Gibraltar's Ghosts

I decided this week to see what I could find out about local ghosts and discovered that, despite Gibraltar being such a small place, there are far too many ghosts to write about in just one post.

I was born and grew up in Gibraltar in the sixties and seventies, at a time when TV was generally desperately boring and only available in black and white for a few hours a day so people had no option but to enjoy each others' company. And on those longer winter evenings, which in Gibraltar can often e quite mild even late into October, this often involved sitting around the patio with the neighbours exchanging stories, usually memories or local tales. 

I remember that the younger women would usually be busy with post-dinner washing up or settling babies, Dads would be gathered together talking about 'el Union' and 'el strike' and chain smoking Dunhills. which left us kids hiding in the shadows to prolong our bedtime and listening to the older generation, the ones who could still recall the Spanish flu at the end of the First World War, the Civil War in Spain and the Evacuation to London, Madeira and Jamaica.

Ghost stories were my favourite. Endowed - or perhaps blighted - with a vivid imagination,  they terrified me witless and kept me awake into the small hours of the night when the rest of the household was fast asleep. 

But I couldn't stop myself from listening avidly, creeping closer to the older women as they told about the tenement building where the sound of babies crying could be heard from inside the walls; about the grey woman that appeared from time to time in the Convent (the Governor's Palace); or about the military man who could be seen walking through a bar in Town Range and then disappearing into the wall; and, of course, about the soldier who walked his dog through the tunnels deep inside the Rock, unnerving, to say the least, the military personnel on duty there.

Gibraltar has been populated since ancient times, pre-history in fact, and remains of Neanderthals from some 24,000 year or so ago were found in Gorham's Cave in the nineteenth century. If Neanderthals were here, at around the same time as humans were known to have also roamed the earth, then it is perfectly possible that humans also have lived in Gibraltar since ancient times. Situated as it is at the gateway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, it stands to reason that Gibraltar would have been home to, or at least a stopping point for many travelers of many civilisations. Where there are people, there is death, and where there is death, darkness and superstition, there are ghost stories.

And Gibraltar has a very violent past. It's not just that it has been a fortress for centuries, nor that it has suffered many sieges with the death and destruction and disease that these brought. The life of the people that lived here, until relatively recent times, has been harsh, violent, and many of those lives ended in tragic circumstances. Yellow fever, cholera, war, murder, capital punishment of the most vicious sort - it's all happened here. No wonder then, that Gibraltar is utterly riddled with ghosts.Which bodes well for a haunted Halloween!

Some years ago, the Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation made a couple of series where a camera crew, some investigators and a medium went on local ghost hunts, following those tales of long ago. I've embarked on a bit of a series catch-up as many of these can be found on YouTube. I'm calling it research for future ghost stories I will write. But actually, I am as much immersed in these (and they still make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up) as I was when a child, listening to my great-aunts, their husbands and my grandparents talk about the Ghosts of Gibraltar on those drawn-out, dark winter evenings of my childhood. 

Check a couple of these out:

The Ghost Trail, by Gibraltar Broadcasting Television (GBC)