I’m sorry guys – I know this paranormal stuff sounds whacky, but I’m having too much fun to stop. Gotta share another story ...
According to scores of witnesses and auditory evidence, a ghost haunts an Avro Lincoln B11 bomber at the RAF Museum, Cosford – Shropshire, England.
No kidding. You’ve got to read this ...
Nestled in Hangar Three sits bomber RF398, an elderly Avro Lincoln long-range bomber. Built in 1945, she served in the Bomber Command Bombing School until 1957, eventually winding up at Cosford in ‘68. Since then, museum staff and others have insisted that “Master Pilot Hiller,” an airman who eerily announced that he’d “haunt his baby” (referring to this particular bomber), actually
haunts the machine.
Shortly after Hiller’s untimely death at Cosford, something supernatural possessed the Avro Lincoln.
It started in 1980 during the bomber’s restoration. A staff member was locking up one evening when a flicker caught his eye. Somebody was cavorting inside the bomber, a dillydallying guest, he assumed, and that was a no-no. The staffer flicked on the lights, scurried to the aircraft, and searched it from nose to tail – but found no one. Scanning the hangar with a critical squint, he shuffled back to the door, turned off the lights, and glanced one last time at the lonesome Lincoln – when his jaw dropped: A willowy, undulating “cloud” hovered near the bomber, close to the perspex nose. Slowly, the vapor coalesced into the filmy apparition of a pilot dressed in flying kit. The staffer gawked in disbelief, swallowed his tongue, and then bolted out the door.
Days later, a mechanic dropped a wrench inside the Lincoln’s cavernous, darksome bombay. As he bent down to feel for it, an unseen hand thrust the tool into his outstretched fingers.
Mechanics began to report tools, spare parts and other items materializing right next to them. Rare fittings and fixtures turned up no matter
how scarce or unusual they were. On one occasion, the restoration team was at a loss for a type of wire that was all but impossible to find – until a coil of it magically appeared in a hangar corner. Obsolete bulbs showed up when needed. Switches, knobs and other out-of-production devices materialized, too, as the restoration progressed. Nobody had a clue where they came from.
One afternoon, an electrician working on the Lincoln 15 feet above the floor fell from his perch. He recalls thinking “This is it!” But rather than smacking the concrete, he gently floated to the floor “as if,” he recalled,”some invisible force had prevented my fall from being fatal.” He landed without so much as a scratch.
Months later, the secretary to the museum society was piecing together a bulletin board inside Hangar Three when someone called her name. Thinking a staff member was requesting a cup of tea, she craned her neck toward the bomber, but saw no one. The voice called again, and this time the secretary saw an unearthly face gawking at her from the cockpit. Understandably, she's refused to enter the building alone to this day.
All of this and more prompted the BBC’s Gwyn Richards and paranormal investigator Ivan Spenceley to investigate the haunted bomber in 1991. The pair spent two nights inside the aircraft armed with recording equipment. Their results:
The recorders captured mechanical sounds that can’t be attributed to the building cooling down or the aircraft settling. Such as four engines coughing to life and revving at high speed, the roar of the bomber pulling maximum power down a runway, the change of pitch as the aircraft turns and dives. To corroborate their findings, Gwyn and Ivan played these recordings to ex-Lincoln air crew, who confirmed the sounds as genuine and
exactly what you’d hear inside the bomber as it flies. Three of these ex-crew members, Phil Pritchett, Gareth Lewis and Peter Palma, attributed several of the sounds to actions typically implemented by pilot and crew. No one could explain any of it.
At another time, someone recorded the sound of a Consul navigation beacon inside the cockpit, a bizarre phenomenon considering the Consul beacon has been out of use since 1956.
So what’s going on there? Is “Master Pilot Hiller” actually
haunting that bomber, just like he said he would? Or is it some ghostly Whitley crew member, as others suggest, who longs after the engine of his ill-fated bomber that once resided in Hangar Three? We’ll never know. But current staff members, several workmen and more than a few guests still insist something creepy hangs around bomber RF398.