The Writers' Circle

As far as I am aware I have only ever seen one ghost, and that was nearly twenty years ago.

At the time I was a junior officer in the British Army stationed at Hohne barracks in North Germany. Roughly equidistant from Hamburg and Hannover.

Hohne was then - and probably still is - a large military camp. It was originally built for the German Army in the 1930s as an artillery training depot, and could easily accommodate 10,000 men. Although when I was there it housed about half that number consisting of 3 British regiments, 2 German and 1 Dutch. It had been built in a thinly populated area of woodland and scrub and was about a mile down the one road that ran past it from what had once been the concentration camp of Belsen.
Nothing remained of Belsen itself except large burial mounds each with a stone plaque stating how many souls had been buried there. From memory the average mound and pit beneath it contained 10,000 corpses.
By contrast, very little of Hohne camp had changed since it had first been built half a century before. All of the barrack blocks were original, although their interiors had been refurbished. What had once been the Ballroom had been turned into a shopping area, the original cobbled roads within the camp had been asphalted over, a new building containing a bank and a small car showroom had been built, and that was about it. The rest remained the same.

My regiment was responsible for the security of the camp complex. It had to be a British regiment, as at the time there was still a very real threat of terrorist attack by the IRA. Why my regiment was given the task rather than one of the others was something that was never explained, but what it meant in practical terms was that we had more fatigues than anyone else, as we manned the guardroom and provided armed patrols inside and outside of the wire fencing. For the junior officers of the regiment the extra work consisted of spending some of our free time detailed as orderly officer. This duty, while not unpleasant, was boring and disliked by most of us. It was generally given to someone who had displeased the Colonel in some way, and as myself and the Colonel didn't get on, I found that I spent more time than most in the role of orderly officer.
As I have said, the duty was not unpleasant. It basically meant that one was restricted to the orderly officer's room for the night and that one had to inspect the guard sometime between midnight and dawn. The exact time would be given by the adjutant before he went home.
The orderly officer's room had originally been a storeroom, and the bulk of it was taken up with paper archives going back to 1945. The remaining quarter of the room space contained a bed, a sink, a table and chair, and a telephone.
I didn't mind too much when I pulled extra duties. The room wasn't much worse than my own room in the officers mess.
Hohne was also too far away from anywhere to make a night out practical. I didn't have much money, and I was single so no-one was missing me. I would pass the time laying on the bed reading through the old archives or browsing a book that I had borrowed from the library. The biggest problem was that the orderly officer's room was a good twenty minute walk from the guardroom and in mid-winter the cold would cut through the service uniform that one was obliged to wear when on duty.

It was around 3 o/clock in the morning on a cold clear November night when I saw the ghost, or spirit or whatever it was. I was making my way from the orderly officer's room to the guardroom located by the main camp gates when I was passed by a German soldier riding a bicycle. I had seen him twice before, but both times at a greater distance. It had always been around the same early hour of the morning when I had noticed him. This particular morning he rode past me at a distance of no more than ten feet and I was able to observe him more closely. He was wearing the standard German barrack dress of field grey with a green/grey forage cap, and on his left arm he wore a red cross brassard. On both of the other occasions, I had assumed that he was a baker as no-one else would be travelling around the camp at that early hour, but now I could see that he was a medical orderly. His bicycle was a heavy old fashioned looking black model without lights.
I heard his approach and had turned and stopped to allow him to pass. As he did so I had a vague feeling that something was not quite right, and it took me a second or two before I realised what it was.
The wheels of the bicycle were not rolling along the top of the tarmac but appeared to be about four inches below the surface of the road.
I was so astounded by what I had seen, that I stood rooted to the spot unable to think of anything to do or say. By the time I had recovered my wits the cyclist had disappeared into the distance.

I made my way to the guardroom and passed what must have been a desultory inspection of the guard as I can't remember anything about it. Wisely I did not mention what I had seen to anyone. My standing with my superiors was not exactly at an all-time high, and it would have been stupid to give them further reason to put me down, despite the fact that I was absolutely sure of what I had seen, I had not been drinking (I was on duty after-all) and it had been a clear moonlit night.

A few weeks later I came upon a possible explanation of what I had observed, although there could possibly have been a different story that would have fitted equally as well.
Within the archives for 1945 there had been a report of a German "sanitaire" or medical orderly who had been found dead hanging by a rope in one of the barrack blocks. At that time Belsen had been liberated for about 2 months and the survivors were being treated by British soldiers along with a contingent of 200 German medical troops under supervision. The dead German had been one of these and the report blandly stated that it was probably suicide. With so much death and suffering going on at the time it is no surprise that the report didn't bother to investigate further.
Whether the appalling conditions at Belsen affected the man's mental stability, or whether he knew someone there who had died (Belsen held political prisoners, gays, gypsies and common criminals as well as Jews) is not known, and with the passage of time, now never will be. It's also possible that he may have been killed by someone else.
I don't know why the man died, but have a belief that what I saw one cold November night in Germany was his spirit passing me on the cobblestones four inches below the road's surface.