Assume Nothing – A Belfast Haunting, BBC Radio Ulster
Bleak November nights make ghosts and hauntings perfect fireside fodder.
None draws you in so much as a story close to home, on streets you have walked.
A Belfast Haunting is one such tale – we stroll with our host, one Reggie Chamberlain-King, through the streets of the Lower Falls to the spot where a house once stood in Beechmount Grove.
The Skillens lived there back in 1989 and rumours spread that the house was haunted by the ghost of an angry woman who attacked the man of the house, banging his head off the wall and throwing him off the banisters.
The crowds gathered – over 100 men and women - and the priest was called, but only to reassure the family.
That was a tough year in the times of the Troubles – it was the year of the Stone attack on the funerals at Milltown cemetery.
But whilst the story of the face of Jesus appearing on a fireside hearth in Dunville Park struck a note with me, I don’t remember 91 Beechmount Grove.
Reggie is a local fella, he knows his turf.
He whisks us with him through the Lower Falls and on to the Linen Hall Library to track down the book written by John Skillen – the man who was the target of the ghost woman’s rage.
Read more: Halloween: My encounter with a demon-haunted Irish boy
Number 91: A Belfast Ghost Story is not an easy find. Reggie couldn’t try in the Falls Library because he still has a copy of the Prophecies of Nostradamus that he took out in 1993.
So if you chance upon this podcast, be prepared to be spooked and receive a small side of humour.
When Reggie finally gets the book from the dusty shelves of the Linen Hall, he is engrossed.
There’s a chapter called ‘Showdown: Furniture and Vodka: the Crisis and After the Crisis’.
The haunting began with a flickering TV and footsteps on the landing and went on to outbursts of extreme violence from a woman in black who banged John Skillen’s head off the wall.
The family was traumatised and the community was split. Some prayed outside the house whilst others said cynically that it was a ruse to get out of the area and a better house.
But we’re all drawn in; it’s a story so well told that this listener was truly hooked.
