If you walk away from Westhide in a northerly direction, or, better still, get a taxi, you’ll eventually arrive in Kingspan – an industrialised village-town on the Englo-Welsho border. The place sprung up in the 1960s as a manufacturing hub, following popular demand for stuff. And stuff it made – lots of it. At its peak, over 45% of Britain’s workers lived and struggled in Kingspan. Trusted and respected, the settlement delighted end-users across the land with the quality of its products and its open honesty. At some point, the Kingspan News and Voices and Herald reported:
“A village tramp has created a 300-yard pictogram charting the district’s rural rumpuses through the ages.
“‘Rusty’, who has traipsed Kingspan’s streets and turnpikes since 1971’s great Furnace Walkout, constructed his three-tone homage with muds and the plasma of leaves.
“Christened Hurtle Mimby by his Lap-Grecian parents, ‘Rusty’, as he came to be known by colleagues as a consequence of his ‘tendency t’ward decay’, fell into work at Kingspan’s vulco-furnace in the mid-60s.
“A bizarre vestige of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the titanic plant smelted over a billion ounces of proto-tin bullion a fortnight – but suddenly ceased production after ‘well-meaning but evilly-intentioned socialist agitators’ whipped over 2,000 plant bodies into an aggrieved frenzy.
“Jobless, Rusty strode to a beech-led coppice, where he settled in the cold and stench.
“He aged as the years passed and perfected a diet of berries, sweet lily and acorn waters.
“During the 80s, President Mitterrand of France’s mischiefs met his woodland-bound ears, driving him to mental chaos and near ruin.
“However, the calming indifference of Prime Minister Major’s 90s Britain soothed the itinerant, and he spent the next score and five years in a ‘kind of wretched bliss’.
“But the rise of middlesome band Razorlight stoked a hitherto submerged artistic yearning in his bowels, and he yoked the earth’s bountiful fundaments as his tools in his quest to codify his memory’s vales in lurid spectacle.
“The vagrant has pasted his bucolic behemoth across an imposing wall of twine-lashed ‘n’ tarred railway sleepers, and its depictions are predicted to last until mid-winter’s east rains obliterate the thing in its entirety.
In the meanwhile, Kingspan’s High Police Station has issued a bill for the hobo’s arrest in connection with a string of unsolved murders, arsons, gruesome attacks and frauds.”
Kingspan also has the honour of being home to Britain’s smallest ever ghost. The apparition, measured by phantomologists at “only around a centimetre long” (a bit less than half an inch in millimetres), was discovered by a wife and her husband, the Queedleys, after they detected minute dollops of ectoplasm around their three-bed semi, which the minuscule spectre deposited as it went about its preternatural business.
Flummoxed inspectors gave up, buzzed off and left the Queedleys to ponder the bizarre situation alone. Eventually, a magnifying glass evening the couple held revealed the presence of the being, and reporters from the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express and the Daily Week vultured into the charming property – which featured two master bedrooms, a quintet of en suites, a gorgeous rococo staircase, an airy conservatory, a cellar converted to show SD films, and several priest holes – and de camped for two half weeks, dispatching terrifying tales back to their news desks. Rapt readers were excited both by the microscopic wraith’s travails and the slick pics of the Queedleys’ delightful home.
Such was the enthusiasm for their property, the couple received many offers for their proud semi, leading to an excitable bidding war, the house ultimately selling to a Greek yacht earl for over £two £million £pounds. Cash-stuffed, the minted twosome invested heavily in the arms, tech and pharmacological sectors – canny steps that netted huge dividends when a number of wars broke out, illnesses and diseases flourished, and people started buying lots of computer-type stuff. As was pointed out by pontificator Julia Hart Brewer, on a television show she was allowed to make, the moral of the story (and all stories have morals, even, maybe even especially, amoral ones, thinkably) is that there’s no real need to despair if your house is haunted: you might make a lot of money.
Mysterious EnGland 
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