A Figure Made of Mist, Wolverton Mill

Tonight’s story reached me through a particularly delightful connection – last year, I was honoured to be a guest on Rob Kirkup’s wonderful How Haunted? podcast, talking about this project and the stories I’ve been collecting across Milton Keynes. Rob has a wide international audience, so when the episode went out in November, I wondered where our conversation might travel – and I was delighted when it reached someone right here in the city!

Tom got in touch with me on Twitter. He’d heard me on the show and wanted to share a few ghostly stories from around Milton Keynes – there was an old tale from Passenham, about a woman and her baby whose screams can still be heard near the river. He also knew Clophill, that famously atmospheric old church where so many local teenagers seem to have gone at some point, half-excited and half-terrified, to test whether the stories were true. (It’s technically outside my grid, so it’s not on my map, but I’ve written about my first visit there here.)

And then Tom shared the story that had happened to him.

It wasn’t long, and Tom was almost apologetic about that at first, worried that it might not be “extensive” enough for the blog. But over the last year of collecting these strange stories from across the grid, I’ve learned that not every haunting arrives as a long, elaborate sequence of events – sometimes the thing that stays with someone most is just one moment, or a glimpse of an unexpected figure at the edge of an ordinary evening.

Tom was about fifteen when it happened.

He told me he was out on his bike at Wolverton Mill, heading over towards Galley Hill. It was around 10pm, and he was riding past the balancing lakes when he reached the path that leads down towards the water.

And there, by the lake, he saw it.

A green mist.

Not just a patch of vapour or a trick of low light, but something with form. Tom described it as “in the shape of a person,” hovering there in the darkness.

The sight frightened him so much that he sped up as he passed it. Years later, he told me that it still gives him chills when he thinks about it. Of all the things he has seen with his own eyes, this remains one of the strangest.

There’s something about that image that lingers with me.

A teenage boy on a bike, the dark shape of the lake beside him. The hush of a still night. And then, suddenly, where there should be nothing but shadow and water, a green, human-shaped mist hanging in the air.

No footsteps followed him. No face appeared. No voice called his name.

Just that hovering figure by the path, and the instinctive, bodily certainty that he needed to get away from it.

What I found particularly compelling about Tom’s account was how grounded he was about it. He wasn’t trying to convince me of anything, and in fact, he told me he doesn’t really believe in ghosts, not exactly. But at the same time, he couldn’t dismiss what he had seen, or the stories other people tell. Something must be there, he said. He just didn’t know what.

So many of the stories I’m collecting sit in that strangely uncertain space. Often, they come from people who are still turning them over in their minds years later, trying to make sense of one thing that refused to fit into the world as they understood it.

I went back to the balancing lakes in December last year, which tells you how long this story has been quietly waiting to be written.

Tom had very kindly sent me a map, so I knew exactly where to go. But once I was there, I found myself slowing down. It was good to be out in the cold air, with the lake beside me and the paths almost empty, and I ended up spending an hour taking photographs, wandering without much purpose, and letting the place settle around me.

It really is beautiful there. The lakes may have been dug relatively recently, built to contain overflow flooding from the nearby estates, but they didn’t feel artificial while I was there. There was open water, winter trees, and that strange hush that comes when you have somewhere almost entirely to yourself in the quiet pause between Christmas and New Year.

But a place can be calm, still, and beautiful, and still leave you with the distinct impression that you shouldn’t linger after dark.

And of course, Wolverton Mill has already appeared in this project before.

Andy’s story, which some of you may remember, took place very close to the balancing lakes. His encounter was very different from Tom’s: not a green mist by the water, but a dark, robed figure stepping from a derelict house, something he could only describe as the Grim Reaper. Andy and his friends were children then, sneaking into a place they knew they shouldn’t be, when fear descended so suddenly and so completely that they ran. Years later, the memory still haunts him. 

Tom’s figure is quieter. Stranger, perhaps, because it is so much less defined. A green mist, human-shaped, hovering beside the lake on a still night. Just enough shape to be almost a person, but of course, there was no-one actually there.

And then I found myself thinking about Alison’s story, on the other side of the city at St Mary’s in Shenley Church End. That one also came through Rob’s How Haunted? audience, and it too involved something partial and mist-like: a pale shape rising behind a gravestone in bright daylight, seen by both Alison and her husband, mistaken for smoke or fire for just a moment before vanishing completely. 

When I began Revenants on the Redway, I thought I was collecting separate stories. A house here, a road there. A churchyard, a bridge, a bedroom. Each one pinned neatly to its own square in its own little pocket of strangeness, but the map is starting to change.

It feels a little as though the pins are no longer just pins. They’re beginning to gather into little clusters of experiences that are forming across this supposedly unhauntable city. Wolverton Mill has given us a Reaper by the old house and now a green mist by the balancing lakes. Shenley Church End has given us running legs that vanish into empty space, and a curl of white mist by the stones. And of course, Bradwell has its own almost-transparent, human-ish figure hovering by the railway bridge. 

There is something intriguing about the way these stories are beginning to arrange themselves, like a half-seen shape in the darkness: suggested by fragments, the pattern only visible once you can step back a little.

That’s what I keep coming back to with Tom’s story: how it was just a fragment of a moment, but how clearly it’s stayed with him.

Perhaps it was just mist, or one of those fleeting tricks the landscape plays when night has softened all the edges.

Or maybe, for a few seconds, Tom saw something at Wolverton Mill that was never meant to be seen clearly.

Something gathered from darkness, water, and memory, from a time long before these lakes were even built.

Something the land here has remembered, perhaps?

I wonder, if I’d stayed till nightfall, whether I’d have seen it too.

Thank-you again to Tom for trusting me with his story and thank YOU for reading! 
If you have a story of your own to share, I’d really love to hear it.