GHOSTWRITTEN by Ricky Blake.

I was asked to recount a personal encounter with the supernatural for this article. In the story I am about to tell I am not the subject rather, my father is, but it is a story that is nonetheless personal to me in the sense that it was one in which I would ask him to retell countless times to me as a child. I hope you find it as interesting as I do.

I present: ‘The Penny, the Girl, & The Signalman.’

Let me take you to the Yorkshire village of Hutton-Cranswick at the turn of the last century. The village is served by a railway station on a busy line. The villagers relied on the railway and as result the railway staff were a familiar part of the community. None more so than Mr Meginson the Porter-Signalman, whose job title meant that alongside the important safety critical role of signalman, he dealt with tickets, lamp trimming, and many other small jobs for a village station. His reward from the ‘money-centred’ railway company was a cottage, a meagre wage, smart uniform. He was known to be an upstanding family man.

For Meginson, the safety of the railway was top priority, and lamps and tickets came second. Something which was not the priority for the railway company, for them it was the accounts and that every farthing was accounted for. I’m sure Meginson found a quiet hour to sort the accounts for an upcoming audit that cold Edwardian winter. I’m sure too that it was cosy in his cabin with the coal fire gleaming off the polished levers, and brass instruments of his trade. It has been lost to history how the seemingly insignificant event happened that was to cause Meginson such mental anguish and grief. Perhaps a clumsy accident, perhaps a careless oversight by a man keeping so many plates spinning. So small did it seem that he would not have been aware until the men from the British Transport Police came up the wooden steps to his cabin.

The charge was serious and plain, one penny was missing from the latest audit and he was liable for embezzlement. The punishment was swift, Meginson was immediately dismissed from his post pending an investigation, if guilty he would lose his home and face imprisonment. The lack of the small railway wage meant that Meginsons family were unable to properly sustain themselves. That cold winter his daughter got sick, and at a time when one’s chances of recovery were dependent on a well-stocked fire and hearty meals, the girl did not recover. Because he was known in the village, an outcry cleared his name and forced his reinstatement, albeit on a reduced wage. Nothing could replace his lost daughter. The missing penny remained lost.

Around seventy years on, little had changed in Hutton-Cranswick signal box, the addition of electric lighting being perhaps the most notable change. A newly qualified signalman Nigel Blake was working in his first box. On that winter’s night, the coal fire gleamed off the polished lever handles and brass instruments, and Mr Blake took advantage of a quiet hour to sort out a delivery of tickets into their allotted slot in the mahogany drawer. I’m sure there was little on his mind while doing this dull boring ta“Bugger!”

The signalman pulled out the heavy drawer too far when it fell out leaving the little card tickets mixed up in a mound on the floor. After some time sorting the tickets back into their correct slot it was a relief when the time came to put the drawer back. The frustrated signalman tried to ram the aged drawer back into its slot and it would not go. Now having to look in the hole, the signalman saw right at the very back of the cabinet in a dark corner, was the blockage.

Pulling it out to inspect he found an Edwardian penny, his mind instantly went to the occurrence book he had just been looking through, which, with newspaper clippings and official documentation, gave a history of the station and the likes of Meginson.

Then the temperature dropped, the young man’s attention was drawn from the enarius in his hand to the opposite corner of the room. Against the black windows coated in condensation the faint spectre of a young girl in Edwardian dress appeared, she smiled, bowed her head and vanished from view. It was as if through the decades the mystery of the missing penny was solved, and an aged old wrong had been put right.

The signal box was demolished a few years after Mr. Blake finished working there, and with it went the ghosts of over a hundred years of constant railway operation. Now I can’t say for certain if the penny was that same penny, nor if the girl was added for the amusement of a small child. However, there is something to be said about the streets we walk, the jobs we fill, the buildings we inhabit, and the ghost stories which they hold. We undoubtedly are, in our daily lives, walking a well-trodden path.