The Poetry Bus Meets Casper the Friendly Ghost

Pure Fiction is this week's driver and has set us a ghostly challenge here.

We had to write about a ghost - not the usual bedsheet-with-eyeholes-going-woo-woo kind of a ghost but a helpful one.

Now, I've never met a ghost, helpful or otherwise, and was pretty sure I was going to miss the bus this week. However, by an eerie coincidence, some people were talking in our office today (located in an old Cortauld's factory no less) and our security guard spun us a tale of Mary-Ann, the building's resident ghost of a young lady that committed suicide in 1905 - a tale which he later confessed to having completely made up during a boring shift. This gave me an idea....

Other bus-riders to the beyond are here and here. Why not jump aboard?

This building is old,
Said the watchman
With a glint in his eye,
And I'm told,
Said the watchman,
Not a word of a lie.
There's a ghostly Appearance
A chill of cold air.
Late at night, there are footsteps
But nobody's there.

Before it was offices
This place was a mill.
Before these computers,
It was pen, ink and quill.
This building remembers,
It was well built to last.
In its bricks and its mortar
It holds on to the past.

I fancy I've seen them
At night on my rounds
When the scratch of their pens
Makes the softest of sounds.
I fancy I hear it,
The clack of the loom,
But my torch shows me nothing
But this empty old room.

She worked at the weaving
He toiled as a clerk
She thought that he loved her
But he thought it a lark.
So, with her heart broken
She ended his life
Let out his heart's blood
With his own paper kinfe.

She went to the gallows
And he to his grave.
Such a tragic old story
Of a maid and a knave.
But his spirit is restless
Some say he's here still
Keeping his ledgers
Down here at the mill.

So if, come the odd morning,
You find something has changed
Your pens have been straightened,
Your files re-arranged,
It wasn't the cleaners
Nor me, for a lark
Your desk has been tidied
By the ghost of a clerk!

(For best effect read this in a darkened room with a torch shining upwards into your face)