It’s the early morning of May 27th 1913.
The newly formed Royal Flying Corps have an airfield at Montrose in Scotland.
The first of its kind in Britain.
Doing his pre-flight checks on his trusty B.E.2 Biplane
is 29 year old Lieutenant Desmond Arthur.
The 60 horsepower engine takes a couple of tries to get started,
but then the bird springs to life.
Adjusting his goggles, Arthur signals for the chocks to be pulled away
and the plane starts to drag along the airfield.
Arthur is an experienced pilot for the time
and just at the right speed he eases the controls and the B.E.2 lifts gently into the air!
Gaining altitude Arthur still feels the thrill and excitement of this technological marvel.
He set’s course for Lunan Bay. It’s an amazing spot of natural beauty
and from the air Arthur gets a view that’s only been available to the birds just a few years earlier.
What a time to be alive!
Arthur pushes the controls forward and starts to descend to 2500 feet or around 750 meters
when disaster strikes.
A spar on the right side of the top wing snaps
and the entire wing folds up.
The plane tumbles violently and gets thrown around its axis as it plummets to the ground.
In the death throes of the BE2,
Arthur’s seat belt snaps and he’s thrown out of the tumbling mass of wood, wire and cloth.
The crumpled remains of Lt Desmond Arthur were found 150 meters from the crash site.
This was the early days of flying and crashes were not unheard of.
However Arthur was an experienced pilot.
The Royal Aero club produced an official report stating that the wing had broken due to a botched repair…
But in the Summer of 1916 rather than have the issue of explaining faulty repairs…
an official government investigation concluded
that Lieutenant Arthur had died through his own incompetence through bad flying!
Effectively dishonoring the memory of this young aviator.
Shortly after the government report was issued
Major Cyril Foggin was looking forward to reading the newspaper and maybe even a decent cup of tea
in the officers mess.
Rounding a corner he stopped dead in his tracks.
Foggin was a military man and not easily given to fear…
But his blood ran cold and that cold feeling crept it’s icy fingers down his spine
as he saw a ghostly figure, dressed as a pilot heading into the officer's mess before vanishing!
Foggin was dumbfounded.
He decided not to make an official report of the sighting for fear of ridicule or even losing his job.
He must have been comforted when the ghostly apparition
was seen by more and more people.
A senior flight instructor had his sleep interrupted.
Waking with a start in a room lit by the stove fire,
he saw a man
sat facing him
in full flight gear
just at the end of his bed.
From his bed the instructor Shouted out,
“Who the bloody hell are you
and what are you doing here?”
Guest sat,
motionless,
silent as the grave.
With the instructor jumping out of his bed,
the evening intruder just disappeared.
More and more people saw this uninvited apparition
but only up to then in the old number 2 mess where Lt Arthur had lived 3 years prior.
One night 2 men on guard duty at the base were talking to each other,
trying to relieve the boredom
when out of the gloom
a figure emerged.
Something wasn’t right.
He walked towards the guards and they saw him coming from a distance….
Ominously. He just kept on walking towards him.
They called out, but the figure kept on walking.
Challenging him to stop
the image…
“flickered”.
The two men abandoned their posts and fled, terrified of the apparition they had seen.
Summoned to their commanding officer
the guards were questioned as to why they in a gross dereliction of duty had abandoned their posts?
Sheepishly the 2 men told the story of the ghost
expecting ridicule from the commanding officer
instead,
all charges were dropped.
The haunting was well known and felt by all who had served on the base,
including the commanders.
In the end of 1916 Investigative teams looked at the Be 2 crash afresh
and castigated the review board.
It was obvious that the faulty repair had been made on the spar of Lt Arthurs plane
and had been patched up shoddily.
This reinstated the reputation of the fallen pilot
and at the same time
the hauntings stopped.
But at the outbreak of WW2,
the activity started once more.
In 1940 a pilot of a Hurricane was coming into land at night.
The ground crew saw the Hurricane on final approach
power up
and go around again before landing.
Exiting the plane the pilot blustered at the ground crew,
“Who was the damn fool in the biplane
who cut me up?”
The ground crew has no explanation...about a ghostly biplane
In the war years the sightings continued with workers saying
they would hear a bang and see the ghost coming through the doors of the morgue….
why would a ghost be coming from the morgue?
Well,
previously that location had been the officers' mess.
By 1949 any newcomers to the Montrose air base were given a printed document
as part of their familiarization with the base
informing the staff that the camp was haunted by the youngest ghost in the Royal Air Force,
an officer
named
Flight Lieutenant Arthur.
One sighting was by a Scottish clerk
who woke to see an officer in a white flight suit and wearing an officer’s hat.
Casually standing by a desk examining papers.
The Spectre
stopped at the knees
and seemed to be floating in mid air.
The clerk was naturally terrified.
But one of the best sightings was attributed to Sir Peter Masefield in 1963.
On May 27th he was flying his Chipmunk over Montrose.
Montrose had now been closed for several years. It was a beautiful clear day.
Masefield put his plane into a turn over Lunan bay and started flying along the shore.
Ahead of him at a similar altitude
he saw a strange sight of a biplane.
As he got closer
he was amazed to see it was a BE2 trainer of the type used by the Royal Flying Corps before WW1.
Flying alongside Sir Peter saw that at the controls was a pilot
in a leather flying helmet, with goggles and a scarf billowing
as the ancient plane powered along.
Masefield was an aviation expert and knew
that there weren’t any more of these flying…
Maybe a few reproductions but this one looked, well,
perfect.
He watched in horror as the right wing snapped
and the BE2 went crashing towards the ground.
Sir Peter put in an emergency landing on a golf course nearby
and shouted for help for the stricken pilot.
Strangely
no one else had seen the crash.
Rushing to where he had seen the plane go down…
There was no wreckage to be found.
Nothing.
Just the peace of late May in the Scottish countryside.
When he went to write up his logbook he saw that the date was 27 May, 1963
exactly 50 years since Desmond Arthur’s fatal accident.
In recent years the airbase is reopened as a museum that you can visit today.
The Montrose Air Station Heritage Centre is located to the North of Montrose in Scotland.
The ghostly goings on continue at the museum.
In 2010 to the astonishment of the staff an old radio in the airfield’s 1940s room
suddenly began broadcasting speeches by Winston Churchill and the music by the Glenn Miller Orchestra,
the Allies’ favourite band during the Second World War.
The Pye valve wireless radio wasn’t powered and had no aerial.
The broadcasts come on seemingly at random and can last for up to 30 minutes.
Technicians from the museum have examined it and took it apart but found "nothing but cobwebs and spiders".
100 years after the accident of Lt Desmond Arthur-
the museum decided to lay a wreath at the grave of Lt Arthur.
Dr Dan Paton, the curator of Montrose Air Station Heritage Centre
said in an article in the Scotsman newspaper:
“Is there a Montrose ghost
and is it Desmond Arthur?"
Well, there are certainly recent sightings of apparitions of men in flying dress which defy rational explanation
but we should remember that hundreds of men were killed at Montrose over two World Wars.
Circumstances point to the existence of many ghosts.
As far as Lt Arthur is concerned….
He returned briefly for a purpose and once he was cleared of the blame for the accident he departed.
We should let him rest in peace.”
“All the same, on Monday, when we lay a wreath on his grave,
I should be watching the skies around Montrose.”
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