What lurks in the shadows of war: The haunting stories hidden in the IWM archives
"There was something in that cellar..."
These are the haunting words of British nurse Mairi Chisholm who, along with Elsie Knocker during the First World War, was treating wounded service personnel in a cramped, decaying building with a nailed-up door leading to a cellar that left her feeling unsettled.
She said: "I thought 'gosh, you've had it kid, you're suffering from a bout of shock... pull yourself together'.
"So, I went on, but all the time I had this feeling, my eyes were instinctively drawn to this beastly door."
This isn't the start of a horror movie the likes of "Obsession" director Curry Barker would make.
Instead, it's one of a series of haunting military stories told in book 'Wartime Ghost Stories' by first time author Esme Smith, an apprentice curator at the Imperial War Museum (IWM).
Speaking to BFBS Forces News, she explored what it would have been like to be stood with the nurse, saying: "I'd love to have been in there with them and just said, 'Why don't we open it up and see what lies beneath?'"
The voices of the dead
In her role within the IWM Sound Archive department, Miss Smith immerses herself every day in the sounds of the past, often the voices of those who have died but whose stories still resonate powerfully today.
With about 35,000 oral histories to choose from, the author said she found it difficult to find traditional "ghost stories" as the people whose anecdotes she wanted to tell hardly ever described them that way.
It was often, "I saw this thing and I didn't know what it was" and never, "I saw a ghost".
Set against the backdrop of war with death and destruction seeping through each haunting story, these tales inevitably ask one question – what happens when a person is starving, exhausted, isolated and facing their own mortality?
She said: "Your brain can play tricks on you... and when you're in times of peril, it's really, really heightened.
"And the other thing is the presence of death.
"When you're at war, it's all around you, especially with the Angels of Mons in the First World War."
The angels who appeared over Ypres
In a letter dated 30 May 1915, a soldier tells the story of a fellow wounded soldier whose ghostly experience led him to believe in God.
As Miss Smith writes, "the introduction of poison gas at Ypres had brought a new fear factor to battles".
Hope had never been in such short supply.
The wounded soldier said: "We were quite powerless and heard the German cavalry approaching.
"Suddenly I looked up and exiting the top of the [chalk] pit was a ring of shining angels.
"As the cavalry rushed up, the horses saw them and there was a general stampede.
"Our lives were saved."
Miss Smith writes of 21st-century British soldiers and US Marines in Afghanistan "seeing strange lights, feeling cold chills and hearing Russian whispers from the shadows" where, they later discovered, service personnel had died during the 1979 Russian invasion of the country.
Finding a way to cope with trauma
As readers, it is not our job to prove these tales right or wrong but perhaps to understand why service personnel might experience other worldly phenomena.
Are these experiences caused by trauma compounded by hunger, exhaustion and the feeling that death is omnipresent?
Or are ghost stories simply a way to keep each other entertained while isolated in the middle of nowhere with nothing but their imaginations to keep themselves from going mad?
Sometimes ghost stories can be so horrifying that you're left feeling unsettled and fear what lies in the shadows but, now and again, an encounter with the unknown can be reassuring as Miss Smith proves in the chapter, A Visit From Three Friends.
She said: "The one I always come back to is the Falklands one where he's visited by his three friends and he just says, after that I could sleep again."
During The Battle of the River Plate, on 13 December 1939, German cruiser Admiral Graf Spee attacked HMS Exeter, HMS Ajax and HMNZS Achilles off the Argentinian coast leaving dozens killed or wounded.
One of the survivors, Stoker Ronald Roberts, claims his three friends who died during the attack – Bob Stee, Frank Randall and Brian Pett who he had lain unconscious next to before he was rescued – came to visit him when he was recuperating with a family in Port Stanley, Falkland Islands.
He said: "They just walked in as they were before the shell come in... but as soon as I shot up in bed, everything went.
"I'm not a religious person in that sense, but, well, there was something [that] happened there. I feel sure."
Miss Smith admits that, unlike the writer of this article, she's never seen a ghost but she knows some incredibly sensible people who claim to have and writing the book helped her look at their experiences differently.
She's hoping the book will help those not previously interested in the First or Second World War take a different look at this time period.
"I think people have this idea that [war] is battles and tanks and guns and [there's] nothing wrong with that... but it's this really human element that you can get through the sound archive and especially through ghost stories," she said.
"Because, yeah, they're spooky and they're fun [but]... to their roots are about what men and women do when they're in these moments of survival."
The omnipresence of death
The ghostly tale she finds most captivating is very different from that of Stoker Roberts.
There was no comforting presence, just spine-tingling evil.
In his memoir, written after the Second World War, Corporal Peter Dolan of the South African Army, wrote of one particularly horrific night after the liberation of Italy.
One night as he, separated from his men, desperately searched for shelter during a storm, he nervously entered an eerie, decaying house.
He wrote: "I gagged on a heavy, clinging smell of death, which came from nowhere and everywhere and hung in the room like animate evil.
"There was no sound but the banshee wailing of the wind outside."
No ethereal, floating spirit, just the unwavering presence of evil, as though he was being followed by the Grim Reaper.
A menacing spirit, determined to be left alone – just like the two nurses' experience at the Villa Espagnole.
Of that place, Miss Chisholm said: "Never did a single thing hit that place.
"Shells fell and it remained completely intact.
"It's been a mystery always to me... there was something in that cellar."
One question remains; would you have opened the cellar door?
Wartime Ghost Stories by Esme Smith is available to buy here from 8 October.
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