Jersey Lil

Five years later some of the night shift workers at the town's Ford plant began to report that the ghost of Jersey Lil had returned to the area. Many years previously the ghost was said to haunt the old Elba Tinplate works at Jersey Marine and it was thought she may have returned to the works which is now part of the Ford plant itself. One theory suggests that Lil had been a woman of easy virtue who had been murdered in the area many years earlier; another theory was that she was a worker at the old Elba Pickling Works and met her death in a vat. Certainly when the Ford company took over the site they were warned that they had a ghost on their hands, but it didn't trouble them, it seemed, until now. In December 1970 a worker was in the toilet of the heat treatment area when he said he felt a hand on his shoulder; he turned around and there was the wraith like figure of Lil. He made a hurried exit from the toilet … later an identical figure was seen walking down the steps into the main plant. Now workers recalled that Lil made a brief appearance at the plant a couple of years previously, but nobody took much notice of her. The management were not committing themselves, other than to say that in the heat treatment area crown wheels were put into the furnace to and then cooled off and there was a lot of steam and rising smoke that could perhaps be mistaken for a ghost. Later a spokesman for the firm said that he had noticed there was often about eighteen month intervals between reported appearances of the ghost, but could offer no explanation for this apparent rhythm. Newspaper reports of the possible re-appearance of the ghost brought a letter from Geoffrey Hemming of Briton Ferry, who said that about a year ago he and a friend had spent an evening in Swansea and after a late meal they had set out for Briton ferry via the Jersey Marine road. By this time it was nearly midnight and as they passed Ford's and approached the area where the road lighting ended, they both saw what they thought looked like the figure of a woman cross the road from the beach side and pass right in front of them. The driver of the car swerved in order to avoid hitting the person and the low grass embankment at this point stopped the car from overturning. Feeling rather shaken they climbed out of the car expecting the worst- but saw no sign of a body underneath the car or any sign of anyone resembling the figure they had seen anywhere in sight. At the time they thought it could have been a trick of the light and shadows, but after reading about the ghost of Jersey Lil, they wondered whether it could not have been her ghost that they saw.

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