Biography, Autobiography, Old Steve of Scarborough, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom

1. We said we would end with Fishermen and Ghosts and although we have digressed a little, we have said nothing futher about Ghosts. Now I do not believe in Ghosts, or I don't until I see one and even then I might not be too sure as I am of the belief that the whole phenomenon manifests from within the mind. But every Pub has to have one and the older the Pub, and the more often the story is told and repeated, the more bizarre the tales and unusual happenings become. Everyone has to have the ghost of the Hanged, Pregnant Barmaid, the Highwayman, even if the Pub was built long after the era of Highwaymen, the Shot Landlord, the Barmy or Suicide Landlady, the Local Squire and so on. We couldn't hold a candle to some of the tales told on dark moonlit nights, where the fog swirled round the moor and the ghostly hoof beats passed across the open heath just before the pounding was heard on the solid wooden door and an eerie voice demanded, 'Tell that bugger if he is not home in ten minutes I'm eating these fish and chips and he's locked out.'

2. So explain this, if you can. The number of times I quickly turned round, when down in my cellar, fully expecting someone to touch me on the shoulder at that point and having done so found no one there except a cold feeling and silence.

3. It was standard practice, for health and hygiene reasons and to help with the keeping of 'real ales' in good condition, to regularly hose down, with fresh cold water, all the walls and floors in a beer cellar and this I would conscientiously do. Now when this dried off, as it would do, assisted by the cooling fans and a barrel was moved, for any reason, it nearly always left a wet ring on the concrete floor where the water had been trapped under the rim. Left exposed it would quickly dry up. So then why is it possible to go down into a dark, locked cellar and having then switched on the light see, on the floor, a ring of water and on odd occasions two or more rings of water, left behind and in such a way that they could only have been caused the result of barrels being very recently moved. Moving all the other barrels, empty or full and that were standing on end on the floor, each one with the exception of one would leave a wet ring and that one might be some distance away from the exposed wet ring in question.

4. 'Ah,' I hear you cry, 'I know the answer,' and so I thought did I. Landlords drink and could quite easily move things about and being tired, overworked and under the influence, forget what they have done or why they have done it and that is possibly true. But why then, fully aware and prepared for what was happening, could I go down there, first thing in the morning, to roll out the empties ready for collection and long after the cellar had last been washed down, find these exposed rings and then they, along with all the others that I would expose, all dry off in five or ten minutes and all whilst I was there?

5. One day I took a piece of chalk and marking the side of each barrel continued the chalk line onto the concrete floor. Nothing happened and all the barrels had eventually to be moved, either for 'racking' prior to 'tapping' or to be returned as empties. The next delivery, which could be as often as three times in the week, especially in the summer, arrived and were hosed down as usual. A couple of days later there appeared a wet ring. So I was tired, maybe, but not all the time and before you ask, the cellar was always kept locked and there was only one set of keys that opened the cellar and for ninety-nine percent of the time they were in my pocket. The other one percent, well draw your own conclusions but not before I can assure you that I checked and double checked as it happened so regularly.

6. Soft drinks are one item that required compressed gas to dispense and aerate them and in order to do this a complex mixing and cooling system was installed, in another area of the cellar, and it was fed by a bank of pressurised gas cylinders, that according to supply and demand had to be changed, by us, at regular intervals. When the gas cylinder was empty the dispense heads, in the bars, would shut down and it would be necessary to go down into the cellar, shut down the cylinder at the stop valve, disconnect, using a spanner, the delivery pipe and reconnect it to the next cylinder in line, open the valve, check the pressure gauges and away it went again until the next time. Or did it? Why, on numerous occasions and always when we were at our busiest and had all been working hard for several hours and everything had been just fine, would the dispensers go down and the staff start hollering and when I went down in the cellar why would I find, on attempting to screw down the control valve, to shut off the empty cylinder, as was the correct procedure, that it was already shut down? There were no automatic shut down facilities on the equipment and no vibration on the cylinders that were secured in a safety rack and linked by flexible pipe work to the actual dispenser. I would simply open the valve and the pressure gauges would go up, indicating an adequate supply of gas and the cylinder would continue to happily dispense gas for quite some considerable time after that. The system simply would not run without gas pressure and it was impossible for it to build up within the unit so that it would run for any length of time after the cylinder had gone down, let alone close down its own control valve after having done so. But 'something' or 'someone' did.

7. The lock on the Spirit Storeroom door, also located in the cellar, had to be substantial and remain locked at all times, a condition of the Insurance Companies. Explain if you can why the key would often not turn in the direction that opened it, as it would already be in that position and be open and unlocked? Because I often forgot in my haste to keep a busy bar supplied? You might just be right in that case.

It could have been much worse and we could have had a similar Ghost to the one in the Pub, just down the road, that drank their spirits. The place was eventually exorcised when the cleaner was dismissed and the yobs, she let in, early morning, were stopped from drinking anything that didn't entail the use of a pump to dispense it, which would have been heard upstairs.

8. I have had other experiences of ghosts, if that is actually what they were? Years before, when we lived in the big house in Bradford, often my wife and I would be woken, during the night, by the sound of what we believed to be our son running along the back hall that connected his bedroom with ours and yet he would never open the door. If I jumped out of bed, me being the closest to the door, and opened it there was never anyone there and if I went on to his room it would be to find him hard and fast asleep in his own bed. That happened with monotonous regularity all the time we lived there. On other occasions I often believed I was being followed when out alone, at three, three thirty, four o'clock in the morning, scrambling over the rocks on the sea shore, looking for something to do with the Coastguard. On more than one occasion I found myself on the radio enquiring if there was anyone in the same area and being told there was not. I have also been so convinced that someone or something was there that I have hidden round rocks and waited for them to catch me up, which they never did. My own foot falls echoing below the cliff face? The wind and the sea? A combination of both? Then why did it continue after I stopped and why when I thought it close and I stepped out to confront it, was there silence and nothing there? It's a damned good job they don't scare me or I might be a nutter by now? Perhaps I am and that is why I experienced all these things? I will let you be the judge of that, but all I know is that it all felt very real to me at the time, and I would dearly have loved to have seen something which would finally have convinced me one way or the other.

9. Sad when things, in reality, began to deteriorate and everything went 'pear shaped.'

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