‘Help!’ cried a voice in the dark – but there was no one there. Help had, presumably, come too late
By Bunty Austin and Richard Holland
Mr Ted Hughes, a resident of Anglesey in North Wales, told ghost story collector Bunty Austin about the following weird adventure he had in the estuary of the River Forth, north of Edinburgh:
During the war, when I was in the Navy, a group of us were on guard at night on a small island called Burnt Island, under the Forth Bridge. It was a vital spot to watch for mines, flares from ships in distress, submarines etc. I was detailed about 3am. It was the middle of winter, very cold. The guard hut from where we used to patrol had a telephone and, occasionally, the guard commander would ring to check we were alert and hadn’t gone to sleep. Apart 
from that, the man on guard was completely alone.
‘Well, this night, it was rough, very rough indeed, blowing a full gale and so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. There was a long concrete slip, going out to sea, which we had to patrol, watching keenly for flares, mines etc and it was very narrow, so I picked my way carefully along it, for one false step and I would be in the water. I couldn’t see a thing and the only noise was the sea roaring in the gale. I was about halfway along the slip when suddenly I heard something.
‘I stopped and listened. It was a voice coming from the sea – but the odd thing was, sometimes it was faint and sounded as if it was far away, next it sounded right near my feet. “Help!” it shouted, and after a bit, “Help!” it went again, and kept on. Now it seemed to be right in front of me and I remember thinking if it was light I would be able to see him. I thrust my rifle towards the voice and said, “Here! Get hold of that!”
‘It was the only thing I had, you see, and it stretched further than my arms. But nothing grasped it and I couldn’t even see the water, it was so dark. There was just the roar of the wind and the sea and the voice crying for help. One minute it was right in front of me, to the left of the slip and, as I held my rifle there and shouted, it would come from behind me on the other side. It confused me. How could it get from one side of the slip to the other?
‘I did my best, holding out my rifle to wherever the voice was calling. It went on for three or four minutes, me turning from side to side, and completely bewildered by the dark and the gale. Then it stopped, just as suddenly as it had begun. It didn’t get weaker and weaker as it would if someone was drowning, but just as strong as I first heard it. I stood there in the blackness and the uproar, and I started to think how unnatural it was. So I groped my way back along the slip to the guard hut and telephoned my guard commander.’
Ted told Bunty Austin that he was expecting to be laughed at, but his commanding officer listened soberly and he got the strong impression ‘that he had heard it all before’. If so, he remained close lipped about it and the origin of Ted’s eerie encounter remains a mystery.
[SOURCE: ‘Haunted Anglesey' by Bunty Austin pp 39-40. ‘Haunted Anglesey' is a superb collection of mainly first-hand accounts of largely unrecorded ghosts from the Isle of Anglesey, with one or two examples, like the one above, from elsewhere. The book is published by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch ISBN 0-86381-883-8]
© Richard Holland 2008 / Extract from ‘Haunted Anglesey’ © Bunty Austin 2005
