IN 1909, a house situated next to the Greenside Cemetery in Alloa became the focus of some strange goings on.

The graveyard is reputedly haunted, and it is said that there are tunnels in the graveyard which allow ghosts to travel between this world and the "Otherworld".

Mrs Gilles and her family lived in the property and from early September she had heard strange noises, although she never claimed to have seen any ghosts.

She said she heard "tappings and low moanings" coming from the corner of one of the rooms, and this happened between midnight and two or three in the morning.

To her, they appeared to be speaking in a foreign language.

All her family heard the sounds too. But they were not the only ones to hear them.

People passing outside the house also claimed to hear them.

A friend of her son James, a Mr Watson, corroborated the claims. The pair had been in the kitchen when they suddenly became aware of tapping noises as though two people were talking.

Again, he claimed, they were speaking in a foreign language which he could not understand.

He had never been so frightened in his life.

The story appeared in the Alloa Advertiser and shortly afterwards, a respected spiritualist from Glasgow read it with interest, and decided he wanted to come through to the town and investigate.

On the evening of Wednesday, September 22, he arrived at Mrs Gilles’s house and asked her permission to carry out an investigation.

In the early hours of the Thursday morning, he entered the haunted room alone.

Staying in the kitchen the Gilles family waited, and shortly afterwards, they heard him call out "Come forth! Come forth!".

The spiritualist then reported he had seen two men who had risen up through the floor simultaneously, carrying two torches.

He believed they were seafarers and they had begun to wrestle one another, with the young man eventually winning the tussle. Neither seaman spoke so the medium could not tell if these two had been the cause of the noises that Mrs Gilles and her family had heard.

In the early hours of the Saturday morning, the noises returned to the house and by this time Mrs Gillies was at her wits end. She was "fair frightit" by it all.

The mysterious and frightening goings on the house disappeared after a short time and were never heard again, but Mrs Gillies remained vigilant and kept the address of the spiritualist close to hand, just in case.