A Library Story for Hallowe'en.

[htfb]

[Written to read aloud at the end of a Hallowe'en party in the Community Library for about forty overexcited primary-age children. Probably 500 words too long for all except the oldest of them.]

Comments

[chiller]

Poor Mary! I wonder if bread has yeasty ghosts?

Obv I have an additional reason to like this, since stories don't often mention Catford.

[htfb]

Grove Park, at the time, was still a woody hill of Unburnt Ash.

[chiller]

Now that IS such stuff as dreams are made on.

[brightybot]

Fantastic - is it all your imagination or is there really a ghost story told about the library?

[htfb]

I'm sure some of the dons did try to propagate the presence of a ghost, which I heard about when I visited the college when small rather than as a student, and I suspect Roger Highfield was the source of that. I'm not sure where the feet-in-the-raised floor come from but it's certainly not mine and I think whoever told me about the Merton ghost used that detail. The narrative, such as it is, is mine.

[brightybot]

I've heard the feet in the raised floor thing before, too, possibly from my father. I wrote a ghost story at school that used that deatail - but based it in Keble.

[brightybot]

Feet through the floor is a ghost story classic - it makes me think of the Roman soldiers stamping through a basement in York, only visible above the knees.