AFTER a family visit to Raby Castle, near Staindrop – “Christmas trees, hot chocolate, mince pies” – Shaun Whitehead forwards some attractive images.

“The castle looks amazing in the dark,” says Shaun, and so it does, but on closer inspection they notice something else seemingly hovering in the night sky.

There’s a face, Shaun believes, and with a resemblance to that of King Charles II. “Do other people see the ‘ghost’ in this photograph? What did Charles II have to do with Raby Castle? I’m intrigued about such things.”

The castle’s website (“Santa’s grotto fully booked,” it still reports) offers a possible clue. Built in the late 14th Century, Raby and its estates were bought from the Crown in 1626 by Sir Henry Vane the Elder, who paid £16,000.

Sir Henry Vane the Younger, says the website, “rejected the advantages of his class” and was a Protestant Dissenter. He became governor of Massachusetts when just 23, had John Milton write a sonnet in his praise but still managed to upset both Kings and Commonwealth.

When in England, he spent much of his time with his wife and ten children at Raby.

After the restoration of the monarchy, his death warrant was signed (of course) by Charles II who considered him “too dangerous a man to live” and waived the Act of Indemnity. Further research, however, suggests that Charles was such a good egg really that he overturned the ruling that Sir Henry be hanged, drawn and quartered and allowed him to be beheaded – “a gentleman’s death” – instead. He was 49.

In June 1662, Sir Henry sought to make a final speech from the scaffold but was deliberately drowned out by the sound of trumpets and of drums. “He died as much a martyr and a saint as any man did,” wrote Samuel Pepys.

Could the king still walk, restless, around the castle? We’ve all heard of the Raby Hunt. Could this be the Raby haunt?

THE Church Times newspaper over the New Year devoted a two-page spread to all the positive things happening under the Shildon Alive banner, run under the auspices of St John’s church and already national winner of an Ecclesiastical Insurance “Churches helping communities” award. Shildon, writes St John’s admirable vicar the Rev David Tomlinson, is one of many North-East communities proud of their past but with little hope for the future. “My parish has become a standard bearer in listening to those on the margins.”

BENEATH the headline “Wig and a prayer”, shortly to be explained, the column on August 18, 2011, told the story of aviation pioneer Ernie Brooks and of Shirley Jennings’s plans to write his biography.

Ernie, from Spennymoor, was passionate about gyrocopters, seemingly flimsy flying machines which forever invited the caption “Don’t look down.”

He designed the prototype Brookland Mosquito in his garden shed in Tudhoe, built them with a Volkswagen car engine in his commercial garage in Low Spennymoor, sold them for £1,150 and believed that they would become the motor car of the air.

He was killed in 1969, aged just 39, when the Mosquito crashed at Teesside Airport. Friends believed he’d been trying to loop the loop.

Shirley, herself a gyrocopter pilot and instructor in Cornwall, appealed through the column for memories of her hero after a Brookland archive was found semi-abandoned in a cellar near her home. The response was impressive, many including telephone numbers.

That they haven’t had a call back hides a surprising secret: the woman who’d spend every day of her life fearlessly flying a gyro is terrified of the telephone.

The book’s draft manuscript tells how she was offered a flight with the man acknowledged as “greatest gyrocopter pilot on the planet”, preceded by lunch at his golf club. “Just give me a ring,” he said.

She never did. “Those five simple words shot me down in flames.”

Shirley would thus like respondents to know that the Brookland book – like the “sheer, all-encompassing joy of flying an autogyro” – is still very much alive. She hopes to complete it by the end of this year.

n Wig and a prayer? Though Ernie Brooks was prematurely bald, Spennymoor photographer George Teasdale’s wonderful picture of him flying over Brighton pier shows Ernie test piloting a hairpiece. If it came off – that is to say, if it didn’t come off – Ernie would be allowed to keep the rug rig. A ring and a prayer may take longer.

PETER JEFFRIES in Durham comes up with a new angle on the great American actor Alan Ladd – a Co Durham Ladd, it transpires, at least on his mother’s side of the Atlantic.

He was christened Alan Walbridge Ladd. Could it be, Peter wonders, because his mother Selina Rowley’s birth in 1889 was registered in Chester-le-Street and Waldridge, spelt slightly differently, was just down the road?

It might take a bit of proving, he not unreasonably supposes.

Rowley first married a painter from Newcastle, left him while he was doing time for what then was termed larceny simple, headed to America and married Alan Ladd senior in 1912. Their son was born the following year.

Known at school as Tiny, said to have been no more than 5ft 7ins tall, Ladd nonetheless became a big star – “millions of adoring fans around the world,” his website still proclaims.

Particularly he may be remembered for starring roles in Shane and opposite Sophia Loren in Boy on a Dolphin. Since Loren was considerably taller than he was, she was asked to stand in a trench when filmed together.

In 1937, his mother – then known as Ina Raleigh – came to stay after a relationship breakdown and asked for money with which to go to the store. Ladd guessed that she wanted alcohol but instead she bought an arsenic-based ant paste and killed herself with a deliberate overdose in the back of his car.

In 1964, Ladd also died from an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates, but the inquest ruled that one accidental.

...AND finally, Pointless pundit Martin Birtle in Billingham reckons the television quiz show reached a nadir last week.

A young female contestant was asked to name any country whose last two letters were consonants. Eighteen qualified, she was told.

England was a starter, Egypt and Bangladesh potentially more profitable. She said Paris.

Martin’s bemused. Either a) she didn’t understand the concept of “country”, b) she didn’t know what a consonant is or c) both.

The young lady in question is studying history at the University of York.