The Haunted History of Port Glasgow’s Clune Park Estate
Let’s take a deep dive into an eerie housing estate on the banks of the River Clyde and uncover the forgotten legacy of the area dubbed ‘Scotland’s Chernobyl’.
Introduction
Port Glasgow is famous for its long history of shipbuilding, being a central part of Glasgow’s shipbuilding industry. It was home to one of the first steamships, the ‘Comet’, and also played a role in the iconic ocean liner, the “Queen Mary”.
However, when people think of Port Glasgow, the word ‘ghost’ rarely comes to mind, and yet, there’s a particular part of the area that seems to be a paranormal hot spot. Once cited as ‘Scotland’s Chernobyl’, the Clune Park Estate has slowly, but surely, been garnering itself a fierce reputation as a ghost town, but it seems like the nickname may just have some grains of truth to it.
The Estate That Progress Forgot
Clune Park’s history began in the late 19th century, when it was a bustling community glistening with the promise of economic growth and success for the residents. Nestled on the banks of the River Clyde, it was to become a shining beacon in the shipbuilding industry, but nothing lasts forever.
With World War I, the shipping industry exploded. Battleships were built and deployed, and damaged vessels had to be repaired. The conscription forced many women to take up the shipbuilding trade. Men who were spared the draft were only done so because they had critical skills that couldn’t be passed on easily — knowledge that would take years to train and master — and time was of the essence during the war.
The first decline came not longer after World War I, when a fragile peace blanketed Europe. Sadly, another global conflict lingered just on the horizon, and the shipbuilding industry saw another massive boom in their production when World War II erupted. Similar to before, women took up the mantle and helped ensure the Allied victory.
After the wars, the industry began to slowly decline. It wasn’t immediate, but as global trade and commerce became more viable and changes in technology such as the introduction of computer technology, less and less people were needed in the Glasgow yards. Some shipping yards tried to save themselves by switching their attention to specialised vessels — oil tankers, for example — but this wasn’t enough. The entire industry was faltering.
Thankfully, Glasgow could shift its economic focus to other areas, but this change left places like the Clune Park Estate behind. As the years went on, many of the locals were forced to seek employment elsewhere. In 1997, the local church was closed, with the school dating back to 1887, following soon after.
Over time, the Clune Park Estate fell into disrepair and despair. Out of the 430 flats, it’s estimated that only around twenty residents remain, and these people often warn visitors about the dangers of lingering in the apartment blocks because of aggressive homeless people.
Eerily, Urbandoned Team, reported that many of the homes still have expensive items left behind and full rooms of furniture. One of their photos shows a mug and a spoon resting on a coffee table. If I didn’t know the history of the area from my research, I’d have sworn this was just an image of a shabby, rundown apartment that was still being inhabited.
The other photographs captured by the team paint a bleak and hopeless picture of a place that many former residents recall fondly as a ‘bustling’ area. You can view their mini-documentary on the area in the references below, as it’s part of the same article the photograph is from.
While some of the current residents hope that the Clune Park Estate can be restored to its former glory with some well-needed funding, Inverclyde Council have openly referred to the estate as a “festering wound” and expressed fears the complex could collapse at any time.
Interestingly, the council tried to come to a resolution. They first agreed to a regeneration plan, but then a compulsory demolition order was issued, due to the dangerous state of the buildings. Even though the flats are almost entirely empty and have been for years, landlords fought the council, determined to have the building stay up, and in 2016, a sheriff completed overturned the demolition order.
Sadly, the Clune Park Estate is a tragedy waiting to happen. If the worst ever comes to pass, the council will most likely get the blame, despite them vying to have the flats demolished for safety, but being blocked at every hurdle.
I wonder if the nickname ‘Scotland’s Chernobyl’ came from the fact that many of these abandoned houses look like someone just simply left and never returned. It’s easy to draw parallels between Clune Park Estate and Pripyat. They’re places frozen in time. The world outside continues without them. Perhaps some of the former residents did flee — after all, the Clune Park Estate has become known for its foreboding atmosphere among would-be ghost hunters.
Tracking Down The Truth
Despite all the word-of-mouth whisperings of the Clune Park Estate being incredibly haunted, I could find little concrete evidence of anything out of the ordinary. It’s my opinion that most of these stories and rumours began life on the various amateur ghost hunting YouTube channels. I found a few of them while I was conducting my research and I was not prepared.
From claims of recent mass-shootings (the United Kingdom has extremely tight gun control laws and anytime a shooting takes place, it’s front-page news), to mass drug dealings, these videos have it all. They even go so far as to claim deceased people lie behind closed doors and that every single resident of Clune Park Estate is a drug dealer or a gang member. I had to turn this one particular video off at this point because of the eye-watering disrespect of the current residents. It’s an eye-rolling experience.
Of course, not all amateur ghost hunters operate like this. I was an amateur ghost hunter myself back around 2011. Most of them are respectful and just want to figure out the truth, but some, like the channels I found, are click-baiting, jump scaring content designed to climb the YouTube algorithm by appealing to younger people and children.
Don’t get me wrong: I thoroughly enjoyed researching the history of the area. It’s always good to learn new things and verify them against other sources. The problem is, I’d heard rumours of how insanely haunted this area was, and I left each website bitterly disappointed when there wasn’t so much as a whisper of a phantom.
Until I found one particular video.
The Phantom At The Window
I’ll be honest: I’m a sucker for anything spooky. Even when I know it’s a hoax, I still like to think ‘oh, but what if…’. I view most purported ghost videos with my sceptical hat firmly planted on my head, but sometimes, just sometimes, I’ll come across a video that gives me chills.
Now, I mentioned before that I used to be an amateur ghost hunter. I was part of a local team called the API (Ayrshire Paranormal Investigators). We started off small, investigating my uncle’s eerie garden (and capturing some insane EVP recordings which I’ll post when I finally find the rest of my photos and documents and have enough evidence to write an article about my time as a ghost hunter), and we moved on to other homes. We even held a collaborative charity night at Craufurdland Castle.
All this is to say that I’m no stranger to the unknown. I know full well that there are things out there that we can’t explain, and I’ve had some experiences that others would never believe without witnessing them first-hand themselves. Still, I try my best to remain as objective as I can.
Recently, I’ve been addicted to a YouTube channel, Bizarre Bub, that collates various ghost videos from around the globe. The creator merely offers their thoughts on the videos but never gives a definite ‘this is absolutely, one-hundred percent indisputable proof’ type of comment. It was on one of their videos that I found this particular incident.
Now, I’ve seen a lot of weird things in my time. From lights in the sky to shadow people, I’ve even had possible demon encounters at Loudoun Kirk (don’t worry, I’m aiming to write a piece on my experiences there with the API). Not many videos will make me pause, replay and squint at my screen. Most of the time, I look at these videos and I get a good spook but it’s just that: entertainment. This video in particular gave me goosebumps.
User Scared2Death0, an amateur ghost hunter who enjoys the thrill of exploring abandoned places, uploaded the four minute long clip a year ago. It starts off with a bang, capturing one of the few things that’s given me the creeps.
Part of me did question whether this entire thing was a setup. After all, and I say this as a former ghost hunter myself, but if I saw that I’d have immediately turned and just left. You couldn’t pay me enough to enter a building that a skin walker skull or some other skeletal like figure just peered at me from. There’s a snowball’s chance in Hell of that happening. My soul would have left my body immediately.
Still, these guys are made of stronger stuff than I am, evidently, and they immediately decide to head in. Not much else happens in the remainder of the video — just the usual bumps and bangs you hear in ghost clips — but good God, that skull gave me the fear. I’d have just burned the whole place down and then spent the next week spraying the ashes with holy water and saging the air (that’s a joke, by the way, Police Scotland– just gotta make it crystal clear that I am not, and have never been, an arsonist nor do I condone any criminal activity).
I managed to triangulate the precise apartment this took place in, using landmarks in the creator’s video and discovered that it’s a first floor flat.
The ghost hunters actually enter the apartment but it’s in absolute shambles with debris and litter strewn everywhere. It’s entirely devoid of life though.
Thoughts On The Validity
I paused the video, zoomed in, tried to question what it could be. I can’t work this one out. It’s very possible that, perhaps the duo in the video, have a third friend who’s already inside the building with a Halloween prop. There’s a street in my town where someone poses Halloween masks and props at their apartment window, no matter what season. It used to creep me out when I was younger. It’s certainly a way to get folk talking!
But still, this one eludes me. Surely, if they were going to go to the effort of creating a hoax like this, they would have made the rest of the video more eventful. Or perhaps that’s the beauty of subtlety in a hoax — if you make it just that one moment, that one eerie second, rather than the entire video, it makes things more believable.
I even pondered if the gaunt face was perhaps an addict or a homeless squatter down on their luck, but there’s no way whatever appeared at the window is human. Prop? Maybe. It’s definitely hard to say, but my gut feeling is that this is something else. Like I said, it takes a lot for me to get those goosebumps and that feeling that something just isn’t quite right and this video is one of them.
I think the main thing that gets me wondering about the validity of this, though, is how the ghost hunters immediately decide to enter the home. There’s also the question of why the actual residents of Clune Park Estate don’t report things like this, if they are known to happen. I know some experiences and phenomena are genuine one-off occurrences, but for it to happen the moment a camera is rolling? I honestly can’t decide one way or another whether this is real or another hoax.
Hoaxes are an even bigger problem nowadays with the exciting financial incentive that clicks and shares create for content creators. It’s easy to fake things now — you don’t even need to be a skilled CGI artist. Even just some Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas know-how, some downloaded templates or effects, and you’re good to go.
A recent example of this was a video that took the internet by storm recently, claiming to show the moment the doomed Flight MH370 was ‘taken by aliens’. It blew up on Reddit, garnering over six thousand likes and three thousand comments and that’s just one of many places the footage was posted. I discovered the footage via YouTuber SomeOrdinaryGamers who covered the unfolding events and, through his research and exploration of other sources, he could uncover that the portal seen was actually from an old VFX pack from the 90s.
Yet, people still believe the footage blindly.
There’s also the very real possibility that many of the bumps and knocks heard, not only by this duo, but by other urban explorers and ghost hunters, may simply result from the other residents living their lives. Birds nesting or even other stray animals seeking shelter? Perhaps even the dying gasps of a derelict building. After all, the local Council themselves are concerned about the real possibility of collapse, so what’s saying there’s not a perfectly normal explanation for the noises?
Either way, it’s definitely up there with some of the eeriest footage I’ve ever seen.
Conclusion
It’s impossible to say for certain whether a spectre was caught on camera but it’s absolutely possible that phantoms linger in the area. Given the area’s ties to both World Wars, it’s entirely possible that strong energies linger, connecting our realm to the netherworld.
I do wonder, however, how much of Clune Park Estate’s fearsome reputation is real and how much of it is due to the overexaggerated YouTube videos I mentioned in the article. A close friend of mine lives in Glasgow and when I’d mentioned I was researching this article to her, she commented how she’d heard ‘rumours’ about the area.
But that’s just it: rumours. Since the area is still occupied and even citizens of Port Glasgow seem to only avoid it for its derelict and rough appearance, it does make me wonder if most of these ghost stories have been generated by YouTubers and other content creators. The residents who currently live there have commented that although the area seems scary, it’s actually a peaceful and quiet place to live.
I dived into this research after watching Scared2Death0’s video expecting to come across a treasure trove of lesser known paranormal occurances. Although part of is disappointed that I couldn’t find anything other than the video and whispers, I’m glad I’ve uncovered that Clune Park Estate seems to be a misunderstood and forgotten part of the city.
The abandoned apartment blocks are a sad reminder of lives long forgotten and yet, new stories are quietly unfolding behind its beaten and battered doors. However, it’s my opinion that the demolition of the estate would breathe fresh life into the area and give the current residents a fresh start. It would help the area overcome the scaremongering and whispers perpetuated by opportunists and give the area and its residents the respect they deserve. Perhaps, by letting go of the past and the spirits that linger within abandoned homes, we can look forward to the future.
Still though, I find myself thinking about Scared2Death0’s video and pondering what if… Just what if something really does linger in the shadows of the estate? We may never know.
References
Glasgow Live. “Glasgow’s Queen Mary: The Ship That Put the City on the Map.” [Online]. Available: https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/history/glasgow-queen-mary-ship-clydebuilt-16338094.
Urbandoned Team. “Clune Park Estate Report.” [Online]. Available: https://www.urbandonedteam.com/reports/clune-park-estate.
Mirror. “Inside the Ghost Town with Just 20 People Living in It.” [Online]. Available: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/inside-ghost-town-20-people-18554571.
Daily Record. “Scotland’s Chernobyl: Inside the Sad, Abandoned Ghost Town of Polphail.” [Online]. Available: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/scotland-now/gallery/scotlands-chernobyl-ghost-town-sad-30769369.
Scared2Death0. “Scary ‘GHOST’Clunepark Scotland. Original (full version) (scared2death0).” [Online Video]. YouTube Channel: Scared2Death0, Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ9rl84AC6w&t=16s.
u/Voelkero. “Old footage of several UFO’s stealing an airliner out of the sky and teleporting away with it.” Reddit, r/UFOs. [Online]. Available: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/15kfy1i/old_footage_of_several_ufos_stealing_an_airliner/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
SomeOrdinaryGamers. “Massive Update On The “Disappearing” Plane UFO…” [Online Video]. YouTube Channel: SomeOrdinaryGamers. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdYuWN3jbUo.
WIONews. “Fact Check: Was MH370 Abducted by UFOs as Viral Video Claims?” [Online]. Available: https://www.wionews.com/trending/fact-check-was-mh370-abducted-by-ufos-as-viral-video-claims-625291.
