Repton School's most enduring ghost story is unusual among this register's entries for resting on a specifically named, dateable individual rather than a vaguer local tradition. Frederick Wickham Railton was fourteen years old and a pupil at the school in 1853, remembered in the story as a genuinely talented runner, when he died as a result of a rough and, for the period, not unusual piece of schoolboy initiation. He was made to run the gauntlet along the Gallery, a corridor running the length of the top storey of the school's boarding accommodation, while other boys lined the passage armed with rolled-up towels and pillowcases to strike him as he passed.
What should have been a painful but survivable ordeal turned fatal when one of the boys involved, rumoured in the story to have been Railton's own brother, had tied an ink bottle inside his towel before the run began, whether as a deliberate act of cruelty or a thoughtless addition of extra weight is not recorded. The blow from the weighted towel struck Railton on the head, and he was killed.
His ghost, remembered at the school as the Gallery Ghost, is said to reappear each year on the night of the senior steeplechase, the school's own long-running cross-country race, and to specifically haunt whoever wins it, a detail the school's own tradition explains by pointing back to Railton's own skill as a runner in life, as though he takes a proprietary, not entirely friendly interest in whoever now claims the title he might once have held himself. The haunting has reportedly been part of school lore for at least 120 years, passed down through generations of Reptonians as one of the school's most persistent and specifically explained ghost stories.
Comments