom engine noises” are by no means uncommon, according to Bruce Halfpenny, a former RAF policeman who has spent years investigating stories of haunted airfields. He has carried out research at a number of old bases throughout the country where unearthly sounds have been reported, he explained to David Gordon of the News of the World:
“One of the most interesting cases was at an old airfield, Kelstern, in Lincolnshire where I heard the sound of engines approaching the overgrown concrete runway at dusk several times. I can recognize old bombers from their noise, so I knew it was a Lancaster. It sounded as if it was limping back to base. Then the engines suddenly stopped as if something had happened to the plane. It was uncanny.”
Bruce also told the reporter he had felt a “chilling presence” at an old base near Middleton St George in Durham where Canadian fliers were stationed during the war. They were known as “The Ghost Squadron”, he said, because of their “death’s head” badge. Many of them died and the ghost hunter is sure that some are still haunting the airfield.
A far more unusual and unnerving figure is associated with RAF Mildenhall on the remote Norfo
lk Breckland. Known as “Old Roger”, he is dressed in a fluttering cloak, his long hair streaming in the breeze and playing an ancient flute. It is claimed he has the power to “whistle up” a sandstorm and did this twice during the Second World War to protect the airbase from German raiders. Herbert E Wiseman told the story in the October 1960 issue of East Anglian Magazine:
“ ‘Old Roger’ was on the spot on two occasions when he was most urgently needed by the RAF. Had he not whistled up his sandstorms the base might have been badly plastered with incendiaries and high explosives. On the first occasion in 1941 when the aerodrome was attacked, the old fellow was distinctly seen playing his pipe and a few moments afterwards up went whirling pillars of sand all around. The raiding planes couldn’t find the target so they turned tail and fled and the wind and sand subsided and all was quite and normal again.”
The second appearance of “Old Roger” occurred on a March evening two years later. This time it was a single dive bomber that had found its way through the coastal defences. Says Wiseman:
“The lone plane was seen approaching when the whistle started again and a great roaring pillar of sand swept the sky. A few moments later there was not a trace of sand and not a sign of the plane. Anyone who might have concluded that the whole thing was a hallucination or the raider was a ‘ghost plane’ was quickly proved wrong when the wreckage of the raider was found a few miles away on the East Coast.”
But the story did not quite end there. For the investigators who examined the plane found it difficult to understand why the German had crashed and killed every member of the crew. Wiseman explains the eerie finale:
“The experts were baffled. They discovered that sand had penetrated the mechanism of the plane at every point. The wreck looked as if sand had been shovelled into it. Some suggested that the raider had flown into a sandstorm. But a soil expert would have none of this. ‘Sandstorm!’ he is reputed to have said, ‘they do not occur in England – at least not sandstorm of such heaviness and violence!’ Those who were familiar with the legend of ‘Old Roger’ knew exactly who was responsible for coming to his country’s aid . . .”
The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings Page 34