"Myrtle Gardens was opened in the 1930s as part of the city's answer to the chronic housing shortage. The tenements were bordered by Myrtle Street, Crown Street, Melville Place and Orphan Street - a street which was named after the Orphans' Asylum that had once stood nearby. Most of the tenants of Myrtle Gardens - including my
grandmother - were unaware that part of the tenements had been built over the site of a
graveyard attached to the Orphanage Church. The graveyard had been
the final resting place of many poor little paupers who had not even reached their teens in the second half of the 1870s. The foundations of Myrtle Gardens had been built on the unmarked graves of the orphaned waifs, and this fact will probably explain the first supernatural incident which took place at the tenements in the 1970s. One hot oppressive summer's night in the early 1970s, the residents of Myrtle Gardens left their
windows wide open in an effort to air their homes in the unbearable heat. On one block of the tenement's nicknamed 'Sleepy Hollow' - because it was quiet and in a part of Myrtle Gardens that hardly received any sunshine - a strange rhythmic sound was heard. A teenaged girl on the top landing of the block had been listening to the Osmonds on her radio, but she turned the volume down to a whisper when she detected the peculiar rhythm of what sounded like someone repeatedly striking an object. She went to the
window, and she thought the sound was being made by - a
skipping rope. But who on earth would be skipping around 11 o'clock at night? The girl turned the radio's volume back up and continued to dream of her heart-throb Donny Osmond. However, the girl's father would later discover who was skipping at that late hour. Around one o'clock in the morning, the girl's dad returned from a pub called the Red Duster and walked unsteadily to Myrtle Gardens. Upon reaching the bottom of the stairs, he too heard the rhythmical skipping sound, and he imagined that some child was playing at a somewhat unearthly hour on the top landing of the block. When the man reached the topmost
flight of steps, he got the shock of his life. The girl skipping was dressed in a long white dress of the type that the man had only seen on a girl who was making her communion, or perhaps being a bridesmaid. This girl looked about seven years of age, and her golden hair was plaited and adorned with quaint looking
ribbons tied into bows. Her face was a ghastly pale colour, and her dark eyes gazed at him with an unnatural stare.
'Hey, what are you doin' out at this time kid? Where's your mother and father?' the man asked in a slurred voice.
The girl smiled - and vanished before his eyes.
The intoxicated witness rushed along the landing to his home, and after blindly stabbing at the lock with his Yale key and missing it each time, he hammered on the knocker. He was afraid to look behind him in case the ghost had followed him.
That was just one instance of an encounter with the little girl in white, but many more residents of Myrtle Gardens saw or heard the ghost at play. Her identity remains a mystery. However, another supernatural visitor to the tenements predates the Victorian child, and she - or was it a he - terrified the Edge-Hillian people of Myrtle Gardens in the previous decade.
In the summer of 1964, a weird apparition of an abnormally tall woman, dressed in funereal black outdated clothes, was seen silently creeping along landings as she snooped through the windows of the tenants. Those who were unfortunate enough to encounter the Woman in Black, as she was known, reported that she not only made no noise when she walked, but she also had the eerie capacity to turn a corner and vanish whilst always leaving you with the impression that she was watching you. Mr Jones, a young coalman from flat 72d, was on his way to the local Threllfall pub in Melville Place for a well-deserved drink one night in the summer of 1964. He trotted down the stairway of the tenements, whistling - when he suddenly almost collided with the Woman in Black, who was standing between the two
flights of stairs in the corner. She was at least 6 feet 6 inches in height, and she wore a small black hat on her head. Her face was plastered with make up, and her cheeks had much too red rouge spread upon them. The sinister beady eyes glanced at the startled coalman, and the Woman turned to hide her face. Mr Jones said the hairs on the back of his head stood up with fear. The weird figure wore a black calf length skirt that hugged her thighs, a short black into-the-waist jacket, and she also carried a
handbag. All these fashion items dated to the early 1950s. Mr Jones was of the opinion that the woman was actually a man in drag, because her features looked decided male. The slapdash heavy-handed application of the woman's make-up was also suspect. Later that night, the same bizarre-looking figure walked past a Mrs May Fisher and Mrs Theresa Silla, two residents from the top landing of the tenements. The women noticed that the gait of the woman looked like that of a man, and 'she' also had well-developed muscles in the woman's legs and knees were of a masculine nature. Fisher and Silla watched with intrigue as the Woman in Black went to the end of the landing and stopped to peer in at a family through the top panes of a window. When the figure walked back and passed the women, she turned a corner into the staircase, and although the women followed almost immediately, they were amazed and a little unnerved to find no trace of the weird-looking drag artist on the stairs.
The reports of the Woman in Black soon circulated throughout Myrtle Gardens, and the superstitious residents remained indoors once the gloom of twilight fell on the tenements. One woman in the tenements had three children, and while two were sharing a bath one Saturday night,just before their bedtime, the youngest child was being washed in the
kitchen sink. The 2-year-old child looked up and pointed to the window. Her mother glanced up and saw the expressionless face of the Woman in Black, staring at her and the child through the top windowpane. The woman screamed and ran out of the
kitchen clutching her dripping child.
By the late autumn of that year, the Woman in Black seems to have stopped her pointless journeys and audacious peeping Tom activities, for she was seen no more after that period, but to this day, the residents of Myrtle Gardens, who were all scattered across the city after being re-housed in 1980, often talk about the sinister cross-dressing shade."
.jpg)
