Sinister echoes

Until recently, my brother was in the 9th/12th Lancers in the British Army, based at the Bergen-Hohne Station in Germany. It is on the edge of NATO’s enormous Bergen-Hohne Training Area, established in the 1930s by Hitler’s Wehrmacht. It feels remote, despite being near the town of Bergen, and is about 2km (just over a mile) from the site of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. On liberation, the barracks, which had once housed Wehrmacht soldiers, became home to thousands of displaced persons, but since 1950 has been used by the Army. Unsurprisingly, the barracks are legendary amongst soldiers for being haunted.

In December 2010, my brother was the only person in his block over Christmas. On his first night alone, he noticed that the motion-activated lights had come on in the corridor. He poked his head outside his room but didn’t see anyone. He thought that whoever had set them off might be hiding in the showers, but their motion-activated lights hadn’t come on and they were in darkness. But someone had to be in there, because one after another, the showers turned on. Back in his room, he could hear stamping feet and the sound of something being dragged across the floor of the attic above. Was one of the few other soldiers on site playing a prank on him?

About five or six months later, he was living in another block. He kept his heavy daysack on a shelf above his bed, and one night he witnessed it fly about two or three metres with great force across the room, as if it had been thrown by an invisible hand. This was no prank.

He wasn’t alone in experiencing strange phenomena. About a year or two later, a friend of his who was, again, by himself over Christmas, heard screaming, plates smash and doors slam. He went to the kitchen but it was just as he had left it – no one was there, and no plates were broken.

The Med Barracks are nearby, and there are soldiers’ tales that the basement was filled in because inhumane experiments had been carried out there. It is off-limits, gated and locked. There is no electricity, but lights are still seen in the windows, and chilling cries have been heard from it.

My brother said the area had an oppressive, unnerving atmosphere: it would seem that the echoes of unimaginable human cruelty still linger. Helen Barrell Birmingham