The Lantern in the Loft

My wife Eleanor and I had driven from our home in the Scottish Borders to the Welsh Marches for our daughter’s wedding. The old coaching inn, ‘The Cider Press’, stood at the edge of a village that seemed to be sinking into the damp earth. Its beams were black with age, and the floors sloped like a ship’s deck. The owner, a Mrs. Pritchard, led us up a narrow, twisting stair to our attic room. The ceiling was so low that my head brushed the cobwebbed rafters. ‘You’ll be snug here,’ she said, her Welsh lilt flat and unconvincing. I laughed and whispered to Eleanor, ‘Perfect for a ghost or two.’ She did not laugh. She never liked my jokes about such things.

That first night, we slept in a deep, dreamless void. But as the first pale light of dawn began to seep through the curtains, Eleanor sat bolt upright. ‘Why did you turn on the light?’ she demanded, her voice tight with irritation. I was already awake, watching her. ‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘The room is still dark.’ She rubbed her eyes, frowning. ‘There was a brilliant light, right in my face. Like a camera flash, but brighter. It woke me.’ We searched the room. No lights, no lamps, no way for such a light to appear. I put it down to a dream, a trick of the mind. But Eleanor was unsettled, and she slept poorly for the rest of our stay.

The wedding passed in a blur of happiness, and we returned home, chalking the incident up to an old house’s quirks. But a week later, a letter arrived from Mrs. Pritchard. It was apologetic, but firm. She asked if we had left a lantern, or any kind of lamp, in the loft. She wrote that the room we had stayed in was used for storage now, and she had found a strange, modern torch on a shelf that she didn’t recognise. It was still switched on, its beam pointing straight at the spot where Eleanor’s face would have been. She enclosed a photograph. The torch was not ours. It was a brand we had never seen, with a faded label that read, ‘Property of the Ministry of Supply, 1941.’

Intrigued and unnerved, I did some digging. The inn, it turned out, was once a relay station for a top-secret radar project during the Second World War. The loft was the exact location where a guard was stationed to watch for incoming aircraft. On the night of the wedding, we had slept in the same spot where a young man had once spent countless hours, his job to switch on a powerful signalling lamp to guide pilots during landing. His logbook, stored in the county archives, recorded that on May 12, 1941, he had been relieved at dawn, but he never left his post. The entry simply says: ‘Stood firm, light held steady.’ His body was never found.

Now, whenever I stay in an old building, I do not joke about ghosts. I think of that persistent beam, still cutting through time, searching for something it once guarded. And I wonder if, somewhere, a young man’s lamp still burns, waiting for a plane that will never come, and shining on anyone who dares to sleep in his watch. I have not told Eleanor, but sometimes, in the deep of the night, I switch on my phone’s torch and point it at the wall, just to feel that I am not alone.