Ghosts of the Blitz

Eighty-three years ago, on the 13th and 14th of March 1941. Hitler did his best to destroy my hometown of Clydebank; the town was raised to the ground. 528 people died (however, it has been argued that the number was much greater). That night, my paternal grandmother (25) had invited some friends from Glasgow to her house for a party. The group of friends got caught in the bombing. After the all-clear sounded, my grandmother went to help look for survivors. The first bodies she came across were those of her friends, who had been tragically killed. She never overcame that trauma; the sounds of fireworks on bonfire night or thunder during a storm would bring back memories of that night. She would stand in her hall to get away from the loud banging noises and flashing lights that reminded her so much of the falling bombs of 1941.

My maternal grandmother (20) was visiting a friend in the town when the bombing started. She was told there was no room in the friend's Anderson shelter, and she would have to make her way home. She walked to her grandparents' house in Garscadden, an area of Glasgow about a 40-minute walk from Clydebank, as the bombs dropped around her. I can't imagine the fear that both my grandmothers must have gone through but thank God they survived, or I wouldn't be here today to tell you this tale.

Clydebank was a prime target for the Germans due to shipyards and munitions factories. When the air-raid sirens wailed their haunting howls at 9 pm on the evening of Thursday the 13th of March, it was a bright, clear spring night with the full moon shining down on the town, commonly known at the time as a bomber's moon due to the fact the more brilliant the moon, the easier it was for the Germans to find their targets below. Over two nights, Clydebank was brought to its knees, and the town would never be the same again.

Fast-forward 62 years to September 2008, when I received the keys to my new rented flat on Dumbarton Road, Clydebank. It was a small one-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a modern set of flats built in the early 1990s to replace a section of Victorian tenements bombed during the Blitz.

A 1950s map showing where the tenement building was directly hit by the Luftwaffe (which was marked as a ruin). Later, this space was filled with modern flats.

A picture showing the devastation on Dumbarton Road, Clydebank (March 1941). Where my flat was later built in the late 1990s.

Reconnaissance photograph of Clydebank showing targets (1939)

As you do when you move into a new home, you start to put your stamp on the place. I started painting and wallpapering the rooms and had new carpets fitted. I had managed to persuade a few friends to help with the decorating. One evening, after a day of painting the living room, I suggested to my friend that we pop over to the local pub for drinks and dinner as a reward for all our hard work that day. On returning to the flat, I went to turn on the ceiling lights in the living room, only to find they weren't going on. Walking over to the centre of the room, I noticed that both the light bulbs had been dislodged from their light fittings and were now under the coffee table. Strange, I thought, especially since removing the bulbs would involve pressing hard on the bulb and forcefully twisting it out of the socket. This was also strange as it had happened to both light fittings, not just one.

There was an eerie feeling in the flat those first couple of weeks I spent decorating, a sense of being watched. A week or so later, after the light bulb incident, I was returning home from work when I looked up at my living room windows and noticed they were fully opened, with the curtains being blown outside. Now, these windows had child locks on them, so there was no way they could have been blown open in the wind. Nobody else had a set of keys to the flat, so I knew nobody else could have come in while I was out and opened the windows.

Over the next few months, other strange occurrences, such as money going missing and turning up inside the kitchen bin, would occur. However, two of the creepiest incidents would happen late at night while I was in bed. The first occurred after a friend, and I had gone to sleep after a night out in town; she was staying at mine to save her trying to get home in the early hours. I awoke to what I can only describe as an air raid siren going off outside. I opened the window and looked up and down the empty road. It was about 4 am , and there was not a soul out. As I was looking out the window, my friend awoke, and I asked her if she could hear that sound; she could, thank God, as for a moment, I thought I was going crazy. The siren lasted for about a minute before it eventually died down. In all that time, not one person appeared to leave their home to look outside and see what the noise was about. The next day, I was at a friend's birthday party with many people from Clydebank. I asked them if they had heard anything in the early morning hours, and nobody did. To this day, I can't explain why that siren went off as it did. Could it have been some form of residual energy, replaying the air raid siren that screeched across the town those fateful spring nights in 1941?

The next unusual event that was to occur happened again in the early hours of the morning. I was fast asleep when I awoke to what felt like a cat walking over the duvet and me. Growing up, I had a cat, and I recognised that feeling of little paws pressing down on the duvet as the cat made its way across. For a split second, being disturbed from a deep sleep and not knowing what was happening, I automatically concluded that it was our family cat, forgetting I no longer lived at home and that our cat had died years previously. I lay there for a few seconds, not knowing what to think. I then dared to pull back the covers and jump out of bed. I switched on the light to find nothing in the bedroom; that is nothing that the naked eye could see.

A few months later, a friend I worked with was having a birthday party at her house, and she thought it would be fun to invite a tarot reader. He set himself up in the back bedroom, and one by one, we went in to have our cards read. Some of the things he said were generic, like, "I can see you meeting someone new in the next few months". However, just as I was getting ready to leave, he asked if I ever had anything strange happen in my flat. When I said yes, he went on to say that the spirit of three children visited that flat, and they have been trying to make themselves known. Straight away, I recalled those little taps on the duvet cover. Could it have been little hands tapping the covers, trying to wake me up!?

I bought a house in another part of the town a few years ago. The house was built in the late 1930s, just before the outbreak of war. The historian in me likes to research the history of the houses I live in, and I was interested to see if this house had been bombed during the Clydebank Blitz. Fortunately, Hitler's bombs did not hit this house. However, the building next door (four flats in one block) was not so fortunate. A bomb landed nearby, killing eight people who lived in the block and an 18-year-old A.R.P messenger boy in the street outside the house.

I'm very happy in this new house, with no signs of spooky goings-on so far!