Hauntings

Platform 5, Temple Meads

Also known as: Bessie Cross shooting

Platform 5, Bristol Temple Meads station

October 1917

Bristol24/7's 2018 list of 13 places you did not know were haunted includes Platform 5 at Temple Meads. Its entry tells a story of passion and heartbreak: in October 1917 Private Albert Cross, returning to duty in France, was saying goodbye to his wife Bessie when she told him she was pregnant by another man, and he shot her with his rifle and handed himself in to the police.

The shooting is listed in a database of unsolved British murders as taking place at 12.54am on Monday 15 October 1917, with the husband aged 27. Bessie was taken to hospital and died. That site cites contemporary newspaper reports in the Western Daily Press and Liverpool Echo.

The ghost part is missing. The Bristol24/7 entry does not say that Bessie or her husband has been seen, only that the station was the backdrop to the event. The record is kept as a haunted reputation attached to a real death, with the caution that nobody has described a sighting.

Working railway station.
Evidence
Dubious
Access
Open ground
Location
51.449, -2.581 (Sited to the building or field)

Sources: Bristol24/7, 13 places in Bristol you didn't know were haunted [other]; Unsolved Murders, Bessie Cross, 1917 [other]

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