Here’s the story of poor Arthur Windgate, who’s spirit haunts the corridors and cell’s of the Lifers wing.
A Prison Haunting
After a graveyard, I expect that the likeliest place for a ghost to appear must be prison. Just consider some of the residents over the last few centuries in British jails. Think about the executions – consider the innocent men who have spent their last corporeal moment swinging from a rope. Death penalty aside, even today prisons are filled with souls in turmoil, rife with regret or brimming over with incandescent rage. Prison souls cast shadows.
A few years ago, one such soul haunted the Lifers’ wing in my prison. Lifers are often housed separately, not because they are dangerous – ironically it is often the men that have been convicted of murder that are generally the least likely to commit further acts of violence. As a rule, Lifers tend to adjust to the prospect of being in prison for a long time – they are less volatile than those serving short sentences. Lifers tend to adapt by shutting out the world, some have been away long enough to believe that smartphones and Oyster cards are the work of science fiction.
It was a 20 year veteran kanga[1], Tony G who explained the origin of the haunting.
Tony hadn’t been working in the prison for long when he first met Arthur Windgate, a prisoner who at that time had spent more than 25 years behind bars for a gruesome double murder. Now old Arthur didn’t socialise with the other prisoners. He had no family connections outside the prison. He lived a solitary existence, spending all of his time in his cell. He never watched TV, his only hobbies were reading the bible and listening to Chris DeBurgh’s ballad on his cassette player.
I remember Tony’s northern accent took on a sombre tone as he told us, “There were whole weeks when Arthur wouldn’t come out of t’cell. Obsessed with good and evil he was. At night I’d hear him mumbling about heaven and hell, damnation and t’like. I wasn’t here the morning they found him dead, but the lads that did find him told me he was twisted up and contorted something rotten.” Tony face had lost all colour, he shivered and blessed himself before he continued. “But I tell you this lads, this wing still puts t’heeby-jeebies in me at night. There’s a few of us over the years who have heard that damned Spanish Train song when there is nobody around. At one point it even started playing through peoples’ TVs.”
One of the prisoners observed, “That’s somebody taking the piss out of you surely Mr G. One of the lads must have it on CD or something?”
“Aye, we thought that too.” Tony answered,” So we tore t’wing apart and stripped every cell. We searched t’showers, toilets, laundry – the lot. There was no sign. Although we did find all sorts of other stuff – there were a lot of nickings handed out that day lads.”
Tony told us that there would be months and even years between ‘events’, one might be forgiven for thinking that the tortured soul behind the song might finally have found their rest. But the soul of Arthur Windgate would never find peace. Sooner or later the creepy refrain would seem to come from the walls and floors.
Over the next few days and weeks the prisoners started noticing odd things on the wing. There were new creaks and groans. There were shadows appearing from nowhere. Things were being moved from their original location. Nobody could be sure if these were new occurrences or if these things had always been happening. The more reasonable among us argued that people were only looking for weird events because they had heard about Old Arthur – on the other side the belief was that talking about Old Arthur had woken him up.
It wasn’t until about a month later, in early October, that events took a serious turn.
On our wing there were no sinks or toilets in our cells, so the doors were never locked and it wasn’t unusual for people to get up during the night to have a piss. Over time one became used to these ambient sounds. But one particular morning at about 3 am I heard a shout and the creak of a cell door opening and then slamming shut. The shout half-woke me, but once I had woken fully and processed what I heard I felt deeply uncomfortable. Chris DeBurgh’s classic folk ballad was how this spirit announced itself.
“There’s a Spanish train that runs between
Guadalquivir and old Seville
And at dead of night the whistle blows and people hear
She’s running still.”
Still half-asleep I joined the kerfuffle outside and heard how one of the lads freaked when his stereo had suddenly begun playing Old Arthur’s song. It only lasted about 10 seconds before it shut off again. The following morning my peers held a thorough investigation, but there was no CD in the player and the alarm was still set for the usual 7-15am. The only logical conclusion that could be drawn was that a power surge had caused the stereo to switch on and that it had found a random radio station that was playing the song. It was a tenuous theory, but it was all we had.
For the next week nothing happened. People started to put the thoughts of ghosts out of their mind when it happened again. This time it was a cell on a different floor and on the opposite side of the wing. Once again, at 3 am, the guy’s stereo had switched itself on, played a snippet of Spanish Train and then turned off again.
A committee of prisoners approached Tony G and demanded he take action. Tony was at a loss, what could he do? He had been working on the wing for 20 years now and nobody had been able to do anything about the ghost of Old Arthur.
A week later things took another turn when a third man’s stereo was possessed by Old Arthur, but this time as the song faded the man in question heard a gravelly voice warning him that Hell and Damnation awaited the wicked – what was most disturbing was that the voice addressed him by name!
Over the next few weeks the wing was a very strange place to live. There was almost a siege mentality, like Ripley and her crew aboard the Nostromo being hunted by an alien. The whole prison was abuzz with the story of the haunting on the lifers wing, various strange acts were reported throughout the prison including the wailing of a woman on H-wing – rumoured to be the wife of a man who had killed himself some years earlier.
The library had been inundated with requests for books on the paranormal. Various members of staff were being asked to research addresses for ghost hunters so the prisoners could write to them to invite them to investigate.
And all the while Old Arthur visited the stereos of more men, with more than one visit each night – all told 7 men on the unit had reported their stereos being possessed. This was seen as further proof of the ethereal nature of these events as most of the stereos were different models by different manufacturers – it couldn’t be put down to a manufacturing fault in any one type of machine.
Things took a more serious turn when one of the lads went to the chapel in crisis. He had barely slept he said and made enquiries about an exorcism. After much consultation the chaplaincy team came up with a compromise and the Roman Catholic priest eventually came to the unit to perform a blessing.
That night there was no haunting. There was no backlash from a wounded ghost – just an unremarkable, uninterrupted night of sleep. The next day I noticed that there was a sense of tentative optimism among the men. They hoped that the ordeal had passed. A week later and everybody began to forget about the haunting and a month later it was resigned to being an anecdote for new arrivals.
But I know for a fact that the hauntings are not gone for good. The spirit of Old Arthur still wanders the ethereal mist on ‘the other side’. One night he will return and the wing will be haunted by the strains of Spanish Train. His ghost will not be at rest until I either lose my MP3 player, get grassed out by my co-conspirator Tony G, or all of the men on the Lifers’ wing figure out what Bluetooth is and how to disable it on their stereos!
Regards,
Arthur Windgate.
[1] Kanga – Prison Officer. Rhyming slang from Kanga-roo (screw)
