A Christmas ghost story

To mark Christmas this week, here is a short tale about a ghost and a cowardly private detective...

In 1891, the residents of Peterborough were scared, and it was the fault of a railway worker named Mr Rimes.

Although Rimes’ full name was not provided in reports into this case, he may have been Robert Rimes, a railway labourer in his mid 40s, who lived in the town with his wife Emma. Several months earlier, Rimes had moved into a small house at 22 Mayor's Walk with his wife, brother, sister-in-law, and three children. Since then, the whole family had been subject to some strange goings-on in the house - some amusing, some terrifying. Rimes, for a long time, suspected that they were the victim of a practical joker, and had tried to find out who the perpetrator was. He called various neighbours in to sit up in his parlour at night, watching - but all fled from the house in terror.

Not even a private detective could solve the mystery of the Rimes’ ghost

While the Rimes family were in bed, their bedclothes would be thrown on the floor, the doors would shake on their hinges and be broken - even when Mr Rimes was in the room. Most terrifying were the noises. Some were unearthly, while others sounded like smashing crockery, a cartload of bricks being tipped up in the house, or even part of the house being demolished.

Eventually, Rimes called in a private detective who was well-known for exposing 'ghostly characters'. Mr Wright, the detective, was commissioned to come and investigate.*

Mr Wright stayed a night, and heard what he described as 'a sack of coals drawn along the landing, and then thrown down the stairs.' No coals could be found - in fact, he said that although the noise throughout the house at night was violently loud, and even woke the neighbours, nothing in the house was ever found to be displaced. The violent sounds were always preceded by a low humming or the sound of wind. Others in the area said that their houses had been 'shaken' by a noise like a cannon.

On the Friday before Christmas Day in 1891, the noise reached its peak. Locals called it 'hideous', with several houses in Mayor's Walk shaken, their residents woken by the noise and petrified. Nobody could explain the 'extraordinary phenomena they witnessed.' Even Mr Wright was scared - so much so that he fled before the dawn, unwilling to stay any longer, even if it meant he would not get paid.

The Rimes family moved from the address shortly after; although the road still exists, the house that scared the locals so much has since been replaced.

*The detective was not Edgar Cartwright, a well-known private detective who would later run Wright's Detective Agency, but another man who was probably more local to the Fens. There appear to have been a couple of private detectives with this surname, but no contemporary newspaper report into this case give the man in question’s first name