ALEHOUSE HAUNTS

THE STEP BY ESTEP GUIDE TO SHEPTON MALLET

A HAUNTED HOUSE OF CORRECTION

It seems as if every prison has its ghost story, and Britain’s infamous Shepton Mallet is no exception. Dating back to the early 17th century, “the Mallet” (as many of its inmates and prison officers once called it) has a claim to being the UK’s oldest prison. It should therefore come as no surprise that many believe it to also be the most haunted.

The Mallet has a long and colorful history, locking up prisoners for crimes ranging from murder and robbery to practicing witchcraft. Many have died within its walls over the years, some from natural causes, others from suicide – and a surprising number were executed. The human remains of several prisoners who were put to death at Shepton Mallet are buried inside the prison grounds, as was customary in the days of capital punishment, in a row of unmarked graves just inside one of the outer walls.

Tragedy struck in the early morning hours of Saturday, December 14, 1940, when three soldiers died while sleeping in an uncertified cell. An inquest would later determine that the men had been overcome by carbon monoxide. A fourth occupant, though rendered extremely ill by the fumes, would go on to recover. The prison officers who oversaw this awful incident were heavily reprimanded following an inquiry. until the United States military took over administration of the facility in 1942. Before the end of World War II in 1945, eighteen American servicemen met their deaths at the Mallet. Sixteen were hanged in a purposebuilt execution chamber, and two were shot dead by firing squad outside, close to the wall where the civilians are buried. The Americans were all rapists and/or murderers, the worst of the worst. They are not buried inside the prison. Their remains lie in a segregated burial ground in the US military cemetery located in Oise-Aisne, France. Each executed man was stripped of all rank insignia before being hanged, and was then re-interred in a plot marked only by a number – there are no gravestones to record their names, or dates of birth and death. The US military considers this to be a cemetery of shame.

One is forced to wonder whether the restless souls of these executed men may still wander the halls of the place in which they met their deaths. Yet other spirits are also said to haunt Shepton Mallet Prison. Claims of a lady in white prompted such fear among the prison officers decades ago that the Home Office ordered an investigation. Needless to say, no evidence of ghostly activity was documented, but several guards told stories of chilling encounters with the phantom woman.

When the opportunity arose for me to spend four nights investigating the Mallet in the early summer of 2022, I jumped at the chance. Along with fellow investigator and medium MJ Dickson, and a small team of British paranormal investigators, we set out to discover everything we could about this infamous house of detention.

Wandering the cell blocks and hallways of Shepton Mallet can be an unnerving experience, even during the hours of daylight. British readers will almost certainly be familiar with two of the prison’s most notorious inmates, the East London gang lords, twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray. They served time at the Mallet during their period of national service in the British Army, after demonstrating a penchant for unruly behavior and punching non-commissioned officers.

Exploring on my own, I come across a cell which has photographs of the actor David Tennant posted on the door.

Our guide wrote the incident off with a casual “Oh, strange things happen here all the time…” As if to prove her point, the following day, she sent photographs of unexplained bruises which had appeared on her arm.

Tennant portrayed serial killer Dennis Nilsen in the TV drama “Des,” and scenes of Nilsen in his prison cell were filmed at Shepton Mallet, which is a popular shooting location for movies and television shows. Over the course of the next four nights, we are treated to a multitude of interesting anomalies and subjective personal experiences. Some are eminently debunkable, of course, but others leave us scratching our heads. There are the ubiquitous unexplained battery drains across multiple devices, something with which every field investigator is familiar. A little stranger was the behavior of Carl’s hatchback, which decided to raise and lower itself several times for no apparent reason. The car hasn’t malfunctioned in this way before or since, and we were unable to explain it. “Eh, eh, peel me a grape,” exclaimed an astonished carl. Our guide wrote the incident off with a casual “Oh, strange things happen here all the time…” As if to prove her point, the following day, she sent photographs of unexplained bruises which had appeared on her arm. To add to the atmosphere, we were treated to thunderstorms with lightning and heavy rain. There was also a Blood Moon on the night of May 15, in which the moon turned an angry crimson before being fully eclipsed. Unfortunately for us, the great British weather refused to cooperate, hiding the spectacle behind a ceiling of low-hanging cloud. The vast, empty cell blocks begin to feel very sinister when you’re sitting there late at night. That’s probably a purely psychological phenomenon, in my opinion, although sensitives might take the view that hundreds of years of negative energy can leave something akin to a “psychic scar,” which some people are able to pick up on. More difficult to explain away are the shuffling sounds we heard on multiple occasions, and at different places throughout the sprawling prison complex. The same could be said of the knocking on a window some three stories above the ground. I kept a close eye out for rodent droppings, and didn’t see anything to suggest we might have been dealing with nocturnal critters. Birds do make their way inside the cell blocks on occasion, however, and that’s something I tried to bear in mind for some of the sounds which came from up above our heads.

With Alex and MJ waiting for Weirdness

On more than one occasion, team members saw what they were convinced was a dark figure, standing on the upper landing of a wing staircase. A thorough search of the floor in question revealed nothing but a row of empty cells.

It made sense to focus a lot of our time on the execution chamber. The room in which hangings took place was surprisingly small. The trapdoor through which sixteen American servicemen fell to their deaths, was fenced off with a wooden railing. It was a sobering thought to imagine the chamber packed with American military officers, all gathered to witness the end of a human life. Hangings were conducted by an officially sanctioned British government executioner, such as the famous Albert Pierrepoint, who were appointed by the Crown to travel the length and breadth of the British Isles, carrying out statemandated capital punishment.

Adjacent to the execution chamber can be found the condemned man’s cell,

in whose narrow confines the prisoner would spend the final hours before their death. Unbeknownst to them, the room on the opposite side of the narrow hallway was set aside for use by

the executioner, who would typically arrive the day before the hanging was set to take place. The hangman would arrange with the prison guards to size the prisoner up without his knowledge, sometimes spying on him in the exercise yard, and adjusting the length of the rope to the condemned man’s height. There was a formula to be followed. On the day of the execution, the prisoner’s arms would be pinioned tightly, and he would be marched onto the trapdoor. In his autobiography, Pierrepoint expressed his distaste for the American military’s method of execution. When he hanged a Brit, the executioner recalled, the entire process took just a minute or two from the time the prisoner arrived in the room. During a US execution, however, the condemned was forced to stand there on the trapdoor, while the entire litany of charges against him was read aloud to the room, followed by any comments the presiding officer might be inclined to make. This could result in a delay of eight or ten minutes, something that Pierrepoint (who was a consummate professional) considered to be somewhat inhumane. Gathering quietly around the trapdoor above which the gallows would once have stood, we carried out a series of hushed and respectful EVP sessions. Once again, we clearly heard the sound of movement from out in the corridor that led to the execution chamber and its adjoining specialist cells. After a few basic questions, we played back the audio recording and were astonished to hear a male voice gruffly declare: GET BACK. It certainly wasn’t the voice of any male investigator present in the room. Additionally, none of us had spoken those particular words. MJ had mentioned earlier in the evening that she believed we were being followed by the spirit of an inquisitive prison officer as we made our rounds throughout the prison. Could this perhaps be his voice, or alternatively, was it a residual phrase, something that was paranormally imprinted on the environment during the days when executions still took place here? GET BACK would be reasonable thing for an official to say if somebody happened to be getting too close to the trapdoor, for example.

Nor was this EVP capture a fluke. A few minutes later, a similar male voice would turn up on playback, asking the words WHAT’S THAT? Yet again, none of the males present spoke these words. This was confirmed by other voice recorders we had position around the room.

The following evening, I took the opportunity to Facetime my sister. As I was wandering between C and D wings, chatting away and giving her a good look at the place, there came a loud boom from one of the floors directly above my head. I peered up through the suicide prevention netting, strung across the cell block in an attempt to deter inmates from jumping to their deaths. Nothing seemed to be moving up there.

“Tell me you heard that,” I asked her, suddenly feeling a little disconcerted at being all alone on the wing. She confirmed that we had, and, laughing, signed off by wishing me good luck for the night ahead. Naturally, many of the occupants of the prison were not nice individuals. We were reminded of this during an EVP session at the intersection of A and D wings, when a male voice aggressively growled F*** YOU. This was followed moments later by an extremely loud slam from somewhere on the top floor of the cell block, as if one of the big, heavy doors had been slammed shut. (Of course, when we went to check, none of them had). MJ was uncharacteristically shaken after the encounter, and had to go outside to get some fresh air – code for having a cheeky smoke.

It was then that arguably the most remarkable experience of the entire investigation took place.

Parked in front of the gift shop, not too far from the main gate, was a van. Just as I approached MJ, we could both hear the sound of footsteps on the far side of the vehicle. “Alex,” she called out, “is that you?” Except the heavy, measured tread coming toward us didn’t belong to our fellow investigator, Alex, at all. He was still inside the prison, not taking in the night air as MJ had initially thought. Still the footsteps kept on coming, circling around the front end of the van. My first thought was that it had to be an intruder, somebody local who had gotten in through the gate or over the wall somehow, and was trespassing inside the prison – perhaps with a view to breaking into our cars. There was no way I was having that. Picking up the pace, I stormed around to the far side of the van to confront whoever it was – and found nothing. There was nobody there.

I circled the vehicle several times, looking underneath and all around, just to rule out the possibility of it having been a fox or a badger – but MJ and I both knew that the footsteps we had heard were much too hefty to have belonged to an animal.

So much more happened at Shepton Mallet than I can relate in this article. Interested readers will be able to read the full story in my forthcoming book, SPIRITS BEHIND BARS, which will be published in September of 2022. I would like to thank my fellow investigators and guides at HMP Shepton Mallet for making the adventure such a memorable one.

When we think of vampires,

the imagination immediately summons the archetypal images of the fiendish Count Dracula, with his aversion to sunlight, garlic and religious iconography. Such lore about all things vampiric appears to have been launched into popular culture with the widespread popularity of Bram Stoker’s classic novel and propagated through the years with portrayals true to Stoker’s vision in films, books and television shows.

Our fascination with vampires didn’t begin with this particular novel though – some of the earliest recorded accounts go back as far as 4000 BC. Ancient Sumerian and Babylonian mythology describe a vampiric creature known as ‘ekkimu’ or ‘edimmu’ that was once human, but due to lack of a proper burial, became a type of demon that inhabited the body in order to feed from the energy of the living. Belief in supernatural beings and forces has always been part of the historic human worldview and vampires are no exception, with accounts and reports recorded down the centuries. Similarities between the circumstances described in these ancient tales and the one recounted below are quite striking. The Berwick Vampire

The tale of the Berwick vampire was recorded during the reign of Richard the Lionheart in the twelfth century by an Augustinian Canon named William Parvus, or William of Newburgh. Plague ravaged the country during this period, and fiscally poor areas such as Northumberland endured considerable hardship. The king himself was absent for

By Lucy Willgress

most of his reign as the crusades seemed to be more of a priority than the suffering in his own kingdom, although due to the religious fervour of the time, appeasing god through crusading was viewed as a way of making a personal sacrifice in order to put an end to disasters and diseases such as the Black Death.

According to Canon William, a wealthy, well-respected merchant in the town of Berwick fell victim to the plague. Described as religious and thoughtful in life, it was only after his demise that evidence came to light that the unnamed man had, in reality, been a wicked and nefarious man by nature. His burial within consecrated ground was refused and soon afterwards, strange and frightening occurrences began to take place.

It was said that the merchant began to emerge from his grave at night accompanied by the eerie howling of a pack of dogs in his quest to feast on the flesh and blood of the living.

A later version of the story states that the cursed man ran through the streets shouting that “until my body is burnt, you folk of Berwick shall have no peace!” Although this isn’t mentioned in the translation into modern English from the original account, what is interesting is that when the townsfolk gathered to decide what to do about the monstrous occurrence, ‘…the wiser (amongst them) shrewdly concluding that were a remedy further delayed, the atmosphere, infected and corrupted by the constant whirling of the pestiferous corpse, would engender disease and death to a great extent; the necessity of providing against which was shown by frequent examples in similar cases.’

It’s interesting to note that the last line in this paragraph suggests that the above was not an isolated incident, but also that fearing a further spread of plague, no doubt believed to be caused by undead corpses roaming the streets and spreading infection, the townsfolk using the scapegoat of a supposed vampire hounding the community would have made a great deal of sense to people whose physical reality went hand-in-hand with seemingly supernatural elements that could not be explained. So, what happened to the Berwick Vampire?

Sources say that higher and middle ranking town officials got together and employed ten farmhands, noted for their bravery, who were employed to disinter the carcass, dismember it and destroy it by burning. Sadly, not long after, the Black Death returned to the town and wiped out around half the residents. As the disease-wracked corpses were laid to rest, those that were left began to hear the heart-stopping screams of the vampire, accompanied by the howling of hounds once more. With the original supposed cause – the vampiric merchant, now burned to ash, perhaps it was assumed that tragedy on such a large scale had produced more supernatural creatures of the night?