IT WAS the most popular of all the walks organised by the Friends of Darwen Cemetery. Almost 150 gathered for the Hallowe’en hike of a few years ago.

A watery sun had dipped behind the tall trees of Whitehall park as Harold Heys and Tony Foster gathered the large group around an old grave for the last look-back of the evening.

It was the grave of husband and wife George and Ann Yates of Moss Side Farm, below Drummer Stoops at Blacksnape. They are buried together in a corner of Section 1, just off the bottom of Lark Street.

It raised more than a few eyebrows at the time of the joint burial, four days later – May 27, 1897 – as the Coroner, sitting at the Red Lion, found that George, a 57-year-old platelayer, had murdered Ann, 47, by slitting her throat before slashing his own, almost severing his head.

They had five children still living at home and four had gone that Sunday to the annual school sermons at Whittlestone Head. Albert, aged seven, was first back and ran in to find a terrible scene.

The Darwen News reported: “To the little fellow’s horror he found his parents lying dead in a pool of blood at the bottom of the staircase.”

The hallway and scullery were spattered with blood which was dripping down the walls.

The terribly sad story which was told that Hallowe’en evening a few years ago had a distressing finale.

Albert went off to fight in the Great War with the Lancashire Fusiliers and, tragically, was killed just a few weeks before the end of the fighting. He was 29 and had been living in Withnell.

Harold Hays has subsequently learned of a desperately sad prequel to the double-death tragedy …

Six years beforehand in 1891, Albert, then a baby, and his sister Sarah, five, were in Moss Side Farm when four-year-old Thomas brought in some dry hay and set fire to it in the grate. It flared up – and set his clothes alight.

Sarah tried to put out the flames and then picked him up and ran with him to the Ashton’s farm some 200 yards away.

Ann Ashton stripped off the burning clothes and rolled him in a sheet, reported a local newspaper.

He was “shockingly burnt about the lower part of his body” and his mother was sent for. She applied some limewater and oil and Dr Hodgson was called in.

However, the child died three hours later “having suffered intense agony”.

Before the couble death trgedy, George Yates had apparently, been troubled for several weeks after having been ordered by a court to pay damages for assaulting his brother-in-law in the Crown and Thistle. It had preyed on his mind.

At the inquest, a verdict of “wilful murder” and “suicide whilst in a state of temporary insanity” was returned on Ann and George.

Who knows how the little boy’s horrific death had affected him …