The Barracks Corridor Where Everybody Walks Faster And Nobody Says Why

I did six years. I am not a nervous man and I have never seen a ghost, and I want that on the record before I tell you about the corridor.

Block C, ground floor. Between the drying room and the fire door, maybe fifteen metres.

Everybody walks faster there. Everybody. Two hundred men, all ages, all backgrounds, most of them the sort of person who would rather be hit by a bus than admit to being frightened of a corridor.

Nobody talks about it. Nobody ever said "this corridor is haunted". What happens is more like this: you would be walking down it with a mate, mid-conversation, and the conversation would just stop, and you would both be walking a bit quicker, and on the other side of the fire door you would pick the conversation back up at the exact word.

And neither of you would mention it. Not once. Not ever.

The only time I heard it spoken about out loud was by a lad from Newcastle, very drunk, at a leaving do, who said, "Anyone else count the doors?"

And a corporal — a big, unbothered, rugby-playing man — said, immediately, "Eleven."

There are ten doors.

The room went quiet, and then somebody put on a song, and that was the end of it, and the next morning nobody mentioned it, and I have never mentioned it since, and it is nine years.

I looked it up, years later, in a way I am not proud of, because you do, at 2am, when your marriage is not going well and you have had a drink.

There was a fire in that block. 1974. Two men died. The block was rebuilt in the eighties.

The rebuilt corridor has ten doors.

I do not know what the eleventh one is. I do not want to know. I have never in my life been so glad to be a civilian, and I still — and my wife has caught me at it, in our own house, in the hallway — walk quickly past a certain kind of door.