A Christmas Ghost Story

A small seasonal gift.

Grüezi!

As we slide towards Christmas and the new year, I thought I would share a ghost story with you.

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A Shooting Man

I heard this from my grandmother, who had it from the man himself – her brother.

Harold had been a miner before the war. When he joined up they made him a sapper – his war was spent in tunnels. He was a corporal by armistice.

When the war ended he didn’t move back north. He was done being under ground.

But he came back that Christmas of 1919 to see his sister, who had been living in the small cottage near the colliery since their father’s death.

She had recently taken in a springer spaniel – liver-and-white, well-bred, half a dozen or so years old. For company.

It was a working dog, the estate’s head keeper’s animal. He’d enlisted in 1916 and been lost in France the following December.

The telegram was barely opened when his widow remarried, the village gossips said. And she didn’t want the dog where she was going.

My grandmother had a way with animals, but the spaniel did not settle. It would sit in the hall by the door. It walked unwillingly and barely ate.

Over a quiet Christmas lunch, she told Harold the news from that morning’s chapel. The estate was holding a Boxing Day drive – the first since the war. The new keepers were short-handed. They needed anyone who could work a dog. Harold knew.

“Take him,” she said. “It might do him good.”

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Although she’d made a bed up for him, Harold preferred to stretch out on some blankets and watch the fire go down. That Christmas night as he lay there before the dying glow of the coals, he could hear the wind whipping around the cottage, making a noise in the chimney, rattling the thin window panes.

The dog wasn’t sleeping either. And then he heard it. A sort of shuffling. Light steps on the gravel path. The spaniel began to bark.

A badger, likely. Nosing around for scraps.

A sharp gust clattered the front door and the letter box.

My grandmother came down with a small lamp lit and found Harold trying to calm the dog.

“Fox or a badger set him off. Sorry he woke you.”

“That wasn’t it,” she said. “I thought I heard a whistle.”