GHOST WALKS IN GAOL.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 274, 19 November 1927, Page 23

GHOST WALKS IN GAOL.

CORRIDORS CONVICTS AVOID. GIRL IN A SHEET. Ghosts are said to haunt some -section of every prison. Much terror was caused on the women's side at a big prison at one time by stories of the ghost of an old matron who had died in harness after a long term of service. Nobody, prisoner or officer, could claim to have seen this ghost, but the legend that it walked had been handed down from one prisoner to another, together with harrowing tales of the old woman's iron rule, and even some of the officers shared the dread qf meeting her flitting through the corridors.. One gloomy corridor in the prison is still shunned after dark, and old prisoners tell with bated breath of icy blasts and queer, uncanny noises.

At the same prison a woman declared that 6he had heard three knocks on a door. Her graphic story of the knocks,

which, as everyone knew, "never come for nowt," caused homething of a panic amoDgst her cronies, each "never knowin' whose turn it might be."

Their fears were tremendously relieved at last by the news that a death had occurred in the prison hospital.

A ghost in which many of the convicts at Aylesbury believed, was once said to haunt the punishment cells situated at that time in an outlying block.

So scared were they of being left alone in the .block that whenever one prisoner was removed there for refractory conduct, it was considered "up to" a couple of her pals to run amok in order to get placcd in neighbouring cells for company sake. In spite of the penalties incurred by 6uch behaviour they would keep their courage up by spending the nights singing, dancing, and cat-calling from one cell to another.

One lively young convict, tiring of this form of diversion, blackened her face all over with blacklead scraped frpm tie iron grid covering the cell ventilator and, draping herself in a sheet in the' early morning succeeded, to her great glee in startling a stolid old officer nearly ou of her wits.