Haunting tale of murdered POW
Mine of information
During my childhood, I was told the Johnstone Castle woods were haunted by the grisly ghost of a murdered German soldier.
It was said the fearsome phantom goose-stepped through the trees in the dead of night, creepily clad in his steel-helmet and dark uniform, singing military marching songs from bloodied battlefields.
It was even whispered the spectral soldier had a skull for a face, fleshrotting bones for the hands, which carried his bayoneted rifle, and wore combat fatigues splattered scarlet with blood.
Maybe it was a well-meaning adult ruse to keep curious children away because the ground was riddled with coal mines.
Deep air shafts dropped hundreds of feet into cavernous catacombs, where several colliers drowned a century earlier when a tunnel was flooded.
But the eerie tale had a bizarre twist, as I discovered years later.
During the Second World War, there was a German prisoner-of-war camp in the wooded grounds of the Johnstone Castle estate, which, for 200 years, belonged to the Houstoun family, who were the local lairds. Derek Parker knew many of Paisley’s secrets — the grimy and the good.
He wandered every corner in search of the clues that would unlock Renfrewshire’s rich history.
These tales were shared with readers in his hugely popular Parker’s Way column.
We’ve opened our vault to handpick our favourites for you.
This article was first printed on September 30, 2002.
Incarcerated in huts cocooned with barbed wire, the captives exercised daily by marching along nearby Beith Road — accompanied by armed guards.
During the day, many went out to work on local farms and factories, including a tannery at Bridge of Weir, before returning to the stalag at night.
One evening, something sinister happened at the prison camp.
A German soldier was mysteriously murdered.
Some people say he was shot while trying to escape.
But it is more likely he was executed by fellow-inmates after being tried by a ‘kangaroo court’ for some offence.
Possibly, he passed information to camp guards or tried to lead a mutiny, which could have led unwilling escapees back to the front to fight for a lost cause.
Most prisoners were happy to see the war out in the relative comfort of Johnstone.
Gruesomely, it was rumoured the victim was drowned in a toilet cistern by his compatriots.
The slain German was buried in a woodland grave, wrapped in his country’s flag, between the Johnstone Castle ruins and the derelict walled garden, just across Beith Road from the Bird in Hand Hotel.
Symbolically, the grave in the glade was guarded by a black German eagle, wings outstretched and sculpted on a block of stone in the wall.
Older Johnstone residents still remember the Eagle Stone, although it has long disappeared.
Today, the German prisonerof-war camp site is covered by the Johnstone Castle housing scheme.
The grim ghost of the German soldier is no longer seen, nor heard.
Perhaps, like the Germanic gods of his creed, he is in Valhalla, the mythical haven where slain Teutonic warriors are healed miraculously of their wounds and indulge eternally in the pleasures of fighting and feasting.