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| A chilling tale. http://www.canadaka.net/forums/poems-writings-f21/a-chilling-tale-t14687.html |
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| Author: | GreatBriton [ Wed May 31, 2006 12:03 pm ] |
| Post subject: | A chilling tale. |
A spooky true story. A chilling tale Local Mysteries with Tom Slemen THE British winter that stretched from December 1962 to March 1963 was the most severe on record. No place between John O'Groats to the Channel Islands escaped the freezing fog, followed by blizzards which blocked roads and rail-tracks, downed power and telephone lines and cut off villages from the rest of the country. Even the sea itself froze in the sub-zero weather, leaving the country surrounded with a half mile coastal crust of ice. Birds fell dead in the freeze from perches and died in their nests from the cold and starvation, and the Thames and the Mersey froze over, with nighttime temperatures plummeting to minus sixteen degrees centigrade. As Mark Twain once quipped: "Everybody talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it." We are rarely prepared for arctic temperatures in this country. In February 1963 there was a lull in the glacial cold spell, with brief sunny mornings which seemed like a godsend to the weather-beaten people of the north-west, but the price of these golden hours of sunshine was dense afternoon fogs which rolled in from the Irish Sea. On such a February afternoon that year, a 13-year-old boy named Angus Pike, and a boy of identical age named Jack Robbins, played truant from school and ended up at the Pier Head. A grey limbo materialised around the boys as the fog drifted in from Liverpool Bay. Angus had just enjoyed hot chicken soup at the Pier Head Cafe, which provided him with some warmth, and Jack wore a scarf and a balaclava. Seeing the silhouette of a policeman on his waterfront beat, Angus and Jack hurried away from the Landing Stage until they could see nothing in the fog but themselves, and to one another they appeared ghostly. Somewhere close to the Princes Dock, Jack Robbins saw a break in the safety chains, and down below in front of him came the swirling sounds of the river. Then he noticed the rope bridge to his right, with wooden slatted footways that stretched into the fog, fading into nothingness. Angus imagined the bridge led to a ship, and he started to walk across it, but Jack stayed put and told his friend to come back. He watched Angus become fainter, then vanish. Then came a terrible scream, and the rope bridge trembled. Jack shouted to Angus, but there was no reply, just the sounds of the Mersey lapping the sea wall below. Jack ran off and somehow found the policeman he had seen earlier, and they both were unable to find any rope bridge. Then they heard a boy crying, and the sound led them to Angus Pike, who was found sobbing, minus his school blazer, wandering along the promenade. He gave a garbled account of a strangely-dressed man who had tried to keep him on board a ship. Angus had only escaped by slipping out of his blazer, leaving the man clutching it. The policeman gave the boys bus fare to go home immediately, and he wondered about the strange incident, because he had heard about the phantom rope bridge several times before. It was said to appear whenever a fog blanketed the river, but who the would-be abductor was, and what he was for that matter, the policeman did not dwell upon for long. http://icseftonandwestlancs.icnetwork.c ... _page.html -------------------------------------------------------- A phantom ship from centuries past? |
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| Author: | jazzman [ Wed May 31, 2006 2:25 pm ] |
| Post subject: | |
That is seriously freaky man. By the way, the link doesn't work. |
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