The Lock-Keeper's Second Sight
A Canal Ghost Story

About this book:

The water in Blackwood Basin never forgets. For thirty years it has kept Squire Blackwood’s secrets—his cracked pocket watch, his beaver-skin hat, the iron-bound chest resting in the silt beside something pale and ribbed. Now the railway’s pile-drivers are shaking the canal’s clay cradle, and every vibration brings the past closer to the surface. Lock-keeper Enoch Hale has always seen what others cannot: the drowned girl combing her hair in the sluice foam, the dead Squire standing upright in his rotted boot at the bottom of the basin. But as the Great Western Railway prepares to drain the cut and bury the waterway beneath iron rails, Enoch’s second sight is shifting from curse to desperate necessity. Something in the deep wants to be found. Something the canal company, the railway men, and the Blackwood heirs would kill to keep buried.

In the autumn of 1842, the Wiltshire canals are dying. Toll revenues collapse, lock-keepers are dismissed, and the towpaths surrender to briar and rabbit-hole. Enoch Hale, a man who reads the water like a ledger written in ink that refuses to dry, watches his world vanish one dredging at a time. When a silver watch rises from the mud— the same watch he saw on the Squire’s chest three decades past—Enoch realizes the railway isn’t just stealing his livelihood. It’s disturbing a crime the water has witnessed in silence. With a fly-boat captain’s daughter asking dangerous questions, a navvy foreman who knows too much about the basin’s construction, and the canal company’s own surveyors driving pegs into ground that should never be broken, Enoch must navigate channels more treacherous than any lock chamber.

Atmospheric, historically immersive, and haunted by the ghosts of England’s industrial revolution, *The Lock-Keeper’s Second Sight* follows one stubborn man’s battle against progress, corruption, and the rising dead. From the sucking mud of Blackwood Basin to the navvies’ shantytowns, from the canal committees’ boardrooms to the locked chamber where the water remembers every hand that pushed a body beneath its skin, this is a ghost story rooted in the grit and grease of a vanishing world. The floodgate is opening. The final draw-off has begun. And the water always collects what belongs to it.