A TERRIFYING experience on a school summer camp has provided the inspiration for a former Bolton News journalist's chilling debut novel.

Black Camp 21, by Bill Jones, is based on shocking true events during Christmas 1944 when a young, ordinary German soldier, housed at the Cultybraggan POW Camp in Scotland, was found brutally beaten to death and mutilated.

An investigation was launched by the British intelligence services and five of his fellow SS prisoners were eventually executed in London for their role in the murder ­— the largest number ever executed for a single crime in the UK

Several months before these events a mass break out and march on London to bring about British defeat was planned by German prisoners centred in Wiltshire, but was foiled at the last minute.

Many of those implicated were shipped to Cultybraggan's Black Camp 21, which housed the most dangerous and fanatical captured Nazi troops ­— who were sent to the country's northernmost and remotest edges.

One night the camp's inmates gathered for a show trial to find a scapegoat for their failed coup, leading to the notorious, bloodthirsty consequences.

In the post-war years Cultybraggan became a holiday camp for army cadets, including Mr Jones who experienced the terror of the place in 1968.

Mr Jones recently revisited the camp ­— still standing near Comrie, Perthshire ­— to give a reading in one of the huts where the murder took place.

He said: "It's an amazing place up there and is still untouched and in the same condition it was in 1944. I recently went there for the first time since being at school and it was a very powerful and spooky.

"It's meant to be one of the most haunted places in Scotland and it's certainly somewhere you wouldn't want to be on your own."

He added: "I got a real creepy feeling in my bones which took me right back to 1968 and that school trip."

Now living in Yorkshire, Mr Jones spent much of his life in Summerseat and worked at the Bolton Evening News, before moving to Granada television where he made documentaries for 30 years.

Having previously written two acclaimed biographies, Mr Jones began work on a third book, initially intended as a nonfiction account on German POWs in the UK.

Mr Jones said: "I was looking at writing a nonfiction book about German prisoners of war because its a very interesting subject.

"But the more I looked into it and what had happened at Camp 21, especially after I discovered that I had stayed there as school boy, it was very hard to find out about these very young people, and what they did before the war.

"So I though it was much more interesting to write to a write a fictional novel, wind the clock back and tell a story of how these people ended up in Scotland and for what reason they had picked on this particular person.

"In order to give it some humanity I created two or three fictional characters who bring an element of doubt in to the whole process. So we have a hero who is brought into the but is very unhappy about it.

"As he gets deeper, he has to make a choice whether to do what is right or keep the oaths he made to his country.

"It's quite a shocking book and its really about for what reason this man was killed."

Black Camp 21 is out now, published by Polygon.