Inverness Ghost Seeks New Home
I've been sitting listening to Tom Morton rubbish the whole idea of ghosts and goblins. There was similar scepticism from Gary Robertson on Good Morning Scotland this morning. With this kind of hard-nosed broadcasting pouring across the airwaves, what chance is there for any of us to get in to the Halloween spirt?
At home, our front room has been decorated in a variety of black & orange banners, battery-powered pumpkins and fake cobwebs with suitably scary, hairy spiders. I even found one of those under my pillow last night. Once they had peeled me off the ceiling I was fine.
But these are bad times for ghosts. Here at the ´óÏó´«Ã½ in Inverness we're just about to demolish a back stairwell which has long been home to a famous phantom who is said to annoy newsroom staff when they are working late. A few years ago a psychic investigator was brought in to check things out. As I recall, she confirmed that a certain part of the stairwell was "very cold" and that the phantom was that of a woman who had experienced some kind of emotional trauma.
Perhaps she had tried the ´óÏó´«Ã½ coffee.
Well every old ´óÏó´«Ã½ building seems to have its own ghost. They tend to materialise in the run-up to Christmas when news is a bit thin on the ground, which is helpful. I'm going back to Glasgow soon to record a programme about the history of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ building in Queen Margaret Drive. I wrote some months ago about the ghost that is supposed to haunt the basement under my old office.
A listener asked me recently what had become of that particular spook.
Who knows? She never phones, she never writes....