Book Description

On one cold winter’s night in the 1850s, around midnight, a young nightwatchman is walking the grounds of the railway station at North Road, Darlington. Feeling the chill in the air, he hurries down to the porter’s cellar, where he knows there is a warm fire where he can get warm and have something to eat. Sitting opposite the fire, and turning up the gas, he notices a strange man, wearing a stand-up collar, a cut-away coat with gilt buttons and a scotch cap on his head, coming out of the coal shed followed by his dog, a large black retriever. The strange man moves directly in front of the fire, staring intently with a smile at the alarmed nightwatchman. Suddenly the strange man lunges at the watchman with his fist, followed by his dog who goes for the poor man’s leg. The nightwatchman retaliates and hits back at his stranger, but his fist goes through him and onto the wall behind. The strange man recovers, clicks at his dog, and both he and his four-legged companion return to the coal shed from whence they came. The nightwatchman shortly follows, but neither the stranger nor his black dog is nowhere to be found. This is the ghost story given by James Durham and was published in 1891 by W. T. Stead in “Real Ghost Stories”, and it was later revealed a clerk of the Stockton and Darlington Railway Company, called Thomas Munro Winter, had committed suicide nearby and his body had been lain in the exact cellar before being transported for burial years before. Who exactly was this mysterious stranger, why did he go for the nightwatchman, and importantly, what poor circumstances did the poor man have before ending his life? This is the biography of that apparition, Thomas Munro Winter, and the short turbulent life he had, and whilst this strange event has been wrote many times before, this book is the first time the full, or at least most of the facts of his life, and that of his widowed wife, have been laid out to rest, if only Thomas Munro Winter and his dog could do the same… Disclaimer: This book deals with depression and suicide in the early Victorian era. Some Artificial Intelligence (AI) imagery has been used for the cover and interior of this book and may not accurately portray the environment or times in which this book is set.