Ghosts & Gallows (21 page)

Who did kill Pat McAdam and why? The prime suspect, Thomas Ross Young, was released from prison in 1975 after serving two-thirds of his sentence for assaulting a teenager. In June 1977, police investigating the rape of a sixteen-year-old girl at an address in Ashley Street, Glasgow, were given his name by the victim, who claimed he had held her by force inside the house for ten hours and subjected her to a repeated and violent assault. Ross was traced to the house of his estranged wife, where he was arrested. Police found a secret hideout under the floorboards where the lorry driver had been concealing himself, which contained a number of items including a make-up compact. This was found to belong to thirty-seven-year-old bakery worker, Frances Barker, who had gone missing from her home in Maryhill Road, Glasgow earlier the same month. Her decomposing body, naked from the waist down and with her hands tied behind her back, was subsequently discovered in undergrowth near a service road leading to Inchneuk Farm at Glenboig on 27 June. Forensic analysis of hairs collected from the cab of Young’s lorry revealed they were the same as those from Frances Barker’s body and on 25 October 1977 at the High Court in Glasgow, a jury took an hour to find him guilty of murder and Young, the ‘Monster of the highway’, was sentenced to life imprisonment. At the time of her disappearance, Hazel Campbell had told police that Pat had refused to sleep with someone at the party they went to on the Saturday night in Glasgow as she was on her period and most commentators have concluded that she would have dissuaded her killer from having sex for the same reason. It probably cost her her life.

On 23 September 2007, over forty years after the disappearance of Pat McAdam, Young was officially charged with her murder by Sheriff Kenneth Ross via a video link with the Dumfries Sheriff Court. The petition alleged that Ross had carried out the killing, by means unknown, at or near Charlesfield Farm on the B7020 road between Annan and Dalton on 19 February 1967. However, despite the indictment, closure in the McAdam case was not made possible as it was subsequently found that Ross, then aged seventy-two, was too ill to stand trial due to a suspected heart condition, and the hearing was dropped. Two months later, in November 2007, the case of Thomas Young took a new twist when it was announced that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission had referred his conviction for the murder of Frances Barker to the High Court of Justiciary as being unsafe. In the Commission’s view, a study by two forensic pathologists at Glasgow University together with a report submitted by FBI profilers at the Behavioural Analysis Unit at Quantico, Virginia, on the killings of six young Scottish women during the 1970s made it highly likely that either one or more men had carried out all six murders. The reports had been prepared as part of the prosecution case against another Scotsman, serial sex killer Angus Sinclair, who was accused of killing two Edinburgh women, Helen Scott and Christine Eadie, in 1977 in what became known as the World’s End pub murders. Scott and Eadie, along with Frances Barker, were three of the six ‘cold cases’ which were reviewed at the time by the FBI, all of which, according to profiler Mark Safarik, were carried out by the same killer or killers. Sinclair’s trial collapsed in August 2007 due to lack of evidence but it paved the way for a review of Young’s conviction, who was in prison during the times that the other five women were killed, although the Commission acknowledged that there remained a strong body of evidence that continued to implicate Young in the murder of Frances Barker. To date the High Court has not pursued the Review Commission’s case and Thomas Ross Young remains behind bars in Peterhead Prison, now one of Scotland’s longest-serving prisoners.

The story of Pat McAdam continues to arouse periodic interest. In January 2011, the discovery of a woman’s skeletal remains in a disused quarry near Longtown in Cumbria brought the case again briefly into the spotlight, but forensic examination soon discounted any connection with the forty-four-year-old mystery. Writing about Croiset’s role in the investigation in the early 1980s, Colin Godman concluded that if Pat McAdam’s body
had
been discovered in 1970, the case would have become ‘the classic work of psychic detection’. Even Croiset’s most ardent critic, Piet Hein Hoebens (who died in 1984), admitted that it was one of the clairvoyant’s greatest triumphs. However, Hoebens preferred to believe that the wealthy Croiset had in fact paid his secretary to travel to Scotland to collect the information on his behalf, a somewhat desperate attempt at debunking given the wealth of independent evidence that supports the genuineness of the case. ‘A few hundred pounds is a bargain for a classic ESP hit’ was his rather short-sighted comment, a response that goes a long way to proving that on occasion, a belief in paranormality is far more credible than the ‘rational’ explanations of the sceptics.

For parapsychologists intent on obtaining the smoking gun evidence that would give psychic detection the satisfaction of a convincing ‘case closed’ scenario, the Croiset-McAdam story was a frustrating one. Colin Godman’s ‘classic work’ seemed to be forever tantalisingly out of reach, but as we shall see, it was coming. It would just be a matter of time …

We have already seen how the alleged ghost of a murder victim was the catalyst that brought about the revelation of Modern Spiritualism in the middle years of the nineteenth century. What is often cited as the first ever instance of the investigation of a haunted house, a hundred years before the birth of Christ, may also have involved the apparition of a murdered man. This is the well-known account, attributed to Pliny the Younger, who described the discovery of the skeleton of a man, bound hand and foot in rusted chains, from under the floor of a courtyard in a villa in Athens. The appearance over several years of the fettered figure of a grey-haired old man, so Pliny recorded in a series of letters to a friend, had so frightened several occupants that the house had a sinister reputation in the immediate neighbourhood and the owner had considerable difficulty in finding tenants who would stay for any length of time. A philosopher, attracted by the local tales and the disarmingly low rent, moved in and observed the appearance of the ghost, which disappeared at a particular spot in a corner of the courtyard. When this was excavated, by workmen in the presence of the philosopher and a magistrate, a shallow grave was found which must have lain undisturbed for many years. After the skeleton was given a proper burial, the sinister apparition of the mysterious man in chains was never seen again.

Unlike the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who revealed to his son how he was murdered in his sleep (with poison poured into his ear) by his brother Claudius, Pliny’s spectral Athenian, if he was the victim of an ancient murder, did not reveal the identity of his killer or give any indication of how he came to be bound and buried in such a way. The world of literature abounds with vengeful spectres who materialise to denounce killers and reveal secrets from beyond the grave. Much nearer to our own time than Shakespeare’s tale of the tragic Danish king, writers Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd, in their book
Ghost Stories Round the World
(1965), a collection of accounts based on allegedly true happenings, tell the story of one such purposeful shade, that of the doomed Henry Edwards, ‘The Ghost of Anngrove Hall’. Edwards, an under-coachman in the service of Charles Stanford, is dismissed and later murdered by the Master of Angrove for revealing his love for the Squire’s daughter, Catherine. Henry’s ghost later appears to his sister Polly and denounces his former master as a killer. Polly, in the tradition of the tale of the Red Barn with which it is contemporary, dreams of her brother’s body buried in a grave under a haystack on the Anngrove estate. Labourers from a neighbouring country house dig at the site and unearth a heavily decomposed body dressed in a coachman’s uniform, but by this time Charles Stanford himself has disappeared, presumably at the ghostly hands of his former servant, and Anngrove Hall, located near Stokesley, a small market town in North Yorkshire, has become a derelict ruin.

Palmer and Lloyd’s book contains a number of stories previously collected by Charles Lindley Wood (1839-1934), 2nd Viscount Halifax, and published in 1936, with a foreword and annotations on the contents, by his son as
Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book
. The book, which contains a broad cross-section of reported cases of supernormal phenomena including crisis ghosts, phantasms of the living, phantom guardians and haunting apparitions, is one of the first major collections of allegedly true ghost stories and should be read by any serious investigator interested in the history of the paranormal. Lord Halifax was an avid collector of supernatural encounters and gives the provenance for the vast majority of the accounts he preserved, these often being the experiences of personal acquaintances. Sadly, the authority is missing for one such tale, ‘The Passenger with the Bag’, which interestingly features the ghost of a murdered man whose appearance results in the eventual apprehension of the killer: an unnamed gentleman is travelling on a train out of Euston and falls into conversation with a fellow passenger, who reveals himself to be the director of the particular railway company on whose line they are travelling. The director, a Mr Dwerringhouse, discloses he is carrying a substantial amount of money to a local bank which will be used to finance the construction of a new branch line. When Lord Halifax’s correspondent mentions he is attending a dinner party at a particular house in the district, the traveller declares the owner to be his niece and asks to be remembered to her, mentioning a previous visit during which he stayed in the Blue Room and complained of the over-large fire which had been lit in the grate. When the train pulls up at a station and the director gets off carrying his bag, the passenger realises he has dropped his cigar case and, following him out onto the platform, observes Mr Dwerringhouse talking under a lamp-post with a man with sandy-coloured hair whose face he clearly sees. However, the two men have unaccountably disappeared when the narrator reaches the spot and a nearby porter declares that no persons matching their description were standing on that part of the platform at the time. Arriving at his destination, the traveller dresses for dinner and during the meal passes on the message to his hostess, who is clearly distressed at hearing the news. After the ladies have retired, leaving the men to their brandy and cigars, her husband takes the narrator to one side and reveals that his wife’s uncle is missing and under investigation by the police, having apparently absconded with £70,000 of the railway company’s money. Their conversation is overheard by two fellow guests, also directors of the same company, who request the narrator give a statement about his encounter to the Railway Board. At the meeting a few days later, the narrator recognises the man with the sandy hair, who turns out to be the company’s Chief Cashier. When questioned he eventually admits to robbing and murdering Mr Dwerringhouse in a quarry on the way to the company’s bank, although the killing itself was not planned: in the struggle to gain possession of the bag, the railway director fell and died instantly after striking his head on a rock.

The story sounds almost too good to be true and at this distance of time there is much to be suspicious about the uncorroborated account as presented by Lord Halifax in his
Ghost Book
, particularly as all important dates, locations, as well as the names of all but one of the participants are missing. However, Charles Lindley Wood was a careful collector of allegedly true paranormal experiences and in this respect ‘The Passenger with the Bag’ is an exception; the vast majority of the stories included in the collection (which includes a detailed account of the famous poltergeist haunting at Hinton Ampner in Hampshire) contain details of dates and witnesses. Rather than dismissing the account out of hand, it serves as a good example of the importance in obtaining accurate information concerning reports of supernormal experiences in order to make the reported facts that much more credible. As we have seen with the case of Gerard Croiset, the sceptical opposition to the paranormal has reached almost professional status in recent years, one that can only be challenged by a meticulous and similarly professional presentation of convincing evidence.

Not all ghosts that are said to be the victims of violent crimes and murder, however, are as obliging as the apparitions of Henry Edwards and Mr Dwerringhouse in revealing the identity of their killers. An interesting modern case that involves both a murder, the appearance of an apparition thought to be that of the victim, and also where specific details of witnesses and events, both natural and supernatural, are readily known, remains a mystery to this day.

The Hertfordshire village of Wheathampstead lies on the B653 road between Welwyn Garden City and Luton in neighbouring Bedfordshire. In the autumn and early winter of 1974, a series of strange and inexplicable events at a business premises on the northern outskirts of the village had become so regular and notable that by the beginning of the following year they made front page headlines in the local press
1
. Staff at a plant hire company operating from outbuildings at a former pig farm in Marshalls Heath Lane, a quarter of a mile north of the main Lower Luton Road, became convinced that the workplace was haunted, so much so that two employees refused to work shifts there after dark. The phenomena, which lasted for a number of months before gradually petering out, comprised incidents of a poltergeist nature and psychic touches, as well as the opening and closing of doors and the appearance of a mysterious female figure.

Several employees working at the old farm site all reported unusual happenings. Bob Shambrook, a twenty-four-year-old workman from Ware, was alone one night when a stable door adjacent to the company building began opening and shutting by itself. Disturbed by the noise, Shambrook fastened the latch securely on three occasions, but each time the door seemingly came open unaided and repeatedly banged against the wall. There was no wind and Shambrook was certain no one could have played a trick on him without being seen. Another employee, Alfred Spink, a mechanic in his mid-forties from nearby Harpenden, also reported strange experiences. Alone in one of the outbuildings one evening, he was feeding a local cat when he had the unmistakable impression of something brushing against the side of his head. Immediately turning round he saw he was quite alone, but the experience was convincing and unsettling. Another worker at the farm also reported the same cat hissing and arching its back at an apparently empty space on several occasions. Similar happenings continued at Marshalls Heath Lane for several weeks, almost as though they were building up to what became the most notable phenomenon associated with the haunting.