Great Britain: Ghosts on the Moors

“Let me in,” a most melancholy voice sobbed. “I’ve come home: I’d lost my way on the moor.” As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window, almost maddening me with fear.

—Wuthering Heights

The ghost of a child walked the bleak Yorkshire moors last week, just as did that of Cathy Linton in Emily Bronte’s novel of a century ago. This time the child was real, and murdered. The body of a ten-year-old girl who disappeared three days after Christmas when leaving her home in Manchester for a holiday excursion, was discovered three weeks ago, naked, in a shallow grave on the Saddleworth Moor in Yorkshire.

The discovery set up a huggermugger that still swirls about Saddleworth, a mist-shrouded, hilly corner of country England near where Yorkshire, Cheshire and Lancashire meet. Acting evidently on the advice of tipsters, police began combing the moor three weeks ago. First, they found the girl’s body, then, in a second grave, that of a twelve-year-old boy, missing for nearly two years from his home in near by Ashton-under-Lyne. Half a dozen neighborhood children between the ages of 12 and 16 are also listed as missing.

Last week, shoulder to shoulder in a line of 80, the police were still systematically advancing over the moors, plunging slender canes into the soggy peat, then sniffing their tips for the telltale stench of putrescent flesh. Near by huddled newsmen, cameramen and private ghouls who have converged on the neighborhood, jamming local hotels, emptying stores of boots and galoshes, and quite un-mystically sending auto-rental rates up to $30 a day.

There were other entertainments for the sensation seekers. A special Northwest Regional C.I.D. force of 140 men has also busied itself investigating a handful of houses in the neighborhood, some occupied and some not. Crowds watched police meticulously remove kitchen utensils, brooms, linoleum and bedding from one tidy row house, with a vase of flowers in the window, in a “council housing estate” (public housing project) several miles east of Manchester. Last month police turned up a suitcase containing a scrambled skein of recording tapes in the checkroom of a Manchester railway station, played the tapes at a BBC studio. On them were eerie sounds not unlike the voice of a terrified child.

What did it all mean? Police, in the best tight-lipped Scotland Yard tradition, declined to say. Nonetheless, every reporter on the scene was busy trading rumor and theory. Last week an R.A.F. Canberra was called in to take aerial photographs of the grave sites. Newsmen promptly asked Detective Superintendent Arthur Benfield whether some kind of black cult could have buried its victims in a magic pattern or symbol, visible only from the air. “I like black magic,” Benfield parried, “but they tend to make me put on weight.” Black Magic is a well-known brand of English chocolates.