The Echo - (Adam Maxwell-Farquhar) ( Introduction)

The Echo- (Introduction)

After my experiences in France, I returned to Aberdeen, and being somewhat distressed by my experiences there, I was deemed to be ‘traumatized’ by the Great War, and was advised by my physician Dr McHardy, to step back from being a clergyman for a year or so, to allow myself time to recover.

I returned to the Maberly Street area of the city where I rented a spacious tenement flat, where I would spend more time among my books, and perhaps write some memoirs, investigate some malevolent spirits, and hauntings.

My flat, as I said was spacious, but the room at the back of the building was always cold, even in the blistering heat of Summer. I suspected a malevolent spirit, and I was not wrong.

Mr Mitchell, the owner of the building said that the spirit that haunted the room was that of a man who had drowned in the Loch of Aberdeen which had been in this area five hundred years prior to our own time. Some of the earliest settlers in the city were hunter-gatherers who had set up home by the loch, and built up their own settlements, which became the district of the Loch lands, hardworking individuals who drew their living from fishing and weaving, and from the fertile land which blessed them with crops with each successive year.

As time passed, the loch was drained and new tenement housing was built on its site, commemorated by the street names, Loch Street for example, which was not a stone’s throw from where I now stood.

Mitchell told me that he heard many stories of Aberdeen’s history over the years, so he was aware of the loch and was well versed in the evolution of Aberdeen as a city over the years.

He advised that there had been wet footprints leading up to the second floor of the tenement, and that on nights when rain had not fallen.

Mitchell was a real repository of the facts and folklore of the city and its people, and in years to come would provide me with the assistance I needed in my new vocation, his collection of books on ancient lore, arcana, incunabula were second to none, all piled high in his garret rooms in the self-same building.

In time, Mitchell would become my companion on my ghost hunting, exorcisms, and the like, the first of which was an investigation into a haunting in a church just south of the Granite City.

Word had spread of Adam Maxwell-Farquhar, ghost hunter, and I had been sought out by the Reverend Yeadon, at the Cauld Parish church in the wee village, in upper Deeside, not an area that I was familiar with in any way, but I was eager to investigate these mysterious happenings.

Yeadon had been hearing voices in his head; he was not diagnosed with any madness of any kind and assured me that these voices were heard in the church when there was nobody else present.

He told me that the voices were like a cacophonic choir, all its members singing out of tune, sometimes there was a brass band, he said. like the Salvation Army band, that sort of thing, not a noise like that ‘jazz music’ that is coming from America these days, he mentioned that he had been dreaming also of this band, who were named ‘The Band of Holy Joy.’

I thought back to my adventure in France, that very title was like something from an Arthur Machen tale or one by Jimmy Pirie, the Aberdonian soldier I had met back in France.