The Pilot’s Ghost of Montrose

From the ground, people only could see the result of a sudden collapse of the upper starboard wing: the broken wing folded and threw the little biplane into a series of convulsive, fluttering jerks. The uncontrollable gyrations snapped the pilot’s seat-belt and a dark object fell away from the wreckage, arms and legs working with ever-gathering speed until it hit the ground. In 1913, no parachutes were worn.

The Royal Aero Club’s Accidents Investigation Committee found that the wing had collapsed because of a faulty repair carried out on the ground by an unknown person. Some guilty party had broken the wing, botched the repair and then covered it all up. No one had logged either the damage or the repair. For whoever flew the plane in that condition, it was a deathtrap – but there was no clue to identify the murderer and bring him to justice.

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The death of Desmond Arthur had been horrible, but the little Celt did not come back to haunt his murderer or to revisit the scene of the crime. When the Great War broke out, everything changed. Montrose, this lonely place near the North Sea, became a training aerodrome occupied by the No. 18 Reserve Squadron. The wartime expansion brought a building programme to house the pupils, including a new officers mess. The instructional staff however did not live there with the “Huns”, as the novices were called because they could break British aeroplanes faster than the Germans did. The staff stayed in the old mess, the original building used by No. 2 Squadron, of which Desmond Arthur once had been a lieutenant.

One evening in the autumn of 1916, Major Cyril Foggin saw an officer in a flying kit walking in front of him to the door of the old mess. When the Major reached the door, it was closed… and the other officer was not there. It was impossible that he could have stepped off the path without Major Foggin noticing. Foggin afterwards tried to reason the apparition away as due to eyestrain or imagination, but he knew he had seen somebody… who had vanished in a way no human being could.

Some days later, Foggin saw the mysterious airman again walking to the old mess… and vanishing when he reached the door. Senior officers at flying training schools who see disappearing ghosts repeatedly are likely to be invalided as nerve cases or the victims of hallucination. So, Major Foggin did not tell anyone what he had seen, and what he saw a third and a fourth time… But he was aware of the uneasy atmosphere which invaded the mess, as if other officers also were seeing things, or sensing them… and were all too wary of ridicule to tell anyone else.