The three girls. Based on a true story. Charles Roberts

        The county of Lincolnshire has a huge number of old airfields, hence it is known as ‘Bomber County,’ virtually every town or village had an airfield near or named after it. Most have now gone, either under the plough or a few being used as industrial sites, but their memory lives on, usually the last building, for some reason, to be demolished is the control tower, but these are the buildings where most of the strange happenings occur.  This is the story about one such disused airfield which is now an industrial estate.  The aircraft and personnel may have gone, but some things remain to remind us that people lived, worked, and, sometimes died there.

          I remember my first day on a new job back in the sixties, it was as a security guard on an old airfield in the north of Lincolnshire.  The place had closed in nineteen forty seven and everything was left as it had been when they were flying from it, all the buildings and runways; in fact, apart from the graffiti and vandal broken windows you’d have thought that the air force had just moved out.

          It was my job, not mine alone, there were eight of us working in shifts, driving round the airfield making sure the buildings weren’t being broken into, but I remember this one early morning in Autumn, I was driving the old Land Rover we had, round the perimeter track to check on the buildings on the far side of the runway.  I recall that it was still dark and there was a thick fog that morning, I was approaching the end of the long runway, trying to see where I was going through the fog, when I heard singing and laughing.  I had the Land Rover windows open, I was just about to radio back to the office when, out of the murk I saw three women in uniform walking, or it might have been staggering, arm in arm along the perimeter track just in front of me.

          I slammed on the brakes, but I hit them, I felt the thump as I ran into the girls.  When I stopped I jumped out of the Rover and ran round the back to look for them, but there wasn’t a thing in sight.  I walked back the way I had come for a few hundred yards, but the only thing I could see was the tarmac and the very faint glow of my rear lights through the fog.  I ran back to the Rover and looked underneath, but there was nothing.

          Jumping back into the Rover I grabbed the radio and called the office and told then what had happened.  The guy who answered thought that I was having a laugh with them, but sent another chap out in the other Rover.  When he arrived he took one look at me and saw that I was as white as a sheet and shaking.  He got me into his Rover and drove back to the office where he gave me a sweet tea and I told my story again, he put it down in the incident book and we thought no more of it, although it still gave me goose bumps whenever I drove past that spot.

          It was about six weeks later and I was sitting in the office when an old chap walked in and sat down to chat with us.  He had been stationed there during the war and ask us if we’d seen anything odd out on the airfield.  I told him about my encounter with the three girls.  He looked at me and said, ‘so you’ve seen those three have you?  They were coming off duty in the control tower and walking back to the domestic site on this side of the airfield, but they took a short cut across the runway; which you should never do when they were flying, but it was a thick mist that night and they obviously thought that no one would be flying in that.

          Un-be-known to them an aircraft from another station was in trouble and had to make an emergency landing and we were the only field he could reach.  He’d jettisoned his bomb load over the sea and we put the runway lights on to give him some idea of where to land, although we all doubted that he’d be able to see them.  The girls were about half way across the runway when he managed to touch down with two of his engines dead.  He managed to taxi round to a dispersal, following a tractor with a flashing light on. 

          When they climbed out of the aircraft the crew said that they had felt a bump shortly after landing, but they couldn’t see anything.  When they investigated they found the bodies of the three girls’ sill on the runway.  Since then, they appear every now and again walking round that end of the perimeter track, usually when it’s misty of foggy.’