RAF East Kirkby operated as a heavy bomber station throughout the Second World War and is now carefully preserved as the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre, home today to one of only two remaining airworthy-taxiing Avro Lancasters found anywhere in the entire country, a genuinely remarkable piece of living aviation history. The site's own control tower, one of the best-preserved examples of its kind still standing on any former Bomber Command airfield, has built up a reputation among staff and visitors for footsteps and an unshakeable feeling of not being alone, generally attributed to the base's real, documented wartime aircrew losses rather than to any specific named airman.
As with the county's other former bomber stations recorded throughout this collection, the story here remains general rather than tied to any single documented incident with a name and a date attached, but East Kirkby's unusually well-preserved buildings and its genuinely active heritage role give the tradition a very tangible, visitable physical setting to attach itself to.
Visitors walking through the same control tower where wartime aircrews once prepared for missions many of them would never return from can, in that sense, experience the site's history directly, whatever they make of the footsteps and the persistent sense of company that so many staff and visitors alike continue to report there.
Comments