...you're sure of a big surprise! (by Andrew Wooding)

THE STORY SO FAR:

We sneaked into some woods at night to seek out a bench where (it was claimed) the ghost of an old lady had been spotted doing some knitting. We couldn’t find the bench anywhere, I slipped in some freezing cold mud, and we soon emerged out the other side onto a road. Turned out we’d gone to the wrong woods, and the correct woods were just across the street.

READ ON, McDUFF…


We were cold, wet, miserable and dejected – especially me with mud splattered all over my jeans and coat – but we’d come this far and I wasn’t going to turn back now. We crossed the road and plunged headfirst into this second set of woods, and we soon found a path that led up to a quaint old cottage surrounded by trees.

‘Nice cottage!’ said Mike. ‘Wonder if anyone’s in?’

To illustrate his statement, he shone his torch into the front window.

‘Blimey!’

To our horror, the light came on in the front room. We’d thought that no one was inside, but obviously we were wrong.

Had the occupants been startled by Mike’s torch and quickly flicked on a lamp to phone the police about intruders?

Quaking, we hid behind one of the trees.

‘Ow.’

As luck would have it, as I turned in the dark I bashed my knee on the side of a bench. Doesn’t sound lucky at all, does it? Not until you realise that it was the exact same bench we’d been looking for all evening.

‘It’s here, Mike,’ I whispered.

‘What is?’ said Mike.

‘The bench,’ I announced. ‘It fits the description. It’s got four legs, you can sit on it, and it looks like a bench.’

‘That must be it, then,’ agreed Mike. ‘A bench that looks like a bench. Success!’

Not quite. We’d located our bench all right, but we hadn’t found our ghost.

If this blog was called ‘Two Men and a Bench’ we’d be laughing. Result!

But we weren’t after a bench, were we? We were after the ghost that sat on it, merrily knitting mittens or woollen tea cosies or the like.

Anyway, there were two reasons we sat on that bench in silence for twenty minutes.

One was to wait for a ghostly manifestation. (No such manifestation appeared.)

The second was ‘cause Mike was worried that if we moved back into sight of the cottage, we might give the occupants a heart attack. It was nearly midnight after all, so what would they make of two grown men roaming around the equivalent of their front garden, one with a ghost-hunting fedora on his bonce and the other caked in mud from head to trainers?

But we had to make a dash for it at some point, and me needing a pee was the deciding factor in our sudden lurch for freedom.

‘Here goes!’ we said and we raced back past the cottage like the cast of Blackadder going over the top of the trench in that infamous final episode.

It didn’t help that we could hear a police helicopter overhead. Or rather it did – it made us race all the faster!

Minutes later we arrived at our starting point, with just a short walk up the road to Mike’s parked car. But I was aching from my fall, wheezing after our run, and busting for a pee. So Mike kindly offered to fetch his car and drive it down to me while I strategically relieved myself on the base of an obliging pine tree.

Standing by the side of the road – bladder now empty, and with traffic racing past - I couldn’t wait for Mike’s car to meet me so that I could get back home and flop straight into bed.

Not much later: Home. Flop. Snoring immediately. And that was the end of yet another successful ghost-hunting venture from the good folks of ‘Two Men and a Ghost’ in Sheffield.


POSTSCRIPT

Email from Mike the next day:

‘This morning, my poor back was killing me, this forcing me to walk in a very odd manner. When I took my son up to school, I happened to be walking along to his classroom, when a young dad passed me, saying: “Good morning.” All's well until I hear the words: “Weren't you coming out of the woods last night with another chap carrying torches?" At this moment, I felt the world rush past me.

‘Because of getting put on the spot, I replied: "Oh, yer, we were doing research for a project on our blog!" Yep, that sounded good, well done, Mike. It sounds very professional and mysterious. So why the hell did my mouth continue by saying: "Hope that the passing police helicopter didn't see us!"’

Mike was hobbling and I was covered in mud. I dread to imagine what he thought we were doing in the woods that night…