Playground Playmates From The Past, Great Holm

My day job, for the time being at least, is being in charge of all the surveys that go out to students at the Open University. Collecting and analysing data is my bread and butter, so when I had this idea for finding and sharing stories from the dark side of Milton Keynes, it was only natural for me that one of the first things I did was design a form that people could fill in. As it happens, most of my tales have come through a more interactive route, with interviews, email exchanges and Facebook chats to fill in all the details, but I’ll always be grateful to today’s experiencer, the first ever submission through my form!

Thank-you, Nina, for taking the time to get in touch, fill out all my boxes, and send this eerie tale through the ether to me. It was a delight to read, and I’m really happy to be able to share it with you all now.

I know the location for this one extremely well. I must walk past this playground on Great Holm two or three times a week—it’s on my route into the Open University, I walk that way when I go into the city centre, and quite often at lunchtime I’ll take a walk around Lodge Lake. The playground is rarely silent, the whole space bursts with life — children racing up steps and down slopes, swinging, climbing, laughing, rolling, the air full of shouts and the clatter of feet on metal steps — a place of pure, unstoppable joy.I’m certainly going to be looking at it differently after reading this…

Nina told me:

Around 1985 my sister and I moved to Milton Keynes with our parents
I was 9 years old and my sister was 14
We moved to Great Holm which back then was a new housing estate
There was barely anybody around very quiet
One afternoon my sister and I decided to visit the local park opposite the Obelisk
As we were approaching we heard children laughing and playing and thought great we can make friends
As we got closer we saw 4 children
In Victorian or Edwardian clothes playing with what appeared to be a wooden hoop with a stick
As we got closer they waved and we waved back
Just as we arrived to the park they had disappeared we looked all around the park and were nowhere to be seen
My mother always reminds me of the time my sister and I came back and told her.

There’s something quietly unsettling about the idea of two children, newly arrived in a strange estate, going out with open hearts in search of new friends — and being met with smiles and laughter that didn’t quite belong. The children they saw were friendly, yes, but clothed in another era and playing with a toy that hadn’t been common in playgrounds for generations. Their waves must have felt welcoming at first. But what a thing, to reach the edge of the park and find them gone. No one else to be seen. How do you explain that to your parents without sounding foolish or frightened? And yet the memory has lingered in the family ever since.

I went over to Great Holm to take these photographs at twilight, returning after the last kids had all gone home. (Apologies to the two lads who thought I was photographing them on my first pass by— totally accidental!) The May evening was warm, still, and full of birdsong. In the distance, someone laughed — close enough to hear, but not to see.

For a heartbeat, I let myself imagine the laughter hadn’t come from nearby — but from a long-forgotten evening, still looping through the air like a sound that refused to die.

In the shadow of the obelisk, where stories whisper, where ghosts once waved, it didn’t seem entirely impossible.

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Thank-you to Nina for this delightfully creepy story, and thank YOU for reading!
If you have a story of your own to share, I’d really love to hear it.