The Montrose Ghost: Lt. Desmond Arthur at Montrose Air Station

27 May 1913. About 7:30 in the morning. Lt. Desmond Arthur of No. 2 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps, was flying B.E.2 No. 205 near Lunan Bay, south of Montrose. At about 2,500 ft a wing failed. His body was found 160 yards from the aircraft. It was Scotland's first fatal aircraft accident.

A Royal Aero Club committee blamed the incompetent repair of a broken spar by an unknown mechanic. Then, in 1916, a government committee reopened the case. Its interim report found no evidence of previous damage. It blamed Arthur's own flying.

By 1916 the old No. 2 Squadron officers' mess at Montrose aerodrome housed No. 18 Reserve Squadron. Major Cyril Foggin was the senior flying instructor. Walking to the mess one evening, "he became conscious in the half dark of a Scottish summer's night of a figure walking up the path ahead of him." "The figure was wearing flying kit, with a sort of knitted helmet on his head." It reached the door. "When he turned his head back the door was still shut. But the figure had vanished."

Peter Underwood later wrote that Foggin saw it five times that autumn. At first he kept quiet, fearing he would lose his post. He was not the only one. In the end "not only Major Foggin but the CO and half a dozen or more of the other instructors who lived in the same mess had seen the same figure."

Two officers saw "a man in flying kit sitting in a chair before the dying bedroom fire reading some papers." An instructor woke to a uniformed man in a chair in his room. He challenged it. It vanished. Two officers sharing a room woke with an "acute sense of oppression" and the feeling of a third person present. They searched. They found nothing.

Christmas Eve, 1916. Officers saw "the familiar figure with his back to them in front of the blazing fire." It wore "a grey helmet on his head, a flying coat loose around his shoulders." Then "it threw some papers on the fire and then was there no more."

That December the final report carried an addendum signed by Sir Charles Bright and Arthur Butcher. It corrected the August finding and cleared Arthur. The sightings reportedly stopped soon afterwards, though one tradition places the last in January 1917. C. G. Grey, editor of The Aeroplane and Arthur's friend, named the figure as Arthur. He believed Arthur had returned to defend a threat to his honour.

The legend grew. In 1940 a Hurricane pilot reported a "mysterious biplane" that "cut him off on final landing several times." In 1949 new cadets received a printed welcome saying that "Lieutenant Desmond L. Arthur haunted the camp." On 27 May 1963, exactly 50 years to the day after the crash, Sir Peter Masefield flew a Chipmunk south past Montrose. He wrote that an angular biplane emerged from cloud, its top wing collapsed, and the pilot fell "with flailing arms." He turned to the passenger behind him. "No one was there."

No official inquiry ever examined the ghost, and no conventional explanation for the 1916 sightings is on record. The inquiry was a controversy every officer in the mess knew about, and researchers have failed to meet anyone stationed at Montrose in 1916-17 who had not heard about the ghost. Masefield's story draws sharper doubt. In 2018 Robert Charman judged it questionable, and some pilots suspected it was tongue-in-cheek. Today the Montrose Air Station Heritage Centre still collects reports. Its curator, Dr Dan Paton, has described a figure "dressed in old-fashioned flying gear."