Mansfield Street, Glasgow

The following article entitled ‘Ghost is no joke for the Hanlons’ was published in the Glasgow Evening Times on 7 August 1961.

“We’ll never go near it again”

A shaken, sleepless man sat resting in his mother’s home to-day while six miles away a whole street argued furiously about the ghost he left behind him.

And as he sat in his mother’s ground-floor tenement home at 224 Muirshiel Crescent, Priesthill, Glasgow, 31-year-old Lachlan Hanlon was sure of only one thing – he will never go back again to his room-and-kitchen home in Partick.

As he took a firm grip of a doorpost, Mr Hanlon told me to-day about the two years of chilling noises, perpetual coldness about the house at 23 Mansfield Street, Partick, and a “constant creepiness”.

Obviously badly shaken and suffering the effects of a sleepless night, Mr Hanlon declared – “A lot of people think this might be a glorified publicity stunt. They can sneer about the haunted Hanlons, but let them come through what we have and they will soon stop their joking”.

He was then joined by his dark haired 28-year-old wife Mary, a former beauty queen, whose face was chalk-white and whose red-rimmed eyes betrayed a night of worry.

Said Mary – “We didn’t want all this fuss, but you can believe everything we have said is true. I will never go back there, nor will my children”.
The Hanlons endured all creepiness until early on Saturday morning when the shy ghost made his first appearance.

After coal rose and dropped back in the bucket, and after they were pushed by “invisible fingers” , Mr Hanlon ran through to the bedroom to waken his wife and a friend’s wife.

It was the friend’s wife, Mrs Thomas Kearney, who saw a figure like a very tall man with bushy hair leaning over the children’s bed.

And added to the problem of finding a new house which faces the Hanlons there is the unusual one of how they are going to get their furniture out of the house.

“That is one of the things I am still worried about” confessed Mrs Hanlon “because I will never step inside thathouse again, nor will the family to get them. I will just have to face that problem when I get to it”.

Meanwhile in Mansfield Street the haunted house “ghosted” the Russian spaceman into obscurity.

For the Hanlons ghost was the was the No.1 talking point. Groups of people gathered to point at the white-painted frontage of the Hanlons home and argue fiercely about ghosts.

Children peered through the letter-box watching for the dancing coal.

One neighbour who definitely does not believe in ghosts is 84-year-old Jean Rintoul who lives through the wall from the Hanlons. She said “I never had a sleepless night over it. Noises? Sure you hear plenty of them – from the children upstairs. If my coal starts jumping about in the bucket I’ll blame it on the mice”

Although she and many others pooh-poohed the idea of the ghost there were a few who were not quite sure.