Haunting tales of ghostly sightings at military locations that might keep you awake at night
From paranormal activity being detected in an abandoned hospital which treated severely injured WWI patients to the ghost of a British Army officer who walks his phantom dog through gloomy tunnels – spooky spirits are rumoured to lurk at several military locations around the world.
BFBS the Forces Station broadcasters spoke to some members of the Armed Forces community who have had close, personal encounters with grisly ghouls that, to this day, haven't been explained.
Their spooky stories serve as a reminder that lurking in the dark on military bases on Halloween might not be the best idea.
Haunted Somme Hospital
Semi-derelict Craigavon House in Belfast, formerly home to Northern Ireland's very first Prime Minister, Sir James Craig, was used as a home for injured, shell-shocked soldiers during the First World War and is said to be haunted by the spirits of the Great War.
Rachael Price, a BFBS the Forces Station broadcaster, braved a tour around the building to see what secrets lie within its walls.
Price's tour guide was Billy Colgan, a former Irish Ranger turned maintenance man at the Somme Nursing Home which is built on the grounds of Craigavon House.
In addition to being the location of the provisional government of Northern Ireland, Craigavon House, built in 1870, is where the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) were located during the First World War.
The UVF handed over the building in 1917 so that it could become a hospital for severely injured soldiers returning from the brutal, bloody trenches.
Colgan say that sightings of ghost WWI soldiers who died at Craigavon House after suffering life-threatening injuries on the battlefield have been seen by visitors and groups conducting paranormal investigations.
The most prominent ghost is Ethel, the former matron. She is described as a stern woman who ran a very tight ship. It is said that she loved her job and was upset at being forced to retire in the 1950s.
But would she have loved it enough to haunt the halls for eternity?
People have shared hearing loud moans or even faint whispers that seem to come from one of the mirrors.
A light tapping heel sound has also been heard moving along the top corridor accompanied by the smell of lavender even though the building has been semi-derelict for nearly 30 years.
Lee Patience, the current matron of the Somme Nursing Home, tells of this happening.
She said: "Photographs... show the ghost of supposedly Ethel who was the matron.
"If you call her name out in here, in the house, you get quite a good response from her."
There has been a lot of paranormal activity picked up in one area in particular.
Colgan said: "The Titanic has nothing on this staircase, it's really beautiful and you can just imagine in its day, the amount of people, ladies in their big, long dresses... all coming to visit various people in the house.
"You can see behind that panel there's actually a mirror.
"We did have, a few months ago, some people who come in and actually spent the night here – braver men than I am.
"They did say that they picked up paranormal activity on their equipment and they did actually take a photograph which they say shows someone standing just at the bottom of that staircase."
Price left Craigavon House with the eerie feeling that it is "alive with intelligent activity" and that some of the ghostly encounters are "malicious with the spirit around the staircase causing physical harm to some who have passed".
You have to wonder, what is truly in there? Is the mirror the cause of all of this activity or is something patrolling the corridors keeping an eye out for any intruders?
Gibraltar's haunted tunnels
The dark tunnels of Gibraltar can be spooky even at the best of times but even more so if you have been on a Halloween-themed tour of the passageways beneath the Rock, a monolithic limestone promontory that dominates the landscape.
Since the end of the 18th Century, a series of intricate tunnels have been dug out, the vast majority by the British Army, with the peak of the digging during the Second World War, in preparation to defend Gibraltar from a possible German invasion.
Enough space was carved out to hold 16,000 people inside the Rock with enough food to last them 16 months without needing to leave.
After the war, many of the MOD-owned tunnels were abandoned and handed over to the Gibraltar Government which now uses them for purposes such as storage use, wine cellars and tourist locations.
Some tunnels, however, are completely abandoned and not safe to be entered.
Within the towering Rock of Gibraltar, you will find 34 miles of intricate tunnels. In fact, there are more roads inside the Rock than outside of it.
While Cpl Mark Mallabone of the Royal Air Force was leading a Halloween tour, he told BFBS the Forces Station broadcaster Greg Burnet some of the spookiest stories.
Ghost sightings don't tend to have a health and safety aspect to them, but one rumoured phantom is reported to have stopped a workman, who was doing some building in the tunnel, from getting into the back of a van in the Great North Road.
He said: "So he got off the back of the van to go and speak to the chap but when he looked around the guy had gone and he'd completely disappeared, so he took off down the pedestrian tunnel that they walked in through.
"As he went screaming down the tunnel, he came out the far end shouting about people that weren't there on the back of his van.
"All the locals took off and they wouldn't come back until they got a local priest in to exorcise that area of the tunnel and that's why there's an idol of Madonna within that part of the tunnel."
Cpl Mallabone also tells of a friendly gentleman ghost that walks down Fosse Way which is a connecting tunnel on to the Great North Road.
He said: "Some people believe that he's an officer in the Army and he walks his dog... through Fosse Way and he's believed to be a good luck symbol."
Curious to find out more about the ghost dog, Burnet presses for more information saying that the image he has in his mind of a ghoulish dog is something from a horror film. A theory that Cpl Mallabone understands.
He said: "Three-headed, demonic, charging through the tunnels on fire style?"
Instead, it seems as though the reality is much cuter, as Cpl Mallabone explains: "I think he's a border collie."
Is The Roundhouse in Germany haunted?
Niall Thurlow and his wife Rachel spent many years based in Hohne, Germany, but one night at The Roundhouse remains etched in their memory.
Built in 1936, The Roundhouse was a former Nazi Officers' Mess.
After the liberation of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, The Roundhouse was used as a hospital to care for those who made it out. Some barely alive.
Eventually, the building stopped being used as a hospital and for a short period was temporary accommodation for the British Army before becoming the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons camp.
There were thousands upon thousands of Jewish people who had no homes or families to return to after liberation from concentration camps like Bergen-Belsen. Entire generations of families were murdered during the Second World War.
The Roundhouse is where many displaced persons lived until the 1950s when the building was handed over to the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR).
It became a welfare hub and housed the NAAFI, the YMCA and was the location of several social events.
It was also where Rachel Thurlow got her hair cut.
Niall, who worked at Bergen Belsen Hohne Camp, got a call from Rachel, who worked for SSAFA, to ask him to pick her up one dark, cold night in the middle of winter.
"I started to drive to collect her and then I got another phone call from her to tell me to stop messing around and I said, 'I don't know what you're talking about, I'm driving to pick you up and she said 'are you not here yet?' and I said 'no'.
"When I arrived, the building was locked and it was in darkness. It was a very, very windy night. The trees were swaying backwards and forwards and my wife was stuck inside with the hairdresser."
"Unbeknown to them, the person responsible for locking the building had locked them in and switched all the lights off. They were in pitch black."
Eventually, Niall managed to get them out and his wife explained what she and her hairdresser had experienced in the spooky, dark corridors of The Roundhouse.
He said: "She said, 'we had a really strange experience in there'.
"'I really thought you were messing around because we could hear the sound of chains dragging along the corridor and I shouted out to you and you didn't reply and that's why I rang you and then when you rang back were really quite frightened in there, but fortunately you arrived 10 minutes later'."
What on earth could explain the sounds of chains being dragged if the women were the only two people in the building?
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