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The next coincidence came a week or so later when another teenager of my acquaintance told me of his own encounter with the Robins Lane ghost, a couple of years earlier. He and a friend had been walking home along this popular short-cut, late at night, when suddenly they had seen a white shape in front of them. It was only there for a few seconds... and so they carried on walking. When they reached the place where the 'shape' had appeared, to their consternation it appeared again, this time in a field to their left. They walked on, a little bit faster... and then, to their horror, it had appeared once more - in front of them - when it should have been behind them! The idea that some ghostly apparition was playing games with them was too much, even for these brash teenage boys, and they weren't ashamed to admit that they had turned tail and run back along the path, taking the long route home instead.
When I subsequently discovered that Blackpool's UFO research group had staged several 'watches' along Robins Lane in search of similar strange lights, I couldn't resist the temptation - the next Saturday night saw my partner and I walking the dogs along the Lane at two in the morning, hopeful of seeing something mysterious for ourselves. We walked quite a distance, my partner took several photographs, and the dogs were ecstatic at this midnight adventure, but of course we saw nothing remotely supernatural. Until we developed the photographs. To our surprise, one of them showed a white misty shape hovering above a field just off in the distance. What was it? Had we captured the ghost of Robins Lane on film? Sadly, probably not. We surmised that the strange glow was probably caused by the camera flash, lighting up a patch of marsh-mist. And the following day we retraced our steps and explored that field, and sure enough, we found a pond. The boys had probably seen a similar patch of mist, lit up for a second or two by a distant car headlight. How disappointing!
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However, none of this explains what happened to the poor taxi-driver, back in 1936. And despite the newspaper's tendency to turn his experience into a rattling good story, there is no reason to doubt that he did have a very frightening experience. It was nearly eleven o'clock on a cold December night when a lady outside North Shore Station hailed Harry Hodges' cab and asked him to take her to Robin's Lane in Carleton. Harry set off to take the best route; over Carleton railway crossing and along the Carleton road. He turned into Stocks Lane and was about to turn right into Robins Lane when his passenger interrupted, asking him to turn left instead. Harry was puzzled - the road on the left led only to the Crematorium gates - but the woman insisted, so he did as she asked.
He pulled up just in front of the gates and waited whilst the woman found her purse to pay him... and as he turned to take the money from her, he looked out of the car's side window and found himself staring into the face of an old man, 'with sunken eyes, long dark hair, a Punch-like nose and prominent chin'. Then Harry jumped almost out of his skin as an ear-splitting scream came from behind him - his passenger had obviously seen the face too. The next moment, the woman was clambering out of the cab and running off, disappearing down a path to the left of the Crematorium gates. Stunned, Harry continued to watch in grim fascination as the phantom face moved around to the front of his cab, and then... it wasn't there any more. It had simply disappeared.
Harry's next thought was one of concern for his terrified passenger, who had obviously seen the face too. Quickly, he put his cab into gear and maneouvred so that the headlights illuminated the path the woman had taken, but there was no sign of her - and we can forgive him if he didn't actually get out of his car to make a more thorough search...
Text © Melanie Warren 2001 |
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