RAF Bircham Newton: the sick-quarters footsteps and the haunted squash court

RAF Bircham Newton lies in Norfolk, near Docking and not far from Sandringham. It served the RAF from 1918 to 1966. Then the Construction Industry Training Board took it over, and it became the National Construction College. The airfield closed. The stories stayed.

August Bank Holiday, 1949. About 9:00 pm. Mary Tock, a WAAF nursing orderly, was on duty in the Station Sick Quarters with a fellow WAAF. Then came the clunk of a door closing. And heavy footsteps.

"The footsteps were so heavy, it sounded as though he was wearing heavy boots," Mary said. The two ran into the Staff Duty Room and phoned the Guardroom. The Station Police searched the sick quarters and the Decontamination Centre. They found no one. All the doors were securely locked.

Some weeks earlier a fighter had crashed a few miles from the station, and the pilot's remains were brought to Bircham Newton. Later the Medical Officer asked Mary whether she had a relative in the RAF. The dead pilot's paybook read "Peter Took". A bloodstain covered the second "o". It looked like "Tock".

About two decades on, the haunting settled in the station's First World War squash court. Visitors to the right-hand court felt uneasy and cold. Footsteps sounded in the viewing gallery. Players described a man in RAF uniform who disappeared through the walls as soon as he was approached. Peter Clark, a crew member, saw a uniformed figure in the gallery. "The atmosphere was so cold, so frightening that it was like stepping into another world," he said.

Denny Densham's recording came first. Bruce Barrymore Halpenny called it "one of the most psychic recordings ever made". It held muffled speech, a ghostly woman's voice and metallic clangs, like a hangar at work in wartime. Then a tape recorder was left in the court overnight. Jack de Manio replayed it on BBC radio. A strange, groaning voice. The drone of aircraft. It caused a sensation. A BBC engineer found no fault, a brand new tape, and a nine-inch brick wall that let little noise through.

A Nationwide interviewer spent the night there and reported intense cold and banging doors. Sue and Jeffrey Cooper of Bishop's Stortford ran an all-night cassette vigil. They caught odd thumps, a metallic ping, footsteps on the gallery stairs and about twelve minutes of an aero-engine. Densham's verdict: "For my choice, I would say that that was a piston engine, or a twin engine machine, that is standing on an apron with its engine ticking over."

No one has alleged a hoax. But the ghosts change with each telling. Andrew Green named three RAF pilots killed in an Avro Anson crash: Pat Sullivan, Gerry Arnold and "Dusty" Miller. Others speak of fighter pilots or American bomber crews. Two Ansons did collide at Bircham Newton on 9 May 1939, killing three people, yet no source links those names to it. No record of a Peter Took has been found. And after 1966 the old grass runways were used to train people on construction plant, a possible source of engine noise that no investigator examined.

In 2008 Building reporter Emily Wright spent three nights at the college. At about 3 a.m. she felt "a very slow, deliberate pressure" on her mouth, like "a finger". Densham's original tape is said to be sought after but never located. The voices of the squash court survive only in the telling.