Story-by-story: Competing Theories With Regard to the Origins of the Ghost of Totterdown Lock

I wrote the first words of this unusually structured story, about the ghost, or ghosts, haunting a canal lock, in about 2017. I finished it in 2023.

Those first lines weren’t written to be part of a story. They were the snippet of poetry which opens it and which were inspired by – that is, ripped off from – Wilfred Owen’s ‘Shadwell Stair’:

I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair.
       Along the wharves by the water-house,
       And through the cavernous slaughter-house,
I am the shadow that walks there.

I came back to the lines I’d written, about Bristol’s evocatively-named Floating Harbour and Underfall, when I became obsessed with Totterdown Lock.

I walk or run past Totterdown Lock almost every day but didn’t notice it until I read something about it being filled in during World War II. You can see it here on a historic map.

This got me thinking about how the landscape of St Philips Marsh has changed over the years with successive waves of industrialisation.

Entire communities, like St Silas, have come and gone. Everywhere there are traces of old structures, old waterways, old street patterns.

I also wanted to capture something of the garbled nature of local ghost stories. “What I heard was…” and “The story I was always told is…” I don’t use Facebook much but I am a member of a couple of local history groups where this kind of half-remembered tale is often told.

Really, this was a way for me to tell a lot of small ghost stories, overlapping and contradicting each other, in a range of voices. A little like ‘Ten Empty Rooms’ in my last collection, Municipal Gothic.

The story was originally published, if that’s not too grand a word, in a homemade ‘zine of which I printed precisely 20 copies.

I gave those away to anyone who was interested. Just because I wanted to make something complete and whole, purely for the sake of making it.

What’s your personal ghost story?

One of my favourite conversational games is to ask people: “Have you got a ghost story?” Almost everybody does, it turns out.

The closest I’ve got isn’t from Totterdown Lock or the Feeder Canal but from the road that runs parallel, one block over.

Walking along Silverthorne Lane one damp, blustery evening, alone and surrounded by derelict industrial buildings, I distinctly felt the firm prod of a finger in the small of my back.

I span around, ready to defend myself from a mugger or weirdo. But, of course, there was nobody there.

I’ve thought about this a lot since it happened. Of course the setting might have had something to do with it – the shadows, the ruins.

Perhaps what I felt was a piece of litter blown into me by the gale.

Or maybe it was just a muscle spasm.

So… what’s your personal ghost story?

Intervals of Darkness will be published as a paperback and eBook on 7 September. You can pre-order the eBook now.