Benny Hill’s Ghostly Prediction from beyond-the grave comes true!

This is Baker Maurice Piner from Greymouth.

In yesterdays Christchurch ‘Press’ the neurotic populous of the region were told about the things going bump in the night in his bakery – and it wasn’t drunk patrons from The Railway Hotel on their way home.

Everyone knows when creeping shadows, unidentifiable sounds combine with a journalist after a sensationalist story – it’s gotta be a ghost!

And this is not just any run-of-the-mill spectre either.

Amateur West Coast historian Paul Schramm places Phil’s bakery on the same site as an 18th century boarding house & as it happens in 1891 a lonely Chinese miner called Ah Sing hung-himself.

Joining the dots, using a Ouija-board, yet another local historian Julia Bradshaw (clearly there’s not much to do at night in Greymouth outside genealogy) believes Ah Sing was overcome with guilt having stolen a watch from a mate and took the honorable way out at the time.

Bradshaw confirms, by way of thinly strung innuendo, it’s the ghost of Ah Sing who’s checking out the bakery's gluten-free loaves of bread and chocolate donuts, rather than rattling chains in some Scottish castle.

This story about Chinese miners of course is a total load of crap.

There is a much more logical explanation, an apparition prophesied by none other the demi-god of comedy – the late ‘Benny Hill.’

One could easily think a quaint ditty like ‘Ernie The Fastest Milkman in The West’ (1971) is little more than a amusing throw-away tune.

Wrong!

There is a dark-side to this song.

One only needs look at the forth and last verses of ‘Ernie’ to come to the same spine-tingling conclusion I did:

Now Ernie had a rival, an evil-looking man,
Called Two-Ton Ted from Teddington and he drove the baker's van.
He tempted her with his treacle tarts and his tasty wholemeal bread,
And when she seen the size of his hot meat pies it very near turned her head.

But a woman's needs are many fold and soon she married Ted,
But strange things happened on their wedding night as they lay in their bed.
Was that the trees a-rustling? Or the hinges of the gate?
Or Ernie's ghostly gold tops a-rattling in their crate?

Yes folks, it IS Two-Ton Ted from Teddington that’s haunting that bakery!

If only more people would do their research.