‘Ghost at 999 station’.
A priest may be called in to tackle a pesky poltergeist at Wilford Ambulance Station. Staff felt it was time something was done when a clock crashed off the wall and broke into pieces. But this was just the last in a series of mysterious phenomena which left staff worrying about their safety. The mischievous spirit is also supposed to have hurled weights across the garage and flung snooker balls across the games room.
Leading ambulanceman Richard Cox believes the clock’s attachment mechanism made it almost impossible for it to fall off the wall. “It has a proper slot-in hook and the dial is twisted and bent. When you drop a clock, you don’t bend the dial,” he said. “Someone said the room was very cold when they went in, even though the heating was on.”
The staff submitted a report asking management to do something and a scientific investigator was called in. But the poltergeist eluded his technological sorcery. Now the men are thinking of resorting to a good old-fashioned priest. Ambulanceman Malcolm Clifford, said: “We have got ambulances here and a lot of people have passed away in them. It could be a spirit from one of them. It can’t be someone clumsy. Not when you go out and find all the snooker balls over the floor when you get back – and there was no-one in the station and no sign of a break-in.”
Nottingham Evening Post, 17th April 1990.
I’m not one to look for a likely person who’s died to be responsible, but I couldn’t help noticing this. Even though ‘ambulancemen’ would see awful things every day, you’d imagine this would have made a particular impression, with it happening immediately outside the station and to a lad just starting his adult life? Not that we know how long the trouble had been going on and whether it could fit into the narrative.
‘Our grief for Jason’.
Jason Massey should have been celebrating his 18th birthday tomorrow – but instead of planning a happy event, his parents are making arrangements for his funeral. Jason, 17, of Gardendale Avenue, Clifton, died on Tuesday evening after an accident outside an ambulance station, just a day after starting a new job. He had finished a YTS scheme at a joiners and on Monday had just started a new job canvassing. He was crossing Clifton Lane outside Wilford ambulance station at 6.55pm on Tuesday when he was in collision with a Ford Sierra. He was taken to the Queen’s Medical Centre but was dead on arrival. […]
Nottingham Evening Post, 8th March 1990.