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Ghost-town.

On coming home, digging up skeletons and learning to lie with them.

By Lauren EntwistlePublished 2 years ago 7 min read
3
Ghost-town.
Photo by Tandem X Visuals on Unsplash

My hometown lies smack-dab in the middle of a valley. It’s a soup-bowl filling with more and more people by the year, carved out of the Dark Peak over millennia. There are two winding roads that dip out of each side (the Snake Pass and Woodhead, that veer off towards Manchester and Sheffield respectively) scooping up city folk wanting the ‘best of both worlds’.

It’s also a historical market spot, and in the 1900s the high street boasted glass fronts in looping metalwork with a large dome that crested the bank.

Nowadays, visitors can enjoy the presence of not one, but four major supermarkets dotted throughout — including an M&S, and you know you’ve made it when you get an M&S. There’s also a Wetherspoons, two Costa Coffees and the skeleton of a gutted KFC on the edge of a business park, just a road over from the shell of an empty Toby Carvery.

I learned how to balance on the clutch in those parking spots.

We have a beautiful old theatre, haunted by one of the founding members who reportedly shows up in the shape of a butterfly. There is also a blooming health food shop, a smattering of really very good eating spots (you know they’ve made it because the city newspaper said so) and an OXFAM where I sweated out an entire heatwave in the back, steaming vintage tweed jackets and sorting old children’s clothes.

We got a lot of donations from home clear-outs ahead of a move, or the odds and ends that went uncollected following someone’s passing. One time I even tagged a pair of Jimmy Choos — figuring the only way I’d ever part with them was if someone pried them off my cold, curling feet.

And so it goes. I worked in the shop the summer I first returned home from University, dragging post-graduate depression back to the town I had been so desperate to escape from in the first place. During that three year stint in another city, my hometown had loomed in the back of my brain like a half-formed spectre, a consolidation of everything terrible in the world. It was built into the bricks of a house I no longer lived in, stuck in the resting room of a ‘Carriage Company’, scattered fragments on a hillside that you could see from every street you walked on. The memories from childhood — that I had once relied on for sanity — were now poisoned thanks to their location.

Death was everywhere and nowhere, all at once. And it infuriated me.

...

I had hoped to return home a healthy, well-rounded and successful person. Mostly to show people who had stayed there, having completed apprenticeships or settled down that, actually, I had not fallen completely off the wagon when I was seventeen and my breakdowns were totally a thing of the past.

The opportunity to get away was a welcome one, representing a fresh start from years spent desperately trying to keep the reaper at bay. While I had exhausted my teen years watching one of the people I loved most wither and decay, many of my classmates were shaping themselves. They were busy forming ideas and fleshing out personalities, creating the stuff that hardens as you reach adulthood — the sense of self that protects your guts when the going gets tough.

Which makes sense, in a way. Doesn’t that old adage say ‘You Become What You Behold’?

Inevitably, I struggled horribly away from home. The disconnect I felt from fellow students was not through lack of trying on anyone’s part, but my grief carved out a bitter divide. After all, nobody wants to spend Fresher’s listening to you cry about your dead Dad in a club bathroom. There aren’t enough Jägerbombs in the world worth that.

Truthfully, I hadn’t even begun processing the sheer scope of my loss, stuck missing home and missing him and missing how things were. Every time I closed my eyes I could see the waxy figure of my father’s face in the Chapel of Rest, his hair parted in a way that he had never worn. Sometimes I could feel the tufts of his fringe beneath trembling fingers, ruffling it to normalcy and pulling the lace divider back over like a secret.

So I tried to drown out the phantoms with work. Pushing myself to study longer, write more, feverishly pitching to whoever would listen. I’d keep an unsociable timetable, ordering takeout late, getting through cheesecake and a bottle of white wine as I typed out nonsense into the early hours. No one haunted me at those hours. It was wonderful.

Then it all came to an end. I had to go home — and going back meant exorcism.

...

A good deal of the soil surrounding the town is full of bones. In the early 20th Century, the hill that now holds my father’s ashes was the site of notable murders. It used to be pocked with mine-shafts, one of which became the resting place for a local woman and her two children, thanks to her murderous partner. He’d later dispose of a four-year-old boy in a similar way.

The Pit Murders were well-known with my Dad’s generation, swapped as scary stories on the schoolyard. I wouldn’t find out about these old bones, long cleared and reburied until my return home, having landed a job as a local journalist after a few months. Someone else had to have a crack at OXFAM’s steam-cleaner.

At the paper, you could pore over the archives and find all sorts of grim endings: drowned pub landlords in the 1800s, throats cut in a grisly domestic, train passengers mistakenly stepping out into the night during the blackouts and falling from the bridge itself. They hadn’t realised the driver had stopped early and completely missed the platform edge.

But the bones that I carry around with me are quiet. I suppose you collect the souls and stories that resonate with you, in a way.

At the other side of town, on that winding road, sits a Church high above the reservoirs. It’s small but hardy, with no choice but to bear the brunt of northern winters over hundreds of years. It is one of the most desolate chapels in the country with less than forty people living in a four mile radius, leaving the pews and altar in perfect perpetuity.

Some of the skeletons that lie in the churchyard are ‘Railway Navvies’, the workers who sadly died during the construction of the Woodhead Tunnel. Their gravestones are gifted with beautiful views. But in the moorland beyond the wall more people are rumoured to have been buried; the Roman Catholic workers and families who weren’t permitted to sleep in Anglican ground. The bodies of people who succumbed to cholera at Saltersbrook are also thought to rest there.

Unmarked. Unseen. More bones to sort. I wonder if their spirits get cold up there.

...

It is a strange phenomenon to be brought to life while you are still living. Especially in the place you considered a grave.

It is even stranger to build upon the pieces of yourself you thought were lost to time, irretrievable, and make them into something new entirely. But letting go takes time. Allowing yourself to chew through the grief and swallow it makes for a brand-new person.

I haven’t quite found peace with my home town. In fact, I still struggle to take ownership of a place that was the site of so much pain. Opening up here is hard. But I’m stronger now. Sometimes I reach out and feel my old self stir slightly; in the grass where I sledged with my parents as a baby, the places I explored with friends after school. Then she’s gone. Another ghost to add to my collection.

On bright evenings, the sun shines gold on a collection of old pine trees at the top of the Level. I don’t know if it’s the official term but it’s always been called ‘The Burial Ground’ to us — and if you lie in the grass looking up, the stars seem to come to you.

When my Dad said he wouldn’t be having any more treatment, my Mum drove me to that spot, where I curled up in the grass and cried until there was absolutely nothing left. It was there that I think the last, childish bit of myself (that hoped for a different ending, God, please, any other ending) left my body and wandered past the tree line. If the conditions are just right, I believe you can see her still.

It’s a beautiful place to haunt.

humanity
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About the Creator

Lauren Entwistle

Girl wonder, freelance journalist and writer-person. Also known as the female equivalent of Cameron Frye from the 1989 hit, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off.'

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