The real Blue Lady, and other ghost stories
Classics like
Mallory Towers and
St Tinian’s had led me
to romanticise the idea of boarding school from a very young age. I
imagined a sisterhood fuelled by torch lit ghost stories and midnight
feasts. So when I was packed off to boarding school with a tuck box and a
lacrosse stick at the age of thirteen I could not have been happier.
And to my utter delight, my new school friends not only enjoyed ghost
stories, but the school had a resident ghost of its own. Her name was
The Blue Lady. I can’t remember if we knew who The Blue Lady had been,
how she had died or why she haunted the school, but every girl knew her
name. Legend had it that she always appeared on the last night of term.
We faithfully upheld the end of term tradition of sleeping the wrong way
round in our beds so when The Blue Lady came to chop our heads off in
the night she’d only find our feet. This
tradition, however flawed in logic, was something we continued into
sixth form. I remember one school story of how a bunch of girls had
stolen a blue choir robe from the chapel – one girl then donned the robe
and shrouded her face in a blue chiffon scarf. She’d waited until
midnight, when all the first years were fast asleep – their heads lined
up in a row at the foot of their beds. The girl walked down the central
aisle of the dormitory, sweeping her cloak over the girls’ heads as she
walked, waking them up one-by-one and ensuing mass hysteria.
Some of the episodes that feature in my book,
The Blue Lady,
are an undisguised nod to my time at boarding school – the Ouija board
in the abandoned dormitory being one of them. My friends and I went
through a period where we were obsessed with Ouija boards and séances,
trying to summon the spirit of The Blue Lady and other long-dead school
girls we could muster up from the Other Side. Sadly – or fortunately,
depending on your love of the dramatic – we never managed to contact a
spirit. Still, we persisted in trying.
I remember one Halloween we all filed in to one of the disused
dormitories with our matron in tow to tell our favourite ghost stories.
By that age I was an expert in urban legends, conspiracy theories and
all things spooky. A steady literary diet of Point Horror and any
classic with a mere sniff of a ghost had seen to that.
Wuthering Heights,
A Christmas Carol,
Rebecca,
The Turn of the Screw
– all books I devoured as a school girl and put me in good stead for a
little spooky storytelling of my own. As I listened to the other girls
tell their stories, old favourites such as
Humans Can Lick Too,
The Killer in the Backseat and
Babysitter with the Murderer Upstairs,
I prepared to tell mine. Let me just indulge you with a little
information about my teenage self – I was incredibly dramatic. In fact I
wanted to be an actress; I loved any opportunity to put myself centre
stage, so a ghost storytelling session was right up my street.
The story was this…
A weary traveller returns to the deep dark countryside to visit his
family. His car breaks down and he is forced to hitchhike. A woman picks
him up and agrees to take him to his family home, but first she offers
to take him to her house where she’ll make sure he gets a warm drink and
something to eat – the man looks frozen. Too polite to decline the
woman’s offer, the man reluctantly agrees.
She drives him to a splendid manor house. The windows glow with warm
and inviting light and the sound of music and laughter dance to the
man’s ears. As the woman leads him into the house he is amazed by the
scene – glamorous party guests draped in luxurious fabrics, fashions
which he hasn’t seen in his lifetime, he assumes the party is period
fancy dress. The woman leads him up a grand staircase and into a sitting
room on the first floor, pours him a brandy and they stand and exchange
pleasantries by a roaring fire whilst the other party guests come and
go.
Never too fond of brandy, the man leaves most of his drink, placing
the glass on the mantelpiece as he makes his excuses to depart. The
woman then graciously drives him to his family home. The next morning,
over breakfast, the man recalls the strange tale to his family. “But no
one has lived in that house for years,” his father says with confidence.
Determined to prove his father wrong, the man insists that they pay a
visit to the house. Sure enough, the windows are boarded up and the
walls crumble with age and decay. Lost for words, the man leads his
father into the house, up the grand staircase and into the sitting room
he’d been in only hours before. The fireplace is cold and bare, cobwebs
cover every surface and wall. But sure enough, on the mantelpiece, is
his half-drank glass of brandy.
The story went down a treat, much to my great satisfaction. It was
around this time that I began to harbour the secret desire to write. I’d
fill notebooks with bad poetry and stories and scribble down ideas for
novels and characters that I’d one day write. So it seems fittingly full
circle that I have now given The Blue Lady her own book, complete with a
story as to why she died and why her spirit just won’t rest. I wish I
knew the real Blue Lady’s story, but regardless of what it might be, my
imagination has thankfully filled in the gaps. I hope you like her story
when you read it, I hope it chills you and makes you wonder what’s
lurking just on the Other Side. Enjoy.
TOMTOM GPS SPORT WATCHES
