The Haunted Airship Cardington Hangars in BedfordhsireThe Cardington Hangars are reputed to be haunted by at least one airman from the ill-fated R101 airship disaster of 1930.
Built in 1917, the two massive buildings dominate the surrounding landscape. Now a dilapidated, rusting hulk, Hangar 1 undoubtedly displays its age. However, Hangar 2 was not too long ago restored to be used as a theatrical set by Warner Bros. You can gauge its enormity because Gotham City was built within it for the movies Batman Begins and The Dark Knight! Paul McCartney and Rod Stewart have each used its enormous interior for live performance rehearsals.
However, Cardington Hangars are forever connected with one of British aviation's greatest disasters. It was within the immense interior of Hangar 1 that the massive R101 airship was once built in the late 1920s, and from the airfield outside, she set off on her maiden voyage in 1930 - a journey destined to end in disaster.
At the time of its completion, the R101 was the biggest man-made object ever to fly and was intended as a symbol of Britain's engineering prowess. For her maiden voyage, which was scheduled for 28 September 1930, it was decided that she should fly the Secretary for Air, Lord Thomson, and several other dignitaries to Karachi and back. On his return, Thomson would then be able to trumpet the superiority of British technology to Commonwealth heads of state at the Imperial Conference, due to take place in London on 20 October 1930.
Technical setbacks and adverse weather conditions meant that her maiden flight needed to be delayed several times. With the date of the Imperial Conference rapidly approaching, Thomson grew ever more impatient. Official pressure was borne on the crew and technical staff to complete the project. Even though several of them had grave reservations about her worthiness for this type of long flight, at 6.24 pm on 4 October 1930, the R101 set out on her maiden voyage under the command of Flight Lieutenant H. Carmichael Irwin.
On board were 54 crew and passengers, together with Lord Thomson and Sir Sefton Brankner, the Director of Civil Aviation. In the early hours of 5 October, after flying over Beauvais, northwest of Paris, the R101 suddenly dived twice, after which it crashed in flames, killing 48 of the people on board. They now lie buried in a communal grave in Cardington Cemetary, across the field from the Cardington Hangars, where the R101 was constructed and from where they left on the ill-fated voyage.
The Cardington hangars and the airfield have long been reputed to be haunted by crewmembers of the R101. Security guards patrolling the site at night time have encountered all manner of inexplicable phenomena, while their dogs often behave very strangely around the giant hangars. Even in daylight, the hangars give off an oppressive and eerie air of mystery.
The disaster is renowned in spiritualist circles for another reason. Several days after the disaster, a group gathered at the National Laboratory for Psychical Research in London to attend a seance with the medium Eileen Garrett. They intended to contact Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had died three months prior.
Instead of Conan Doyle's spirit, Garrett reached the dead captain of the R101, who went into a lot of technical detail concerning the ship and the cause of the crash. When news of the seance appeared in the press, it caused quite a sensation. Several military officials, including Major Oliver Villiers, attended several further seances with Garrett and became interested. At these meetings, Irwin and other passengers and crew came through to offer details of the final moments of the R101. Villiers was so convinced that he had communicated with Irwin that he presented the evidence he had gathered at the seances to Sir John Simon, who was heading the investigation into the disaster. On the other hand, Simon rejected it because testimony from the dead was inadmissible in a court of law.
The last word, though, must go to Major G.H. Scott, another crewman who perished in the disaster. In one seance, he announced, "Villiers, it's all too ghastly for words. It's awful. Think of all the lives, experiences, money, and material. All thrown away. What for? Nothing."
