Haunted Magazine 26 - To Hell and Back

GHOSTLY DRUMMERS: Why do we keep banging on about them?

PRODUCED UNDER SUPERNATURAL SOCIAL-DISTANCING GUIDELINES

THE KIDS ARE ALL FRIGHT! Is Your Child Psychic?

THROUGH THE KEY-GHOUL: Haunted Murder Houses of London ARCHAEOLOGY: Ghost Hunting with Shovels?

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EXCLUSIVE

INTERVIEW

Also Featuring: Casefiles, Comic Strip, Drummers, Exorcisms, Hauntings, Haunted Houses, Haunted Histories & Mysteries, Haunted Hedges, Jottles, Creatures out of Bottles, Spooky News, Views and A Bonanza of Boos! And so much more... # D O N T B E N O R M A L - B E PA R A N O R M A L !

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EDITORIAL

CONTENTS

NOT THE PARANORMAL LOCKDOWN WE WANTED, BUT… As I sit here, in my underpants, writing this editorial from the comfort of my makeshift office aka the settee, I am experiencing a kind of Paranormal Lockdown that I do not really want.

I would love to be roaming around haunted locations, pretending I am knowing what I am doing but there comes a time when you have to do the right thing and staying safe and saving lives is more important than trying to communicate with past lives.

We hope that, with this issue of Haunted Magazine, we can bring a little paranormal into your lives, from the safety AND comfort of your homes (and hey if you want to sit in your underpants / knickers too, be my guest) From everyone associated with Haunted Magazine, our hearts, our thoughts, our love, our best wishes go out to every keyworker out there, doing their best to protect as many people as possible.

Paul

#DontBeNormal BE PARANORMAL!!

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BUT DIFFERENT #1: Ghost Hunting v Paranormal 04 SAME Investigating. Amanda ‘Spook-Eats’ plays ‘Spot the Difference’.

COMFORTS: It is Elemental my dear. Jane Rowley 06 CREATURE teaches us all about the creatures that feature in the paranormal.

YOUR DOWSING RODS: One minute they are there, next 08 LOST they are gone. You have been ‘jott’ed. Sarah Chumacero explains.

THE FIT IN FRIGHT: Morgan Knudsen dons the lycra 11 PUTTING and investigates exorcising in the Paranormal.

GHOST OF MICHAEL JACKSON: Nicky Alan and another 14 THE “Thriller” of an investigation, which proves that ‘mediumship’ isn’t always “Black & White”.

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HAUNTED MURDER HOUSES OF LONDON: Jan Bondeson unlocks the door and asks “who’d die in a house like this?”

Readers, it is over to you…

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NOT SO ‘ORRIBLE HISTORIES: Spinalonga: An island tourist attraction that was one of the last active leper colonies in Europe.

We look back at its history.

HELL AND BACK: *Exclusive Interview* with Jack Osbourne & 28 TO Katrina Weidman who are on the hunt for Portals to Hell in Season 2 of their TV show.

GHASTLY GHOUL OF GOOLE: Another Yorkshire adventure 33 THE with Dr Q and Oddfellow ROAD TRIP: What happened when Amy’s 38 REFORMATORY bespoke road trip takes her to one of the USA’s most haunted

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Prisons.

DRUMMERS: If you can’t beat them... Mike Covell asks 41 GHOSTLY why ghost drummers are still hanging and banging around.

STEP BY ESTEP GUIDE: Tonight, Matthew, that “hospitals” 45 THE guy becomes the Dark Prince of Bellaire… Smell ya later.

TO TELL IF YOUR CHILD IS PSYCHIC: Although they will 50 HOW know you are reading this, if they are? KNOW, IF THEY ARE? OR LATER: Hubert Hobux hops up North to 52 SCHOONER investigate a haunted hotel but is all it seems.

THE STORY: Casefile #2. Another spooky case file from 56 WHAT’S author and investigator L.J. Willgress.

AINT NOTHING BUT A GHOST TOWN: Higgypop takes a 59 2020, special look at the year so far and how things have changed in such a short space of time.

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SAME BUT DIFFERENT #2: Digging up the Dead: Ghost Hunting v Archaeology. Are they the same thing? Take your pick.

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Ghost Hunting vs Paranormal Investigation and Why They’re BOTH Important

By Amanda R. Woomer (Spook-Eats)

e What’s the differenc er and a nt between a ghost hu ator? paranormal investig t IQ or (please no jokes abou social number of friends on media please)

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n 2004, both the paranormal community and the general masses were graced with the likes of Jason Hawes, Grant Wilson, and Steve Gonsalves on our television screens.

They called themselves Ghost Hunters, and the paranormal was never the same. Over the last 16 years, a lot has changed in the studies of the supernatural—technology, research, and the sheer number of Ghost Hunters-esque shows now flooding our networks. But the most significant change we’ve seen is the negative connotation the term “ghost hunter” now gets.

To many, “ghost hunters” are reckless teenagers trespassing in cemeteries or a group of drunk friends who break into old abandoned buildings. They’re disrespectful, and sometimes even put themselves in harm’s way, giving the rest of the paranormal community a bad name in the eyes of the mundane public.

I’d like to argue that this is not the case, and “ghost hunters” are not just a bunch of amateurs running into each other as they try to antagonize a response from a spirit (though there are always bad apples in a bunch).

Of course, there is a difference between those who call themselves paranormal

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investigators and those dubbed ghost hunters… but I’d like to say that one is not better than the other. I’ll go one step further: both are necessary to the paranormal community.

Everyone would agree that investigators do their research on a location ahead of time, learning essential dates, names, and events linked to the potential haunting. They spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on equipment (some of which ventures into Ghostbusting territory). They might interview eyewitnesses or locals and visit the location multiple times before coming to any sort of conclusion (if they ever do).

Ghost hunting might be considered a diluted form of investigating with a few scares and lots of excitement thrown in just for fun. Ghost hunters might research a bit ahead of time and even bring an EMF detector or a digital recorder to capture that coveted EVP.

Amanda with Steve Gonsalves and Dave Tango from ‘Ghost Hunters’

Established paranormal investigators host ghost hunts throughout the year, making a killing around Halloween… yet why do the “professionals” turn up their noses at the “amateurs?” After all, every investigator had to start somewhere.

Maybe it was a Ouija board or dowsing rods. A tape recorder or only just a camera. Perhaps you saw your first ghost as a small child, and it’s haunted you ever since (pun intended). Every paranormal investigator started as a ghost hunter, merely curious about the paranormal. For many, that curiosity became a passion leading to a life revolving around all things strange and unusual. Therefore,

“it is vital to make the paranormal accessible to everyone, even the novices.”

The second biggest question in life (after “Why are we here?”) is “What comes next?” And this is a question that almost everyone has asked themselves at least once in their lifetime (unless you’re like me and it is every single day).

Perhaps it was when your grandparents died, and you had your first brush with death. Maybe it was when you had to put your dog down. The death of a child,

a parent, a partner, a friend… everyone experiences death throughout their life, and with those experiences come questions.

“It is the paranormal investigators and the ghost hunters who are desperately searching for the answers.”

Who are we to bar the opportunity to find answers and possibly even peace of mind from those who are searching for it… no matter what label we give them?

I was one of those curious ghost hunters not too long ago. After experiencing my first paranormal encounter at seven years old, I began to actively participate in ghost hunts starting in 2005, and I thoroughly enjoyed it until 2015. It was then that my little brother, Jed, died after a cancer diagnosis at age 19, and suddenly that curiosity became a necessity to know what comes next.

Since then, my years of researching and investigating (and yes, even still hunting) has shown me two things: •

I am not the only person who lost someone dear.

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That loss has left people with one burning question: what comes after our last breath?

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And so, Spook-Eats was born.

Spook-Eats is about bringing the paranormal to the general public—not just the established investigators.

On TV, hunters, investigators, and researchers visit unattainable places like abandoned mine shafts, prisons, and insane asylums. These places are nearly impossible for your average person— hunter or investigator—to access. With Spook-Eats, I try to highlight haunted restaurants, bars, and hotels where, for the price of a pint or appetizer, you might experience the paranormal and begin to find answers to your burning questions.

And with those answers might come a whole new wave of questions that will undoubtedly lead you into the whacky, fascinating, and incredible world of ghost hunting… and maybe even one day investigating.

But everyone must start somewhere, and the paranormal investigators must be the guiding lights for the up and coming ghost hunters. After all, when you’re dead and gone, won’t you want to have someone to talk to? It might just be that little ghost hunter you helped all those years ago.

Amanda xx

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Have you ever been on an investigation and sensed something around you, but it doesn’t feel human? Have you caught something on the SLS camera that is clearly an energy, but it has no human form?

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Jane Rowley’s

R EATUR E OMFOR TS

n 2nd June 2018, I was part of the Team investigating at the Haunted Antiques Paranormal Research Centre. There were about 10 guests and the evening proceeded with the normal activity. Another member of the Team and myself were looking after 4 guests and we began in the Séance Room.

Unfortunately, one of the shops at the end of the arcade had a pop-up bar and were hosting a private party. The music was so loud everything was vibrating, and the Séance room was unworkable.

We decided to move to the front of the building to the tearoom where it was much quieter.

Continuing with the Séance exercise we became aware of something moving around the floor. One person commented on their ankle being grabbed and another saying their leg was being scratched. I then felt the same sensation, only I felt it on both legs, scratching and grabbing.

I was grateful for the connection as it allowed me to see the energy that was there. I found it difficult at first to comprehend what I was seeing but as I trust in Spirit, I went back to Spirit to ask for clarification.

Yes, what I was seeing was what I now call a Spiritual Creature. I tried to work more with-it asking Spirit Guides for help. Could I talk to it? No, it did not talk. Was I safe with it? Yes, it will only grab and scratch at floor level. How did it get here? Someone let it out of a bottle, earlier that day!

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I went to see Neil in the next room to question him about someone letting out a ‘Creature’ and what bottle was it? I was not at the Centre during the day so I was unaware that some Pharmacists Bottles had arrived in a wooden glass cabinet and Neil being curious had taken the cork stopper out of one of the bottles – this had released the creature. I asked him if I could see the bottle, which he retrieved from the cabinet. The label on the bottle said ‘Mercurius’…. we did not know what chemical that was, so we googled it.

see. This was our first encounter with a Spiritual Creature.

In the beginning of July, I detected a second creature, this one had been brought in when a Team were doing some filming at the centre. It was brought it with all their kit from a previous location. Again, I drew this creature in my book. It seems from this first encounter the Spirit World has opened up a whole new chapter in the way of Spiritual Creatures. I see them now all over the place, just existing alongside us daily.

“The experiences I have had so far has fascinated me, surely creatures like this must have been around a long time and others must have seen them in the past, right?”

The first thing that came up was “The Spirit in a Bottle”. A reference to the Brothers Grimm Tale of the Woodcutter and his son, who encountered a ‘Demon’ and trapped it in a bottle.

Was this coincidence? We all felt a little disturbed at this…. Still seeing the creature, I drew it in my book and showed it to the other Team member as she said she too could also see it.

She confirmed my drawing was and exact likeness to what she could also

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Were these Elementals? My understanding of Elementals are spirits related to the 4 elements Earth, Water Fire and Air. They do not seem to fit in the realm of nymphs and gnomes but seem to me to be in a different dimension altogether.

My next avenue to explore was Dragons….

We all know what a Dragon is, and we all know what one looks like but none of us have ever seen one.

The tales of Dragons in folklore go back a millennium.

Nearly every culture around the world has an ancient tale about Dragons, but we know they have never existed on the Earth plain.

The earliest and most famous photograph of the Loch Ness Monster was captured by Robert Wilson and was published in April 1934.

The word “dragon” comes from the ancient Greek word “draconta,” meaning “to watch,” suggesting that the beast guards’ treasure, such as mountains of gold. But this does not seem to sit right as no where in all the tales does a Dragon have a purpose. A Dragon cannot spend gold or profit from its worth. Its only purpose seems to be an object to be slain or challenged, or to have a higher symbolic meaning. So, I ask myself, is this a Spiritual Creature that resides in the same realm as our smaller creatures? Yes, this seems to be the right place where our creatures fit in….

Have they been seen before by people who can see through that spiritual veil and have, they then been drawn and written about leading to the folklore tales? It is not known where the origin of the Dragons came from, but the ancient Greeks and Sumerians wrote about ‘large winged Serpents’.

Are we looking at a picture that may well be a paranormal image captured on camera?

This also then stirred my thoughts on the Loch Ness Monster. Another creature that still holds a place firmly in the folklore tales, but could this also be a spiritual creature that only a few people have been able to see? Is this why she stays so elusive?

It is no secret that Aleister Crowley bought Boleskine House on the banks of Loch Ness in 1899. He bought it for the purpose of having a private residence where he could practice his rituals and experiments with the Occult. His main purpose there was to perform the Abrumelin Ritual, a ritual that can take 6 to 18 months to complete. A ritual that incorporates Arch Angels and Demons. Unfortunately, Aleister never completed the ritual, he was called away to Paris by the leader of the Golden Dawn and the ritual was left incomplete. Did this leave open ‘gateways’ or ‘portals’ for some spiritual creatures to enter our plain?

Some of the Spiritual Creatures I have seen do remind me of Gargoyles.

Again, it really made me question the involvement of these creatures and how people may have seen and perceived them in the past. Why do they think they can use them for warding off ‘evil’ around religious sites? The most famous building for its gargoyles is Notre Dame, a gothic building recently engulfed in flames. There are many horned and beaked creatures on the walls of this building, some of them not recognised as animals that may have walked this earth, but where did the inspiration come from to create such creatures? They could so easily be classed as evil from their looks. Has someone seen these creatures and worked with them and then used them as a token of protection for the building? There are many religious buildings around the world that have stone carvings of gargoyles and creatures upon them.

Even ancient sites like Ankor Wat in Cambodia, proudly displays a statues of the Naga – a seven headed snake that guards the temple and there are unknown creatures carved into the stones in Gobleki Tepe in Turkey, one of the oldest religious sites recorded.

There are many more examples of ‘creatures’ around the world that may have spiritual origins. The Chinthe from Burma is a mythical lion like creature that is a symbol of love between a father and a child. Was this story inspired by a real experience with a spiritual creature?

Did it teach someone of importance a lesson about love and children, which was so profound that statues of these creatures are still around today?

The Chinese Qilin is like a magical unicorn, a one horned beast. It is a mythical hooved creature known in Chinese and other East Asian cultures. It is said to appear with the imminent arrival or passing of a Sage or an illustrious Ruler.

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Again, did someone witness this happening on a spiritual level and is this creature part of some sort of spiritual ceremony where the arrival or passing of an important person is celebrated by Spiritual beings?

Cernunnos is the ‘Horned God’ portrayed in Celtic writings with over 50 examples of his imagery having been found from the GalloRoman period. He is depicted with antlers, seated cross-legged, and is associated with stags, horned serpents, dogs, bulls, and rats.

He is usually holding or wearing a torch. He is also seen as God of the Underworld. He also looks similar to the Knights Templar horned god Baphomet.

Whilst researching both of these I also cannot help but notice their resemblance to the God Pan, son of Hermes. Are there higherlevel Spiritual Creatures that seem to have greater power and have somehow managed to influence the living people of our earth plain to worship them?

Are the similarities more than coincidence?

I feel in ancient times when spirituality was a way of life before many of the restrictive religions we have today, people would have encountered these creatures on their spiritual journey or they would have seen them by chance the same a seeing a full-bodied apparition on a ghost hunt. The evidence in ancient sites of unknown creatures, certainly leads me to believe that people have seen many of these spiritual creatures in the past and that they have always been there and are still around us today.

We have gathered quite a few spiritual creatures at The Haunted Antiques Paranormal Research Centre, and many have now been seen by visiting teams and investigators. I feel the research will go on for a long time into this subject. So, just remember, if you feel there maybe ‘something’ under your bed or in your wardrobe…. you may well be right!

Jane Rowley

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JUST ONE OF THOSE

THINGS...

By THE WIZARDRESS OF OZ: Sarah Chumacero

Have you ever lost an object only to find it days, weeks, months or even years later right in front of your eyes?

It is a phenomenon that happens so often that it has been given a name: JOTT – Just One of Those Things.

Also known as disappearing object phenomena (DOP), the term JOTT was coined by paranormal researcher Mary Rose Barrington who has published a fantastic book on this subject called “JOTT: when things disappear... and come back or relocate - and why it really happens” Barrington has classified this weird occurrence into two different categories: 1. Jottles: This is the more common of the two where objects are displaced either via teleportation, poltergeist phenomena or an apport (a spirit moving an object) 2. Oddjott: Miscellaneous weird episodes that have no rational explanation

Jottles are then further broken down into subcategories: •

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Sarah x Owner/Creator/ Blogger

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Walkabout. This is the most common jottle, where an item disappears from a known location and is found later in another and often bizarre location, without any sort of explanation as to how it got there.

Comeback. An item disappears from a known location and anywhere from minutes to years, reappears in this very same location.

Flyaway. An item disappears from a known location and never reappears.

Turnup. An item which appears in a location which it couldn’t have been in before.

Windfall. An unknown item to you randomly appears.

Trade-in. An item that disappears and never comes back, but a similar item appears instead

Living Life in Full Spectrum 8

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So, are spirits moving our items or bringing them back to send us a message or a sign? Is it just memory fog? Do our items fall into some sort of weird alternate dimension or invisible black hole only to find their way back to us?

What if it is somehow being teleported from place to place? Maybe a poltergeist is playing tricks on us? Many suggest that it could be our own consciousness that has something to do it with. By being upset or frustrated with losing an item, are we unknowingly mentally willing it to appear? While we can theorise over what actually causes it to happen, it is a real phenomenon that is common enough for parapsychologists and paranormal researchers to take notice. Some paranormal investigators have even come up with the humorous term “You got jottled!”.

I myself have been ‘jottled’ so many times that it was really difficult to pick just one experience to talk about. From medication going missing from my cupboard only to find it literally at my feet in a car park days later, through to my precious jewellery falling into my hand from inside my hairdryer, I myself have no shortage of strange stories. The one I wanted to share with you however happened more recently at my treasured Black Rock House. As you may know, I run investigations at a quaint little homestead in Melbourne Australia called Black Rock House. In the last issue, I wrote about an old school night where the guests all dressed up in period or steampunk clothing. It is back at the old school night where this story begins.

One of the guests a lovely lady that went to a great amount of effort for her costume dressed up in what I can only describe as a kind of Mary Poppins steampunk twist. I will call her ‘A’.

Picture Credit: © Black Rock House Paranormal Tours

With her costume, ‘A’ wore a top hat which had a large Eagle’s feather pointing out the top. After about 20 minutes into the investigation when we were inside the main house, ‘A’ realised that her feather had disappeared. When the night finished, we allowed her to go through and search for the feather as it had its own significance to her. She searched the two buildings and the outdoor area for the feather and sadly it wasn’t found. Three weeks later, we had the same event again at Black Rock House, and as a regular visitor, ‘A’ was in attendance again.

The first thing she asked when she walked through the door was if we had seen her feather. The answer was “no we hadn’t” and honestly, I had forgotten about it. One of the other guests who had also been there three weeks before hand said she felt A would be finding the feather on that night. We stood around chatting for a while and ‘A’ excused herself to go out front as we still had a few minutes before we were to begin.

We as a group were standing in a doorway leading to the stables area.

It was then that someone pointed

out that there was a large feather that was ‘stuck’ into the sides of the wheelchair ramp leading into the building. Upon inspection, it was ‘A’s’ feather. What was strange about this was that we had not even been in that area on the night that ‘A’ lost the feather. Even more strange was how this feather was tightly wedged into the gap of the ramp and the edge of the building. It had not simply been blown and placed there by the wind as it took a great deal of human force to remove it. It was completely wedged in the gap almost like it had been put there intentionally. Feathers themselves also have a special significance to people on a spiritual level. An Eagle’s feather represents strength and honour as well as a connection to spirit.

It set the tone for a spooky night to follow and it is still something we talk about. While of course it is entirely possible that someone put the feather there or that it was blown by the wind after It fell from her hat, the part I had failed to mention at the start of this story was a discussion we had just before the

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feather was found. It was a discussion about this very phenomenon – JOTT. I had previously been asking people to tell me their own experiences with JOTT and a few guests told me their stories seconds before we found the feather!

Maybe someone was being cheeky, maybe it was a co-incidence or just maybe it was Just One of Those Things!

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‘A Haunted Atlas of Western New York’ is one of those rare gems that is actually two items in one. Blending seamlessly as one-part spooky history lesson and onepart travel guide, this piece of non-fiction fits at home nicely on any bookshelf whether you are from the area or not!”

Adam Benedict Author, Monsters in Print

“Anyone wanting to visit Haunted locations in New York, this is just perfect, when, where and how in one easy to read and use guidebook, ideal for anyone, even an Englishman in New York, aliens or legal aliens”

Paul Stevenson Editor, Haunted Magazine

The Hidden Truth of

EXORCISM

By Morgan Knudsen (Entityseeker Research & Teachings)

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izien” (in xorcism, or its root word “exork has become h), Oat by Bind to ning Greek mea tern tales, wes h bot nearly myth and legend in lywood Hol by ized idol n the churches, and the n bee has al ritu and s ces pro history. This powerful h oug holicism, alth almost entirely attributed to Cat k bac go t tha places its roots stem into far reaching centuries.

in Hollywood has done a great job often making a very controversial and again, but secretive subject relevant once course, of , with a mix of both truth and Hollywood endings.

Catholic Bishops, for The United States Conference of ctor Mikael Hafstrom’s dire ” example, noted that “The Rite y Thomas was Gar er Fath of adaptation of the story the horror aspect felt but , faith r thei representative of er’s spiritual journey. So, took away from the main charact ut and what can we take what, then, is exorcism really abo an outdated practice? n, see away from, as what is often

ins of the idea. Exorcism First, let’s take a look at the orig invading intelligence is itself consists of the idea that an of possession, and type causing distress, considered a ly, this “entity” ical Typ e. needs to be removed by forc ing someone’s mak and et, ups ss, is causing pain, illne ng to the DSM 5 (the life generally miserable. Accordith Edition), a case of Diagnostic Statistical Manual, 5 be given to those only possession trance disorder can ion, or belief in that sess pos h suc who are in distress from or are demonstrating condition, not those who believe messages, love, that they are receiving positive other joyful connection connection with a loved one, or y cultures, the very idea man In with a nonphysical “mind”. and highly spiritual itive pos a red of possession is conside shaman or healers, experience, often experienced by s, Louis Benjamin, or or channels such as Esther Hick n we reach back into Jane Roberts to name a few. Whe e, all forms of sickness, mpl exa ancient Mesopotamia, for were attributed to the both physical and psychological, session. supernatural and specifically pos

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he number of spirits lying in wait to possess or take over someone’s consciousness or body was considered “one of the most important factors in the daily life of a Babylonian [Sargant, pp., 1973].” In order to rid these people of said illnesses, the exorcist would construct clay or wax statues and proceed to destroy them, believing that this was symbolic of ridding the victim from whatever demon ailed them.

Assyrian tablets offer the first written accounts for the treatment of illnesses and medicine, which carries over into further accounts of exorcism.

Often, they included rituals where demons were challenged or prayer was offered, but they usually related an outside cause as the origin of the illness. If you had a cold or even something such as epilepsy, it must, indeed, be possession. Recently, a small carving in the back of one of the Assyrian tablets was discovered. It was that of a demon said to cause “bennu”, or epilepsy in patients.

Significant since the diagnosis of epilepsy was often related to hysteria so many years later.

The Hindu scriptures called the Vedas composed tell of evil beings who interject themselves into the lives of the living and interfere with the work of Hindu gods. These were written in around 1000BC. Religious leader Zoroaster, who was considered the first magician, and who founded the religion Zoroastrianism, was associated with exorcism also. Accounts from ancient Persia in 6 century BC also offer evidence of exorcism using prayer, ritual, and holy water.

Homer, Socrates, and Plato spoke repeatedly of demons, who believed that anyone demonstrating mental illness or insanity was under the influence of demons. The cult of Dionysus in ancient Greece caused the ritual to become so widespread that it was legally called to a halt in ancient Rome in 186BC. In addition, priestesses served as channels/mediums. For example, the pronouncements of Apollo at Delphi were given through a priestess of which were then interpreted by the priests at the time, although it was later discovered that gasses from the ground on where she often gave her pronouncements may have been the cause of her altered states of consciousness.

Folklore is not deprived of demonic stories either. The oni of Japan are demons said to bring about storms and spoken of in ancient Japanese history. Kelpies are known in Scotland to haunt pools, waiting to drown travellers who are unaware of their presence. But it is not until 4th Century AD that we begin to see evidence of the image of exorcism which Hollywood holds so dear. Zeno of Verona writes, “His face is suddenly deprived of colour, his body rises up of itself, the eyes in madness roll in their sockets and squint horribly, the teeth, covered with a horrible foam, grind between blue-white lips; and limbs twisted in all directions are given over to trembling; he sighs, he weeps; he fears the appointed day of Judgment and complains that he is driven out; he confesses his sex, the time and place he entered into man…[Sargant, pp., 1973] We are all familiar with films such as The Exorcist or The Conjuring, but where is the line drawn between genuine experience and mental instability? Is there a line at all? When we begin to look at possession and exorcism in the late 1880s and formation of the

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Society of Psychical Research to combat and investigate claims of mediumship versus hysteria, we begin to see things like spiritualism making a large contribution to the understanding of known mental health issues which are treatable today, such as borderline personality disorder.

Without the ability to examine the mind, even using a template of possible possession, we would not have the treatments of such disorders that we do today. Does this mean all cases of possession are mental illness? This is up for great debate. The Catholic Church approves one in three thousand cases of exorcism a year, and only after rigorous medical testing by trained physicians and psychologists.

If we take a look at The Exorcist case of “Ronald Doe”, the young Maryland boy who was reportedly possessed by the Babylonian demon “Pazuzu” in the 1970s, we see the interjection of J.B. Rhine, stemming from the psychology department at Duke University and later opening a new parapsychology laboratory there. When he retired from Duke in 1965, it moved off campus and became an independent international research center, since 1995 known as the Rhine Research Center, still located in Durham, NC. Many major universities became heavily interested in the idea of altered states of consciousness and what those implications actually meant for studying the human brain and mind. Princeton, Harvard, Edinburgh, as well as South American universities became heavily interested in understanding the nature of psi and altered states. Today, researchers such as Dr. Alexander Moreira-Almeida in Brazil are at the front lines of research into the line between paranormal and its relationship to human consciousness.

In the early decades, the medical establishment treated psi experiences as pathological, regarding so-called ‘Spiritist’ phenomena as disorders that threatened public health, now things are quite different.

The overlap of spiritualism and human mental health has become undeniably interlinked and, if we wish to continue to understand who we are, delving into the realm of psi is becoming a necessity.

Since the 1990s, scholarly interest in psi has been growing.

Parapsychology began to be established in universities and the religious controversies have greatly calmed down.

The rite of the Catholic exorcism continues to fascinate and terrify audiences all over the world, despite the advancement of the idea of possession in many other areas of research. Positive messages such as those from channels like Esther Hicks tend to go unnoticed as the same type of phenomenon in the eyes of viewers. In these cases, we can start to look at important techniques that are being taught such as surrender versus overworking or being able to still our minds to allow apparent nonphysical communication and psi. Many, such as Edgar Cayce or Leonora Piper, were documented at length and delivered positive messages through trance states and automatic writing, among other things.

Piper herself described the experience as follows: I feel as if something were passing over my brain, making it numb, a sensation similar to that I experienced when I was etherized, only the unpleasant odor of the ether is absent. I feel a little cold, too, not very, just a little, as if a cold breeze passed over me, and people and objects become smaller until they finally disappear, then, I know nothing more until I wake up, when the first thing I am conscious of is a bright, very, very bright light, and then darkness, such darkness.

My hands and my arms begin to tingle just as one’s foot tingles after it has ‘been asleep,’ and I see, as if from a great distance, objects and people in the room; but they are very small and very black.

Leonora described the entity as one Jean Phinuit Sclivelle, generally just Phinuit, an elderly man who passed away in 1860, and who later was replaced by another personality named George Pellew, a deceased acquaintance known to the investigator, Richard Hodgson. Controversy, of course, was rampant, but, real or not, Piper believed she was possessed by these personalities with no ill will or effects, which is the very crux of the classification of possession trance disorder in the DSM 5.

The causes and outcomes of possession vary from violent and tragic to beautiful and enlightening and, I believe, there are things to be learned from it, as I mentioned above. If it is indeed a real phenomenon, then we must conclude that there is a consciousness, being a collective or otherwise, that is more than excited to guide us forward. It addresses the age-old question of “Are we alone?” and if possession is real, the answer is inevitably “No.” It opens up the Hard Problem again: Is consciousness emergent or fundamental? If it is not fundamental, we must start to look at the mind in a new way: If people who exhibit possession-like symptoms such as knowing information they would have no way of obtaining or relaying enlightened knowledge, then we must take a deeper look at how the mind is forming and retaining information. Either way, the phenomenon of possession and exorcism is a fascinating look into human history and the human future. It has graced our theatres, our science and medical textbooks, psychology, helped to shape psychoanalysis, and has brought both fear and comfort to people for centuries. Bringing exorcism into the realm of scientific exploration is both a venture into anthropology and wonder and will continue to hold its place in the halls of legend for years to come.

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Morgan xx 13

Nicky Alan’s

“CAN YOU FEEL IT?” I

know that this is going to sound a bit weird, but I do get excited when I hear a lot of spiritual trouble going on in a house. I obviously have complete empathy for the household, but so many times we go to houses and it’s their family member visiting, so we don’t have any huge problems or juicy challenges, however the house visit we were about to do sounded promising.

Because the disturbances had been quite violent and full on, I decided to bring my brother Richard who is an excellent Psychic Medium and Investigator.

Whatever was at this house would have us siblings to deal with, double trouble!

We were on our way to a house near Harlow in Essex. The girl that lived there was very distraught and had said that she had been pushed and her bed was being shook very violently. She also said that there were regular huge bangs and crashes with no explanation and things kept falling and smashing.

It sounded like a goody.

As always on the way to anything like this Rich and I started to try and sense what was at the house.

We both mutually agreed that the presence was male, quite old in years and a grumpy bas***d!

WE were not wrong.

We pulled up at this normal looking 1960’s semi on an estate. There seemed nothing extraordinary about the building as I stood outside. Sometimes you can sense that the problem is linked with the land around the house, but this didn’t seem to be the case.

As we knocked at the door this young woman, Tracy* welcomed us in. She looked tired and withdrawn. This can sometimes be attributed to sharing your house with a lower energy.

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psychically. Everything in the house appeared grey and depressing.

I felt a little excitement as I knew we were dealing with someone that wasn’t going to leave anytime soon.

We asked for a cup of tea. This is always a good time to scan the occupant and the house to see where the trouble is.

We asked all of the standard questions, occult practices, addictions, depression, when the trouble exactly started etc.

I looked at Rich and he shook his head up gesturing to the upstairs, I nodded in agreement.

Tracy said that there had been rows in the house and that she felt generally depressed since she had moved in. Again more signs pointing to a discarnate spirit in visitation with an attitude!

Our spirit man was in the house at that time in one of the bedrooms. I could smell a crude whiff of rolled up cigarettes being smoked and then the stench of stale cigarette butts in an overflowing ashtray. I then saw in my head tobacco stained fingers putting out a roll up in the aforementioned ashtray.

As I walked into the hall I could feel the heaviness in the air immediately.

The atmosphere felt like a dense fog

“Do you smoke?” I asked Tracy. Rich smiled as he knew exactly why I was asking.

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expected this to be a teenage room. Rich and I had a little chuckle as we said for a laugh, ‘bloody Michael Jackson is haunting this house’!

We weren’t far wrong in a funny sort of way.

As we sat down on the bed, immediately our hairs went up on the back of our neck.

The temperature went down noticeably and there was a huge bang in the neighbouring room, which turned out to be the bathroom.

The smell of smoke then hit us.

“Hi Sid, what you up to?” I said to the space in front of me.

With this, another huge bang emanated form the wall adjacent to us. I could not blend with him or see him, I could just feel his menacing presence. He had the hump and wasn’t making any concessions in letting us know that.

“Hang on,” Rich said, “I think I’ve got him.”

“Occasionally,” she replied, “But I always smoke out in the garden. Funny you should say that as now and then I can smell cigarettes. I put it down to the neighbours and the smoke coming in through the windows.”

“That will be the man you have here darling and he isn’t family.” As I said this, I heard the name ‘Sid’ in my head.

Tracy confirmed that she knew no one of that name here or in the Spirit World.

She then clammed up with fear, you could literally feel her energy close down.

I sat her down and did everything I could to allay her fears.

We left Tracy down in the kitchen whilst Rich and I ventured upstairs. We were both immediately drawn to Tracy’s bedroom. The energy in there was like a morgue. It was lifeless, heavy and exceptionally negative.

What we noticed as being quite unusual was the posters and paraphernalia around the room of Michael Jackson.

For someone in their late twenties, we

He took hold of my hand and instantly on closing my eyes I saw him. He looked in his eighties with badly stained teeth. He was quite a scruffy man with clothes that didn’t look like they had seen a washing machine for some time. He raised a smoked stained set of fingers up to his mouth and drew on his roll up heavily. His stony eyes stared straight at mine, then he almost sneered at me.

“Jesus Rich, he seems like a right grumpy git!” I exclaimed to which he replied, “Tell me about it, we are going to need some time with this one.”

I shouted down to Tracy who was asking what the bangs were. I told her everything was fine and to chill out in the lounge as we were dealing with it.

We sat back down and closed our eyes holding hands and blended back in with Sid. It is incredible how a psychic brother and sister can work together, as soon as I saw a vision in my head, Richard voiced the same vision that I was seeing. We are quite a formidable pair when we are together.

Eventually Sid stopped pacing about and sat down in a moth eaten chair.

He told us about his young life which appeared very happy with his wife and children. His wife died later on in life which made him bitter and sad. He ended up becoming a recluse, estranged from

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his children and ended up living a very sad and lonely life in this house until he was found dead downstairs by a carer.

He had regrets about how he had treated his children. He had been up and connected back with his wife, but said that he had a tie to this house and that he felt unrested.

Now I have never heard of this before. A man has gone up to Heaven, found his soul mate but still keeps getting dragged down to the house he had lived in all of his life. What was it that kept dragging him back here?

He said that he had the hump with all of the changes that had been made in the house. It was a council house and he had not really made much change with it, but as soon as he left they changed it into something unrecognisable. He wasn’t impressed. He also said that he might meet up with his children again if he came back down but we pointed out that they would not be in this house anymore to greet him, to which he eventually agreed.

I asked him why he kept banging things around and he said, “It’s because of her!

She keeps calling me back here and I am sick of it.”

With this last statement I opened my eyes and looked at Rich. What the hell was he talking about?

We had asked Tracy the normal things, have you done an Ouija board without proper supervision, does anyone do anything dodgy in the house etc. She had vehemently stated that she had done none of this and had no clue who Sid was. I perhaps thought we had the wrong name. I nipped downstairs and described the man to Tracy, it fitted none of her dead friends or relatives. He definitely was a stranger to her and no doubt was a previous tenant.

I went back and told Rich of my findings.

We were completely perplexed as to how Tracy was supposedly drawing this man back down to his old earthly home.

We reconnected to Sid, who was quite happy to show us visions and clues to what he was trying to express. In the end, he was insistent that it kept coming down to Tracy.

Without a clue what to do, we decided to go downstairs and have another chat with Tracy.

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We asked her if she was sure that she did nothing to invoke this man. She insisted that she didn’t. I then asked her if she was sure she had not dabbled with the occult or had done anything that would attract him back.

She again stated she had done nothing. I hated making it sound like it was her fault, I could feel her defensiveness as we continued to ask questions to ascertain a conclusion on this mystery.

I then said, “So you do not speak to or do anything to invite dead people here?” You can’t put it blunter than that.

“Well…” She paused, “I do speak to one person every night as I so want to hear that he is ok.”

I looked at Rich as if to say, “Now we are getting somewhere.”

I said with all the patience I could muster, “Who is that my love?”

And she replied, “Michael Jackson.”

I then saw in my head her room filled with Michael Jackson stuff.

“What THE Michael Jackson?” I said incredulously.

“Yes, I thought I could reach him and he would come to me as I am such a devoted fan.”

To be honest and this is a first, I was speechless.

It turned out that every night Tracy would do a little ritual by candle light to ask Michael Jackson to visit her.

Inadvertently the King of Pop funnily enough was not rocking up but the old boy that used to live there was and he was pissed off with it!

After deep thought and a lot of discussion, Rich and I came to the conclusion that Sid still held energy here waiting for his kids to arrive so he could say sorry. Tracy in her desperate attempts to contact Mr Jackson was opening a huge doorway of intention that sucked poor Sid right back in! I had never encountered this before, it just shows you how powerful intent and invoking rituals can be. So be warned people, do it properly or get a medium to do it for you.

I will say at this juncture there is nothing wrong in asking your loved ones for a sign or for them to pop in when they can, but rituals every night to a pop superstar is going to cause anyone who isn’t physically alive in the vicinity to pop in!

We went back upstairs and did the best we could to convince Sid that he must resist the energy that drew him back to the house and that if he concentrated he could

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locate his children’s energy and visit them wherever they were. We then did a clearing session, which basically consists of my guide Julianus opening a doorway that I see in my meditations. This doorway leads to the spirit world. After some coaxing we asked him to go back to his wife and stay put!

We then went downstairs and advised Tracy that she must stop the rituals as she was attracting Sid, not Michael! She assured us that she would stop doing it after we reiterated sadly that perhaps Michael was busier doing other things!

As we left, I had a mixed sense of dread and accomplishment. We had ascertained who the spirit visitor was and the reasons for his visitation. However, I wasn’t too sure on whether Tracy would keep her promise.

Two months had passed and we got a call from Tracy saying that everything had been quiet until the night before. The first thing I asked was if she had been trying to contact Michael Jackson to which she sheepishly admitted that yes she had.

Now I know I can speak for me and my brother in saying that we do everything we can to help people. But when people go against what we advise, we cannot keep wasting our time and energy on something unless our clients want to play ball.

I told Tracy that we could help her no further if she insisted on wanting to reach Michael Jackson. To this day I still think about this case. I wonder if she is still trying to contact Michael and I wonder if Sid is still being dragged back to his old house.

It’s the one, shall we say, that got away.

Some you win, some you lose.

ANOTHER THRILLER FROM NICKY ALAN NEXT ISSUE ….

Nicky x

Psychic Medium, Magazine Columnist Author of ‘M.E Myself and I’ ‘Diary of a Psychic’

The writer has actually stayed – for one night only – at No. 16, Manor Place, Walworth Road, where, in the ‘sixties,’ that unexampled young villain, Youngman, killed his mother, sweetheart, and two brothers in order to procure the pitiful sum of £100. ... I have been over the house – in Priory Street, Kentish Town, at which the somewhat mysterious Mrs Pearcey slew her rival, Mrs Hogg, and the little house in Church Villas, Richmond, where Kate Webster killed and mutilated Mrs Thomas, is sufficiently familiar to me.

Guy Logan, from Famous Crimes Past & Present.

The Haunted

MURDER HOUSES OF LONDON

H

ow often did it happen that London houses in which celebrated murders have been committed got a reputation for being haunted?

Quite frequently, in Victorian times. Indeed, a remarkable 1902 newspaper article stated that “it is a fact that over one thousand houses in London are tenantless because they are supposed to be haunted.

Seventy-one of these have been the scenes of murder ...” In the previous part of this feature article, attention was given to the Bloomsbury ‘ 0’ and its wealth of mysterious murders and haunted houses, but

there are many more of these London houses of horror, all over the great Metropolis, and here I will present some of them. * * * One of London’s most celebrated early murder houses was No. 12 Wellington Terrace, just off Waterloo Road, where the beautiful young prostitute Eliza Grimwood had been murdered in 1838. The house was besieged by a throng of murder-mongers and got a very bad reputation indeed. Rumours soon spread that the empty house was haunted by Eliza’s restless spirit. When Elliott O’Donnell made some inquiries about local ghosts

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in the 1890s, he found a street hawker named Jonathan who had been a boy at the time when Eliza Grimwood was murdered. Jonathan’s mother, who had known Eliza, used to say that she was “as tidy a looking girl as was to be found in the ‘ole neighbourhood.” A certain Mrs Glover had twice seen Eliza’s ghost, dressed just as she had been in her lifetime, making the bed in the murder room. People in Wellington Terrace saw the ghost looking out through the ground floor window so often that they got used to it and were not alarmed.

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T

he crime writer Guy Logan, who had a great liking for visiting historical murder houses, once spent a night at Walworth’s house of horrors, No. 16 Manor Place. Here, back in 1860, William Godfrey Youngman had murdered his mother, two brothers, and sweetheart in a veritable bloodbath. After the murder, the landlady of the house received a guinea from the poor-box, since no lodger would live in the haunted murder house.

No. 16 Manor Place retained some of its notoriety well into the 1920s and 1930s; it was demolished in the 1970s for the construction of the new Walworth Police Station. Some older houses across the road show what it must have looked like: a drab, terraced, three-story building. Murder returned to Manor Place in 1887, when Robert Pickersgill cut the throat of his wife Mary Jane at No. 125, before committing suicide near the Stoke Newington railway station. In 1918, William Constance murdered his wife at No. 157 Manor Place, and was committed to stand trial for the crime. Manor Place has been extensively developed, and none of its murder houses remain.

In 1876, the young solicitor Charles Bravo was murdered at the Priory, a grand Balham country house. His young wife Florence and her companion Mrs Jane Cox were both suspected of poisoning him. At a scandalous coroner’s inquest, Florence’s affair with the elderly practitioner Dr James Gully was exposed, as was the fact that after some anticontraceptive mishap, Gully had performed an abortion on his favourite patient in her bedroom at the Priory, with Mrs Cox acting as nurse. Still, the volatile Florence did not seem like a conniving murderess. As for Mrs Cox, she could be proven to have told many lies, and actively tried to prevent the detection of the murderer. The coroner’s inquest returned a verdict of murder against some person or persons unknown, and the Bravo mystery remains unsolved to this day. As for the murder house, it is reputed to have been haunted

by Charles Bravo’s restless spirit for many years. The father of Mr James Clark, a chronicler of London ghosts, knew the Priory as a haunted house in the 1940s. The Priory has been subdivided into flats, but the haunting has continued.

According to Mr James Ruddick, author of the most recent book on the Bravo murder mystery, Charles Bravo haunted his former bedroom with such frequency that one of the residents called in a priest to perform a ceremony of exorcism. This ceremony is said to have had the desired effect.

In 1877, the 37-year-old Mrs Harriet Staunton was found starved to death at No. 34 Forbes Road, Penge. Her much younger husband Louis Staunton, who had married her for

Eliza Grimwood is murdered, from the New Newgate Calendar.

money three years earlier, and his brother Patrick, were suspected of having murdered her, along with Patrick’s wife and Louis’ mistress Alice Rhodes. Although the medical evidence was by no means conclusive, and although the defence raised the possibility that Harriet had died from meningeal tuberculosis, all four prisoners were found guilty and sentenced to death by the ‘hanging judge’ Sir Henry Hawkins. In the end, the three Stauntons were sentenced to life imprisonment, and Alice Rhodes, against whom the evidence had been feeble to say the least, was acquitted. Alice got a job as a barmaid after her narrow escape. One day, she pulled a pint for Sir Henry Hawkins, who remarked that surely, he had seen her somewhere before.

“You have, my Lord. I am Alice Rhodes, and your Lordship once sentenced me to death.”

“Good heavens! I hope you are now doing well for yourself?”

“I am, quite well – no thanks to your Lordship!”

traits of erable death, and por wedding and at her mis 6 1877. er tob Oc , ws Ne ice Harriet Staunton at her Pol s, from the Illustrated ant cre mis ge Pen r the fou

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As for the murder house at No. 34 Forbes [today Mosslea] Road, Penge, it was reported to be haunted by Harriet’s ghost for many years. A woman growing up there in the 1950s remembers the lurid tales told about No. 34, not far from where her family lived. When it was featured by the author Dorothy Cox in 1989, No. 34 Mosslea Road was in a rather shabby condition, but when I saw it in 2012, the murder house was looking quite well cared for. * * *

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Mary Eleanor Pearcey, a sinister young woman if there ever was one, became the mistress of a well-to-do local businessman, who installed her in the ground floor flat at No. 2 Priory [now Ivor] Street, Kentish Town. Contemporary accounts agree that despite her indifferent moral qualities, Mary Eleanor was a quite attractive young woman, with long russet hair, fine blue eyes, and regular features. She befriended some of the neighbours, particularly the family of a grocer named Hogg, who lived in Prince of Wales Road nearby. Mary Eleanor became fond of Frank, the son of the family, who worked as an assistant in the grocer’s shop, and gave him the key to No. 2 Priory Street. But Frank was also ‘walking out’ with an accommodating young woman named Phoebe Styles. When Phoebe ‘got in the family way’ in November 1888, Frank felt obliged to marry her. In late 1890, Mary Eleanor became increasingly infatuated with Frank. Although he still visited her regularly, she sent him many love letters, begging him to come more frequently.

But Hogg was under pressure from his family to stay with Phoebe and her little daughter. On October 23 1890, Mary Eleanor paid a boy to take a note to the Hogg lodgings at No. 141 Prince of Wales Road, inviting Phoebe to come round for tea, and to bring the baby. Phoebe did not come, but when there was a similar message the following day, she put baby Tiggie in a large perambulator, left a note for Frank saying ‘Shall not be gone long’ and walked to No. 2 Priory Street, arriving around 4 pm. Not long after, the next-door neighbour heard glass breaking. She called out to Mary Eleanor, but there was no response, and the kitchen blinds were down. The upstairs neighbour at No. 2 heard a baby scream, and later what sounded like several people walking around and moving things about.

m the in the Bravo drama, fro All the major players 5 1876. t gus Au er, Pap d ate Penny Illustr

The evening was cold and quite foggy. Still, several witnesses saw Mary Eleanor Pearcey wheeling the large perambulator through the streets. Some of them added that although she was pushing with all her might, she had great difficulty moving the heavily laden vehicle. Nevertheless, the white-faced, breathless woman kept on pushing the perambulator through the endless streets, until she had reached Belsize Park more than two miles away. In an area where some houses had recently been erected, by the crossing of Adamson Street and Crossfield Street, she emptied the perambulator of its contents. The overloaded vehicle had broken, so she left it behind in a side street, before walking home. Another witness saw the exhausted Mary Eleanor return to No. 2 Priory Street, reeling like if she was going to fall over at any moment. Later the same evening, the corpses of a young woman and a baby were found near Adamson Road. Miss Clara Hogg, Frank’s sister, saw the description in the newspaper, and suspected that this unidentified woman might be her missing sister-inlaw. Although her relatives pooh-poohed her concerns, she wanted to have a look at the bodies. Mary Eleanor went with her to the mortuary. When the two women were taken into the presence of Phoebe Hogg’s corpse, Mary Eleanor cried out ‘It is not her! It is not her! Let us go!’ and made to pull Clara Hogg away. But after a closer inspection, Clara identified the body as that of her missing sister-in-law and proceeded to identify the baby and the perambulator as well. Mary Eleanor’s strange behaviour had attracted notice, and after the two women had been taken home in a cab, the police kept watch on her house to make sure she did not escape. They found Frank Hogg, who collapsed when he heard his wife was dead, exclaiming that he knew that he himself was partly to fault. He then told them all about his illicit romance with Mary Eleanor.

The murder house at No. 34 Forbes Road, Penge, in 1877 and today.

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The Balham Prior

y

y. as it stands toda

Mrs Pearcey awaiting her doom, and a sketch of the murder house, fro m the Illustrated Police News, December 20 1890.

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murder The Priory Street d today. an 90 18 in e, hous

Later the same day, the police raided No. 2 Priory Street. Mary Eleanor let them in without demur. She sat in the front room, playing the piano loudly as the detectives inspected her kitchen.

They found plenty of bloodstains on the walls, and signs that the floor had been recently cleaned. Mary Eleanor told them that she had been killing mice, but to produce such extensive bloodstaining would have required a veritable massacre of the murine tribe. Her hands were much scratched and bruised, from a recent violent struggle. She was duly arrested, and at the coroner’s inquest, a verdict of wilful murder was returned against her. On trial at the Old Bailey on November 24 1890, the jury returned a verdict of guilty, and Mr Justice Denman sentenced Mrs Pearcey to death. Mary Eleanor Pearcey was executed on December 23 1890. Guy Logan and other crime historians have not doubted her guilt, but there has been suspicion that another person had been involved in the murder. In particular, the canny Guy questioned how, alone and unaided, Mrs Pearcey had been able to pack the dead body in the perambulator with the presumably still living child. But people in extremis sometimes have surprising strength, and the perambulator was the only chance for the desperate woman to dispose of her victims.

In 1937, Priory Street changed its name to Ivor Street, for reasons unconnected with the murder. Guy Logan called this part of Kentish Town “as dull, ugly, and lugubrious a portion of London as any I know”, but Guy was fortunate to have been spared the horrors of 1960s and 1970s architecture. Indeed, today the relatively isolated area near the Camden Road railway station has a certain oldworld attraction, with its cobbled streets and well-kept terraced little houses.

Contemporary illustrations clearly show that Mary Eleanor Pearcy’s house is the present-day No. 2 Ivor Street: a well-kept house subdivided into flats, still with its characteristic small cast-iron balconies intact. According to a now defunct internet page, a former resident of the ground floor flat found it to be haunted by the sound of a child screaming, and bloodstains mysteriously appearing on the wall. She called the local vicar to have a ceremony of exorcism performed, and the haunting ceased.

After visiting No. 2 Ivor Street, you should follow Mrs Pearcey’s route

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through the cobbled streets to dispose of the dismembered remains of her victims. It leads through a spooky old tunnel underneath the railway line from Camden Road Station. It seems almost a certainty that on dark, foggy October evenings, that tunnel is haunted by the sound of the creaking wheels of a heavily laden Victorian perambulator ... *** In the 1890s, the unemployed plasterer Frank Taylor was living in a small terraced house at No. 12 Fountain Road, Tooting, with his wife and seven children. At half past five in the morning of March 7 1895, there was a knock at the door of one of the neighbours.

When he looked out of the window, he could see Frank Taylor’s son standing by the door. Bleeding profusely from the throat, arm and hands, Frank Jr called out ‘Father cut all our throats and mother is dead!’ The front door to No. 12 Fountain Road was locked and bolted, but the police constables broke it down. Inside the cramped little house, they met with the grossest scenes. In the back bedroom, they found all six children dead in a bloodbath, with their throats cut. In the front bedroom, they found the body of Martha Hocking with injuries from a terrible struggle; her head was nearly severed from the body. Frank Taylor himself was the only person alive, despite a large gash in the throat, but he expired on the way to hospital. He had succeeded in exterminating his entire family, apart from his badly wounded son.

The Tooting Horror, as the Fountain Road mass murder was called, was widely reported in the newspapers.

Although the irrepressible Illustrated Police News exploited the tragedy in some ‘thrilling’ illustrations, most of the press struck a more sombre note. The tragedy caused widespread revulsion throughout Britain. Some people blamed the Tooting authorities for their lack of charity: was it really right that an honest workman should become completely destitute, and driven to desperation once he had lost his job? In a strange ceremony of exorcism, all the furniture, clothes, and other effects of the murdered family was dragged out of the murder house and burnt to ashes in a field to the rear of the house.

The spooky tunn el underneath th e railway, not far from Mrs Pearcey’s house.

So, is Tooting’s House of Horrors still standing? This question has been debated on the Tootinglife internet homepage, but without any constructive deductions being made.

Interestingly, one of the contributors could remember lodging in a haunted house in Fountain Road, where doors opened and shut on their own accord, and no tenant stayed longer than eight months. Although the houses in Fountain Road have been renumbered, analysis of the contemporary drawings of the murder house, and the relevant Post Office directories and Ordnance Survey maps, shows that the House of Horrors stands to this day; it is No. 159 Fountain Road, and looks well-nigh unchanged since the tragedy. ***

Sensational Scenes of the Tooting Horror, from the Illustrated Police News, March 16 1895.

One of the most notorious haunted murder houses of modern London was the grocer’s shop at No. 36 Leinster Terrace, just at the crossing with Craven Hill Gardens, where the manager Mr Edward Creed was murdered by an unknown intruder in 1926. The motive was thought to be robbery, but excessive violence had been used against the hapless shopkeeper. Elliott O’Donnell declared the shop to be haunted by Creed’s ghost, after staying there overnight and experiencing many unexplained and uncanny phenomena.

More steady and balanced people than this jittery ghost-hunter also felt the ghost’s presence, and as a result, the shop became very difficult to let.

It is said to have stood until the late 1960s, although becoming increasingly derelict. In the end, the murder shop was demolished, along with No. 35, and a small restaurant, hopefully without any resident ghost, was constructed on the site.

y.

Old houses in Fountain Road toda The Tooting murder house, from the Penny Illustrated Paper March 16 1895.

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In the wee hours of April 22 1972, smoke was emerging from the endof-terrace house at No. 27 Doggett Road, Catford. After the fire had been extinguished, the 26-year-old homosexual transvestite Maxwell Confait was found murdered in the first-floor room where he had lodged.

The house belonged to the West Indian metal worker Winston Goode, a bisexual who had ‘picked up’ Confait at a gay club and invited him to No. 27. Goode was the initial suspect, since he lied about his activities the night of the murder, but although harshly questioned by the police, he made no admission of guilt. Instead, the detectives picked up a gang of three youths who had been suspected of starting fires near Doggett Road, and they confessed to both their arsonous activities and to the murder of Maxwell Confait. On some very flimsy evidence, they were all found guilty and sentenced to lengthy prison sentences, although a Court of Appeal freed them in 1975, and they ended up receiving compensation for their years in prison.

When the police investigation resumed, it was suspected that two homosexuals had killed Maxwell Confait, perhaps as a result of a mishap in some perverted bondage game. One of them was already serving a lengthy prison sentence, and the other soon committed suicide, so they were never prosecuted, and the Doggett Road murder has remained unsolved. As for the murder house, there have been rumours that Confait’s first-floor room was haunted.

Groans and bumps in the night were regularly reported by the next inhabitants of the house. In 1985, a team of paranormal investigators is said to have stayed at the premises overnight and photographed ‘orbs’ in the murder room.

No. 36 Leinster Terrace as it look s today.

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*** Many of the haunted houses of London appear to fit into four categories. Firstly, there are the houses presumed to be haunted by some famous personage [Lord Nelson, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens] who had once lived there. These stories are often intended for the consumption of tourists. Secondly, there is the poltergeist type of haunting, which tends to be independent of misdeeds committed by former inhabitants of the house; many sceptics believe that mischievous adolescents are responsible for some of the historical instances of poltergeist activity. Although the abode of that doyen of London’s poltergeists, the Cock Lane Ghost, is no longer in existence, several celebrated London ‘poltergeist houses’ of the 1920s and 1930s remain to this day. No. 8 Ferrestone Road, Hornsey, where lumps of coal flew through the air back in 1921, still stands, and the humble little terraced house at No. 8 Eland Road, Battersea, home to a well-known poltergeist haunting in 1928, still frowns upon the passer-by.

Thirdly, it was not uncommon that houses of a very dilapidated and neglected appearance became notorious in the neighbourhood. They might fit into a ‘Miss Havisham’ or ‘Dirty Dick’ legend, and be considered the abode of some tragic recluse who had once been crossed in love, or an alternative legend that they were once the site of a gruesome murder, and shunned ever since since their haunted.

Examples of the former topos are Nathaniel Bentley’s old house in Leadenhall Street, which no longer stands; Dirty Dick’s Tavern in Bishopsgate purchased some of Bentley’s paraphernalia, but has nothing to do with the original legend. There was a similar story about No. 19 Queen’s Gate, Kensington, around the turn of the century, due to the house’s neglected and begrimed appearance.

Richard Whittington-Egan investigated a Liverpool legend involving an old house at No. 1 Mulgrave Street, said by many people to have been the home of a ‘Miss Havisham’ character, but the truth turned out to be that it had been deserted for many years after its owner died in 1906, since his maiden sister thought it harboured too many painful memories.

A good example of the pseudo-murder house variant was the ‘haunted house’ at No. 43 Stamford Street, Blackfriars, which in the 1850s was said to have been the site of a terrible murder and haunted ever since. The truth is that the house belonged to an eccentric old lady, Miss Angelina Reid, who deliberately allowed it to go to ruin, in order to spite her nephew and heir. At night, she and her elderly servant sometimes surveyed the dusty, decaying rooms by the light of an old lantern, thus giving rise to the haunting legend. One of the reasons that No. 50 Berkeley Square was believed to be haunted was its neglected appearance, compared with the other houses in this square. People made up various stories to explain this discrepancy, one of this involved a murder taking place on the premises.

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The haunted murder shop at No. 36 Leinster Terrace, and other imag es from the murder of Mr Creed, from the Illustrated Police News, August 5 1926.

Fourthly, we have the ‘genuine’ haunted murder houses of London.

In Victorian times, it was of frequent occurrence that houses in which sanguinary murders had occurred developed a reputation for being haunted. The house at what is today No. 9 Park Road, Richmond, where the servant Kate Webster murdered and dismembered her mistress Mrs Julia Thomas in 1879, before boiling the body parts in the kitchen copper, is recorded to have stood empty for many years, since nobody would live in such a house of horrors. But in 1897, a lady and her servant moved in, without being disturbed by the ghosts of the brutal Kate pursuing her timid old mistress, brandishing a chopper. When Elliott O’Donnell, made a polite inquiry about the

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spectral inhabitants of No. 9, he was surprised and dismayed to find that the place was not haunted.

Guy Logan, who took a particular interest in this murder house, wrote that “The majority of houses which have been the scenes of murder seem ever after to be under a cloud, and to shudder, as it were, from the public gaze, but this cannot be said of the neat and pretty little villa at Richmond, which was the locale of Kate Webster’s horrid crime.

I have passed it many times in the course of years, and anything less like the popular conception of a ‘murder house’ it would be hard to imagine.” The house still stands today: a valuable and well looked-after semi-detached house in a peaceful Richmond street.

Not many people know its horrible secret.

A murder house goes through three phases: notoriety, rehabilitation and oblivion. A minority of murder houses, mainly cheap and unattractive buildings that had witnessed the grossest and most horrible murders, and achieved considerable media publicity, never emerge from the notoriety phase, and consequently they are demolished. All the valuable London murder houses have entered the rehabilitation phase, however, but for some notorious Victorian murder houses, it would take long for them to become reintegrated into the neighbourhood. As we have seen, the Eliza Grimwood house at No. 12 Wellington Terrace kept its notoriety for decades, and the house where Kate Webster murdered Mrs Thomas was shunned for 18 years. Some of the haunted houses in the ‘Murder Neighbourhood’ were equally notorious: No. 12 Great Coram Street and in particular No. 4 Euston Square.

In contrast, the rehabilitation of most modern murder houses is a comparably swift affair. There are several examples of London and provincial murder houses fetching very good prices and even being quite sought after. One of the most striking examples is the house at No. 20 Dewhurst Road, Brook Green, where the West London mystery man William John Saunderson-Smith was murdered in October 2011. An attractive house in a sought-after part of London, it would normally have been snapped up very rapidly, but would the fact that the former owner had been tortured and murdered on the premises impede the sale? When Tates Estate Agents put the murder house on the market, West London Today had the headline “‘Fantastic’ Brook Green murder home for sale at £1.8M!” This newspaper did not think that even a grisly murder would put off potential buyers in this very convenient part of London, however, and they were proved right: the murder house was swiftly under offer.

No. 27 Doggett Road today

The title-page of an 1850 pamphle t about the [bogus] haunted murder house in Stamford Stre

et.

Jan Bondeson is a retired senior lecturer and consultant physician at Cardiff University, and the author of many books, including Buried Alive, Murder Houses of London and Rivals of the Ripper.

There would appear to be several reasons for this change in attitude. Firstly, the increased mobility in modern society has resulted in a decrease in local knowledge and sense of belonging: few modern people, apart from determined amateur historians with a taste for the macabre, bother to record the local murder houses. The gradual decline of the Christian religion, and even stronger decline in various superstitious beliefs, like hauntings and curses, has also played an important part: to a financially astute modern atheist, a murder house is just another house.

And unlike the situation in Victorian times, when the Illustrated Police News and other newspapers freely published the full address of the most recent murder house, and sometimes a drawing of it as well, the numbers of murder houses are rarely divulged in the newspapers today. This means that the identity of a present-day murder house is known to an extremely limited number of people, and definitely not to out-oftown buyers or London property investors looking to expand their portfolios. But when you walk the streets of the great Metropolis, evidence of its criminal past is everywhere to be seen: part of London’s forgotten history is that of its murder houses.

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PENNY GRIFFITHS-MORGAN’S

NOT SO ‘ORRIBLE HISTORIES*

SPINALONGA THE ISLAND NOT TO LINGER LONGER

I

am writing this whilst the world is in the thick of a global pandemic (or should that be panic?) with the threat of the Covid-19 virus looming over us all, despite reports that the majority of the population will experience nothing more than a mild dose of the flu, society is still hoarding groceries as though an apocalypse is on the horizon and banishing anyone who has the temerity to cough in public.

Whilst we may think this is just a reflection of our self centred twenty first century times, I would draw your attention to one of the oldest illnesses known to man, one that in the bible says:

And [if] the priest see that, behold, the scab spreadeth in the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him unclean, Leviticus 13:8 What am I talking about? Hansen’s disease, more commonly known as Leprosy. The common image we have of this affliction is people’s limbs falling off and of them walking around on crutches whilst missing a foot or worse, but are we just perpetuating the bias that was shown

against sufferers of the Mycobacterium Leprae or is it fair.

The earliest known recording of a person suffering from leprosy was back in 600BC, and whilst here in the UK it is seen to be an affliction attributed to more “third world” countries, we do still have cases diagnosed.

As with the current plan for Covid-19, the most common answer to prevent spread of an infectious disease – even to this day scientists are not 100% sure as to how the bacteria spreads, they believe it to be from coughing and sneezing but it is not highly contagious – was to exclude sufferers from the rest of the community, isolate them if you will, and for this purpose, leprosy colonies were devised.

The diagnosis of leprosy was not immediate, someone who had contracted it would potentially not show signs for at least five years and possibly up to twenty, it was a very hard disease to monitor and combat. As soon as it was confirmed however, they would be separated from their family, all their financial assets and property seized and what is perhaps worse still, their identity wiped from the records and their Cretan citizenship revoked.

In the Gulf of Elounda, in north eastern Crete, by the town of Plaka lies a little island called Spinalonga which from the years of 1903 to 1957 was a place that that the Cretan government tried to hide from public eye as it was basically a prison for those who had contracted leprosy.

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These poor people ceased to exist as far as the authorities were concerned, and because there was no cure (although more of that later) they would never return from Spinalonga, it was basically a death sentence.

They would leave the town of Plaka on a boat and would be expected to enter the island colony via their own entrance down a long stone tunnel into the former fortress isle, commonly known as Dante’s Gate. There was a Doctor assigned to the people of Spinalonga, however they would only make the trip to the island if a person was to fall ill from something other than the inherent condition of leprosy, in the main, the residents were expected to care for each other. As we have seen recently, that assumption that people care for their neighbour has been proved not to be 100% accurate sadly, and even when your neighbour is suffering from the same death sentence as you, the fact that on Spinalonga, the priest struggled to find residents to help him bury the deceased does not surprise me, it was every man for himself.

These people knew they would never return home and tried to make Spinalonga their new refuge but were forbidden from acting like normal “humans”.

Businesses were banned, relationships strictly outlawed, and the inhabitants were meant to live like unemotional zombies.

In the early part of its use as a colony – the reports say hospital, but seeing as no one was cured or nursed, I

am not sure how it can be classed as such – the reports estimate two hundred and fifty one residents, with just over one hundred of those being women. There are many unofficial reports of women being assaulted and worse, and there is even a statue of a woman about to jump off the wall, her stomach swollen as though she was pregnant. Unsurprisingly the authorities vehemently deny such accounts, but when humans are together, the need to procreate takes over and so unexpected pregnancies may have been frequent.

The other reason for a woman not wanting to give birth is the knowledge that the baby would be taken from them immediately and sent back to the mainland, despite it being known scientifically at this stage that Hansen’s disease was not hereditary.

It was not until a 21 yr old law student Epaminondas Remoundakis was sent to the island in 1936 after managing to conceal his condition for some nine years that things began to improve. Even though his sister had taken the boat ride there and passed through Dante’ Gate some years earlier, Epaminondas refused to spend the rest of his life – this wasn’t an actual true death sentence remember – living in conditions worse than a prisoner and totally ostracised from community and care.

In 1933, a few years before Epaminondas arrived, there were an estimated nine hundred and fifty four people living there (according to the International Leprosy Association), larger than many Cretan villages and also a place where you could be sent from any part of Greece if diagnosed (or even suspected) of leprosy.

The well educated and eloquent Epaminondas formed the Brotherhood of Spinalonga patients and lobbied for marriage to be allowed, for the product of relationships (babies in other words) to be allowed to remain with their parents and for a school and a theatre to be erected. His view seems to be very much that although these people were to be shunned by society, they should still be able to live and that a community should be allowed to flourish. In fact, the local villagers of Plaka realised how important their near neighbours were and began to supply them with goods to help.

When the Italians and Germans occupied Crete however, the island was also used as a sanctuary from the fighting as the soldiers had been told to go no where near the contagious leper colony. This, whilst saving the lives of many I have no doubt, did not help those who would swim the short distance to salvation and get shot by axis soldiers like literal fish in a barrel.

But that period of history is a whole article in itself.

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In 1957, the Cretan Government decided to close the island and moved the remaining residents (I hate calling them lepers, they had leprosy, their condition did not define them any more so than people with Tuberculosis are “Consumpters”) to a hospital in Athens to begin treatment. This is where you begin to ask questions however, treatment for leprosy had been found in the early 1940’s, yet it was not given to these people for well over ten years.

What makes it even more suspicious is the huge cover up campaign that raged for many years until the government realised that Spinalonga was a tourist attraction. When Maurice Born (who translated a book titled “lives & deaths of a Cretan Leper” by Remoundakis) first visited the island he found paperwork and identity records strewn everywhere as though people had left in a hurry.

When he returned there a few years later all traces had disappeared and there was also evidence of fires having been set and demolition of buildings attempted.

Were the powers that be trying to cover up the mistreatment of these many

souls? Who knows as there are scant written records of what happened on a daily basis and although the excellent novel by Victoria Hislop entitled “The Island” provides some information and she did indeed develop a love for Crete and befriended some former inhabitants of Spinalonga, it is still written with rose coloured glasses and does not convey the sense of hopelessness that must have pervaded once you knew you were making the short water crossing to Dante’s Gate.

I saw a piece on twitter recently where a historian said that the biggest piece of advice they could give (in relation to the current Virus) was to write experiences down for future reference. Is anyone in one hundred years time going to believe the history books when they say what we are seeing right now? Whole countries on lock down, people bulk buying toilet roll, and supermarkets bringing in security to stop fights amongst shoppers. I wish that people had spoken to those who lived on that tiny little Cretan island to find out just what it was like, we are lucky that we had people like Remoundakis

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to let us know their truth.

Is Spinalonga haunted, I could not say, there are certainly no accounts of mysterious happenings available on line but as any of us with an interest in the paranormal know, just because it is not written down, does not mean it does not happen.

Or is it merely haunting? That’s for you to decide if you ever get the privilege to visit.

Penny x

Penny Griffiths-Morgan presents the Haunted Histories podcast via Paranormal UK Radio, has authored two books My Haunted History and A Haunted Experiment and can be found

www.hauntedhistories.co.uk *the not so ‘orrible histories might, at times, be a bit ‘orrible, it’s just a tagline, okay?

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ng

oi g e r a a n i r t a K Jack &

H

auntings exist all over the world, more than often what we see or hear about are the “light & fluffy” ones, being tapped on the shoulder, moving a table are always good to experience and witness but are not dark or sinister. On our HauntedLIVE events (and broadcasts) we have often felt a “darkness” trying to interfere or connect, we know there’s something there, if there was no bad in the paranormal world, then the word good wouldn’t exist. Where there is light, there is also darkness, aint that what they say.

Haunted locations have sordid pasts and dark histories and even darker mysteries, some are even considered to have doorways to the ghostly underworld where evil can come and go at its leisure.

With the abundant amount of ghost-hunting shows on television today you can either be on overload or loving every minute, it is one of the paranormal divides in the much-divided paranormal world. Take it or leave it, paranormal reality television is extremely popular, some love them, some hate them, some watch them just to moan about them (always wondered why people do that) but the valid question is always out there, how much of it is “real” versus “entertainment”.

Going back to the “dark side” of the paranormal there’s not many that concentrate on that side of things although Portals to Hell is one that does.

Here at #HauntedMagazineHQ we enjoyed season 1 of Portals to Hell, it was different, dark and if we may say “heavy metal paranormal” (probably don’t make sense but we know what we mean).

When we got the press info from the people at Discovery, we knew we wanted to know more about it and about Jack and Katrina.

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“Katrina and I are breaking down walls – literally,” said Jack. “We have unprecedented access to a number of locations and are also the first team to ever investigate some of them for TV. They’re incredibly active sites for the paranormal, and we’re going all in to try and capture substantial evidence.”

The undaunted duo will face their most fearsome cases yet, as they uncover disturbing tales from bygone pasts and unnerving paranormal activity. Jack and Katrina filter through extensive research, utilize advanced scientific equipment and enlist a network of specialists, including psychic mediums, to try and exhume answers behind these terrifying hauntings.

There’s something about breaking down walls in the paranormal we like and whilst we got all the press bios, info and blurb we asked if we could have any exclusive time with Jack and Katrina and they said YES!!

YES

In the current situation we find ourselves in, #LOCKDOWN #LOCKDOWN,, we caught up with Katrina & Jack using a socially distancing interview technique we’ve adopted a lot over the last few months, the fact they were in the USA & we were in the UK helped massively.

“This season is intense,” Katrina. “Jack and I purposefully explore locations that embody the darker side of the paranormal, as we try to understand why certain places evoke more sinister activity than others. It is exciting to see what new discoveries we can make in the paranormal field. Yet as we explore the unexplained, we can only presume to know what we are working with.

At the end of the day we really don’t – and that’s the scary part.”

Hi guys, firstly welcome back to Haunted Magazine Katrina, it seems ages since we saw you last in that disused underground station in London and at Sage Paracon and a big HELLO to Jack. We are looking forward to Season 2 of Portals to Hell, what can we expect from it?

Katrina (K): (K): Jack and I take what we have learned from Season 1 to new heights. Continuing our search for the biggest, baddest hauntings on Earth, we delve deeper into the paranormal world hoping to document the unexplainable.

Jack (J): (J): Season 2 of ‘PTH’ is very much a progression of season 1. Initially we set out to find locations that were alleged portals or some kind of gateway to the Spirit World. However, that can be limiting at times because not every location we were finding had reports of portal activity. So, we broaden our scope and now explore locations that are just downright scary.

What’s changed and how much more intense is it compared to season 1?

K: We are constantly growing as investigators. Every location changes you. Every investigation gives you more questions than answers. We are challenging ourselves, so I think that growth and willingness to explore even more supposedly sinister locations is pretty intense.

J: The volume. Went from season 1 with 8 investigations to season 2 with 18. So, by virtue it makes the whole process more intense.

One of the things that caused a little ripple amongst some UK investigators was the notion that you are establishing Portals to Hell. It is a big statement to make. How do you establish what and where these portals are, and do you think the term itself is controversial?

K: That is interesting, I actually had not heard that it caused such a stir. The name is just that, a name. Portals, like most terms in the paranormal field, are subjective as nothing in the field is proven.

What I find interesting is that there are places in this world where people use that terminology to describe unexplainable events. So, then my question is, why?

It seems to be that when the term portals is brought up people use it to describe an area where either an usual amount of activity occurs and/or a bizarre type of activity occurs that doesn’t usually fall under the traditional “haunting” heading (think, Skinwalker ranch in UT, USA).

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Where “Portals to Hell” comes in is there are places in the world where people describe extremely negative experiences, like Bobby Mackey’s Music World, why is that? What makes that place riddled with negative experiences and another location more benign? The funny thing about the word portal and how we use it in the field- it is a doorway or an opening- you can then make the argument that every haunted location is a portal.

To sum up, Jack and I have always been really upfront that we are not actually looking for a “tangible” portal but are exploring places where that terminology is often used.

J: Yea, what Katrina Said :)

What is the most dangerous location you have visited over the past 2 seasons?

J: New Orleans. One of our crew members was attacked and our vehicle was broken into and gear was stolen. was stolen.

Has anything made you concerned or worried enough to consider leaving a location?

K: Absolutely, not every place is safe to be in.

“Some places we have investigated are very rundown and causes a real threat to us physically. There has been a place or two where I have also worried about our safety due to a client’s behaviour, luckily those have been few and far between.”

J: Yes, the Hill House in Mineral Wells Texas just felt very unnerving. Allegedly there is a demonic entity that resides there. But Katrina and I just had a feeling of discomfort the entire time and the desire to just leave.

Katrina, we have seen you in several seasons of Paranormal Lockdown which has sadly drawn to a close. How would you say Portals differs to that and what did you learn from Lockdown that has assisted you with current investigations?

K: Completely different investigations and shows. With Lockdown we lived in locations for days. With “Portals to Hell,” we investigate for several days, but we do not always live there. Jack and I also look at investigations from the standpoint of “what makes this place negative and this place benign?”

I think every investigation, every investigator you work with, and for me every project I have worked on, has helped me grow into the investigator I am today. In this field you are always learning, and every experience helps you on your next journey.

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You clearly love your MEL meter Jack! What first attracted you to this as your ‘go to’ piece of tech and what other gadgets do you like to use on investigations?

J: I use the MEL Meter mainly because its three instruments in one and it’s easy to carry. I do not consider to be the end all be all but having Milligauss Meter, a rem pod, and a thermometer all in one instrument is convenient. is convenient.

Katrina, What’s the best thing about investigating with Jack?

K: I really appreciate Jack’s sense of humour- it is wonderfully colourful- and his objectiveness. He also has training with the police and is a reserved patrolman, so I find him to be great at sniffing out when a story does not quite add up, he is great at reading people.

Same question back atcha Jack (but obviously about Katrina): J: Katrina and I have stellar senses of humour; we certainly try to have as much fun as we can.

Paranormal investigating is an inherently depressing subject matter – you are dealing with death. We tend to try and mask a lot of our discovery around humour. It is a big factor with our ability to work together; we can laugh when we need to.

One of the noticeable things about the show is that you treat the audience as adults both in language and style of investigation. The look of the show is also quite grungy in places. How conscious of this were you during filming?

K: Thank you! We are definitely aware of how grungy things can be. We do not always have the luxury of staying in posh locations and some of them are very rundown. For safety reasons you must always be conscious of that.

J: Deliberate decision amongst myself and the team because as a fan of the genre I wanted to make a show that looked and felt different from a lot of the other shows that are out there. Just because we are covering the same subject matter, does not mean we have to capture it the same way.

We absolutely loved the episode at Skinwalker Ranch in season 1. Would you consider crossing over into some UFO related investigations?

K: It is funny, I have always been into UFO cases and have researched them as well. My initial training in the field went over UFO cases extensively and we often see a connection between some hauntings and UFO activity.

I think though, because the shows I have worked on deal with more of the traditional haunting side of the paranormal field, people are not really aware that I have worked in other areas. It is certainly in my plans to explore it more.

J: I would absolutely love to but my concern is if you UFO hunting can be a lot more daunting and monotonous compared to ghost hunting because you are often just looking up at the sky waiting to something to happen.

We are going through an unprecedented worldwide pandemic as we write. How do you think this may change the landscape of future investigations in the paranormal field?

K: Well, our job deals heavily with travel so it’s really hard to say how we’ll be affected over the next year or so, but the decision was made to keep us home until it’s safe to venture out again. There are certain challenges we are up against, for sure.

‘Ever since

I was a kid, I was a huge fan of the X Files and that was my entry point into paranormal.'' paranormal.

J: It is certainly is changing the way we will be traveling and moving forward to finish the season. Ultimately, we do not know how anything is going to work, as it stands, we are coming up with plans on how to remain safe and sensible while we travel.

As you said, world travel has clearly changed with the outbreak of Coronavirus. Once we are through the other side, what are your bucket list locations around the world that you would like to investigate?

K: Everywhere. Years ago, at work I remember a colleague of mine was chatting to me about whether or not he should take a trip to Boston.

He was really on the edge of not going and had a ton of excuses why- school, work, etc. I remember telling him something to the effect of “You don’t know how long you’ll be able to travel”. Really, anything can happen (as

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we are seeing). Not to be all doom and gloom about it, but I do believe you have to take on adventure if and when you can because you really don’t know what the next year will bring. I say all this because the pandemic has really made me realize how much more I still want to see and do.

I especially cannot wait to visit the UK again!

J: Wow that was deep Katrina, I really want to do Alcatraz.

Jack, we would like to wish you and your family well especially at the present time. Ozzy is a legend. What are their thoughts on you becoming so immersed into the supernatural?

J: They do not really understand it, but they are supportive none the less.

Did they voice any concerns early on?

J: Not really because I tend not to give them too many details about the depth of our investigations.

Have you enlisted other investigators to work with you on Season 2? If so, can you share who they are and what differences they bring to the investigations?

K: Jack and I work with different psychics from time to time to assist us on our investigations. We have found them to be a big help in the past and you will see a lot of familiar and NEW faces in season 2.

J: We have used a pool of psychic mediums that we rely on during certain investigations. Michelle Belanger, Cindy Kaza, Sarah Lemos, and Tim Shaw.

Do you think there is any potential for a Portals to Hell UK version at any time?

K: I think that would be amazing. I do not hide my affection for the UK (it really started to feel like a second home to me- also I miss a proper teatime). My US friends just do not get it! And Jack was born and raised in England so I think it would make a lot of sense for us to do something like that. There are so many amazing locations in the UK that have yet to be explored. Also, in my experience, the UK citizens I met seemed to be much more open to speaking about their encounters with the unknown than some of the witnesses I have met here in the states.

J: I would love to do a UK version of ‘Portals to Hell’. I am open to the possibility.

And finally, can we expect to see you both for season 3?

K: We are still filming season 2 and have plenty of episodes coming your way!

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J: Absolutely but let us get season 2 in the can all the way! way!

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The End

THE LIVING, THE DEAD AND THE INCARCERATED: A night in one of America’s

historic, most haunted prisons

By Amy Bennett, Full Dark Productions

O

n a sunny, blustery Easter morning in 2018, myself, my partner Ryan Bradway, and fellow investigator Jody Morin were traveling back home from a road trip to a haunted location in Kentucky. We were in central Ohio at this point, having spent 3 hours on the road so far, and in no particular hurry to reach our home state of New York.

“Do you know what’s right here!?”

I asked, masking my excitement terribly. I got blank stares in return and could not hold back.

“Mansfield Reformatory!” I said, hoping the inflection in my voice would imply my need to detour for a photo, even if it was a holiday and I knew it would be closed to the public. Ryan and Jody are no strangers to offbeat adventure, particularly in the pursuit of the haunted and strange, and agreed enthusiastically to seeing the building in person. After all, it was a mere 20 minutes from the highway we were on.

Upon pulling off the road into the town of Mansfield and cresting a small hill, a veritable stone castle came into view, complete with arched windows, decorative stone porch columns and large, imposing

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wooden doors. Looming expansively beyond a manicured lawn and duck pond, the building stood silently, but somehow, not altogether completely quiet either.

The structure is behind a tall chain-link fence, giving the once-inhabited prison a truly secluded vibe. Gruesome, inhuman acts of violence that take place in the imagination of anyone who has only seen prison through the lens of Hollywood, began to take shape as I stood there staring. This was a place we had to return to, and we had to spend a night inside it.

Fast forward to May 2019, when the investigation we had booked months earlier finally arrived. This time armed with four more paranormal investigators of varying backgrounds, we pushed open those big wooden doors for ourselves. After an incredibly informative and memorable tour from OSR staff member Keith Fischer, the seven of us assembled cameras, enjoyed pizza (an excellent perk of the overnight rental agreement), and began the head off into the darkened corridors of the prison.

While I had anticipated likely being intimidated by the sheer size of the dark corridors and endless cells, I surprised myself by feeling more a sense of excitement.

There is such a sense of wonder in such an architecturally stunning place, I imagine I was still somewhat distracted by just looking around like a tourist at every turn. If that actually assuaged any fear I expected to walk in with, all the better. We all split off several times that night and covered as much area as we could with cameras, recorders, and a hand-crafted EMF meter.

significance when it comes to personal experiences as one’s own eyes and ears can. That said, we took the opportunity that night to really spread the possibilities further as the night went on, utilizing that machine in several paranormal hotspots.

The prison itself is rather silent, being entirely encased in a stone exterior and newer roof. Most outside noise, besides an occasional car heard through a broken window, does not contaminate audio recordings done inside the rooms and cell blocks. The sounds we heard that night, however, emanated from within the structure itself. Cell doors banging, metal on metal scraps and pops were reported by all of us nearly every time we returned to our central nerve center in the Bullpen.

The EMF meter is usually not something Full Dark Productions uses on investigations, and I am aware this may seem absurd to most investigators. As a documentary film crew, rather than a paranormal team, we attempt to capture the unknown by means of audio and video before we utilize “the rest” of the investigative arsenal. We are not opposed to the myriad devices, but we do not particularly believe they hold as much

“The audible noises astounded us, but what we captured on our Panasonic RR-QR120 digital recorder from within the confines of the secret cells at the back of the attic altered our perception of the place entirely.”

The EVP itself seemed to be a screeching, while also harsh whisper, containing several vocal tones and by all accounts, angry. We cannot to this day make out the words it might have said but listening to it that night gave us a new sense of excitement and awe. That feeling of validation as the mystifying unknown seemed to speak back from within the static, was both shocking and validating.

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The strangeness of the night did not end with our personal experiences and that EVP though. As with so many investigations, and the hours we spend asking questions to the seemingly empty air, we had no idea what we had come away with on our memory cards after after the night was over.

“Upon attempting to load all the camera footage onto our computer at home, the uncanny happened. The video file of the moment that EVP was captured, and initially played back by myself and my partner Ryan, was unplayable.”

The corrupt file would not open, even via four different software recovery programs and multiple frustrated sighs on my part. No other file on any camera came home corrupt, and so it begs the question: why? Was it a paranormal occurrence of camera malfunction, caused intentionally by some unseen force around us in the moment we were recording? Or was it just a very coincidental electronic situation, that occurred at the worst possible time in the entire evening?

One thing remains true; we know we will never know the answer to that. The answer is left up to perspective, to the interpretation of the meaningfulness of that event. If that EVP means to one person that someone was present and spoke while we audibly heard nothing, perhaps that corrupt camera file means it also did not want us to record the interaction. Perhaps in that perspective, we were being driven from the attic by someone still lingering on there. If the EVP means just that an unknown voice occurred on the recorder while Ryan and I were silent, and has no implication on the camera malfunctioning, then the camera is just at fault on its own.

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While the final answer eludes us, the haunting reality of our time in Ohio State Reformatory remains part of us.

What we experienced in the moment, throughout the cell blocks, the warden’s quarters, and the sites of lurid death and calamity, are the unexplainable things we will carry forward with our next paranormal endeavors. Personally, I have allowed the excitement of the experience to outweigh the fear, letting it further my want to face the unknown again. Investigating the paranormal does not necessarily have a peak or a pinnacle moment for me, where nothing past that point could top what I have witnessed. I genuinely believe the strange and unusual is unfolding before us constantly. In lucky moments or maybe driven by our actions, it is able to be witnessed and learned from. After spending a night behind the imposing stone walls of Ohio State Reformatory, we are convinced there is far more activity, still moving, speaking, screaming out and interacting, than meets the naked eye.

Amy B. xx

AMY BENNETT. Investigator/Producer: Amy is a New York based multimedia artist, amateur historian, and is self-taught in videography. She founded Full Dark Paranormal Explorers in 2017. Her and her partner and fellow investigator, Ryan Bradway, have spent nights in some of the most intense and notorious haunts in the US and abroad. While they are still no closer to any definitive answers in the paranormal, they continue to approach the Strange and Unusual with kindness and enduring curiosity.

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GREAT BRITAIN’S

GHOSTLY DRUMMERS

By Mike ‘Cozy’ Covell

I remember as a young boy reading a book about ghosts in Great Britain and was taken in by a wonderful story regarding an allegedly haunted well in a village called Harpham that is situated in East Yorkshire near Burton Agnes Hall.

THE DRUMMER’S WELL, HARPHAM

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ccording to the story “About the time of the second or third Edward – when all young men of the country were required to be practised in the use of the bow, and for that purpose public “butts” were found connected with almost every village, and occasionally “field days” for the display of archery were held, attended by gentry and peasant alike the old manor house near this well at Harpham was the residence of the family of St. Quintin. In the village lived a widow, reputed to be somewhat “uncanny,” named Molly Hewson. She had only one son, Tom Hewson, who had been taken into the family at the manor, and the squire, struck with his soldierly qualities, had appointed him trainer and drummer to the village band of archers. A grand field day of these took place in the well-field in front of the manor house. A large company was assembled, and the sports were at their height, the squire and his lady looking on with the rest. But one young rustic proving more than usually stupid in the use of his bow, the squire made a rush forward to chastise him. Tom, the drummer, happened to be standing in his way, and near the well. St. Quintin accidentally ran against him and sent him staggering backward, and tripping, he fell head foremost down the well.

Some time elapsed before he could be extricated, and when this was affected the youth was dead. The news spread quickly, and soon his mother appeared upon the scene. At first, she was frantic, casting herself upon his body, and could not realize – though she had been warned of the danger of this spot to her son – that he was dead. Suddenly she rose and stood with upright mien, outstretched arm, and stern composure, before the squire. She remained silent a while, glaring upon him with dilated eyes, while the awestricken bystanders gazed upon her as if she were some supernatural being. At length she broke silence, and exclaimed “Squire St. Quintin, you were the friend of my boy, but from your hand his death has come. Therefore, whenever a St. Quintin, Lord of Harpham dies, my poor boy shall beat his drum at the bottom of this fatal well.” From that time, so long as the race lasted, on the eve preceding the death of the head of the house, the rat-tat of Tom’s drum was heard in the well by those who listened to it.

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The earliest mention I can find so far in the archives came on Saturday September 3rd 1859, when the Yorkshire Gazette published the following; At Harpham the burial place of the Quintin’s family is famous well to which tradition had attached a most singular story It was that one of the predecessors of the family had by some means killed a drummer boy belonging to a regiment of soldiers and that at the death of every one of the proprietors of the estate the drum was always distinctly heard in the well.

The snippet was part of a much larger article about the life, and death, of the St Quintin family. The article touched on the death of William Thomas St. Quintin in 1859. It marked one of the earliest examples of the drummer boy, the well, and the member of the St. Quintin family being mentioned. The story quickly gathered pace, and weeks later was published in The Gentleman’s Magazine, or Monthly Intelligencer, Volume 68, dated October 1859, and written by Edward Cave.

The next mention I came across was in The Leeds Mercury, dated Saturday February 5th 1881, it stated; DRUMMERHEAD’S WELL Can any of you correspondents give any information respecting Drummerhead’s Well, at Harpham, near Lowthorpe, East Riding? How does it derive its name &c?

Yorkshire Notes and Queries, Volumes 1-2, 1888, featured a section on the story of the well in its 1891 edition. It states that the poor drummer boy was named Tom Hewson, and that he was accidentally knocked into the well by a member of the St. Quintin family who were subsequently cursed by Tom’s mother, who was known as Molly Hewson, and a local witch. This was the first mention of the drummer boys name, and that of his mother. A search of the Victorian press failed to turn up any other stories from this period. It was quite common for newspapers to pick up stories from magazines and run them, however, the Hewson family, neither Tom nor Molly, were mentioned in the contemporary press reports.

According to the Great British Ghost Tour, the rear of the church in Harpham is the “Drumming Well” which foretells the death of a member of the St. Quintin family. It is claimed that the deceased boy was named Tom Hewson, and that he was pushed down the well in the 14th century. It goes on to claim that the boy’s mother was a well-known witch who cursed the squire responsible for his death and told him that the phantom drumming would foretell the death of a family member.

THE DRUMMER’S WELL,

T

he history of Great Britain is riddled with stories of phantom drummers, researching the story connected with that of Harpham and the alleged “Drummer’s Well,” I came across countless stories connected to audible and visual hauntings connected to drummers. One of the earliest, and probably the most infamous was the “Drummer of Tedworth,” which was reported in 1661 when a local landowner, known as John Mompesson, who owned a house in the town of Tedworth, which is now named Tidworth, and situated in Wiltshire, had taken up a lawsuit against an unlicensed drummer named William Drury. It is claimed that Drury was collecting money illegally and by false pretences. Mompesson won the case against Drury, and afterwards Mompesson was plagued by the sounds of phantom drumming. Additions to the story claimed that Drury was connected to a band of gypsies, and that the phantom drumming was connected to witchcraft.

Writer Joseph Glanvill visited the property in 1663 and would later write about the case in his book, Saducismus Triumphatus, published in 1681.

Samuel Pepys noted in his diary on Christmas Day in 1667 that his wife had read the story to him.

There have been, however, arguments against this phantom drummer. In 1881 Amos Norton Craft wrote that he believed that it was trickery played on Mompesson by the servants, whilst Addington Bruce, in 1908, argues that the phenomenon was caused by the children of Mompesson, a view later supported by the belief of Andrew Lang, of the Society for Psychical Research, who suspected the work of the children either consciously or subconsciously.

Harpham in 1929, note the site of the Hall, lower left, Drummer’s Well

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HARPHAM

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Another ghostly drummer boy is said to have haunted Alconbury, Cambridgeshire. The story dates from 1796 and revolved around a man named Gervase Matcham, a 31-year-old from Yorkshire, who was drinking in the Woodyates pub on Salisbury Plain. A strong storm blew up and Matcham was said to have been greatly disturbed by this.

His drinking partner, a man named Sheppard, calmed the man Matcham down, and in turn Matcham revealed to him that he had enlisted in the 49th Foot Regiment in 1780 and wore a scarlet uniform, given to him by the Quartermaster Sergeant Jones. Sergeant Jones had a son named Benjamin Jones who was a drummer boy. Matcham and drummer Jones were sent to Diddington Hall to collect money on August 17th 1780, but on the way back, with the £7 in his pocket, Drummer Jones was murdered by the man Matcham. Matcham returned to York, but later he joined the Navy where he met Sheppard. Sheppard took Matcham to the authorities and he stood trial and was found guilty of the murder, sentenced to death on the gibbet, and in a cruel twist of fate made to wear the scarlet uniform that he had worn when he was a member of the 49th Foot Regiment. Since then people have claimed that if you walk down the road between Alconbury and Alconbury Weston, you can hear the sounds of the phantom drummer boy walking behind you, and if you listen carefully, on the wind, you can hear him beating his drum.

A further phantom drummer boy has been reported at Dover Castle, it is written that during the Napoleonic Wars, a young drummer boy was said to have been murdered in the subterranean passages, that stretch beneath the castle foundations. It was claimed that the murderers, who have yet to be named, decapitated the drummer boy, and his body is said to walk along the battlements minus his head.

Angus, Scotland, also boasts a phantom drummer. It is written that during the 19th century the phantom drumming could be heard near the castles of Cortachy and Airlie. In 1845 Margaret Dalrymple claimed to have heard phantom drums beneath her window. She asked the Earl of Airlie, “My Lord, who is your drummer?” The Lord was said to be upset, and later guests told Margaret Dalrymple that the phantom drummer can be heard prior to the death of a member of the family dies. It is claimed that five or six months later the Countess of Airlie died at Brighton. It is claimed that in her personal papers she was convinced that the drummer had played to herald her imminent death.

There are numerous theories as to the identity of the drummer. One theory claims that the drummer was the servant of a neighbouring laird who had been in a feud with Lord Airlie. The drummer was sent from the laird to the lord with a message, but the lord, angry at the contents of the message, took it out on the messenger, who was also a drummer. He then threw him out of the window of the tower. Another theory claims that the drummer was residing at Cortachy Castle and had crossed a former Lord Airlie, who threw him, and his drum, from the window of a tower. Since then he cursed the Airlie family. Another claim is that the murder took place in Margaret Dalrymple’s room. Furthermore, another theory states that the drummer was Lord Airlie’s wife’s brother, who had been outcast.

RICHMOND CASTLE -

THE DRUMMER BOY Another story of a drummer boy takes place at Richmond Castle in North Yorkshire. It is said, according to one version, that soldiers garrisoned at the castle during the Napoleonic wars determined to discover a secret passage that was said to be linked to Easby a mile away, sent a drummer boy down the castle end of a passageway. He was instructed to go down the passage and continue to drum, while they followed the sound above ground. They followed the drumming for some time, but eventually, halfway there, the drumming stopped, and the drummer boy was never seen again. He was said to be heard drumming on moonlit nights.

I remember as a young boy reading this story in a book I had about British ghosts, the name of which escapes me, but the story fascinated me. I often wondered when it happened, and whether he had ever been found, so researching the story was fascinating.

Map from the 1930’s showing Richmond Castle, to the left, and Easby, to the left; according to the legend the drummer boy walked down the tunnel between these two locations

The earliest mention I can find of the story dates back to 1901, when County Folk-Lore was published by the Folk-Lore Society, in a section on Yorkshire written by Eliza Gutch, in which it mentions the story of the Drummer Boy. According to this version there is a vault underneath Richmond Castle that was previously the same vault where Potter Thompson had his adventure, and from this vault runs a passage to Easby Abbey along the River Swale. It is claimed that a drummer boy was sent into the vault, and down the tunnel, where he was ordered to go down the passage, playing his drum. As the drummer boy walked alone along the passage he played, and above ground the sound was traced, but after a quarter of a mile the sound of the drumming fell silent, and the drummer boy never reappeared.

It was believed that the roof had fallen on him, and a stone was placed at the spot where he was last heard, which was at the entrance of the Grammar School Cricket Field, at the foot of Clink Bank. It is said that at midnight some nights the sound of drumming can be heard under certain conditions.

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Some versions state that the drummer boy came across King Arthur and his knights, and that the knights ordered him to stop drumming. In other variations it is claimed that the story inspired Lewis Carroll, who lived in Richmond for a short while, into writing about Alice in Wonderland and Alice’s trip down the tunnel.

The same word for word story was republished in a book in 1901 entitled Publications, and published

by W. Glaisher, Ltd., and later in Examples of Printed Folk-Lore Concerning the North Riding of Yorkshire

by Eliza Gutch, also published in 1901.

The story was mentioned in The Graphic, dated Saturday July 31st 1920, and later in The Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, dated Monday September 8th 1930.

The Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, dated Thursday December 10th 1936, later added further details to the story, stating that the soldiers told the drummer boy of treasures in the tunnel, and that the point at where he stopped was occupied by Richmond Grammar School at that time.

The Scotsman, dated Saturday December 14th 1940 also featured the story, stating that there was a fabled underground passage that ran from the castle’s keep to Easby Abbey. The soldiers stationed in the garrison had heard the stories and wanting to prove them they took a drummer boy and he entered the vault and began playing his drum. Above ground the soldiers listened and followed the sound of the drumming until it reached Frenchgate, and opposite the old Grammar School the drumming stopped abruptly. It then states that there are similar legends in Scotland in the Highlands.

During 1956, the story was published in Bright Tapestry, by Margaret Mary Pearson, and published by Harrap, mentions the story of the phantom drummer boy of Richmond Castle.

The Liverpool Echo, published on Saturday June 23rd 1973, reported that the drummer boy was sent by soldiers to ascertain if the tunnel led to Easby Abbey. The story would later make it into Ghost Hunting in the Yorkshire Dales, by W. R. Mitchell, and published in 1996 by Castleberg.

The story was also featured in Collins Ghost Hunters’ Guide to Britain, written by John Spencer, and Anne Spencer, and published by Collins in 2000, and later in The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends, from Spring Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys, by Jennifer Westwood, and Jacqueline Simpson, and published by Penguin in 2005.

On May 28th 2003, The Northern Echo reported that there would be a recreation of the tragic drummer boys walk. It was reported that a nineyear-old schoolboy, named Sam Rawson, would take the role of the drummer, and the public would follow him between Richmond Castle and Easby Abbey. The walk, which takes place annually, was organised by staff at the Green Howards Regimental Museum in Richmond.

Mike C.

Quite a lot of people still claim you can hear drumming around the Abbey/Castle sometimes.

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Richard Estep’s STEP BY E-STEP GUIDE TO THE PARANORMAL

THE PARANORMAL PRINCE OF

BELLAIRE

BY RICHARD “THE HAUNTED HOSPITALS GUY” ESTEP

NOW THIS IS A STORY ALL ABOUT HOW MY LIFE GOT PARANORMALLY FLIPPED UPSIDE DOWN...

“Where have I seen that bridge before?”

I asked, as our rented pickup truck cleared a bend in the road.

Alongside us ran the fast-flowing Ohio River. Barges and other ships sailed past. There was something about the huge iron structure that was ringing a bell in my memory. It seemed awfully familiar.

My companion, correctional officer and fellow paranormal investigator Wes Coleman, didn’t know. He was focused on driving. Fortunately, Doctor Google had the answer. The Bellaire Bridge, which connects the states of Ohio and West Virginia, is perhaps best known for the role it plays in the movie The Silence of the Lambs, some of which was shot in Bellaire and the surrounding area.

It’s February, and the weather typical for the season — cold and overcast. I’ve flown in from my adopted home state of Colorado to be met by Wes at Pittsburgh’s airport. Wes has driven from

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Canada to pick me up for a 72-hour lockdown at one of our bucket list haunted locations: the infamous Bellaire House.

The house has a fearsome reputation. Owner Kristin Lee no longer lives in the house, due to some extremely negative and terrifying paranormal activity she claims took place there. The Bellaire House is situated up on a hillside, with a fenced-in back yard that slopes downward to the street.

It’s fair to say that the neighborhood has seen better days. Many of the houses we pass on the way in are derelict or abandoned, their windows and doors boarded up. Bellaire is one of those industrial towns that sprang up across the eastern part of the United States during the 19th century.

Wes and I are a little surprised later when we’re told to avoid a specific part of the town for fear of getting shot by members of a local gang.

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We meet Kristin outside the house.

Accompanying her is her son, Layne, who turns out to be quite the talented musician. He plays us some of his compositions while we wait for the third member of our party to arrive.

Sarah Stream has made the marathon 17-hour drive from Iowa all on her own, arriving in Bellaire a little after nightfall.

Kristin gives us the grand tour of the house and tells us some of the backstory.

Some of the claims about events at the Bellaire House have been inflated or are inaccurate, she tells us, but many of the house’s mysteries have never been talked about publicly or have yet to be uncovered. It’s deceptively large, with three floors and a cellar. Wes, Sarah, and I are going to be the only occupants for the next few days. Kristin hasn’t asked us for a single penny in exchange for the privilege of investigating her property. All she has asked was for me to tell the truth about our findings.

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The ground floor consists of a dining room (which Kristin has outfitted as a small museum containing photos and artifacts from the Bellaire House history), a kitchen, a comfortably-furnished living room, and an open area at the foot of the staircase which contains a piano.

Heading upstairs to the second floor, a hallway running along the long axis of the house has doors opening off to the left and right. Each one is a bedroom or a bathroom, and paranormal activity has been reported in all of them by visiting investigators.

In one of the bedrooms is a door that has been bolted shut. Kristin opens it hesitantly, explaining that she doesn’t like the energies upstairs in the attic. I go first, climbing a rickety narrow staircase until I emerge in the dimly lit attic. It looks like the set of a creepy movie.

There’s a mattress on the floor off to my left, along with a couch and a few bits of furniture. Wes, who is somewhat sensitive himself, agrees that there is some kind of unpleasant energy up here, and is keeping his guard up. I’ve learned to trust his instincts, even though I can’t feel anything amiss myself (I have all the psychic sensitivity of an extremely thick block of wood).

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We’ve been at the house for a while and I feel like a cup of tea. My brew kit is already set up in the kitchen, so we head that way. Kristin goes first, with me following along a few steps behind. We reach the bottom of the staircase and Kristin goes into the kitchen. Suddenly, I hear the thudthud-thud of heavy footsteps coming from an open doorway that leads down into the cellar.

What happens next is probably not my finest moment as somebody who likes to think of himself as a calm and collected paranormal investigator.

“OI!” I bellow, storming across the room into the open doorway.

“Let’s be f***** having you!”

I should explain myself a bit. The footsteps were so clear, so solid, that not for one single solitary second did it cross my mind that they could have been paranormal in nature. They were every bit as loud as those of my own feet on the floorboards beneath me. What I DO think is, somebody must have broken into the house and was even now making their way down into the cellar. The house next door has been abandoned and would make the perfect place for squatters to set up shop.

The foremost thought in my mind is that we we’re dealing with a criminal, not a ghost.

The basement steps are empty. I go down with Wes right on my heels. Between us, we search every nook and cranny.

Nothing. We go back upstairs again. I feel a little abashed. Thankfully, my digital voice recorder had been running at the time, and has captured the sound of the footsteps, proving I was not starting to hear things. While the electric kettle boils, we try to debunk the sound. I have Wes, who was a few steps behind me when I heard the noises, retrace his steps several more times while we stand quietly and listen.

We’re testing the theory that the vibrations from Wes’s feet might have been passing through the floorboards and reverberating back up from the cellar steps, which are wooden and creaky.

It’s a decent working theory, but we throw it out once it becomes apparent that no matter how heavily he stomps, Wes cannot recreate the sound.

For her part, our hostess is completely unfazed, telling us that things like that happen “all the time” at the Bellaire House. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I’m impressed. We’ve hardly had time to get acquainted with the place and already strange things are happening.

Over the next 72 hours, we investigate the house from top to bottom. We each take a bedroom up on the second floor and make it our own. Wes chooses the room closest to the top of the stairs.

On the first night, just a few minutes after settling down to go to bed, he hears the sound of distinct knocking on the wall above his head. Unless there happens to be an extremely determined cat burglar clinging to the second-floor window, there’s no obvious explanation.

I choose a room midway down the hall and sleep undisturbed each night. Sarah goes for the room at the far end of the hallway, the very back of the house. She hasn’t seen the episode of Paranormal Lockdown which featured the Bellaire House or done any research in to the haunting itself. Neither has Wes. I make a point of not telling either of them that this was the room in which Kristin said that she and her dog had been physically attacked by an unseen force.

There are still claw marks on the inside of the door where her terrified pet had tried

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desperately to get out.

As things go, Sarah sleeps peacefully in that room.

Wes does not have such an easy time of it, however.

We conduct an Estes Method EVP session in that bedroom, accompanied by Kristin. The three of us sit and ask questions while Wes listens to white noise and speaks whatever words came into his head. There are a few specific hits that turn out to be uncannily accurate, validated by Kristin as being former residents of the Bellaire House or people who are somehow connected to it.

At the conclusion, it’s fair to say that Wes becomes very emotional. He has picked up on the attack and how emotionally traumatic it had been for Kristin, all without being given clues of any kind in advance.

I respect Wes and Sarah’s desire to go into an investigation ‘cold,’ as it were.

My own preference is to learn as much about the location, the land it’s built on, and the surrounding area as I possibly can. That helps me to assess the validity of any possible hits that might arise from mediums, sensitives, and technological methods during our stay.

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I’ve therefore done my homework on the Bellaire House beforehand. It was built on top of a coal mine and a ley line, very close to a fast-moving body of water — the Ohio River. There is of course a longstanding connection between water and paranormal activity (though it remains just a theory) and the rock on which the house stands may also be a contributory factor to the haunting...but then one has to ask, why isn’t *every* house built on that same stretch of land haunted? What is so unique about the Bellaire House?

Some clues may lie in the history of the house. At least one death is documented within the home, a former owner by the name of Eliza Heatherington, who passed away downstairs. Occult practices have certainly taken place inside the house, some (though by no means all) of it being very dark in nature. My team and I find mystical symbols chalked on the floor beneath some of the beds and rugs in the upstairs bedrooms. The land itself also has Native American ties, and there are stories of ritualistic practices and strange beings having taken place in the area behind the house.

Wes, Sarah and I are sitting in the living room one night, enjoying a quiet cup of tea, when Wes suddenly sits bolt upright in his chair. He has caught sight of something moving from the corner of his eye — a candelabra wrapped in ivy, sitting on top of the piano, has begun to swing all by itself. We’re not talking some slight vibration here, but rather, full-on

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shaking that lasts for several seconds.

There is only minimal air flow inside the house, something we verify using a very high-tech method: holding up pieces of paper to check for drafts. As the weekend goes on, both Wes and Sarah go on to see quick flashes of movement in that same area, but it is always maddeningly out of camera shot, and gone in an instant.

We take great care to lock the house up securely whenever we are working or sleeping there. This is not only for our physical safety, but also to help ensure the integrity of our evidence. While we trust Kristin and her family implicitly, the same cannot be said for everybody else in the neighborhood. On our last night at the Bellaire House, the wisdom of this policy becomes very much apparent.

About half past midnight, all three of us are upstairs on the second floor, carrying out Spirit Box experiments in one of the bedrooms. We decide to stop for a tea break. Wes and Sarah leave the room before I do. The instant they reach the landing at the top of the stairs, they know that something isn’t right. A cold breeze is coming right at them up the staircase.

When they reach the kitchen, it soon becomes apparent why. The back door is standing wide open. The three of us just stand there, looking at one another.

Then we have the conversation: the door was locked, right? Yes, it was. The last time I had gone to the restroom, which was accessed to the kitchen, it had been closed. We had been locked in since our only guests, Kristin and her family, had left. But there it was, staring us right in the face. The house was now open to the world.

Now we’re genuinely concerned for our safety. This is more than just disembodied footsteps on the stairs. For all we know, somebody has just walked into the house while we were upstairs and could be hiding...anywhere. The first order of business is to close and lock the door. Then we check every other door and window. They are all secure. The staircase isn’t one you could climb quietly, even if you wanted to, so I consider it pretty unlikely that anybody would have gotten past us while were up on the second floor. That means we have to start down in the basement.

While Sarah watches our backs, Wes and I clear the basement again, then go from room to room all the way up to the attic, confirming what we already suspect: we are still the only living people in the Bellaire House.

During our 72 hour stay, we’ve had a lot of luck with the Estes Method, and quite a few personal

experiences. After saying goodbye to Kristin, we all go our separate ways, each very satisfied that the Bellaire House is indeed haunted.

Wes is a little happier to leave than Sarah and me. He’s not usually a big fan of sleeping at a haunted location, because sleeping involves letting one’s guard down, and he feels that whatever entities call the Bellaire House home, they were constantly pressing in on him. Our investigation has taken an emotional toll on him.

I get back to Denver early in the evening. It’s good to get home. My body clock has been reset, so I’ve gotten used to staying up late. After walking in my front door, I’m kicking back on my couch and enjoying a beer. My phone pings. It’s an instant message from Sarah.

“So, I’m sitting here at home,” she writes, “and THIS happened.”

Beneath the words is a photograph she has just taken inside her own home. At about the same time we had found the kitchen door open at the Bellaire House, almost exactly 24 hours later, Sarah’s own door has just decided to open all by itself.

It appears that something has decided to follow her home...

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THE KIDS ARE ALL FRIGHT! How to tell if your child is psychic

By Sam Bennetts

How can you tell if your child is psychic?

How do you know if your child is spiritually advanced?

What do psychic abilities look like in children?

I

f you are the parent or caretaker of a child who is showing emergent intuitive abilities, you will want these answers—stat! But before we delve into the “what’s” and “how’s” of intuitive abilities, there’s something you need to know. Basically, psychic development and spiritual giftedness are the same thing.

In other words, if you head down the path of psychic development long enough, you are going to become spiritually aware. And if you head down the path of spiritual practice long enough, you are going to become psychic.

They are two peas in the same pod. A tandem bike headed in one direction.

That is because both abilities stem from the same source—the Divine. You access them through God/Source/The One/ The All—whichever name you choose to use. If you head down one road, you will eventually reach the other. This applies to your child. And, also to you.

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What do psychic abilities look like?

Eager to know if your child has psychic or spiritual gifts? Ready to determine which gifts she has and where she falls on the spectrum? It’s customary at this time to provide a quiz for you to take.

You know, something along the lines of: Is your child sensitive?

1.

Yes. Even his clothing labels make him itch. (30 points)

2. Somewhat. He gets overwhelmed by the crowd when we go to World Wide Wrestling. (15 points) 3. No. He is entirely unflappable, lives on a diet of M&Ms and Red Bull, and is never, ever affected by his environment. (0 points) You see where I am going with this.

I don’t want you to answer a lot of questions, guessing on some or fudging on others to get a higher score (don’t tell me you won’t!) and then frantically adding up the total and tossing your kid into a little box labelled “Lotsa Psychic Abilities” or “Kinda Psychic” or “Not Particularly Psychic at All, I’m Afraid.”

I just hate those quizzes!

There is more to the souls of our beautiful, glorious children than tallying points on how psychic or spiritual they are! What’s more, kids’ skills are developing as they grow. They might have one kind of psychic ability now, and a new ability next year. Once a child begins to open to intuitive abilities or spiritual knowingness, their abilities continue to open (and open, and open!). So, where they are now may not be where they are going to end up.

For example, one month ago, Margaret might have shown no clairvoyant ability at all, and now she might be easily able to see “movies in her head.” At Christmas time, Trina may have been obsessed with Santa, but by February she might have received a message from grandmother, who died four years earlier.

Opening, awakening, emergence—it happens quickly.

I am also, for the same reasons stated above, not going to break down your children into categories determined by their year of birth or eye colour. It’s just too simplistic to take a quiz and then firmly nod your head and say “Oh, Gabe’s an Indigo,” or “Jesse’s a Crystalline” or whatever the category du jour is.

I know, I am stubborn.

I know it makes it harder for you.

But we have evolved past that.

My point is, your children are whole beings, and even if they score off the charts on some imaginary PQ (Psychic I.Q. test) it’s just as important that they have Earth skills for this very earthy life, such as how to make themselves a bowl of cereal, play nice with others, and get their science project turned in on time.

• CLAIRSENTIENCE is the art of psychic feeling. Basically, a clairsentient child feels everything. She picks up energy from a crowd, at the grocery store, in a hectic classroom. She may feel energy over distance (knowing Grandma has the flu—even if Grandma lives 2,000 miles away). She may “just know” stuff, such as “That’s not a nice man,” or “That dog is lost.” Clairsentients may also have the ability to hold objects in their hand, and to tell you about the owner or its history (psychometry).

• CLAIRAUDIENCE is the art of psychic hearing. If your child is clairaudient, she will hear things—unfortunately, this does not mean she will hear you calling her for dinner! She may hear via spirit guides, angels or other entities. For younger kids, this may show up as an imaginary playmate. She may hear in her “mind’s ear.” She may also hear music.

• CLAIRVOYANCE is the art of psychic seeing. If your child is clairvoyant, he will be able to easily see what he might call “pictures in his head,” or “movies in his mind.” He might see images in his mind’s eye or images that are symbolic—for example seeing an image of the metal bars of a jail if someone is imprisoned. Visions, premonitions, going to a place and saying he’s already “seen” it before also apply.

• MEDIUMSHIP is the ability to communicate with those who’ve died. For kids, this can either be really cool (I saw Aunt Martha yesterday) or really awkward (there’s a ghost in my room). If your child is a medium, she’ll need support—it can be tricky when you are being contacted by spirits from other realms.

• CHANNELLING is the art of receiving via another entity. Channels move themselves aside in order to receive from the collective consciousness of the Divine, which may show up as a spirit guide, angel or other teacher. Channelling may be verbal, as Esther Hicks does with Abraham. It also may appear in channelled writing, music, or art.

• REMOTE VIEWING is the ability to see things that are far away, as if you were there in person. Kids who are good at this can have a career working for detective agencies! You might also think of them as your little “finders”—they’re the ones that everyone in the family calls to ask “where did I leave my glasses?”

• ASTRAL PROJECTION. If your child tells you she went to Mars that night, you might as well believe her. Kids who astral project are able to move their consciousness to different places, while their bodies stay put. Astral projection can also be related to shifting or traveling across time, including past life regression.

• ENERGY HEALING is the ability to use energy to heal via hands or at a distance. If your child is an energy healer, she will want to rub your neck when it hurts, and can find the exact area that aches without being told. She also may be able to sense illness in the body as a “medical intuitive”.

• SPIRITUAL ADVANCEMENT is the gift of deep spiritual knowing. You’ll find this in the child who can tell you about where we go when we die, what spirit guides are, what Jesus or the other great spiritual masters really meant. These children will amaze you.

• OTHER ABILITIES. If you can’t determine your child’s abilities in the above categories, consider the idea that they are evolving beyond the abilities we’ve known in the past.

New abilities can be I’d like to say are evolving. Who knows what we are capable of?

What are the ten core psychic abilities?

That said, your child is likely to develop in some keyways. Here’s an overview of what I call the core abilities. Remember, there are no points to tally here, no grades to hand out, no birth years to consider.

Just take a look and see if any of these abilities match up to what you’ve noticed about your child.

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SCHOONER OR LATER A schooner full of spirits helps Hubert’s paranormal medicine go down on a visit to very atmospheric Alnmouth...

By Hubert Hobux

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T

’was the Thursday before the Chillingham Castle event, and when I arrived at England’s most haunted hotel, nothing was stirring (except the mice)*

Seemed a good idea at the time, whilst taking the long trek north up to Northumbria, break the paranormal journey, stay at the most haunted hotel in the history of hotels (well, so said the blurb), The Schooner Hotel, home of sixty individual apparitions and three thousand ghostly sightings. How could I fail to encounter ghostly activity there??

The alarm bells should have rung when my friends started messaging me advising me to read the trip advisor reviews, warning that they themselves had visited the establishment recently and that they had found it to have ‘condition issues’ But I’m blinkered in pursuit of the paranormal so I decided to travel up regardless, now it’s a long way up to

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the Land of the Border reivers** so I broke the trip up even further by visiting a couple of other haunted hostelries en route. Most memorably the Boot and Shoe in Darlington, haunt of a young, long passed domestic servant girl and a big beefy blacksmith type ghost, complete with leather apron and The Old George in Newcastle, a haunt of king Charles I, who reputedly still sits in his favourite 1646 dated chair from time to time.

So needless to say I was running a bit late when I arrived at the isolated Alnmouth railway station & it was pitch black, I was navigating by Google Maps and eventually I reached the bright lights of Alnmouth Main Street, and things started going downhill when I rocked up at the Schooner hotel’s door... and the hotel, (except for a single lamp in the foyer), was in darkness....

Now luckily, here is where I met random Bill, who runs a B&B in the

“At one point I was expecting TV renovator Sarah Beeny to pop out and say hello & I was concerned somebody, random Bill{?} had rented the room out on the sly and was making a living out of hijacking a disused hotel.”

town and was initially “popping round to the Schooner for a pint” when I told him of my predicament he didn’t seem surprised in the least, “hang on”, he suggested, “there may be a way in...” At which he gave the front door a little rattle and it flirted open!! Slightly alarmed that we may have set an alarm off as the place was obviously deserted random Bill said, “oh that’ll be your key on the counter look!”

And there was a single key fob, left out presumably for me, fair dues to random Bill, he waited for me whilst I found my room, (which was acceptable if a little cool) and offered to take me for a pint at his local, a friendly welcome from the Alnmouthians if not the hotel!!

Rather than risk being locked out again, I settled into the room, turned on the heater, then walked the entire length of the remarkably large building, there’s thirty six rooms in there, spread over two floors, every room supposedly haunted, all but five rooms in a state of renovation and every corridor littered with stacked furniture, beds & bath fittings, the place is mostly a building project,

I must admit, I felt fine walking around the musty interior, a little headachy, but it had been a trying day. I believed from reputation that room 28 was the most haunted, strangely, that door was one of the few locked, a room I could not get in, though I did rap on every locked door in a vain attempt to find human life in any part of the hotel, or at least get a ghostly rap back in response, (in which event I may have gone looking for random Bills curiously amiable company), but no answer in reply did come, I was on my own!

So that’s how I spent most of the night, roaming around, getting slightly miffed at this strangest hotel experience, but also buoyed up at the realisation of having a haunted playground at my single pleasure, I tuned in to the sounds of the place, reasonably quiet actually, the roof was secure at any rate I told myself, wandering around by torch light. (The only power on upstairs was the room I was in, the rooms down the tight little hallway next to my room and emergency lights). I started to detect a change in the internal energy, the place was getting definitely creepy, the witching hour was approaching, and the room was airing out a little, so I retired to bed.

That is when the Schooner decided to start periodically banging, creaking, and rapping, strange noises on the previously calm, then around midnight, I heard a man and a woman chit chatting on a corridor somewhere, “Thank gawd for that” I thought ,”someone from the staff has turned up!” I crept out onto the corridor,

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wondering how I could greet them without scaring them half to death. I sauntered all around the corridors again and found, not a living soul, no different lights had come on, all the rooms that had been locked still were, no new doors had been locked shut.

There was nobody, I decided that I must have heard someone walking past the hotel frontage on the quiet, totally devoid of life street and put my head down for an hour or so, the building getting decidedly noisy now, sounded at one stage like furniture was being pushed along, then I heard the same man and woman chit chatting on the corridor again!!

I got out of bed again and after peering around the corner of my door I suddenly realised that the short, mundane little conversation I had heard them having was exactly the same natter they had muttered earlier!

That is odd!

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A tentative walk around the absolutely freezing corridors turned up no trace of human life; and when I heard that exact mumbled conversation again, around 3am, This time louder, nearer, still the exact same syntax. I turned over and went back to bed!

The night was not quiet in that room. I sensed energies and there were three or more that came to see what I was up to. Not a lot of sleep was got I do not mind saying!

The biggest nightmare though was next morning, there was no chance anyone was going to come cook me breakfast!

So that is where I found that they had left me a toaster and some bread out, in what turned out to be a very haunted restaurant room, I was getting chills, seeing bright light anomalies cross the room which drained my phone battery flat in an instant, the night previous I had thought the little bar seating area was particularly haunted as well, that was a swirl of energy also!

By now, I had discovered there was a code key lock on the Schooner’s front door so at least I could come and go at will, I headed for the beach, I needed to ground!

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Alnmouth is a lovely Northumbrian coastal town, the river Aln cuts through the beach to drain the fresh water into the sea, there is England’s oldest links golf course and club house on the grassy dunes, still being golfed on to this day. Church Hill overlooking the mouth of the Aln was the site of the church synod where Cuthbert (later saint) was given the Bishopric of Lindisfarne in the year 684, this coarse sea grass covered hill is full of burials from the days of St Waleric’s church, (stood there and built up from the 12th century). St Waleric’s was washed flat in the cataclysmic storm of Christmas day 1806, the same storm that killed the town as a busy port, the harbour was destroyed and the river Aln’s course was irretrievably altered so that the days of maritime industry were ended, those hey days of being a port were where the Schooner earned its infamous reputation from, being the centre of a town with pirate and smuggling reputation, the towns earliest inn was the epicentre of scoundreldom! (what a word – editor) All sorts of nefarious activity went off behind the closed doors of the once bustling chambers. The ghosts of room 28 are supposedly a French woman and her child, who

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were lodging in there, before being slaughtered one day by the French husband who went deranged in the confines of the Schooner. (I could sympathise with that sentiment).

But as one of the locals in the town’s haunted Sun Inn told me, “it’s a load of tosh! Why would a French family be in Alnmouth especially at a time of constant war with the French”?

He reckoned they would have been imprisoned at Alnwick castle at best, even if they had gotten washed up on the beach! He knew the Schooner well, having rewired all the rooms decades ago. being a sceptic, he thought the idea of it being haunted at all very fanciful.

(I managed to argue the toss about that with him). He was pretty miffed about the state the hotel was in now, he said it used to be the “Cock of the North”, people would travel for miles to enjoy a night of food and entertainment.

There were not many compliments to be found of the Schooner amongst the locals. the place has been in renovation for a few year’s now, the landlord of the Sun said that anybody booking in at the Schooner mostly walk out in disgust and go up to him to try and book a bed and breakfast in his ancient

“I braced myself for another night of ghostly footsteps, disembodied voices and chilled blasts of air gathering around me again...”

(yet exceptionally comfortable pub).

Meals are not to be recommended either according to the lady at the post office unless you want to spend a week in Newcastle General. So it was a shock when I went back in the afternoon to find two swarthy gentleman preparing the haunted restaurant for a night of curry service, yes, incredibly the Schooner is an Indian style restaurant (on the odd nights they open).

“Your roooom is comfeee yessss??” enquired the restaurant manager, at least I was able to reel off a liturgy of complaint to him: no hot water, no breakfast, no night time safety cover and I repeat “no breakfast”.

“But your bed... is comfee yessss??”.

Turns out these guys aren’t the owners, some fella leases them the food side, of course I’d pre-paid the booking, so there was no issues with anybody seeking, or refunding money and upon asking if anybody would be providing breakfast next morning? “I leave you toaster and bread yessss?” came the reply.

Well their reputation obviously preceded them, as all night long they only had two customers in to dine on their curry feast, and at 8pm, the restaurant, copious bar and dining area that they had locked

off from me the night before; and Hotel front door was locked again, the two swarthy restauranteurs left for the night to go who knows where (probably to an Indian restaurant), they do not seem to like being on the property.

So, I braced myself for another night of ghostly footsteps, disembodied voices and chilled blasts of air gathering around me again...

Well the Schooner was as quiet as a mime artist’s greave and as I was pretty whacked, I soon dropped off. Then I sprung awake around 2am as a bright pin prick flash in the bedroom woke me up, I gasped, catching my breath, in palpitations and perspiring a cold sweat, eventually I dropped off into a night of chaotically lucid, spirit-y dreamscapes, modernish spirits these were. That figured strongly actually because the local chap in the Sun Inn had told me of the wild, rather scandalous reputation the Schooner had gained in its latterday history as an “entertainment hub” of Northumbria!

The memory of a male was trying to communicate something or other, most memorable though was a female energy, young, faceless but wearing a distinct red, hooded puffer anorak. She showed

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me some very peculiar stuff and around 3am woke me wide awake with a crystal-clear voice that said, “I show you these things because I don’t want to be.......”.

Be what? be in existence? Be in the Schooner? I don’t know & then she was gone, and as soon as daylight broke......

So was I!

Hubert Hobux

PS: This was not an organised ghost seeking event... just a haunted experience... Not half!

*No mice were discovered, detected, or injured in the process of this experience, the “mice” quip should be taken as artistic licence **Border reivers were raiders along the Anglo-Scottish border from the late 13th century to the beginning of the 17th century. Their ranks consisted of both Scottish and English people, and they raided the entire Border country without regard to their victims’ nationality

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* A l l nam es have been changed to p r o tec t id entities*

# Casefile 2

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

An investigation by L.J. Willgress

W

hen I attended the investigation that follows, I had no idea that it would be one of three and an ongoing story was going to unravel over the course of them. It also changed my understanding of intelligent and/or residual hauntings.

I received the address in Watton, Norfolk, where our investigation was booked. I wasn’t familiar with the area well, so I drove to the group organiser’s house first, where the team were due to meet.

I greeted Vikki - the lady of the house – with an open mind. After all, we’ve often had more activity in 1940s council houses than we have at ancient castles, so who knew what we’d find within the white-washed walls?

Whilst waiting for Pam, one of the other investigators, and Jenny (a medium and group historian), Ted told myself, Mark, Shaun, Fred and Saoirse that we were heading to a private residence where the householders were getting freaked out by odd occurrences on a daily basis.

After moving in six months before, Vikki began to see moving shadows around the house. These usually along the hallway, but also along the back wall in the sitting room. Oddly, it happened at the same time every evening – around nine-thirty to ten o’ clock. We made a mental note to have the video camera up and running in that particular area. We also left a voice-recorder running.

‘Is that the one on Balamory?’ asked Shaun. At this point, I laughed and started singing the opening tune from the wellknown children’s programme.

Ted shot me a stern glance.

‘Don’t be singing that about the estate nickname when we get there, or you’ll never get out alive,’ he joked. I half-wondered how serious he was.

Following Ted’s car through the town to the outskirts of Watton, we turned into a brand-new, modern housing estate called Blenheim Grange. Had Ted got lost in the rabbit-warren of streets? Was there some rickety old house tucked away somewhere? Nope. We really were about to investigate a modern three-bed terrace.

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Vikki informed us that her partner was out for the night, as he wasn’t keen on anything to do with the paranormal, so it was just her and all of us. As usual, Ted talked her through what we’d do, then I continued chatting to her about what she’d experienced while Ted carried out baseline tests with Mark and Fred.

was from the late middle ages. Jenny confirmed that she saw the same woman. The other spirit seemed much keener to communicate and told us through Jenny that his name was Arthur and he’d been stationed here during the war. She said the energy appeared to be around the doorway, so I took the KII metre over there. It beeped and flashed red.

We proceeded to try to record intelligent responses using some equipment. I asked the energy to come towards me in different areas of the room, which it appeared to do. Short E.V.P. bursts yielded what sounded like tapping and a sigh, but no more.

Vikki went on to tell us how the occurrences had ramped up in recent weeks – she often felt ‘watched’, especially when coming out of the shower. She’d heard songs from the 1940s coming from the sitting room.

However, when she went to see where it originated, there would be silence.

When Ted’s group re-joined us, they said that they’d made contact with the woman that had presented herself briefly at the start of the evening. One member had the name ‘Elizabeth’ pop into their mind whilst another sensed ‘Eliza’. Shaun said he felt that she’d been some kind of outcast and that she provoked fear in the community some centuries before but couldn’t expand further.

Splitting into two teams, myself, Jenny, Shaun and Saoirse took the sitting room whilst everyone else went upstairs with Ted. No sooner had we turned the lights out than Jenny ‘picked up’ on two spirits, both attached to the land but from different times. I had the impression of a formidable woman with long, dark hair, who felt like she

After a short break, we all agreed that the talking board should come out.

Myself, Jenny, Ted, Shaun and Vikki put our fingers on the glass and opened the board up to the space that the house occupies. The names ‘Arthur’ and ‘Frank’ were spelt out, followed by ‘crash’ and ‘war.’ Ted asked if anyone was watching Vikki, and ‘I am’ was spelt.

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When asked why, the reply was ‘Nurse Betty’.

The story we managed to ascertain was that one of the male spirits had rather liked Nurse Betty, and Vikki resembled her in some way. When asked why someone walks through the sitting room every evening, the response was ‘Mess’.

When we checked the stationary video-camera, which was pointed towards the back wall in the sitting room all night, we discovered that the brand-new batteries were deader than a dinosaur.

It was only when we called it a night that Ted told me that the whole estate was built on what used to be R.A.F. Watton. I thought our experiences that night was extraordinary. Little did we know that there was more to follow.

A couple of months later, we again got called to do a private investigation. As we pulled up, I had a sense of Deja-vu – I couldn’t believe that we’d been called back to the same road again, and a mere three doors up from Vikki’s house.

This time, a couple called Zara and Ben were experiencing things, such as the T.V. switching itself on – once when it wasn’t plugged in! Lights blew, the electric bill had skyrocketed, yet engineers had been called on several occasions, but could find no logical reason. Zara had heard what she assumed was Ben calling her name, and vice-versa. The respective parties weren’t home at the time.

We stuck to our usual routine, and once tests were carried out, divided into groups. Pamela, Jenny, Shaun, Ben and myself started upstairs while the rest of the group accompanied Ted and Zara.

We were disappointed that nothing much happened, so we were all relieved when Ted shouted for us to join him downstairs.

While nothing of note had occurred for us, there had been lots of activity in the sitting room. Saorise had been touched on the head, the lampshade had moved of its own accord and the temperature dropped by around six degrees, even with so many people in the room.

Unexpectedly, Jenny beamed and said ‘Oh, it’s you! Hello again!’ She went on to explain that Arthur was back, and he’d brought his friends this time. She described them all sitting around in uniform, smoking and playing cards. Since I have a Frank’s Box (a device that scans through radio frequencies in order to

allow spirits to communicate), we thought we’d give it a try. What we recorded was mind-boggling. Here is what we heard: Jenny: How many of you are here?

Frank’s Box (F.B): Lots Jenny: What are you all doing here?

F.B: Carrying on Jenny: What is this place?

F.B: In a mess/In the Mess Jenny: Can you see us?

F.B: sometimes

Jenny reported that the spirit known as Arthur had stood up and walked through the far end wall in the direction of Vikki’s house, three doors along. Ted looked at the clock and pointed out that it had just gone nine-thirty!

Unbelievably, the device had one more thing to say: Nurse Betty.

We concluded that the wartime spirits here mostly saw the place as it was when stationed at R.A.F. Watton, but occasionally, it would fade away and they’d find themselves in certain areas of the modern world, such as Vikki’s bathroom and Zara’s sitting room.

Only weeks later, we found ourselves on the very same road – this time, calling on a house opposite Zara and Ben’s place.

This family comprised a couple with a young daughter. Bizarrely, only one side of the house seemed to be plagued by odd happenings. The kitchen, downstairs loo, narrow hallway and stairs all had a peculiar, heavy feel to them, while nothing had ever happened in the sitting room on the other side of the house. As Mandy, the homeowner, was explaining what she’d experienced, I saw a little boy in a red polo-shirt on the stairs, as clearly as I could see any of the team. When I told Mandy that he’d got a blonde, basin-cut hairstyle, she gasped. She went on to tell us that her little daughter often said she’d been playing with ‘the little boy with the funny hair’.

What the most worried the family was a strange ‘gust of wind’, as they termed it, which seemed to happen along the hallway most days. Mandy described carrying some washing through from the kitchen and almost leaping out of her skin when a blast of icy air flew past. Apparently, her husband and several friends had also experienced it.

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Jenny described soldiers marching in line along concrete before vanishing through a door. We were able to set up the board in the kitchen, but nothing was spelt that made any sense. We tried an E.V.P. session, which didn’t produce anything of note. The KII bleeped once or twice, but this could have been due to the proximity of electrical goods in the room. We were almost about to give up when we heard a yelp from the corridor.

Pam had left the session to use the loo and was blasted in the face by the infamous gust of wind. After the inevitable jokes about Pam’s deathly wind, we set about trying to find a physical cause. The door at the end of the hallway led into a porch, where another door led onto the street. There were no vents or windows that could have caused such a rush of air.

Excited again, we tried another E.V.P. session right there, in the hall. We didn’t get much, but the little we did was brilliant. We heard: Back again?

It’s me Marching back Go for a smoke The voice we all heard was speaking in Received Pronunciation – think of 1950s newsreaders and voice-overs and you’ll know what I mean. It definitely sounded like the kind of speech you’d expect from an officer.

None of the residents we did investigations for knew of each other, nor did they suspect that anyone else on the street could be having paranormal problems. Yet they shared a common factor.

After the final investigation, Jenny researched the site and compared the plans of the old airfield to the estate that exists today. She discovered that Vikki and Zara’s houses both sit within what would have been the officer’s mess. Only half of Mandy’s house would have been inside its walls. Weirder still, a concrete path used to run along roughly where her narrow hallway lies today.

Not long ago, I was at an event where some sceptics asked me why there are never any ghosts in modern houses. After my experiences at Blenheim Grange, I can answer: Yes, there are!

Lucy xx

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HIGGYPOP’S 2020:

R E B M E M E R U DO YO ?

S Y A D D L O D THE GOO ing but a g h th o n ’t n ai , n w to is “Th

ost town...”

Y

ou do not need to be told what a massive impact COVID-19 has had on all of us. It is not only affected the way we shop and travel, but has changed our daily lives, the way we work and how we socialise.

Coronavirus has impacted on every part of our lives, but if you’re the type of person who regularly picks up a copy of Haunted Magazine, then one of the things you might be missing the most is getting your fix of the paranormal.

Of course, the first sacrifice we were asked to make to help limit the spread of the virus was to stop public gatherings and non-essential travel.

Worldwide, gatherings and events have been cancelled on an unprecedented scale, including such huge events as the Eurovision song contest and Glastonbury festival - even the Olympics have been postponed. Of course, this has also had an immediate effect on ghost hunting

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event companies, many of which are small businesses, who were forced to cancel their public events.

Then the virus started affecting more of the things we love. In mid-March, the streaming giant Netflix has shut down all the scripted shows and films currently in production. Sadly, this affected the hit supernatural series, ‘Stranger Things’, which is currently in the pre-production stage.

Although there was no exact date for the upcoming fourth season of the Duffer brothers’ series, we were expecting its release this year. It is not yet known how long the delay will last, or how much it will affect the show’s launch date.

It is not just Netflix that is feeling the pressure of the pandemic, Hollywood have had to change their plans when it comes to upcoming movie releases too.

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mass gatherings and large companies being affected, but the paranormal investigators behind smaller and independent teams were now being asked to stay at home. This forced those who stream live investigations on Facebook or who create paranormal content for YouTube to cease their adventures and stay at home.

We have been told not to meet up with people outside of our own households, so this means most paranormal teams should not be meeting up, unless they live together. Even if teams live together, unnecessary travel has been banned, so there is no way anyone should be travelling to a haunted location. Even those with second homes have been asked not to visit them until this all blows over.

The scheduled release of the paranormal movie ‘A Quiet Place Part 2’ was the first to be delayed. This was followed by an announcement from Sony Pictures that the latest movie in the Ghostbusters franchise will be postponed too.

‘Ghostbusters: Afterlife’, which was originally billed as ‘Ghostbusters 2020’, has had its cinema release pushed back from July 10th 2020 to March 5th 2021. A sad blow for fans of the movie series who are excited to see director Jason Reitman’s extension to the Ghostbusters universe.

The new movie will star Bokeem Woodbine and Paul Rudd, who revealed his involvement in the project in a viral video last year. The US comedian and actor announced the news in a selfie-style video shot outside the iconic New York fire station which was used as the exterior of the gang’s headquarters in the original 80s supernatural comedy movies.

As the COVID-19 restrictions tightened, the paranormal community was once again squeezed. Now it was not just

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time before the virus took hold in Ohio.

Now, Ohio is one of the states in the US with one of the highest numbers of coronavirus cases, and it’s kind of freaky to look back and think that we left right before all of these cases started to appear.”

Working during the outbreak is made tougher for Colin as a type one diabetic, this puts him in an at-risk group. It is a similar situation for husband-andwife investigation team Phil and Sara Whyman. Like Colin, Phil is also diabetic - type two - so he also needs to lie low during the pandemic. This of course puts a stop to them filming new episodes of their back-to-basics ghost hunting web series, ‘Are You Haunted?’.

The Paranormal Files is one of the biggest paranormal channels on YouTube with almost half a million subscribers.

In the last five years lead investigators

Colin Browen and his significant other Payton McWhorter have produced almost 300 videos and notched up a massive 32 million views, but now it’s all on hold as we’re asked to stay indoors and avoid contact with others.

The show’s second season began earlier in the year, but Phil says “the good news is we have approximately five more season two episodes to edit that have already been shot, so we are fairly ahead of the game with that.” He added, “we will try to edit them so there is a constant stream for viewers, perhaps once every two weeks.”

But upping production or relying on a bank of already produced content is not an option for everyone. Until we were all advised to stay at home, Charlene Lowe Kemp and her team were broadcasting

Colin said, “our travel schedule has been put on hold due to the fact that the virus has spread to almost every single state in the US and being a type one diabetic, I’m at a higher risk of developing a severe infection.”

Luckily for subscribers of Colin and Payton’s channel, the content will keep coming. Colin said, “we have months of videos already shot and produced.” He adds, “in February, I was in Cleveland, Ohio, wrapping up a series that we shot in the state, and only days after we left coronavirus cases started to grow quickly in the city. We got out just in

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multiple live ghost hunts a week to the 175k members of her Facebook group, ‘Paranormal Hauntings’.

Charlene, a healthcare worker for the NHS herself, said “I am setting an example and staying in, the same with Chrissie who is one of the team. As a team we have decided for the moment we won’t be doing any investigations.”

While most have been following the governments guidelines, some have tried to bend the rules by taking their daily session of exercise at night and using this time to conduct a ghost hunt close to home, but of course there’s a limit to how interesting these investigations can be.

Even if you live within walking distance of a haunted location, you still should not be visiting another building or home.

Zak Bagans’ approach was to try to lift fans’ spirit with a video message recorded from his home. The frontman of the long-running US ghost hunting show, ‘Ghost Adventures’, posted a message online reassuring fans of the paranormal that we can all get through the COVID-19 lockdown together, and encouraged people to make others laugh in these difficult times.

However, those bending the rules are a minority. Most paranormal teams and YouTubers have sensibly concluded that they should not be risking lives to make paranormal content.

Back in the real world, we have heard heart-warming tales of communities coming together, and clapped aloud from our windows with our neighbours in support of our nation’s health service. In the paranormal community, people have also come together to help each other in our own little ways. The paranormal may just be seen as a silly hobby or interest, but it is at times like these that it is important to cling on to the things the ground us.

All of us as members of the paranormal community should be looking out for each other and doing our bit to make life easier for others at the moment. For this reason, many prominent paranormal investigators and teams have been trying to find new ways to connect with their fans and followers and keep them entertained - while adhering to social distancing rules.

Tolley, had been sending uplifting clips to one another during lockdown.

While Zak is seemingly taking it easy in lockdown, other teams have been coming up with ingenious new ways to bring their followers content. Everything from live streams from home, including quizzes and Q&As, plus reviews of ghost hunting gadgets and online paranormal debates.

Some teams have been delving into their back catalogue of content to create compilation videos of their greatest moments, best evidence, or even outtakes. Danny Moss and the Haunted Hunts team put together a paranormal watch party. Danny, the team, and their partners re-watched some of the highlights from their Amazon Prime ghost hunting series from home in a Gogglebox-style.

The television ghost hunter spoke about how he is doing his bit to beat the “evil entity” that is the coronavirus and thanked frontline medical workers for their efforts.

Meanwhile, Yvette Fielding and her husband Karl Beattie, co-creators of ‘Most Haunted’, announced that they would be doing their best to keep fans entertained while they stay at home.

Zak also shared a few tips on how to deal with being stuck at home, “be creative, do some writing, do some artwork,” but his top tip to ease the current situation was to spread some cheer. He said, “it’s important to make your friends laugh.

Make your families laugh. Send them stupid videos and memes.” Zak admitted that he and his Travel Channel co-stars, Aaron Goodwin, Jay Wasley and Billy

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The pair have committed to help fans stuck at home with additional content on their YouTube channel. Karl tweeted, “as the Most Haunted Experience events have been suspended due to the #coronavirus Yvette Fielding and I will be doing as much as we can to fill the void, so pop over to the Official Most Haunted YouTube Channel, there will be some impromptu lives and more Most Haunted Extras.”

Ever since Yvette and Karl have been popping up on YouTube and Facebook with occasional live streams. Everything from live coverage of gardening, through to a multi-screen game of hide and seek.

They have also been posting weekly paranormal investigations filmed prior to lockdown at various locations across the UK, including the SS Great Britain, Drakelow Tunnels, HMP Gloucester and York Castle Museum.

Another paranormal investigator who is looking to spread positivity and help fans of the paranormal from going stir crazy while in isolation is Jayne Harris. The British ghost hunter starred alongside Barri Ghai and Chris Fleming in the recent series of ‘Help! My House Is Haunted’, she’s now using her events company, HD Paranormal, to help those stuck at home.

As well as giving followers the chance to learn more about the paranormal by tutoring them through her online paranormal research courses, Jayne is also hosting a fortnightly Paranormal Sanctuary, which she hopes will offer those in the paranormal community a

chance to learn more from the safety of their own homes.

The trend was started by Dorian Deathly, who is usually the host of a walking ghost tour in York, one of the most haunted cities in the country.

After finding himself temporarily out of work due to the restriction on public gatherings, Dorian decided to put his knowledge of York’s ghosts to use and hosted an online tour.

This started a wave of virtual tours, with famous haunted locations such as the Paris Catacombs, the Winchester Mystery House and Dover Castle wading in with links to 360-degree virtual tours of their creepy properties.

way to stay connected as we can’t go ghost hunting for a while. Jayne says, “I’ve created a little place for para-peeps to meet to discuss all things paranormal, in an attempt to save our sanity while we ride out this storm.”

It is not just paranormal teams working to bring followers something extra, the owners of haunted venues are also giving those interested in their properties the

Quite how long we’ll need to ride out the storm is obviously still an unknown, and when it comes to ghosts and spooky things Colin from The Paranormal Files leaves us on a positive note, “humanity will come out on top and balance will eventually be restored.”

Steve “Higgypop” Higgins

GHOSTS & ARCHAEOLOGY D O

TH E Y

“The present is full of ruins of the recent past and they epitomize the fragility of boundaries…. and the materials for a haunting awareness of what forces may still linger in signs and traces”.

D I G

E AC H

OT H E R ?

By John G. Sabol Jr

W

e sometimes deal with the material legacy of what for many were life-changing experiences. This archaeology of the recent past requires careful mediation. What haunts us is the exposure to “ghosts” that sometimes have a personal meaning for some of us. There are remains that represent episodes of great trauma, tragedy, and loss. The abandoned home or the deserted business represent today’s contemporary “haunted houses”.

The material fragments evoke familiarity, signature traces that are recognizable. Their stories entangle with ours, so we participate with them in the drama that unfolds during the excavation process.

We are challenged to engage this past presence. That there is an unavoidable closeness to these archaeological remains hopefully permits us to approach what remains with a passionate truthfulness and integrity, rather than simply taking a scientific viewpoint or a “paranormal” stance.

normal, everyday experience. But this does not make them “paranormal”.

The “devil” is not found in the details!

Let’s not “mark” a “demon” is present in these highly charged and haunted locations. This is archaeological trauma, not a supernatural agency.

These are, after all, contested and, in some cases, physically dangerous locations. This work is as much fulfilling, as it is complicated (and certainly not a form of ‘ghost hunting edutainment’). It is adventurous and challenging. It is also, at times, terrifying, depressing, and full of anxiety, especially knowing the history of abandonment and absence. We do not need to add “demons” to the list of material remains that we may recover at these locations.

Due to the intimacy and knowledge of some of these situations, its impact on the fieldworker is considerable.

Certainly, archaeological work, especially fieldwork in and of the present, though familiar territory, deals with situations and events outside

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The Contemporary “Haunted House” No “haunted” site should ever be perceived as a ruin, merely because it is visually decayed; or in ruins, because what remains are only trace elements or what remains is fragmented. This highlights the location’s “pastness”, not its continuing contemporary presences.

(or solid) moving “balls” of light. This “reconstruction” of “haunted” space is a form of “cannibalism”. It “eats” away any credibility by changing the context of the original site and its possible multiple and different past social entanglements.

“The vast literature on ruins has demonstrated that ‘the ruin’ is a conceptual invention of modernity and of its efforts to present itself as a break from the past”

The “aura” of the place, its “ruined” nature, draws from the rubble of fragmented visuals the haunting it cannibalizes!

What emerges, then, out of this “paranormal” quagmire, is a “mess”, not an “afterlife” of continuing cultural semiotics. Instead of a ruin that is hauntingly cultural, a haunted site has become a rubble. Art historian Alois Riegl defines “rubble” as an object that is lacking form, having “no trace of (its) original creation”.

Isn’t that what many “ghosts” have become? “Ghosts” are “anomalous things”, seeming to do and say little, or worse, “demonic entities”. They are little different from their Victorian counterparts. As author R.C. Finucane suggests, “the ghost-beliefs, and consequent ghost-perceptions, of Victorian types continue to surface in our hyper technological age”. She further states that

This “break from the past” leads to difference, as Historian David Lowenthal suggests: “It is no longer the presence of the past that speaks to us, but its pastness” This has led, in contemporary ghost research, to the concept of a “haunting” as a strengthening of a “paranormal event”: something that is beyond normal because it is considered “past”. But an “afterlife” is not past if it continues in the present. A haunting, therefore, and its materializations in the present become, I propose, part of the surface assemblage of an archaeological record of the contemporary past.

Modernity’s concern with decay becomes crystallized in efforts to present ruins as an attempt to overcome decay that “turns ruins into fetishes that ought to be preserved and revered, then a haunting, as part of the archaeological record attached to a ruin, should also be included. That is why the concept of social entanglement becomes important. This is because there is no past disconnect. Social relations with things, individuals, spaces, habits, and memories continue. They didn’t end in the past.

Most “ghost hunters” re-construct these “ruins” (“haunted” locations) based on their own standards of what that haunted past should be: a series of “bleeps” on a “ghost hunting” electronic device; coloured lights; baseless (without vertical context) baseline measurements; incoherent and/or non-sense wordings; and transparent

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“our modern ghosts seem to do and say as little as their nineteenth-century counterparts: as in the 1880s, the banality of ‘real’ spectres stands in sharp contrast to the horrendous and frightening powers they wield in literature; or….in television and the cinema” This also follows what the late Professor Nina Auerbach said: “…. our own ghosts, both those of literature and science, cling intractably to Victorian visions”

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And author Murray Leeder’s comments on the Spiritualist Movement which has, “indelibly reshaped the cultural understanding of the ghost, and there has been scant change since then”.

The Spiritualist commands to table knockings, tilting, and the movement of glasses has been supplanted today with “ghost tech” devices, resulting in the “blurring of the scientific (particularly the electromagnetic) and the occult for a sense of technological uncanny”.

As Professor of Film & Media Studies John Durham Peters states: “Every new medium is a machine for the production of ghosts”.

This Victorian-era “Spiritualist” culture has become, today, a form of edutainment as paranormal reality TV: “the spectral technology of the phantasmagoria mysteriously recreated the emotional aura of the supernatural”. This is because, like today, the “producers” did not explain how the “illusion” of reality functioned.

The popular form of “ghost hunting”, as a belief in scientific practice, is actually a form of re-mediating science to fit “paranormal” beliefs: processes by which well-known beliefs (as “scientism”) are represented in new ways (“ghost tech”), displayed through various popular media formats (YouTube videos; paranormal reality TV) that create different cultural realities than the historical reality of the past.

In “ghost hunting”, to quote Philosopher Bruno Latour’s oft-used phrase “we have never been modern”, the modern “ghost hunter” is still seeped in Victorian “parlour tricks”. They “trick and treat” themselves to an illusion of science through a dependence upon scientism, which becomes a religious belief based on technology and its ability to eventually explain “ghostly matters”.

The field of “ghost hunting” is an example of communitas, a gathering of people connected to technology, where a communal atmosphere of belief and practices inhibit actions and knowledge acquisition.

“Closed-knit circles of sociality in which these enchantments are performed work to validate the ghostly traces as more than the whim of a single mind; even if one or some of us protested against the potential reading or analysis; the congregation of eagerly pitched ghost hunters waiting for ‘something’ meant that collective interpretations were produced and reconfirmed”

“Contemporary perceptions, most of them of ‘pointless’, unknown spirits, represent a continuation of Victorian attitudes towards the other world”

The tech device (like the “ghost box”) becomes a psychometric object, possessed of information and able to gather data about ghosts and hauntings: “a relatively simple device of ‘normal’ technology, enrolled in the service of the paranormal by human intervention, and invested with high expectations …the machine obtained power and potency as a primary node of evidence”.

If ghost research has not advanced since the 19th century, only now it uses more sophisticated “toys”, then we need interpretation to begin at the edge of performance. We must bring forward this interpretation to the moment of materialization, the immediate “reveal”. This means having the necessary historical, ethnographic, and biographical data beforehand. It also means using performance as scenarios that “trigger” past social entanglements.

We must develop non-intrusive technologies that provide immediate (simultaneous) data output to these performance practices.

This technology must not interfere with the continuation of enacted entanglements with other connectors that expand the network back to past social assemblages that are relational to what occurred in the past. The focus of ghost research should not be to document a perceived “paranormal” event, but to record what remains of the past in the present.

John at Dunnottar Castle

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Let’s also not take-for-granted unreflective assumptions of Western science that define “normal” conventions and reality. Let’s alter that “yoke” and “choke-hold” of strict scientific procedures relative to dominate (and domineering) notions concerning “understanding”, “meaning”, “experience”, “validity”, and “interpretation”.

Let’s “study the normal via its paranormal mirror images”, let’s focus on specific versions of historical and ethno-historical understanding and experience.

Today, the process of ruination has accelerated, potentially increasing the probability of more sites being perceived as “haunted”, a criteria based on their “ruined” nature, more so than a documented “afterlife”.

Following Philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argued that the defining quality of places is that they gather, attracting people, memories, and affects, a haunted place has gathered various social entanglements (both past and present). Places, including those haunted by these continuing past (and contemporary) presences, point toward social relations and movements that converge, and from which they move out to entangle other places.

This is not a “paranormal portal”. This is not a form of haunted or ghostly attachment. These are social networks of ethno-historical connections, not “para-history” (a contemporary version of perceived “paranormal” events and experiences).

The problem with recent ruins is their untimely, premature death. Many were not accorded the “good death”.

They fell into disuse and were quickly abandoned, yet presences still remain.

So, a life continues as an “afterlife” in these now abandoned spaces.

Another characteristic of these modern ruins is their speed to ruin, exemplified by war-torn buildings, contemporary demolitions, and natural horrific disasters. But the very process of ruination and destruction can bring to the surface some submerged or forgotten histories. And as Professor of Archaeology Gavin Lucas suggests: “The recent ruin haunts modernity in a way that no ancient ruin can”. This is because the ancient or “classical” ruin is static, where the process of ruination has already occurred, or has slowed such that it appears imperceptible.

There is an assumption in ghost research that science, via technological development, will eventually reach beyond the currently visible, recordable, and measurable to future “fact-based” data constructs.

But this way of thinking has been the ongoing trend since the rise of Spiritualism in the 19th century, and the perennial interest in new technologies. It is the “verification to come” perspective.

Let’s end this “things to come” mentality that hopes to prove the existence of ghosts sometime in a technologically-more advanced future.

Let’s begin a “breakthrough” now, through “excavations” at the “edge of performance”, as this archaeology in and of the present!

John Sabol is an archaeologist, cultural anthropologist, and actor. He has written 40 books on his research and fieldwork. As an archaeologist, he has documented and recorded the manifestations of past soundscapes at various ruins in England, Mexico, Canada, and the USA. He is the director of several documentaries that are accounts of immersions into past ethnographic soundscapes. He has developed numerous scripts and storyboards for these documentaries, as a series of mediated venues that include acoustical archaeologies and ethnographic immersions. He has presented these documentaries at various scientific conferences and popular culture expositions in Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the USA. He has appeared in more than 30 motion pictures, TV shows, documentaries, and commercials. He, together with Mary Becker, is the founder and host of the Haunted History Tours at the Omni Bedford Springs Resort & Spa.

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#StaySafe

I s s u e

2 6 :

C r e d i t s

“Not the Paranormal Lockdown we all wanted” EDITOR-IN-CHIEF:

THANKS TO:

Paul Stevenson @hauntedmagazine paul@hauntedmagazine.co.uk

Spook Eats Dr Q Higgypop Jack Osbourne Katrina Weidman Bellaire House, Ohio, USA Spinalonga, Greece The Schooner Hotel, Alnmouth, UK Full Dark Productions Mansfield Reformatory, Ohio, USA Caryn & Stephanie at Travel Channel

DESIGNER: Andy Soar @thehauntedguy andy@hauntedmagazine.co.uk WRITING TALENT :

HAUNTED MAGAZINE

Sam Bennetts Richard Estep Mike Covell L.J. Willgress Jan Bondeson Amanda R. Woomer Hubert Hobux Amy Bennett Nicky Alan Morgan Knudsen Sarah Chumacero Penny Griffiths-Morgan Jane Bland Rowley Steve Higgins John G Sabol Jr. Bambos Georgiou Mychailo Kazybrid

SPECIAL THANKS TO: Simon Powell Jason Wall “the Renee & Renato HauntedLIVE” Dr Queer courtesy of Bambos Georgiou (script) & Mychailo Kazybrid (art) © 2020

This issue is dedicated to the essential workers all over the world, risking their own lives trying to keep us fed, watered, informed and more importantly, safe.

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