Scary ghost stories and stuff (1)

Hell Hill

“It’s just a hill with some bones in it, Mom.”

I remember the rest of the conversation from my childhood in West Wales as if it were yesterday. My mother started kneading the dough for the Saturday evening’s apple pie more forcefully as she replied.

“Old Fern Hill is not just a hill, Danny, and they’re not just bones. They say that tumulus on the top is five thousand years old, and was a Druid burial ground.”

“Oh come on, Mom! Those legends about the tumulus and the Druids’ curse are old wives’ tales,” I said, not quite believing that statement myself, but it was a thing for a teenage boy to say to his parents at that time.

“Well, all I know is that in your great grandmother’s day some boys went camping there overnight and were never seen again.”

She almost sung those words with her lilting Welsh accent.

“Where’s the proof? That’s just hearsay passed down the generations.”

“Whatever it is I don’t want you playing up there.”

I was thirteen and was at a rebellious stage. The older generations and their superstitions could be discarded like my elementary school’s short pants. Hence, that very afternoon found me with my classmates Rick and Ted, sitting at the base of the grass-covered tumulus on the top of Old Fern Hill.

Not old enough to purchase alcohol we had to content ourselves with bottles of Coca Cola. Ted had also managed to get us a pack of cigarettes from his older brother. We looked down over the fields that led back to the terraced-house estate where we lived, like lords surveying their domain. Our cigarettes made us feel tough and grown up.

“Well I’m off to find a place to pee,” I said. After an hour the Coca Cola had gone to my bladder.

“Go in the ferns at the bottom of the hill. No one will see you there,” said Ted. “That’s what I did when I was last here with the boys,” he made a point of adding, to show that he had braved Old Fern Hill before.

I had a sudden urge to assert my own courage in front of my fellow lords of the land.

“I think I’ll go behind the tumulus. Nobody will see me from that side of the hill.”

“No ‘body’ maybe but watch out for the ghosts,” said Rick. He was making a joke of it but I could feel the respect in his eyes as I strode off. Local legends still meant something in those days.

The other side of the tumulus was in shadow and looked over a couple of fields which ended at the periphery of the ancient woods.

“This landscape must have been similar thousands of years ago,” I thought to myself.

I imagined the Old Fern Hill in prehistoric times emerging from the forest that would have then surrounded it like a green sea. My imagination conjured up Druids walking up to the top to perform their ceremonies. And the tumulus itself? Who or what lay buried beneath?

“I’m just watering the turf like the falling rain,” I muttered as I did my sacrilegious act. Suddenly I became a frightened boy again and rushed back.

“Got another ciggy, Ted?” I asked, trying not to sound like I needed one.

I struck a match and then without warning a wind swept across the hill from the wood side and blew it out. It was a chill wind quite out of character for the warm late August afternoon. For what seemed like a minute we shivered in our t-shirts as if in a trance, and then the warmth returned but it was growing dusk. Surely it hadn’t been this late in the afternoon? We were all too confused to work things out.