A quarry haunted by grey phantoms

One of the scariest places in the Paisley area is a deep water-filled quarry eerily encircled by towering trees and shrub-shrouded rocky cliffs.

Even in the summer gloaming, the petrifying pool is fearsome, when owls hoot mournfully in woodland bowers and black-backed bats flutter phantom-like above the weedwreathed water.

But, on dark winter nights, the flooded quarry is positively terrifying when grey wisps of mist spiral from the murky depths of the lugubrious lagoon.

They twist into writhing human shapes which send shudders down the spine and make your blood run cold.

Dead trees, with leafless branches, loom from the water like the bony fingers of sylvan skeletons protruding from a greenwood graveyard.

In these melancholic moments, you know why the derelict quarry, with its foggy, phantom figures gliding gloomily across the pond, is known as the Ghosties.

As the spectral sentinels drift drearily into the funereal darkness, feelings of foreboding intensify when you recall the mining disaster at

Mine of information

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 April 7, 2003.

nearby Benston coalfield nearly 150 years ago.

On that dark day, five doomed colliers, including a boy aged 14, perished horrifically in an underground flood which battered down the pit-props and caved-in the mine.

Tragically, the crushed corpses of the ill-fated miners were never recovered.

Their bleached bones still moulder 250 feet below the ground in a gallery linking the Benston pit to several coalholes near the Ghosties.

Is it their disembodied spirits, freed at last from their tenebrous tombs, which we see in the wispy wraiths of mist stealing surreptitiously across the black surface of the Ghosties?

But there is an even creepier theory. During the 19th century, the Ghosties was part of the Laird of Johnstone’s Corseford Coal and Lime Works.

The limestone pick-axed by quarriers from the cliff and subterranean ore-seams was burned with coal in nearby kilns and melted into lime to increase the crop yields of fields.

The powdered lime was shovelled on to the land by farm-labourers in horse-drawn carts.

These unsung stalwart sons of the soil toiled all day long.

Blanched from head to toe in the white powder, they and their horses and carts glowed like ghosts on dark winter afternoons and moonlit nights.

Lime is a deadly corrosive substance once used to burn the corpses of criminals after they were executed.

The same white death rotted the bodies of the agricultural bravehearts and horses who scattered it on the fields.

Are theirs the grey phantoms which haunt the flooded limestone quarry at the Ghosties?