Something odd at No.1 Main Street

The building firm I used to be with did a lot of work for a country estate. There is a village attached to the estate and its old stone buildings are in constant need of repair or renovation, between tenants. One such property was No. 1 Main Street. This large stone cottage had been occupied by a retired couple, but, after her husband’s death, the wife had been asked to move into a smaller property.

The cottage needed a lot of work. We replaced all the plumbing, wiring and central heating, renewed most of the woodwork and replastered here, there and everywhere. We were on that job for two or three months.

On such long term jobs we would set aside a room for lunch breaks, where we would all sit at “snap time”, eating our snap. One lunchtime, while snapping in the winter gloom of that room, I had a sudden awareness of movement out on the landing, but by the time I had turned my head to look, all was still. There was an almost identical occurrence the next day.

On the afternoon of the second incident I was working outside when one of the locals came walking down the road. Bob was one of several villagers who I was on speaking terms with, after having worked in the village for a few years. When Bob got to the garden gate he stopped and shouted something like, “they’re keeping you busy, then”; I replied with a witty comment that didn’t come out quite right and left me feeling like a knob, but Bob was kind enough not to notice.

While we were chatting, I asked Bob what he knew about the history of the cottage; it turned out he could tell me quite a lot about it. Most of what he told me was just of passing interest but when he started to talk about an incident that happened there in the 1930s my interest became heightened.


Back then the cottage was home to the estate head gamekeeper and his wife. Two or three times a week the gamekeeper would go out in the middle of the night and lay in wait, on the lookout for poachers after his pheasant. He shared this duty with his two assistant gamekeepers, each taking different nights. He also, unknowingly, shared his wife with one of them, who would nip round to his place on the nights he was on watch.

It was on such a night that the head keeper cut his watch short, owing to not feeling well. His early return gave rise to much alarm, and the panic stricken assistant bolted like a scared rabbit, only to come face to face with the last man on Earth he wanted to come face to face with, standing at the top of the stairs. In his frenzied eagerness to be somewhere else, he made a lunge for the stairs, only to go headlong down them and arrive at the bottom with a broken neck and dead.