A sentry charges a silent woman with his bayonet, and she vanishes in front of him. A murdered sergeant names his killers from beyond the grave. A nurse nobody sent sits all night beside a sick child, then walks out into the dark.
For three hundred years, Britain's soldiers have stood guard in castles, forts, barracks and military hospitals from Cornwall to the Highlands. They were trained to challenge whatever came towards them in the night. Some of them met things that would not answer.
In Ghosts of British Army Barracks and Garrisons, you will stand the midnight watch at Carlisle Castle, walk the corridors of the hospital where Aldershot's Grey Lady was said to come before a death, and descend into the tunnels of the Rock of Gibraltar, where soldiers still hear whistling and digging in the dark. From the Foot Guards' sentries in St James's Park to the lonely Redcoat posts of Braemar, this is the haunted history of the British Army at home.
Drawn from regimental journals, Victorian newspaper reports, an eighteenth-century Edinburgh murder trial and the accounts of nurses, custodians and serving soldiers, every chapter rests on a real place and a story that has been told and recorded.
Fall in and discover:
The Sergeant Who Named His Killers: the 1754 trial where a ghost's testimony was heard in an Edinburgh court.
The Lady in the Keep Wall: the woman found sealed inside Carlisle Castle, and the sentry who met her.
The Leaping Terror of North Camp: the night Aldershot's sentries were ordered to load with live rounds.
The Glowing Figure in Block 57: the officers' mess at Fulwood Barracks, where a young lieutenant drew his sword on a ghost.
Perfect for readers of military history, true ghost stories and anyone who has ever stood a night duty and felt they were not alone, this book is your guide to the soldiers who never stood down.
The guard has changed a thousand times. Some sentries were never relieved.
