A reader's story
Towards the end of a long days cruise my partner and I decided to moor and we found a pretty, but fairly isolated stretch of towpath, around a mile from the nearest settlement. Having secured the boat we did the usual tidying-up and made preparations for a meal. It was a pleasant summer’s evening and I was sitting on the cockpit rail enjoying a cool beer when I noticed a man walking slowly towards me along the towpath. Initially I paid him little attention, as I was busy studying the map and mentally planning the next day’s trip. As the stranger came closer he spoke.
"Good evening. Could I have a glass of water?" was all he said.
It was an unusual accent, which I couldn’t place, and as I looked up to reply I noticed his clothes seemed very shabby and, in a similar way to his accent, odd and out of place. Being the friendly boating type I replied, "Good evening, of course," and shouted to my partner in the cabin for the water. She passed me a full glass which I duly gave to the man and he downed it in one swallow and returned the glass which, oddly, felt colder empty than it had full.
"Thank you kindly," he said, turned abruptly and set off in the direction he had been walking when he arrived.I remarked to my partner on the odd accent and clothes, but thinking nothing more of it we settled down to our meal and a drink and passed a very pleasant couple of hours chatting about the day and our plans for tomorrow. No other boats or walkers passed by and at around 10pm it was nearly dark. We had closed the doors and were generally pottering around getting things ready for an early night, when suddenly the boat tilted as if someone had stepped onboard and there was a loud banging on the cabin door. We both nearly jumped out of our skins, and my partner, slightly nervous at the best of times, said, "Don’t open it," in a loud whisper. I walked through the cabin and shouted through the locked door, "Hello, what is it?"
The same odd accent which I had heard earlier in the evening asked, "Have you any baccy mate?""I’m sorry, we don’t smoke," I replied rather nervously, not sure what to expect. There was a mumbled reply which I couldn’t make out and the boat rocked again and my partner called to me, "It’s the same man who asked for water. He’s walking off down the towpath. He’s stopped. He’s coming back! No, he’s turned and he’s walking away again."
We looked at each other and I said bravely, "I’m sure it’s nothing. He’s probably just a tramp or something," not really meaning it. My partner was rather more convinced.
"We’re not stopping here tonight. Let’s go on to the next village and moor where there are other people," she said.I didn’t put up too much of an argument, and so it was that we set off with navigation lights ablaze, in the direction of the next village. It didn’t take us long and fortunately we found a nice mooring place near to some other boats and a small pub. Once we’d moored up for the second time that evening we decided we could both do with a drink, and as it was still not quite closing time we called into the pub. Chatting to the friendly landlady, who was interested by our late arrival, we blurted out our story and thought how foolish it now sounded in the cosy surroundings.
"Not at all," she said. "You’re not the first boaters to have met Dimitri." She went on to recount the tale of a Russian immigrant who had worked as a labourer on local farms shortly after the Second World War, and who, in the early 1950s, had drowned in the canal under mysterious circumstances, close by where we had earlier been moored. Apparently he frequently asked for tobacco or food from passers-by. The description she gave was unnervingly similar to our mysterious visitor.
Personally I don’t believe in ghosts, and if they do exist I don’t understand how a ghost could drink a glass of water or make a boat rock, but suffice it to say we had a rather disturbed sleep that night, and we were both very pleased to put a few miles between us and that stretch of canal.
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