The Pilot’s Ghost of Montrose

One instructor was soundly asleep when he woke abruptly with a feeling that there was somebody in the room with him… and by the dim light of the fire he saw a man sitting in a chair at the foot of his bed. He asked the man who he was and what he wanted, and suddenly the spectre was gone.

Two officers who were sharing a room woke up one night by a feeling of oppression. The room was completely dark but they both sensed a presence. One of them fumbled for a match, but when he struck a light the room was empty.

The grandfather of author Alexander McKee, who told the story of the Montrose ghost in his book “Great Mysteries of Aviation”, said the pilot’s phantom was often seen sitting down in an armchair in the mess.

The occurrences always took place in the old mess, the former home of Desmond Arthur. It was never established how the stories suddenly became common property. Presumably one of the witnesses blurted out a tale of something very odd he had experienced, and found that the same thing had happened to a dozen others.

The story of the Ghost of Montrose quickly went round the whole of the Royal Flying Corps. A personal friend of Desmond Arthur took it seriously and started an investigation. C.G. Grey was the editor of The Aeroplane and he first had to answer the question why – if the apparition was the ghost of Desmond Arthur – his friend had waited until 1916 before turning up in his old mess. What had disturbed him?

C.G. Grey argued that the government had been having an unhappy time in the spring of 1916 with the so-called “Murder Charges”, when the head of Pemberton Billing Ltd (the firm which later designed the Spitfire) called for a judicial inquiry into both the military and naval wings of the air service. This because “certain officers had been murdered rather than killed by the carelessness, incompetence or ignorance of their senior officers or of the technical side of those two services”. As attack is the best means of defence, the government set up a committee which on 3 August 1916 issued an interim report establishing among other things that there was no truth in what Pemberton Billing had alleged in the case Desmond Arthur.

The deceased pilot would be turning in his grave, for if there had been no botched repair of a broken wing, he must have broken the BE himself by foolishly dangerous flying. The final report of the committee was being prepared in the autumn of 1916, which was precisely the period when the ghost was first seen or sensed at the Montrose base. This report however was followed by an addendum, written by an engineer and a lawyer, who concluded that, in the case Desmond Arthur, it appeared “probable that the machine had been damaged accidentally, and that the man (or men) responsible for the damage had repaired it as best he (or they) could to evade detection and punishment”.

Desmond Arthur could rest in peace now, vindicated. It was stated by experts that he had been the victim of a crime, not of his own folly. After a final appearance in January 1917, his ghost was seen no more. This interpretation by C.G. Grey was published in the December 1920 issue of The Aeroplane and still is a good one, that can compete with various fictional rewrites.

See also:

• The Lost Dutchman’s Historical Mysteries

• We all live in a haunted submarine

• The Hell Hound of No Man’s Land