Wartime Ghost Stories

Discover chilling tales from the frontlines and beyond with this spine-tingling collection of wartime ghost stories. 

War provides fertile ground for ghost stories. Whether people are crammed into trenches, barracks or air raid shelters, such close quarters allow for supernatural tales to spread like wildfire. And with every airfield, ship and stretch of battlefield holding tales of those who died there, there exists endless opportunities for ghostly mythology.

A Final Visit Home

I saw this firsthand while exploring the ghost stories in the Imperial War Museum’s collection, and this book brings together seventeen such spooky accounts.

During my research, the legend of the Angels of Mons emerged as the book’s perfect starting point. Perhaps the most well-documented wartime spiritual experience, the story goes that a host of winged figures (mostly appearing as angels, but also as Saint George and archers from Agincourt too), descended upon the Battle of Mons to aid the surrounded British troops. The angelic reinforcements terrified the German cavalry, which quickly scattered and stampeded, in turn allowing the British to get to safety.

Conveniently, there are no first-hand accounts of the angels. Most records of their existence come in the form of soldiers describing “a friend” who saw the glowing angels. But by the spring of 1915, the story was everywhere, spreading through the ranks, appearing in local magazines and featuring prominently in national newspapers.

Depiction of the Angel of Mons.

I wanted to look closely at why spiritual experiences prosper in wartime, and the Angels of Mons legend proved a great way to explore this. In the case of the angels, the rapid spread of the legend cannot be fully explained without first looking at the bleak reality of Britain’s war come spring 1915. What had at first seemed a war of movement had quickly reached an impasse. Trenches had been dug across the Western Front; new weapons like chlorine gas had arrived on the battlefields and German Zepplin raids had begun over London, bringing the grim reality of the war directly to the public’s doorstep. Given such dire developments, it is little wonder that the British public clung to the story of angelic intervention. In the face of overwhelming grief and loss, many took what little hope they could find. 

In addition to this psychological need for hope, I also found that the physical toll of war, namely stress, sleep-deprivation and hunger, contributes towards the proliferation of ghostly tales. Private Frank Richards of the Royal Welch Fusiliers noted how sightings of the Angel of Mons were likely a consequence of mass exhaustion:

“March, march, for hour after hour, without a halt; we were now breaking into the fifth day of continuous marching with practically no sleep in between…Stevens (his comrade) said: ‘There’s a fine castle there, see?’, pointing to one side of the road. But there was nothing there. Very nearly everyone was seeing this, we were all so dead beat.”

Night Watch in HMS Indefatigable

But the Angels of Mons were not an isolated incident. Looking beyond this single event, it was fascinating to find other ghost stories within our collection. One story follows nurses stationed in a haunted house on the Western Front and another tells the tale of a stoker who was visited by the ghosts of his fallen comrades, but my personal favourite is Peter Dolan’s tale.

Dolan, a South African corporal who was advancing up the Italian boot in the spring of 1944, described a cold and windy night traversing the Apennine Mountains. When a patrol became lost, he set out in search of the missing men but found only an abandoned house. Despite its “eerie” exterior, Dolan entered the building, and the scene he described could almost be lifted from a horror story:

“The walls were marked and dirty. I gagged on a heavy, clinging smell of death, which came from nowhere and everywhere, and hung in the room like animate evil. There was no sound but the banshee wailing of the wind outside… The hair prickled along the back of my neck. My nerves could not have been too good, for I felt extremely uneasy. I made a hurried search of the place; more to curb my own fear than in the hope of finding anyone. There was nothing and no one and no sign that there had ever been anyone, save for the marks and that sickening reek, which was omnipresent and which brought the warm saliva trickling up from the back of my mouth…”   

Private Papers of P K Dolan (Documents.20382)

Peter Dolan recounts The House in Pistoia Mountains.

Ultimately, no two stories in the book are alike. They come from nurses, soldiers, civilians and sailors, and span several continents and over fifty years of conflict. Some are moving, others are humorous, but beneath the chills they speak to the universal experiences of loss, fear and hope felt during times of war.