Spirits of the Cage, by Richard Estep & Vanessa Mitchell

Also by Richard Estep In Search of the Paranormal

About the Authors

Richard Estep (Boulder, CO) first got involved with paranormal research in 1995 in the UK after attending an overnight investigation at the infamous St. Botolph’s (“Skidbrooke”) church. He spent the next five years investigating the haunted hamlets of Great Britain as a member of Andrew Wright’s Leicester based team. Richard cofounded Boulder County Paranormal Research Society (BCPRS) with his wife, Laura, after relocating to the United States in 1999. Visit him online at http://www.richardestep.net/.

Vanessa Mitchell (Essex, UK) is a sales worker who lived in a haunted cottage known as the Cage from 2004 to 2016. After being driven out of the Cage by violent ghosts and paranormal phenomena, she cowrote Spirits of the Cage with Richard Estep.

TRUE ACCOUNTS OF LIVING IN A

HAUNTED MEDIEVAL PRISON Richard Estep & Vanessa Mitchell

Llewellyn Worldwide Woodbury, Minnesota

Spirits of the Cage: True Accounts of Living in a Haunted Medieval Prison © 2017 by Richard Estep and Vanessa Mitchell. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First Edition First Printing, 2017 Book design by Bob Gaul Cover design by Shira Atakpu Editing by Aaron Lawrence All photos by Richard Estep except for image on page 194 by Vanessa Mitchell Llewellyn Publications is a registered trademark of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (pending) ISBN: 978-0-7387-5193-1 Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business transactions between our authors and the public.

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Llewellyn Publications A Division of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. 2143 Wooddale Drive Woodbury, MN 55125-2989 www.llewellyn.com Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction 1

One: Welcome to the Cage 11 Two: Witch Trials 25 Three: A Dead Woman Speaks 37 Four: The Shadow Man 55 Five: The Growling 69 Six: Bloody Cold! 81 Seven: Helloween 93 Eight: Heinrich and Redfast 103 Nine: Dark Christmas 121

vi Contents

Ten: The Jailer 135 Eleven: “I Can’t Fight a Ghost!” 149 Twelve: “Maybe the Ghosts Just Don’t Like Her…” 161 Thirteen: Attacked 175 Fourteen: The Scrying Game 187 Fifteen: “It Has Never Been Human…” 199 Sixteen: “Saint Michael Archangel, Defend Us in Battle” 209 Seventeen: Chased Away 219 Eighteen: Fresh Perspectives 231 Nineteen: “We Need to Get Out. Now.” 245 Twenty: Terrified 265 Epilogue 279 Acknowledgments 289

For my wonderful nieces and nephews: Bethany, George, and Morgan Estep, and Olivia Tiberio.

My love to you all, now and always.

Uncle Richard This book is dedicated to the everlasting loving memory of my dearest and deeply missed grandparents Elizabeth Mary and Malcolm Mitchell—Till we meet so I can cuddle you both again.

Vanessa Mitchell

Introduction

D

o you want to come and live in a haunted prison for witches?”

A lot of people would run for miles if they were offered an opportunity like that. But then again, just as many would jump at the chance. I’m definitely in the latter group.

My name is Richard Estep. I’ve been a paranormal investigator for the past twenty-one years, investigating claims of ghostly activity and haunted locations on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. During that time, I’ve been fortunate enough to spend nights in some of the world’s most haunted buildings: Asylum 49 in Tooele, Utah; Bobby Mackey’s Music World in Wilder, Kentucky (which some have labelled the gateway to Hell); and the notorious Black Monk house at number 30 East Drive in Pontefract, England.

1

2 Introduction

I’ve also been locked up in haunted prisons. I spent a night in the old jail up at Cripple Creek, a former mining camp turned gambling town up in the hill country of my adopted Colorado. In one hair-raising night, my fellow investigators and I heard the whisper of disembodied voices all around us on the cell block, recorded an EVP of what sounds disconcertingly like somebody getting their throat cut, and most concerning of all, my very own doppelgänger put in an appearance while I was securely incarcerated in one of the cells.

But a haunted witches’ prison? Just show me the way!

I had first heard about the Cage from a TV show called Great British Ghosts. In it, former kids’ TV presenter Michaela Strachan travels around the United Kingdom, visiting some of its most active haunted hotspots and interviewing the people who live and work there. It was late 2015, not long before Christmas, and I was in between paranormal cases to consult on.

The episode concerning the Cage really piqued my interest, and I ended up re-watching it several times over. I was impressed by just how down to earth its owner, Vanessa Mitchell, seemed to be. As she began to tell her terrifying story of life inside the Cage, detailing some of the more bizarre and disturbing events that had taken place there, I found myself growing more and more intrigued. Could the building really be as active as Vanessa claimed it was?

Introduction 3

Flipping open my laptop, I went online and began some preliminary research on the Cage, beginning with that most trusted of resources: good old Doctor Google. “Is this UK’s most haunted house?” was the question posed by reporter Matt Quinton in a Halloween week article for The Sun national newspaper on October 28, 2014.

Mr. Quinton spent a night sleeping inside the Cage in order to research his article. His evening seemed to start out innocuously enough, with a tour of the prison conducted by Vanessa, followed by an interview with a paranormal investigator named David Mayhew. Mr. Mayhew reported that he had been “Bitten by an invisible force once while trying to make recordings of spirits in the living room. There was a sudden pain in my leg and I collapsed to the floor. It was agony and actually drew blood. I’ve still got the mark.”

I sat up straighter in my chair. It wasn’t all that unusual in the field of paranormal research to record the voices of the dead, to hear phantom footsteps, feel icy drafts, or even witness shadowy figures … and sometimes full-bodied apparitions, if you were really lucky. But physical phenomena—particularly violent physical phenomena—added an entirely new dimension to things. For one, it implied that any spirit entities that might be present at the Cage would be willing to interact with visiting paranormal investigators … and not necessarily in a nice, friendly manner.

Continuing to scan the article, I read about Vanessa’s own dark experiences while living inside the Cage. It might

4 Introduction

even be more accurate to say that she was sentenced to it, because her life inside the former witches’ prison sounded very much as though it had been a jail term, full of trials and tribulations that ultimately led her to flee the place in fear of her own safety and that of her precious baby son.

When The Sun’s cameraman attempted to film a brief video segment of Vanessa talking about her ordeal for the newspaper’s website, he asked both Vanessa and the reporter to stop humming—which was odd, because neither of them were humming. And yet an unexplained buzzing noise was coming in through the cameraman’s headphones, effectively ruining the footage.

Vanessa brushed it off as one of those things that happened quite often in the Cage, where technology and the spirits of the sixteenth century didn’t really seem to get along with one another. When she led the reporter into the Cage itself (the actual prison where those accused of witchcraft were held, as opposed to the modern house that has been built all around), he was surprised to see that some heavy iron chains that were embedded in the brick wall appeared to be swaying to and fro, despite the lack of any sort of wind.

One would imagine that a reporter for a national newspaper is exposed to some rather frightening (not to say dangerous) things during the course of their career. To his credit, Mr. Quinton admits to feeling a little fear and apprehension when Vanessa and David left him alone for the night. Taking

Introduction 5

up residence in the master bedroom, the reporter curled up and tried to get some sleep. “I roll over in my sleeping bag and try to convince myself that the rattling latch on my bedroom door is caused by the wind. When a sudden blast of freezing air hits my face, I mutter that it too must be just a draught … even though the windows are tightly closed. Then there is a thud from a corner and I break all world speed records for disentangling oneself from a sleeping bag.”

Fortunately, Mr. Quinton was able to make it through an entire night spent inside the Cage; two years earlier, one of his colleagues was not quite as brave. Following links on The Sun’s website, I discovered that his fellow reporter, Miranda Prynne, had also gamely attempted to spend a night alone inside the Cage … with a very different outcome.

In a May 2012 article titled “Building Inspector: Sun girl stays night in haunted house … and is left terrified,” the journalist related how she had settled in for the night on the couch—and waited for the spirits of the Cage to make contact.

It wasn’t long before they did, just as soon as night fell.

The first sign of something being amiss was the same thing that Mr. Quinton had noticed: those heavy iron chains mounted on the brick wall inside the Cage began to sway and clink, despite there being nothing visibly capable of moving them. I raised an eyebrow, getting more and more curious by the second. Two reporters had visited the Cage, separated

6 Introduction

by two years, and had experienced exactly the same phenomenon. At least the spirits seemed to be consistent.

Writing in the third person, Ms. Prynne went on: “As our reporter settled down for the night, she heard scratching behind a wall. Just before midnight the temperature suddenly dropped to freezing and the fire spluttered and died. The investigator felt unwelcome, as if she were being watched—and after just a few sleepless hours scarpered, terrified, around midnight.”

So we had two reporters who were spooked inside the Cage. I continued to browse the web, following links that led me from article to article, and from there on to YouTube, where a number of paranormal investigators had posted video footage from their own visits.

Finally, after several hours of reading and watching videos, my mind was made up. I would reach out to the owner of the Cage and ask her whether I might come and spend some time at the old witches’ prison, in the hope of finding a few answers for myself.

Connecting through the magic of social media, Vanessa and I began talking to each other on a regular basis. I would ask her questions about the Cage, and she would answer in what I soon learned was her typical no-nonsense, down-toearth manner. When I finally asked her if I could move into the Cage myself for a few days, she agreed immediately.

“Just so long as you don’t expect me to move in there with you,” she wrote. “I hate going inside the Cage after dark.”

Introduction 7

I wondered at first whether she was kidding, but it turned out that she was absolutely serious. When I got to know her better, I learned that Vanessa Mitchell isn’t afraid of much on this Earth, but on top of that very short list is stepping across the threshold of the Cage once night has fallen. It is a fear that she still has to this day, and it shows no signs of abating any time soon.

Once the decision was made that I was going to investigate, all that remained was to settle on the date and to sort out a team. Since 1999, my adopted home has been the beautiful state of Colorado, but I did get across the pond once or twice each year in order to conduct a paranormal investigation back in my homeland. It was also a good opportunity to visit with friends and family.

Pulling up my day planner, I was due to attend a science fiction and fantasy convention in Southampton at the beginning of February the following year, a gathering of like-minded geeks and nerds who party the weekend away in support of the Teenage Cancer Trust. That meant that I would be in England for the first week of that month—was the Cage available for me to occupy then?

Fortunately for me, it was. Vanessa hadn’t lived there for several years, ever since she had fled with her son and such possessions as she was able to gather. The building often stood empty, but she currently had a friend staying there, taking care of the place and also conducting an investigation

8 Introduction

of his own. She arranged for him to move out temporarily, leaving the place vacant for me to work unimpeded.

When Vanessa asked me what else I needed, “I’d like your permission to use a Ouija board in the Cage, if that’s alright,” I messaged her. “Do you mind?”

Sitting back to wait, I was more than a little concerned that she might say no. The owners of some haunted locations flatly refused to allow Ouija sessions, fearing that to do so would open up a doorway of some kind—one that would allow dark spirits to pass through.

Fortunately, Vanessa’s reply wasn’t long in coming. “I don’t see why not. I know that it’s been done before. Do you know how to open the board up and close it down properly?”

I confirmed that I did indeed know how to do that. For many years I’d been one of those investigators who flatly refused to employ the Ouija board during any of my paranormal investigations. I had heard too many ominous stories of people using the board and experiencing some very dark and disturbing phenomena afterward.

My mind had finally been changed during an investigation of London’s famous historic prison in Southwark, which is known as the Clink. It was the first time I was ever coaxed into using a Ouija board as an investigative tool.

The Clink is where we derive the modern phrase “thrown in the clink,” referring to somebody who has ended up in prison. On a hot Saturday night in the summer of 2014, when most Londoners were out enjoying the nightlife of the

Introduction 9

capital city’s pubs, clubs, and bars, I accompanied a team of paranormal investigators in an attempt to probe the mysteries of this ancient gaol.

We were conducting an impromptu séance underneath the streets that ran so very close to the River Thames, where hundreds if not thousands of prisoners had lived and suffered in abject misery during the Clink’s time as a busy place of incarceration.

Initially skeptical of the whole thing, I watched quietly as the planchette (the smooth wooden pointer that is used to indicate letters and numbers) skimmed across the surface of the Ouija board, weaving and bobbing its way from one letter to the next. The session actually turned out to be rather emotional. While the sitters had expected to make contact with some spirit that was hundreds of years old, perhaps one of the many unfortunates who had lost their lives living in the abject filth and squalor of the Clink, what seemed to actually come through was someone very different indeed: the recently deceased father of one of the sitters, whose phrases convinced the now-weeping participant that she was indeed in contact with her greatly missed father.

From that point on I was a great deal more open to using the Ouija board on future paranormal investigations.

However, not everybody felt the same way. When I was investigating the infamous house at 30 East Drive in Pontefract, for example (which was the scene of the notorious Black Monk haunting), I was told in no uncertain terms

10 Introduction

by the property’s owner that Ouija boards were under no circumstances permitted inside the house. Indeed, a laminated sign posted on the living room door greeted visitors upon their arrival, telling them that anybody breaking the “no Ouija” rule would be expelled from the house, blacklisted, and never allowed to come back.

Vanessa didn’t have the same fear of the spirit board, fortunately, and once she knew how to use the board safely, she had no hesitation in granting permission for me to bring one into the Cage. “Feel free,” she told me. “I bet you’ll find out some interesting stuff.” At the time, neither of us had any idea of just how right she was.

1

WELCOME TO THE CAGE

W

ith the date set and my flight booked, the only thing left was for me to assemble a team. Based on what I’d seen of the place from TV documentaries and photographs posted online, I knew that the Cage wasn’t a large building. I should be able to cover it adequately with a crew of just three or four investigators, which would be a lot easier to organize and coordinate than the larger teams I used when investigating places as large as Waverly Hills or Asylum 49.

I finally settled on a mix of seasoned investigators and relative newbies. Right out of the gate I knew that I wanted my friend and fellow paranormal investigator Stephen Weidner. He lived not far from me in Colorado and was the kind of friend who was more than willing to up sticks and

11

12 One

fly five thousand miles to spend five days living in a haunted witches’ prison with me.

The fact that he was a Catholic priest also couldn’t hurt, I figured.

The second half of my team would be British, and they agreed to meet us at the Cage on day one of the investigation. The end of January came all too soon, and it seemed as if the weeks had simply flown by.

Once I cleared customs and immigration at London’s Heathrow Airport, I found the nearest coffee shop and sat down to enjoy a hot chocolate and wait for Stephen to arrive.

Although we had both taken different flights (I had flown direct, whereas Stephen had enjoyed a brief layover in Iceland) we both arrived in London within an hour of each other.

The coffee shop was our prearranged meeting point, and it wasn’t long before we were both enjoying a drink together and chatting excitedly about what the next few days might bring.

A hire car whisked us both from London to St Osyth, a journey that only took a couple of hours, even in the face of heavy traffic in and around the nation’s capital. Once we were free of the typical London gridlock, it was all smooth sailing: we arrived at our hotel early on that Saturday afternoon, with plenty of daylight to spare.

Each of us went to our hotel room, dropped off our suitcase full of clothes, and grabbed the equipment kits that would be used over the course of the coming week’s

Welcome to the Cage 13

investigation. So far as we were concerned, unpacking could wait. We had more important things to think about right now: after all, the Cage was waiting for us …

Vanessa and Richard.

14 One

Vanessa Mitchell picked us up outside the hotel. We exchanged a hug. She was short of stature by comparison to me, coming up to my chest, and I was immediately struck

by Vanessa’s larger-than-life personality. She was quick to laugh but quickly grew serious when discussion turned to the subject of the Cage.

Although we had spoken together many times online over the past few months, this was the first time that we had ever met in person. All three of us hit it off instantly, and it wasn’t too long into our drive to the Cage that we were laughing and swapping funny stories.

However, it soon became apparent that the closer we got to the old witches’ prison, the more uneasy Vanessa was becoming. During our many Internet conversations, the slender, dark-haired woman had struck me as the sassy, nononsense type, independent and fearless. Now, meeting her in person for the very first time, I was getting a very definite vibe that this was not a woman who was easily frightened or intimidated.

“This is a beautiful little village,” Stephen said admiringly, taking in the old world charm. “Absolutely beautiful.”

“Yeah, isn’t it?” Vanessa agreed. “But it has a dark past.

Do you know anything about the history of St Osyth—the actual saint, I mean, not just the village?”

We shook our heads. Clearing her throat, Vanessa kept one eye on the traffic in front of us as she began to tell us about the village and its tragic namesake.

Welcome to the Cage  15

The legend of St Osyth dates back to the Dark Ages. Britain was a hard, brutal place in which to eke out a living. Most people were deeply religious, and this belief permeated all levels of society, from the king on his throne to the lowliest peasant toiling in the fields.

At the end of the seventh century AD, many of the coastal towns and settlements lay at the mercy of the Viking raiders. The villagers soon learned to dread the appearance of the dragon-headed longships when they appeared suddenly off the coast or slid stealthily along the rivers and estuaries of eastern England in search of plunder.

One such raid took place on the 7th of October, 700 AD. A Danish raiding party, led by Inguar and Hubba, took the village of Chich by surprise. They burned many homes to the ground, indiscriminately murdering and assaulting men, women, and children alike. The village was totally devastated.

A lady by the name of Osyth was numbered among the dead that day. She was the daughter of Frithwald, chieftain of the Mercians, and Wilburga, who was the daughter of the powerful pagan king Penda of Mercia. Osyth was raised in a convent and wanted nothing more in life than to become a nun, but life seemed to have other ideas: She instead became betrothed to King Sighere of Essex in order to cement an alliance of political expediency.

16 One

Osyth’s yearning to become a woman of God only grew stronger with time, despite the wishes of her parents and King Sighere for her to marry and assume the mantle of a queen. She understood that it was her duty to get married, as the resulting alliance would be for the greater good of the people. Yet at the same time, her calling could no longer be ignored.

One day, when her betrothed was out on a hunt and trying to kill a rare white hart, Osyth made a leap of faith.

This was, she reasoned, her one chance to truly follow her own path. She took sacred vows and entered a convent, with the fervent desire to dedicate her life completely to the service of her God. This decision paid off when her would-be husband eventually accepted her decision and donated a tract of land to her, located in the village of Chich. She subsequently established a beautiful nunnery and church upon the land, and it was there that Osyth spent the happiest days of her entire life, filled as they were with peace, fulfillment, and the love of God that she had craved for so long. Osyth found true contentment in her role of abbess there, but all of that was swept away on that fateful day in October when the Danes came to call.

Having sacked the village, the Danish raiding party turned its attention to the nunnery. They stole as much money and treasure as they could possibly find, ruthlessly

Welcome to the Cage 17

butchering all who tried to stand in their way, and then burned the nunnery to the ground.

Along with a small group of monks and nuns, Osyth had evaded the attack, managing to make her way to a small clearing within the farthest part of the grounds.

The company soon found themselves totally surrounded, completely cut off from any chance of escape.

When she finally came face to face with the leader of the raiding party, Osyth knew without a shadow of a doubt that her fate was sealed. The huge Dane had no respect for her, her God, or the way of life that she loved so much. He demanded there and then that she renounce her God before everyone, offering her allegiance instead to the Norse Gods, worshipping them above all others.

Osyth naturally refused. What choice did she have, she who had given up so much in order to follow her beliefs, even if they led to such a bitter end?

With a single stroke of his sword, the Dane lopped Osyth’s head from her shoulders.

But the story does not end there. Legend has it that once she had been beheaded, Osyth’s decapitated body rose to its feet, and then stooped down to pick up her missing head.

Tucking the head firmly in the crook of one arm, Osyth’s body walked into the village, where it knocked three times on the great wooden door of the church, before collapsing onto the front step and dying for a second time, the head dropping from her lifeless fingers.

18 One

It is said that at the exact place of Osyth’s martyrdom within the woods a spring gushed forth at the very point where her head first struck the ground. The spring has since become a stream, and legend has it that the waters have mystical healing properties that can cure the sick and the dying of their afflictions.

As for the village of Chich, it was later given the name of St Osyth, reflecting the honorific bestowed upon the brave young woman who once braved a Danish raider’s wrath and refused to give up her faith, even at the cost of her own life. St Osyth Prior was named in her honor, and it still stands proudly today upon the same land on which Osyth so lovingly established her nunnery.

Local tradition holds that each year upon the anniversary of her execution, Osyth can be seen walking with her head still held under one arm, traversing the priory grounds and moving along Colchester Road; she then carries on into the village that now bears her name, knocks three times on the church door, and then vanishes.

While St Osyth’s tale is one of woe, and seems to have a hideous ending, this brave lady is remembered not only for her martyrdom but also for dedicating her life to helping those less fortunate, and for her devout love and devotion to God. For generations after her death, travelers came from miles around, making the pilgrimage in order to sit by the side of her grave. It was believed that illnesses

Welcome to the Cage 19

could be cured in such a way, and that St Osyth was still performing miraculous feats of healing from beyond the grave.

“I take it that Osyth isn’t one of the spirits that is said to haunt the Cage?” I asked, smiling. Vanessa shook her head.

“No, but there’s plenty of others in there, Rich. Don’t worry, you’ll meet them all soon enough.”

She turned onto Colchester Road, which ran long and straight toward the heart of the village. We passed a long row of historic old houses on the left-hand side. Some were so old that they leaned out crookedly into the road, looking a little like drunks who were off-balance and desperately trying not to fall down into the street.

And then suddenly, at the very end of the row, there it was. The Cage.

“Sometimes I really hate this place,” Vanessa muttered under her breath as she pulled the car onto the tarmac apron, just in front of the Cage, and slipped it into park.

All three of us climbed out of the car. Stephen and I took a few steps backward to take a good look at it for ourselves.

To the right of them ran Coffin Alley, which cut around the back of the building and disappeared off into the distance.

20 One

Exterior of the house.

Exterior of the house.

Welcome to the Cage  21

The sign on the outside of the building.

I found myself thinking that the Cage itself was actually a rather unassuming, anonymous-looking building; it certainly didn’t look like the classic style of Hollywood haunted house: all dark, gothic, and brooding. On the contrary, the Cage was simple red brick, and the residence that had been built above and around it was painted a bright, mustard yellow color.

22 One

Coffin Alley runs behind the house.

The back side of the Cage.

Welcome to the Cage 23

Stephen and I walked around the building, stepping onto the sidewalk in front of the house. A small wooden plaque caught my eye, and I leaned in to examine it more closely: the Cage Medieval Prison. St Osyth resident Ursula Kemp was imprisoned here before being hanged as a witch in 1582.

It was last used in 1908.

“Alright,” I said, craning my neck to look up at the gargoyles set high into the wall above my head. “What happened here—before you bought it, I mean? There are hundreds of prisons all across the UK, and I’ve only heard of a few being haunted. Why is the Cage so special?”

With a sidelong glance at the upstairs window (we would learn later on why it unnerved Vanessa so much), she began to lay it all out for us.

2

WITCH TRIALS

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, witch trials swept through Europe like an out of control plague, and my little village of St Osyth was not exempt from the insanity—an insanity that was responsible for so many needless deaths of innocent women and, to a lesser extent, men and children.

Many children were left without mothers, husbands were left without wives, and mothers without their daughters, due to the ignorance and cruelty of fanatics such as Mathew Hopkins, the self-appointed Witch Finder General, to name but one. Hopkins was born in 1620, and in his twenty-seven years of life, he embarked on a crusade to rid the east coast of those he deemed to be heretics and also those who had made a covenant with the devil.

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26 Two

Most of all, Hopkins reserved his greatest ire for those he suspected were practicing the dark arts, particularly the witches he believed were laying curses upon the innocent with the ultimate aim of bringing them bad luck, ill health, and death.

Hundreds of years later, Hopkins is still a household name. Yet he was by no means the first or the last to persecute innocents for his own sick and perverted ends. In this day and age he would be classed and treated as a serial killer, possessing all of the ruthlessness and lack of conscience of the born psychopath.

In those days, when it was relatively simple to hide behind the cloak of religion while firing off accusations of devil worship at anybody who took his fancy, this twisted fanatic flourished and prospered. There was rarely a way out for the unfortunate innocents that Hopkins accused of witchcraft and put to death—no court of appeal, no possibility of parole or mercy.

A young woman of around twenty-seven named Ursula Kemp lived in the village of St Osyth in the 1500s.

She was said to be an attractive woman with long brown hair and dark brown eyes, and was well known in the small community, which at that time would have numbered only around three hundred people.

Ursula was mother to one son (an eight-year-old boy named Tom) whom she loved every bit as much as he loved her in return. It wasn’t the easiest of times to live in,

Witch Trials 27

for money was hard to come by and their accommodation would have been no better than a shack. The winters were freezing cold, and most people possessed none of the home comforts that we take for granted today, not even a warm and cozy home to protect them from the elements. The combined warmth of Ursula and Tom’s shared body heat when cuddling up together was what kept them warm at night, with a little extra meager heat from the log fire to supplement it.

It is said that as a child, Ursula loved to play in the woods. She had great affection for all animals under the sun, and her happiest times were spent in the company of all the creatures that the woodland had to offer. It is there in her precious woods that she learned of the medicinal and healing properties of wild flowers, herbs, and plants that nature offered at no charge.

Her life as a young English girl in the 1500s would have been both hard and cruel. It was certainly a life that we can hardly imagine today, when many of us are obsessed with our “first world problems.” I like to think of her as a content child, though perhaps a bit of a loner—a child with her own ways and her own path to follow, a path that was not necessarily the same as the other village children’s path.

We know that at some point in her late teens, Ursula married a man named Mr. Rabbet, who fathered her son Tom. After Tom was born, both parents separated for

28 Two

reasons that are at best unclear. What we do know is that Tom stayed with Ursula, rather than with his father.

Ursula would have been the main bread winner (there was no such thing as child support in those days), and so she tried to eke out a living by working as a midwife and wet nurse for the women of the village. She also had a sideline in healing the sick, employing the various skills that she had learned over the years as a child in the woods.

On one occasion when Ursula herself fell ill, she engaged the help of an old woman from a neighboring village. Her name was Old Mother Cox, and she seems to have been the stereotypical old crone, a reputation that was aided considerably by the fact that she lived in Wesley Woods. She too used unusual and unorthodox methods of healing, and her knowledge of the natural ways was greatly respected in the region.

“Return to your home and make three holes in the underside of the kitchen table,” Old Mother Cox instructed Ursula, “and then stab a knife through each of them three times. If you do this, you shall be cured.”

Ursula obeyed without hesitation, and was indeed cured—though whether by placebo or by genuine means, I will leave it up to the reader to decide. Impressed with her knowledge and wisdom, Ursula occasionally visited Old Mother Cox at her shack in the woods, seeking to learn new methods of healing from the old crone.

Witch Trials  29

Her apprenticeship with the wise woman of the woods soon bore fruit. Ursula learned many new ways to help the needy village folk, which she added to her own repertoire of tried and trusted methods, and before long her healing skills were called upon on a regular basis throughout the village of St Osyth.

I personally cannot help but feel that Ursula was a kind woman and a good mother, someone who wanted nothing more than to help folks and look after her beloved Tom, living in peace and happiness to the best of her ability. Ursula was actively involved in everyday village life and had several friends, one of which was a neighbor named Grace Throw (or Thurlowe).

Grace had one son, a boy named Davy, and was pregnant with her second child at the time her son became ill with convulsions; she asked Ursula for her help in curing the lad, and Ursula willingly agreed. After she had treated him successfully, Davy was once again the picture of health.

Ursula did not charge Grace for curing her son, but we understand that there was an agreement in which Ursula would be called upon by Grace to be her midwife and wet nurse when her second child was born. At that time, Ursula would be paid for her services, and all parties would be happy. Alas, Grace reneged on her word; she did not call on Ursula for help, choosing instead another local woman to deliver the baby and nurse it.

30 Two

Quite understandably, Ursula was left feeling cheated by a woman she had once thought of as her friend. A few months later, Grace experienced another attack of lameness (a malady from which she suffered on occasion) and once again had the effrontery to turn to Ursula for help. Incredibly, Ursula did agree to help Grace a second time, but only upon the condition that this time, she was paid twelve pence for her services—a condition to which Grace readily agreed.

Once again, Ursula’s treatment was successful. The lameness had gone, and Grace by her own admission was happy and believed that it was Ursula’s skills that had cured her. Yet when it came time for Grace to pay her the agreed price of twelve pence, she predictably told Ursula that she could not afford to pay her any money.

Ursula countered that she would be happy to take cheese as payment instead, but Grace shrugged and claimed that she did not have any with which to pay her. Once again, Ursula was cheated out of fair recompense for her services.

The two women exchanged heated words, but Ursula still left empty-handed.

During that era, times were hard and money was always short, and so the village communities relied heavily on one another to get by, trading and bartering both goods and services. If one person didn’t honor an agreement, it was frowned upon greatly by the community. Grace’s choice to refuse Ursula payment a second time round

Witch Trials 31

would have been no exception, especially as she had offered to take food instead of monetary payment.

It was a decision that she would soon come to regret.

When Grace’s baby girl was just three months old, she somehow fell from her cot, breaking her neck on the hard stone floor. Sadly, the infant died.

To make matters even worse, Grace’s lameness returned with a vengeance. In her mind, there was only one person to blame for the death of her child and the subsequent return of her illness: Ursula Kemp.

Grace was all too aware of the potential consequences if somebody happened to be accused of witchcraft: more often than not, imprisonment, torture, starvation, and ultimately death were all possible outcomes. The innocence or guilt of the alleged miscreant hardly came into it. Nevertheless, Grace had not the slightest hesitation about pointing the finger at Ursula Kemp, publicly stating that she was a witch and holding her responsible for both the death of her baby daughter and for her renewed lameness.

On the 20th of February, 1582, Ursula was ripped from the arms of her beloved son on the orders of Sir Brian Darcy, the local priory owner and magistrate. The charge: witchcraft. This meant that she would be thrown into the Cage prison, signaling the beginning of the end for her. Between the 20th and the 24th of February, Ursula was interrogated no less than three times by the powerful landowner.

32 Two

During those interrogation sessions, it was made clear to Ursula that if she pled guilty to all charges (no matter how false or inflated they were) then she would be treated with leniency. Whether she truly believed Darcy’s promises or not is something that we shall never know, but one thing is for certain: every word of them was a lie.

Imprisoned within the Cage, the poor woman was denied all contact with her son and the outside world.

Unbeknownst to her, Darcy’s men had also arrested young Tom, and he also was interrogated. We can only imagine the fear and grief that the little boy felt in having his beloved mother taken from him, and then being interrogated himself, especially when he was told that he would be forced to testify against her in a court of law.

I’m the mother of an eight-year-old son myself, and can feel nothing but horror at the thought of just how powerless poor Ursula and Tom must have felt, having no voice to protest or plead their innocence. They were all alone in the world, and things were about to get much, much worse.

During those desperate days of Ursula’s interrogation and incarceration within the Cage, Ursula is said to have told Lord Darcy in confidence that she was the owner of four familiars. Two were male spirits, which she used to kill those who displeased her (or their loved ones, such as Grace Thurlowe’s infant daughter) and two female spirits, who specialized in inflicting sickness on both people and cattle.

Witch Trials 33

Tyttey was a male white lamb; Jacke was a male black cat; Pygine was a female toad, and Tyffin was a gray female cat. When pushed, Ursula broke down and confessed that it was Tyttey who she had sent to kill Grace by rocking the child’s pram until she fell to her death. Darcy knew that this was a blatant admission of witchcraft. Probing further, he convinced Ursula into giving exact details of the way in which she had caused the death and illness of many local villagers by practicing the dark arts.

Those words, doubtless uttered at Darcy’s urging in hopes of gaining clemency, would instead seal her fate.

Yet Ursula wasn’t going down without a fight, and she certainly wasn’t going alone. She told Darcy of several others in the village that she claimed also practiced witchcraft. It is written that Ursula made accusations against twelve other women. They were duly arrested and joined their accuser in chains within the Cage.

The trial of Ursula Kemp is the best documented witch trial ever held in the United Kingdom, thanks to the fact that Bryan Darcy made sure to keep highly detailed accounts of every meeting he ever had with Ursula. It seems likely that Darcy had always planned to use them against her at her inevitable trial. She was the one that he would make an example of. A guilty verdict against Ursula (and a subsequent execution) would bring him great favor with Queen Elizabeth, who had visited St Osyth Priory on more than one occasion. Darcy believed that the Queen favored

34 Two

his elder brother, and so he embarked on a crusade against witchcraft in an attempt to prove his loyalty to the crown.

Ursula and her fellow prisoners were transported from the Cage at St Osyth to Colchester Castle, where they were incarcerated in the cells to await their trial at the Chelmsford assizes on March 29, 1582. Unbeknownst to Ursula, events were about to take a gut-wrenching turn. When the first witnesses against her were called, her eyes widened in horror … for who should walk in but the one human being she loved most in the entire world: her only child, Tom. This scared, frail little boy had to do one of the worst things that we could possibly imagine: testify that his mother was a witch, and that he had seen her practicing the dark arts and worshipping the devil on many occasions. The judge was a ruthless man, and one who cared nothing for the little boy, seeing him as little more than a pawn in a much bigger game. Among other things, Tom tearfully told the court that he had personally witnessed his mother feeding her familiars with beer and cake, and that she allowed them to suckle from her before feeding them her own blood.

The outcome was a foregone conclusion. Few were surprised when Ursula was sentenced to death by hanging, along with two other women, named Elizabeth Bennet and Alice Newman. Following an appeal, Alice’s death sentence was reduced to life imprisonment. In a twist of fate, she died after just five months spent languishing in prison. The remaining women received various sentences

Witch Trials 35

of prison time; some were freed without charge, whereas others died in prison while still awaiting trial.

Unfortunately, we have no hard facts regarding the timeframe of Ursula and Elizabeth’s execution; we don’t know where they were hanged or when. All that we do know for certain is that the records show that Elizabeth was still alive and in Colchester Gaol awaiting her execution some six months after the verdict. As for Ursula, your guess is as good as mine. It was traditional for condemned witches of that time period to be brought home to their village in order to be hanged in public on the village gallows, serving as a warning to others.

Some women who were executed as witches were then dismembered, and their arms and legs were buried in four separate places around their home village; others were strung up away from their villages, and their bodies were disposed of with no more respect than would be given to a bag of old rags.

Ursula’s capture and trial was heavily documented, but it is almost as if history lost all interest in Ursula’s plight once the inevitable guilty verdict had been passed. We can assume that the last time Tom ever saw his mother was at her trial, when he was forced to testify against her. He would have been denied any sort of close contact with her, deprived of even the chance to say one final goodbye.

The Cage was in Tom and Ursula’s own home village, and it may well be that the bereft young lad had gone there

36 Two

while his mother was incarcerated, perhaps to sit outside.

It may at least have given him a sense of closeness to his mother, particularly as the walls were much thinner in comparison to today’s prison walls. I like to think that they were able to talk in secrecy on at least one occasion, and that they got a chance to say their last goodbyes in this world.

When all was said and done, Ursula did not escape the hangman’s noose. It is my hope that Ursula’s body was brought home to St Osyth and that her final resting place is somewhere out there in the woods that she loved so much. I also pray that she was reunited with Tom in the afterlife, but as you will learn later in this book, there is a possibility that her spirit still resides inside the Cage … or at least returns there, every once in a while.

The presence of ghostly children has been reported by many visitors to the haunted old prison, and it may well be that one of them is Tom, looking for his mother all these centuries later.

3

A DEAD WOMAN SPEAKS So, the question remains: was Ursula Kemp a witch or a devil worshipper? I certainly don’t think so, or at least not in the traditional sense. I believe that she was nothing more than a kind young lady, one who felt the calling to help others with her potions, spells, and arcane healing skills.

I have to agree that she probably was a witch, but a white witch—one who was both kind and good. In the years I spent living inside the Cage, I have seen and heard the spirits of many women from those olden days. Some were crying, others were scheming and plotting, but I shall never forget the one who came to me in broad daylight to sprinkle some type of herbs or leaves over my head.

37

38 Three

It was during the early days of my residency. The apparition walked through into the front room of the house from the original prison room, which is many hundreds of years older than the rest of the house. I was sitting on the living room floor at the time, transfixed by the appearance of this woman from a bygone era.

I felt very strongly that she meant me no harm, in fact, quite the opposite. She radiated nothing but the very best of intentions. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was looking at a ghost, and allowing her to cover my head in protective leaves, but I felt no fear at all—not even a little. The spirit woman’s energy felt so kind and wellintentioned that I wasn’t even the slightest bit afraid.

Could this have been the spirit of Ursula Kemp?

Well, the woman certainly looked the part. She was about Ursula’s age at the time of her death, her clothes certainly came from that era—or one very close to it. But the truth is that I could never say for certain. The spirit did not give me her name. In fact, she didn’t speak to me at all … she simply smiled. But in my opinion, I believe it truly was her.

I believe that Ursula Kemp had some inkling of the horrific events that were about to befall me and my young son inside the Cage, and she had come expressly to help me, to try and protect me from what was soon to take place inside that extremely haunted house. I believe that her energy can still be felt in the Cage to this very day, and

A Dead Woman Speaks 39

I also suspect that little Tom has come back many times, searching for his mother. In fact, we have actually recorded an EVP that contains the voice of a young boy called Tom, who tells us that he is “looking for my Muma … ” I’ll be the first to admit that a very real chill went down my spine when Vanessa told me that. Standing there at the end of the long row of houses, I stared at the stout wooden door that led into the Cage. It wasn’t all that difficult to picture an innocent woman being dragged through that doorway in chains, imprisoned on trumped-up charges of practicing black magic.

What must it have felt like to be so badly mistreated? The sheer injustice of it all would burn one to the core, I thought to myself. Emotions that were so powerful indeed … perhaps even powerful enough to survive death itself.

“That’s so very sad,” Stephen said, shaking his head quietly. “The thought that they might both still be trapped here … ” “Some people would tell you that they are,” Vanessa replied, fishing a key out of her pocket. It was an ordinary house key of the sort that might open the door of any home in England.

40 Three

Exterior side of the door.

At first I was a little disappointed to find that it wasn’t an ancient old iron key of the variety that would fit the lock of Castle Dracula; then I chided myself for my foolishness.

The key may have appeared unremarkable, but there was nothing ordinary about the Cage.

Nothing ordinary at all.

A Dead Woman Speaks 41

Richard by the interior side of the door.

Stephen and I followed Vanessa up to the rear gate, which backed onto a long track running between two rows of houses.

I knew that this stretch of ground was known as “Coffin Alley,” so-called because in bygone days, villagers had used it as a means of conveying their dearly departed to the cemetery. For many years, pallbearers had grimly carried coffins atop their shoulders from one end of the alley to the other, where the deceased’s earthly journey ended once and for all.

42 Three

Stephen, Vanessa, and Richard.

The back gate was taller than I was. Its paint was chipped and peeling, leaving spots of bare wood here and there.

Although Vanessa still owned the Cage, she wasn’t living there any longer. There wasn’t enough money in the world to make her want to do that ever again. Instead, she lived elsewhere and allowed a friend of hers access to the Cage.

He would come and go as he pleased, sometimes living there for extended periods and at other times just spending a little time there. He was interested in conducting his own in-house paranormal investigation, and he apparently spent many hours trying to contact the spirits of the Cage. But now my team and I would have the place all to

A Dead Woman Speaks 43

ourselves. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Vanessa’s caretaker, but we needed to account for the whereabouts of each and every person inside the Cage during our investigation if it was going to have any scientific veracity.

I watched Vanessa’s body language with great interest as she approached the back door. When Stephen and I first met her less than an hour ago, she had seemed perky and full of life, embodying good cheer and humor; now all that had changed. She moved in the manner of one who suspected they were walking into an ambush, constantly on the lookout for threats, dangers, and enemies.

With the benefit of hindsight, I feel that Vanessa showed a great deal of courage in simply turning up to give us access to the Cage, let alone going inside to show us around. The dreadful things that she experienced while she and her young son were living inside the former prison had scarred her, both emotionally and psychologically. Her breathing had definitely picked up, and I was willing to bet that her heart rate had too.

No matter how apprehensive she felt, Vanessa forced down her fear and took control. When she inserted the key into the lock, I watched her hand closely for any sign of trembling or shaking; there was none. Taking a deep breath, she turned the key and opened the door. Looking tentatively all around her, she stepped over the threshold and into the house.

44 Three

Stephen and I both followed. To be honest, I was as excited as a child on Christmas morning. Having heard so much about the place over the past few months, I had been living in eager anticipation of this moment for weeks.

Now I was finally crossing over the threshold of what some claimed to be the most haunted prison in England. I had a solid team at my back, years of experience in the field of paranormal investigation, plenty of decent equipment, and best of all, five days and nights in which to find the answers I was searching for.

In short, I was highly confident that I could handle absolutely anything that the Cage was going to throw at me.

In reality, I hadn’t the faintest idea. Looking back, I don’t think any of us did.

The air was on the musty side and smelled of cigarettes— Vanessa’s tenant was apparently a smoker. The house was also freezing cold. I drew my warm winter jacket more closely around me as we stepped inside, allowing Stephen to close the back door firmly behind us.

I pointed out to Vanessa that it seemed colder inside the house than it did outside. She agreed that it did, and went on to say that whether it was the height of summer or the depths of winter, that was usually the case. No matter what one did, it was practically impossible to get warm and cozy inside the Cage.

A Dead Woman Speaks 45

“Do you think it’s the same for all of these houses?” I wondered, indicating the adjoining wall and the rest of the row of housing.

“No,” Vanessa shook her head. “I’ve spoken to the neighbors and some of the other people further along, they don’t have this problem in their own houses. Just here, in the Cage.”

Stephen shot me a meaningful look, as if to say: is that paranormal, or just a kooky side-effect of the architecture here? I shrugged, mentally adding that to the list of questions that already plagued this particular case.

The downstairs living area.

46 Three

Vanessa led us through into the living room, which was dominated by a black metal fireplace—a real fireplace, one that ran on wood instead of natural gas. A couple of electric heaters were used as a backup. Other than that, we’d have to bundle up warm if we were going to keep out the February cold.

“Do you want the grand tour?” Vanessa asked. “It will have to be quick. I don’t like spending a minute longer in this house than I have to, and I won’t step foot in here at all when it gets dark.”

Although half of our team hadn’t arrived yet, Stephen and I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. We’d go ahead with the tour and fill our teammates in on the details when they arrived. Eager to be off, Vanessa started to head upstairs, but I stopped her with an upraised hand.

“Just a second.” I fished a digital voice recorder out of my pocket and switched it on. “You never know what might turn up on one of these things, so I’d like to have continuous recording going on over the course of the next week.” It would turn out to be a wise decision indeed.

Stephen shot me a vaguely smug smirk and waggled his wrist. He was wearing a plain plastic bracelet that I had at first mistaken for a Fitbit or some similar fitness tracker.

“It’s a digital voice recorder too,” Stephen corrected me, tilting it at an angle so that it caught what little light there was. “But it’s also a wearable wristband. No matter what

A Dead Woman Speaks 47

I’m doing, when I’m inside the Cage, it will be recording everything that we say and do.”

“Remember that when you go to the toilet,” I shot back, secretly a little jealous that I didn’t have one myself.

The entranceway that we were all standing in was decorated with a series of old photographs, all framed and showing people from a bygone era, portrayed in drab sepia tones and hues. Vanessa had no idea who they were; she had simply found them there in the house, the remnants of a bygone age, and had felt that they somehow belonged there.

I peered at each of the faces in turn. All of them were probably long in their graves by now. There were men, women, and children alike. What was their connection with the Cage? Were they perhaps the family of a former tenant or owner?

Ever since she had started renting the Cage out to paranormal research groups, Vanessa had warmed to the theme of witches and witchcraft. Her choice of internal decor ran very much along lines that might best be described as “witchy.” Three broomsticks stood in the entryway, leaning up against one of the walls, for example. “It looks as if my ex-wife has parked here already,” I chuckled, making what was, under the circumstances, a pretty feeble joke.

48 Three

The historical photographs that were found in the Cage when Vanessa purchased the building.

A Dead Woman Speaks 49

Vanessa led us from room to room, relating its history and the paranormal experiences that she and her visitors had undergone in each. At no point during the tour did any of us see, hear, or sense anything unusual. We had no idea at the time that we were being watched and, as it would turn out, spoken to by an unseen entity.

The upstairs bathroom was dark and silent. To be honest, I found it to be really quite unremarkable—having no idea that it was one of the most active rooms in the entire house.

Leaning into the doorway, I groped around blindly for a light switch. “Is there a light in here?”

Vanessa said that there was, and told me exactly where to find it. When I flicked the switch, the bare bulb snapped on, casting a dim white glow over the bathtub, sink, and mirror.

Although we would not know it until later on that evening (when we conducted our first day’s evidence review) this was the moment at which an incredible piece of electronic voice phenomena (EVP) was recorded.

Perhaps most importantly, it was recorded on both digital voice recorders: the one that I still held loosely in my left hand and the one that Stephen wore around his wrist. This is actually something of a rarity, because quite often EVPs will turn up on one device only, seeming to completely ignore others that are running in the same area. Strangely, the two EVPs are similar but not identical, which is a difficult thing to explain.

50 Three

The upstairs bathroom.

On playing back both of the recordings and comparing them, Vanessa can be heard talking, conducting her guided tour of the Cage. Then my voice is heard, asking whether

A Dead Woman Speaks 51

the bathroom has a light. Vanessa responds that it is just behind Stephen.

It is at this point that another voice breaks into the conversation. The voice is very obviously different from any of the other three that have been heard on the recording up to that point, sounding like a rasping, croaky old woman’s voice.

Yes, says the voice, when heard on Stephen’s playback.

That’s all. The word yes. Nothing else is said.

On my recording, however, the voice says the words, In the bathroom. The complete sentence on this second recording therefore says: Yes … in the bathroom.

When we played back our recordings for analysis later that same evening, Stephen and I were stunned. We had both been standing very close together, no more than two or three feet apart on the main landing of the staircase. Why had Stephen’s recorder only picked up the word yes whereas mine had recorded the additional in the bathroom?

Due to our close proximity, if this had been any normal, ordinary voice, then each recording should have been so close to identical that the ear wouldn’t detect any difference. Could it perhaps be explained by the differences between the two recording devices? Did my digital voice recorder simply have a more sensitive microphone? We agreed that this was possible, and yet it was equally possible that the bizarre anomaly was simply down to the nature of the recording itself.

52 Three

The truth is that even with the advanced scientific knowledge and sophisticated recording technologies available to us in the twenty-first century, nobody is entirely sure of just exactly how electronic voice phenomena actually come to be recorded in the first place.

Many skeptics believe that EVPs are nothing more than random snippets of electronic noise from the atmosphere, such as stray cell phone signals or radio waves: in other words, what we think could be the voices of the dead are actually nothing more than taxi cab drivers talking to their base station, or radio station DJs entertaining their audiences. But this attempt to rationalize away a much more complex phenomenon ignores the fact that EVPs have been recorded in locations that were completely shielded from stray emissions across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, by placing them in locations known as Faraday cages (an entirely different type of cage to the one that is the subject of this book).

EVPs are usually not heard by the human ear at the time of recording, although there are occasional exceptions. For example, I was present at a sponsored ghost hunt in support of law enforcement charities in late 2015, which involved a team of paranormal investigators spending the night in the old jail at Cripple Creek, a mining town up in the mountains of Colorado. Two investigators were spending time down in the basement, conducting research and attempting to gather evidence of ghostly activity, when each

A Dead Woman Speaks 53

of them suddenly heard the sound of something akin to a person violently coughing up the contents of their lungs, or perhaps more ominously, that of a throat being cut. When the digital file was played back by the breathless investigators, they were relieved to hear that the sound was recorded with absolute clarity. Talk about feeling vindicated!

Another argument against the EVP that Stephen and I recorded having a non-paranormal explanation is the specificity of the language used on my audio track. Remember that I was standing in the bathroom, fumbling around for the light switch, and asked about there being a light … only to be told, yes, in the bathroom. If somebody is going to ascribe that particular EVP to stray radio waves or some other natural phenomenon, then they would have to be a very firm believer in coincidence.

Yet at the time of the tour, we had heard nothing unusual at all. At its conclusion, Vanessa handed me the key, wished us both the best of luck, and stepped outside. She seemed glad to be leaving, but as she walked back to her car, her eyes kept looking back toward the Cage. It was as if she couldn’t help it.

4

THE SHADOW MAN

B

efore Vanessa was able to leave that night, Stephen stopped her and asked her how she came to encounter the spirits of the Cage in the first place.

“I’m happy to tell you, Stephen, but not in there. Shall we go over to the pub?”

“Sure, but no alcohol for us,” the priest said. “We never touch a drop during an investigation. Standard protocol.”

The three of us went over to The King’s Arms and found a table that was situated well away from the windows that looked over toward the Cage. Over soft drinks, Vanessa began to tell us exactly what had led to her owning a haunted witches’ prison—and how, finally, the ghosts had driven her out.

55

56 Four

I first moved into the Cage with one of my childhood friends, Nicole Kirtley, on a warm spring bank holiday in 2004. We were both excited at the prospect of a fun, new lease on life together. I can still remember that day as if it were only yesterday, because the sense of pride and satisfaction I felt when I woke up that morning was so overwhelming. I was beyond excited, practically giddy at the prospect of moving into my dream home.

I had no idea at the time that it would turn out to be an absolute nightmare.

St Osyth Village, and especially Colchester Road where the Cage is situated, still holds the very best of childhood memories for me. The area feels warm, safe, and familiar; along that same road, more or less in the middle and directly opposite the Priory Deer Park, is the house that I grew up in.

It’s fair to say that I did have some knowledge of the Cage’s dark and tragic history prior to buying it. I had walked past the place many times, and had practically memorized the words written on the plaque mounted on the red brick outer walls that identifies it as being an ancient prison for those accused of witchcraft.

Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, I have to admit that I was blind to what that really meant.

I was fixated on the fact that the Cage represented a new home and a fresh start, and I regret to say now that I

The Shadow Man 57

spared little time to think about the evil that the house would have been witness to during its lifetime … and the possible consequences.

I wasn’t too surprised when I saw the For Sale sign posted up outside the Cage. After all, nobody seemed to own the place for very long; the place would change hands over and over again, and even the number of temporary tenants, such as renters, would have a really high turnover. It was almost as if nobody could stand living inside the place for very long. This had happened for as long as I could remember, and I would find out the reason why soon enough.

Nevertheless, I wanted it, and I was lucky enough to get it. A lot of things had to come together in order for me to become the latest owner of the Cage, but I finally found myself standing outside the back door and accepting the keys from the estate agent. Turning that key in the lock and opening the door for the first time, all I could feel was excitement and anticipation; after all, this was my dream home—something I’d wanted all my life.

It wouldn’t be long before I would start to dread walking through that door, terrified of what the night ahead of me would bring. But on that first day I was full of optimism.

Even the ever so slightly musty smell couldn’t put me off.

Nicole and I were grinning from ear to ear as we carted in all of our stuff and began to unpack. Little did we know …

58 Four

“Well, that was quite the story,” I remarked as Stephen and I let ourselves back into the Cage. We had just waved Vanessa off. Her tale had been nothing short of incredible, one of the darkest and most fascinating accounts of an active and intelligent haunting that either of us had ever heard of. “Bloody hell, but it’s cold.”

“No wonder she seemed glad to get away,” Stephen commented.

The first order of business was to get some heat going.

Stephen plugged in the electric heaters, spacing them out at either end of the front room and cranking their temperature setting up to the max. I went through into the kitchen, my whole body shivering, and began to make some hot tea.

The kitchen directly adjoined the Cage itself, which was a fairly small brick building that was somewhere around the size of most people’s guest room. All of the other rooms, including the entire upstairs floor, had been added on to the Cage many years after it was built sometime during the sixteenth century.

Relatively small and compact, the kitchen had enough room for a fridge and sink, along with a few cupboards and shelves. It would not have looked out of place in any fairly modern house.

The Shadow Man  59

The dining area and kitchen.

As I searched around and found a couple of cups, setting them down on the countertop, my eyes drifted over to the big plasma screen TV that was mounted on the kitchen wall. Used by Vanessa’s tenant, Micky, to keep an eye on the goings-on throughout the house, it displayed the feeds from multiple security cameras that had been placed in each room (except the bathrooms, of course). Everything seemed to be quiet for now. Nothing stirred within the Cage, apart from a shower of tiny dust particles that danced across the screen from time to time when an air current disturbed them.

60 Four

“The heaters are up and running.” Stephen wandered into the kitchen and looked around. “So this is where it all started for Vanessa, huh?”

“Yes,” I agreed. “This is where she first realized that the Cage was haunted. And just like us, she was standing right here, making a cup of tea … ” We’d unpacked the essentials first, which included a brandnew electric kettle. It was just coming to the boil. I was leaning against the kitchen countertop when it happened, still lost in a daydream and trying to get used to the idea that I actually owned the Cage.

Dropping a teabag into each of the cups, I carefully poured in the hot water and stood there, waiting patiently for the tea to steep. I could see out into Coffin Alley, which was quiet and peaceful.

When I heard the footsteps behind me, I naturally assumed that it was Nicole. After all, why wouldn’t I? She was the only other person inside the house, as far as I knew.

“You’re just in time,” I called out cheerfully, reaching for the milk. “The tea’s made.”

When there was no response, I thought it was kind of odd. Turning around slowly, I fully expected to see Nicole creeping up on me, trying to be stealthy and give me a good scare. But it wasn’t Nicole at all, and what I actually saw almost gave me a heart attack.

The Shadow Man 61

The figure that stood right behind me was tall and absolutely black. It had no identifiable features of any kind; in fact, it looked as though a child had taken a black crayon or marker and scribbled a big human-shaped dark outline in the middle of thin air somehow. The edges were blurred, not clearly defined at all.

I couldn’t say for certain, but I got the impression that the shadow figure was a man, not a woman. It was very robust in size and build, standing a good six feet tall, broad in the shoulders with long, solid legs.

I couldn’t move a muscle, and neither could I speak; I was so shocked and stunned at what I saw that the old clichés about time standing still proved true. I really could feel my heart pounding away in my chest, fast and hard, while my mouth went as dry as cotton. Every instinct was screaming at me to run, to get out of there, but I couldn’t move a muscle. My feet were rooted to the spot, and just like the rest of my body, they flatly refused to obey the commands that were coming furiously from my brain.

Besides, a deeper, quieter voice inside me reasoned, where are you going to go? That thing is standing between you and the only way out of here …

Was this real—was it really happening, or could it be all just a part of my daydream? I wanted to pinch myself to make absolutely sure, but deep down I was absolutely certain that this was real. I could make out every detail on

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the wall behind the shadow figure, the scuff marks left by our feet on the kitchen tiles … this was no hallucination.

I don’t know how long we stood there facing each other, just looking at one another. The shadow man didn’t have any eyes, but I knew somehow that he was staring me down, like a predator hungrily eyeing its prey. There wasn’t much I could do but stare back. Time passed. It can’t have been more than a few minutes, because Nicole was still pottering about the place, but to me it seemed like an eternity had gone by.

My body had broken out in a cold sweat. I was absolutely terrified. How on Earth was something like this happening to me in my own kitchen, of all places, in broad daylight?

Without uttering a word or making even the smallest sound, the shadow man suddenly turned and began to move off in the direction of the front room. As he moved, he began to slowly fade away, until by the time he had reached the doorway connecting the Cage to the front room, he had completely disappeared into thin air.

I let out a breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

My head felt light and dizzy, and I brought a hand up to massage my temple. At least my body was doing its job again. Concerned that I might faint, I reluctantly turned round and clutched at the countertop for support. Looking through the kitchen window, I caught sight of Nicole, still breezily unloading boxes of our stuff from the back of the car. It couldn’t possibly have been Nicole’s footsteps that I

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had heard coming from behind me in the kitchen. She had been outside all this time.

Fortunately for her, Nicole was blissfully unaware that we were sharing our new home with at least one uninvited guest … the shadow man.

As we sat by the fire, drinking tea and talking, I gave some serious thought to telling Nicole about my experience in the kitchen. Ultimately, I decided against it; she had been diagnosed with cancer and was scheduled to have surgery in order to remove a large tumor. The Cage was supposed to be a place of rest and recuperation for her, and telling her that it was haunted wasn’t exactly going to provide her with peace of mind.

Deciding it was best not to tell her for now, I pushed the frightening experience out of my mind that first evening. We talked and laughed as good friends do, and then slept side by side on inflatable air mattresses in the master bedroom. Nicole was asleep long before I was. I lay awake into the small hours of the morning that first night, reliving my encounter with the shadow man in nauseating detail.

Who was he? What did he want? And most importantly of all, did he mean us any harm? There were no answers forthcoming that night, but it didn’t stop me from tensing up every time a shadow seemed to move.

That was my welcome to the Cage.

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Some full-bodied apparitions are every bit as solid as you or I, to the point where they will even touch the living on occasion. It isn’t unusual for the person encountering them to mistake them for a flesh-and-blood person, interacting with them without even the slightest suspicion that they are in fact talking to a ghost. But such encounters are relatively rare. Ask any paranormal investigator about shadow figures, on the other hand, and they’ll tell you that they are actually fairly common.

Over the course of my own career, I have encountered shadow figures in locations as diverse as an old hospital, a sanatorium, a railway station, a country and western roadhouse, far too many private residences to mention, and even an Italian restaurant, of all places. The shadow man or woman seems to be ubiquitous.

Sometimes the shadow figures act as though they are completely unaware of the presence of the eyewitness that is watching them, simply going about their business without reacting to the living human being who catches sight of them. But others seem to be fully aware that they are being watched, and may even interact with the eyewitness if it suits their purpose. Vanessa’s shadow man was of the second type; we can infer this because he stopped in his tracks and seemed to watch Vanessa, engaging her in some type of staring contest, before seeming to grow bored and taking his leave. Those aren’t the actions of a residual type of haunt (a sort of natural recording)—the fact that the figure

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was aware of Vanessa’s existence and acknowledged it suggests that the first spirit she encountered inside the Cage was all too intelligent.

And it wasn’t it alone.

The shadow man wasn’t the only strange thing that happened to me in the kitchen—far from it. During the working week, my routine was always the same: as soon as I came home from my sales job, I would head straight to the kitchen to make a cup of refreshing tea.

Walking into the kitchen after work one evening, I headed for the sink to fill up the kettle. What I saw on top of the kitchen unit caught my interest, though: it looked like a sheet of typed A4 paper. Curiously, I picked it up and scanned its contents—and nearly dropped it, so great was my surprise.

This wasn’t just any old piece of paper. This was a death certificate—the death certificate of a man who had, until fairly recently, owned the Cage.

To make matters worse, he had died in here, taking his own life by hanging himself from a beam at the top of the staircase a year before Nicole and I had moved in.

I hadn’t known the poor man personally, but my heart went out to him. Suicide is always a tragic thing, and I felt nothing but sympathy for whatever torment and suffering had pushed him to such desperate lengths. While I had known about the man’s death before I had purchased the

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Cage (word gets around in a village as small as St Osyth), I hadn’t let it influence my decision on whether or not to buy the place. After all, he and I hadn’t known each other or had any kind of personal connection.

Yet now, reading the contents of his death certificate line by line, it suddenly did seem personal to me. It revealed such details as the exact date of his death and the specific manner of his death. What really felt peculiar, however, was the fact that Nicole and I had been living in the Cage for several weeks now, and knew pretty much where everything was. So how was it that the death certificate had suddenly turned up on top of the kitchen unit after all this time—a year after the poor man’s death?

I examined the document a little more closely. It was in pristine condition; there wasn’t a fold, crease, or a mark anywhere on it. The death certificate couldn’t have looked any fresher if it had just emerged from a laser printer. To tell you the truth, I found it more than a little unnerving. My brain was searching for a logical explanation and grasped at the first unlikely straw it found: perhaps Nicole had found it somewhere inside the Cage and had left it out for me to read.

But wouldn’t she have left me a note, explaining just that?

An hour later I got my answer when she walked through the door and came into the kitchen. She took the death certificate from me, scanned it, and shook her head. No, Nicole told me, she had never seen it before in her life. To make matters even more complicated, I

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had purchased the Cage from a couple who had, in turn, bought it from the widow of the deceased. What were the odds that the death certificate had been inside the house ever since then, and that all of us had failed to spot it?

That was when we both started to get scared. The only other explanation we could come up with was that somebody was trying to frighten or intimidate us, which meant that they must have broken in. Together we searched the Cage from top to bottom, checking every door and window. They were all secure and undamaged; we found no signs of a break-in at all.

Not really expecting to find anything out, I showed the death certificate to a few of the locals that I knew.

None of them had any explanation either. Although I kept my suspicions to myself, I began to suspect that this might be a message or a sign of some sort, possibly from the deceased owner himself. Was he trying to tell me that he was still there in the Cage?

The man’s wife had understandably sold the Cage as soon as she could and moved out, relieved to be rid of the place and its unhappy association with the death of her husband. What she said she couldn’t understand, I was to learn years later, was why “some people were claiming that my husband’s death certificate was found in the Cage? Only one copy of it was ever made, and the coroner sent that directly to me.”

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I have no reason to disbelieve her, but as far as I’m concerned, that only deepens the mystery. If the single copy was sent to the man’s widow, how could one have possibly turned up in the kitchen inside the Cage? To this day I don’t have an answer. But I will tell you this … it was definitely a sign of things to come.

5

THE GROWLING On a bright, sunny afternoon during my first summer living inside the Cage, my cousin Kirstine kindly came over to help me out with some paperwork and other chores around the house. Kirstine was a year older than me, extremely organized, and with far more spare time on her hands than me. In fact, she would often visit the Cage in order to help out with various things.

I soon fell into the habit of leaving a key under the doormat so Kirstine could let herself in. That’s exactly what Kirstine did on this particular day, but there was no way she could possibly have known that something was about to happen that would change the way she viewed the Cage … forever.

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Kirstine happened to be in the kitchen, pottering around and doing nothing in particular, when she suddenly found herself feeling uneasy. When I asked her about it later, she would describe it as a feeling of icy coldness—she had experienced similar feelings before inside the Cage. But what she felt this day was somehow different: stranger and more intense. Kirstine still remembers the incident vividly: she was standing next to the kitchen sink, looking out of the window toward Coffin Alley. Her back was turned to the prison room, and her mind wasn’t occupied with much of anything when suddenly she felt several small thuds hitting her back in rapid succession, accompanied by the noise of something dropping to the kitchen floor multiple times.

Puzzled, and more than a little scared (Kirstine was fully aware that she was all alone in the house), she whirled around to face her attacker. Nobody was standing there.

The kitchen and prison room were both completely deserted.

Nothing was out of place except that there on the floor by her feet were six small packets of sugar—like the ones that you get from fast food restaurants.

Kirstine knew with one hundred percent certainty that the sugar sachets had been sitting on the kitchen countertop next to the sugar bowl when she arrived earlier that day, and there was no way that they could have possibly flown over to her all by themselves.

Looking around, she wracked her brains to find a rational

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explanation for what had happened, but she finally came up short. There were no windows open anywhere inside the Cage, and there was very little wind outside to have blown the sugar across the room in any case. Besides, there were various pieces of paper—letters, bills, and the envelopes they had arrived in—scattered around here and there, and none of them had been disturbed at all.

Although she was aware of the Cage’s reputation for being “a little bit spooky,” Kirstine had always felt fairly comfortable there, even when she was on her own. But all of that changed on that day. She never looked at the old prison in quite the same way ever again. Somebody had been trying to send her a message, and although throwing packets of sugar wasn’t likely to cause her any real harm, the implication could have been taken in one of several ways. Whichever spirit had done it may have been simply trying to draw attention to itself; it might have been feeling playful; its motives may have been far less friendly.

She would never know for sure. But one thing was for certain: so far as Kirstine was concerned, the Cage had now become a place of fear, and she would never feel comfortable alone there ever again.

The first few weeks that Vanessa and Nicole spent living inside the Cage were far from terrifying, but it’s fair to say that things were getting progressively weirder. Perhaps

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the most confirming thing was a pervasive maggot and fly infestation that had struck unexpectedly. Suddenly it seemed that the verminous creatures were everywhere, and the girls had their hands full trying to keep them from overrunning the house.

Out of consideration for Nicole’s illness, Vanessa hadn’t mentioned her kitchen encounter with the male shadow figure—but she kept her eyes and ears open, and she was quietly taking note of every strange occurrence inside her new home. It soon grew to be quite the list.

Lots of their personal items (far too many to be just coincidence) seemingly disappeared into thin air, before turning up in the most unusual of places. At first, she and Nicole shrugged uneasily and simply put it down to the sheer disorganization of the house; their things still weren’t fully unpacked yet, after all, but deep down, Vanessa knew that it was something far more sinister than that.

A tap in the upstairs bathroom developed a habit of turning itself on and running cold water long after it had been turned off. Once or twice might be written off as simple forgetfulness, but after the third time, Vanessa and Nicole became almost paranoid about turning the taps off after every use. It made no difference: they would go back to their bedrooms or head downstairs and after a while the sound of running water would be heard from above their heads. It soon reached the point where the girls woke up first thing in the morning to find the tap blasting out gallons of

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water into the sink. To make matters worse, the water supply inside the Cage was metered, and the girls were billed for every single drop that was used. It wasn’t long before their utility bills reached near astronomical proportions.

To add insult to injury, electrical appliances inside the Cage also seemed to have a life of their own. For example, the volume control on the TV liked to turn itself up and down at random; the kettle would switch itself on and heat up to the boil, whether there was water inside it or not; and the CD player began to blast out the greatest hits of the band Oasis, operating without human intervention at all hours of the day and night.

By now the girls were beginning to accept the fact that their new home was undeniably haunted. After all, what other explanation was there? Potentially bad wiring and plumbing could only be stretched so far and explain so much. Yet they gradually came to terms with the ghostly activity that was fast becoming the new status quo inside the Cage.

They had no idea that things were going to get much, much worse.

Summer gave way to autumn, and before Nicole and I knew it, October had arrived. The paranormal activity around the house was now constant and was steadily getting worse, growing stronger and more intrusive with every passing day.

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Each morning that Nicole and I woke up, the house would feel just that little bit colder. The old single-glazed sash windows provided little in the way of protection from the chilly English weather. The giant trees that had grown in the priory land opposite the Cage for hundreds of years were beginning to slowly lose their brown and orange leaves, and it would not be long until the spiky, twisted branches were fully exposed and the feeling of impending winter engulfed the village.

The atmosphere inside the Cage seemed to be changing along with the seasons; I wasn’t quite sure what the house was going to throw at me next, but I was absolutely convinced that the worst was still to come. The afternoons were starting to draw in, and it was already dark by the time four o’clock came around. There was a constant smell of burning wood and coal in the air, drifting up from the many chimneys in the village, and the fog regularly rolled in from the sea. Nicole and I felt as though we were living in a Stephen King novel or a Hammer horror movie—it was surreal, to say the least.

My work hours had been reduced due to the end of the working summer season, which meant that I was spending a lot more time in the house than I ever had before. That, in turn, meant that I was getting to know the Cage’s distinct personality in an entirely different way.

The mornings were dark, the afternoons were dark, and there were only limited hours of daylight to be taken

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advantage of. The summer sun was long since gone, and it had taken the last of the die-hard holiday makers along with it. St Osyth was left at peace once again, free from the endless tourist traffic and the hordes of strangers that liked milling around our little village.

Also gone was the background noise from the late night drinkers who liked to hang out at the tables outside The King’s Arms pub next door. We had found the sound to be an annoyance when we first moved in, but now that peace and quiet had descended, Nicole and I both missed the laughter and chatter. It had been reassuring, a welcome touch of normality and comfort just a few yards outside of the Cage. The celebrations reminded us that even though we were stuck living in a haunted house, normal life was still going on out there—it was business as usual for the pub regulars, at least. They weren’t living in a state of fear, which the two of us were finding to be a constant companion once darkness fell.

Every morning when I got out of bed (usually around half-past seven), my first job before anything else was to light the log-burning fire in the front room and attempt to warm the Cage up a little. It would then fall to Nicole to keep the fire going during the daytime, when I was at work, to make sure that the place was still heated when night fell.

For as long as I live, I will never forget something that happened in that very first week of October when temperatures plummeted down toward freezing.

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I came downstairs early one morning, yawning and rubbing the sleep from my eyes, with the intent of fetching the wood and coal from the yard and getting the fire going.

Still wearing my dressing gown, I went into the front room to prepare the fire. My heart sank when I saw that the TV, CD player, my laptop, and every single one of the lights downstairs had been switched on sometime during the night.

As strange as it may sound, this wasn’t such an unusual occurrence in the Cage; it had happened before several times. But this time, things were different … and not in a good way.

I was standing there, looking around the front room and getting ready to start switching off the electrical devices, when I heard it—right in my ear, as clear as day, there came a low, deep, disembodied growl. For just an instant, my first thought was that it was some type of animal. After a couple of heartbeats had passed, I realized that explanation was plainly ridiculous. I couldn’t see anyone or anything else in the room, let alone standing right next to my head. The noise was so close to my ear that it would have been totally impossible for me not to have seen the cause.

There was something unnatural about the sound.

While it may have been short, it felt malicious—pure evil. It certainly put the fear of God into me, I can tell

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you that. I started to tremble, looking all around me for a rational explanation … and finding nothing.

I usually pinpoint that morning as the moment when everything changed for the worse. Whatever it was that had been haunting the house had chosen to take a step forward, making me aware of its existence in no uncertain terms. By allowing me to hear its voice, and to feel its dark, spine-chilling malevolence, I got the strong impression that it wanted me to be afraid of it. The growl had sounded beast-like, inhuman, and I can’t help but think that this was a calculated move on the part of the entity, an attempt to frighten me as much as it possibly could.

Sadly it was a tactic that worked. In the aftermath of the growl, I felt physically sick, temporarily overcome with raw fear. This couldn’t be written off as mischievous or playful, unlike the taps being turned on and the electrical devices appearing to have a mind of their own; this was something far more sinister and downright threatening.

Even my encounter with the shadow figure in the kitchen hadn’t terrified me to this extent. For the first time since we had moved in to the Cage, I was forced to reluctantly conclude that at least one of its resident spirits wanted to harm me.

Our first night inside the Cage was fairly uneventful.

Stephen and I would be alone for the evening, with the remainder of our team joining us the following morning.

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Before they arrived, we wanted to lay some of the groundwork for the rest of the week.

Gathering baseline measurements is a key part of any serious paranormal investigation. As investigators, we try to measure as many atmospheric components as we reasonably can, which depends upon the type and quality of the equipment that we have, the number of observers available to us on the team, and the amount of square footage that has to be covered. We felt blessed by the fact that the Cage was a relatively small place; the four of us could cover most of it with ease.

Measuring the strength of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) within the house is a must. While there is no definitively proven link between high (or low, for that matter) EMF levels and paranormal activity, many researchers have theorized that strong electromagnetic fields may act as a power source, fueling some of the phenomena that we hope to capture during our investigation. Others have found bizarre and seemingly inexplicable EMF spikes at haunted locations, and have subsequently advanced the idea that this may indicate the presence of an invisible entity of some kind.

EMFs can be found all around us these days. Television sets, microwaves, refrigerators, freezers, lights, computers … you name it; if it uses electricity, then it will generate an electromagnetic field. Some are stronger than others.

The human body even generates its own electromagnetic field—if you’ve ever had a doctor perform an EKG on you,

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then you’ve seen a visual representation of the part of that field that controls your heartbeat.

As paranormal investigators, we have tools to measure these fields. Before kicking off an investigation properly, it is necessary to establish a baseline of those levels. Generally, we’ll mark the levels on a floor plan of the property in question. That’s exactly what we did in the Cage. There were no surprises; the building wasn’t that electrically active, other than the lights and the surveillance camera setup. Stephen and I made sure to set our phones and tablets to airplane mode, making sure that they wouldn’t transmit or receive any cellular signals. We’ve seen incoming texts set off EMF meters before, momentarily throwing us off track while we waste time trying to locate something that isn’t remotely paranormal in nature.

Unsurprisingly, temperatures throughout the Cage were uniformly cold. Many people have remarked on the fact that it always seemed to feel colder inside the Cage than it did outside, no matter the weather. I made a point of measuring the ambient temperature outside, and found it to be several degrees colder outdoors—which was exactly as it should be, considering that it was a typically chill English February. But I did find it intriguing that people seemed to feel permanently cold inside the old prison, no matter what time of year it was. Was this a purely psychological phenomenon, attributable to the power of suggestion, or was there something inexplicable at work? Cold spots and

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drafts are par for the course at haunted locations, and they would be something that we’d need to keep a watchful eye out for while investigating the Cage.

Apart from the EVP that we had both recorded on the upstairs landing, nothing of note happened to us on our first night. Cranking up the electric heaters to their maximum setting, Stephen and I settled into comfortable spots in the front room. I chose the couch, stretching out my legs and throwing a blanket over them. My priestly friend preferred an old armchair that was located between the fireplace and the front window.

I’m not sure which one of us fell asleep first, but it wasn’t long before the jet lag began to take its toll. Far from being frightening or sinister, we found the atmosphere inside the living room to be friendly and welcoming.

We had chosen to nap in the living room that first night because Vanessa and her friends had experienced a number of paranormal events in there, including the growl that had frightened her so badly, and we were hopeful that the same thing might happen to us.

Neither of us realized at the time that it was destined to be our first, and more importantly our last, undisturbed night spent inside the Cage.

6

BLOODY COLD!

One warm summer evening after another grueling day at work, I came home at around seven o’clock. It was still light outside, and Nicole was already at home, making dinner for us both as she did most nights. After we had eaten, we both flopped ourselves down on the sofa, intending to relax and talk about our day.

Music was playing in the background, and the mood was light. Nicole and I were chatting away quite happily, chilling out and laughing, when something strange caught my eye. It was a glimmer of light, high up in the air and very near to the ceiling.

Frowning, I looked up and saw what I can only describe as a collection of tiny, twinkling lights, much like the flickers that come off the sparklers on Guy Fawkes 81

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Night or the Fourth of July. They were incredibly bright, dancing around one another very excitedly like a swarm of fireflies. I was totally captivated, and my attention stayed riveted to them as they steadily increased in number. What had started out as perhaps six or seven lights soon grew to twenty, then fifty, and then what seemed like thousands. I had lost count long before then.

As the lights multiplied, they began to fill up the room, losing height and drawing nearer to Nicole and me. We watched them in a trance-like state for what can’t have been more than four or five minutes. I managed to drag my attention away from the lights for a moment and slowly turned toward Nicole, who was staring up at the ceiling with wide eyes. I could see the lights reflected in those eyes, which were hardly blinking. Softly, I asked her whether she was seeing what I was seeing.

“If you mean all those dancing lights, then yes, I am,” she answered without taking her eyes from them for an instant.

To this day, it is something that neither of us has forgotten. We both just sat there in silence, hardly daring to breathe and utterly transfixed on this magical light show, the likes of which neither of us had ever seen before … and probably never will again.

I’m not sure exactly how much time passed, but after a while, the dancing sparkles slowly began to shrink in number, before finally dispersing into the same thin air from

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which they had come. For a few moments, I reveled in the warm fuzzy feeling that the lights had brought with them.

I didn’t know why they had come and had no idea of their purpose, but they were accompanied by a feeling that I can only describe as being good and peaceful, even tranquil.

Looking back on the experience now with the benefit of hindsight, I can’t help but wonder if they came that day from the spirit world as a kind of protection or some form of reassurance—perhaps a case of, “Don’t worry too much, Vanessa, because we’re watching over you.”

If that really was the case, then this show of support couldn’t have arrived at a better time … because events were soon to take a terrible turn: a turn that was both terrifying in its intensity and impossible to ignore.

Between us, Stephen and I had somewhere in the region of fifty years’ worth of paranormal investigative experience under our belts. For the remainder of our team, we had decided to go with a pair of complete newbies, two ladies who had never done anything like this before in their entire lives.

Our rationale was a simple one: they would be full of enthusiasm for the hunt and also refreshingly free of the biases and prejudices that tend to build up after one has spent a lot of time in the field of paranormal research. An infusion of fresh blood might be just what the doctor ordered.

The ladies traveled together and parked their car outside the Cage early on Sunday afternoon. Stephen and I were

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still somewhat bleary-eyed, despite having gone off-site for showers and a hot meal, but we were raring to go. Hugs and introductions were very much on the cards, as neither Lesley nor Caroline had met Stephen before.

Lesley was fifty-three years old and made her living as a pawnbroker’s assistant. Although she didn’t work in a scientific or technical field, she brought a wealth of life experience to the table, and had always wanted to learn more about what might lie on the other side of the veil. She had been asking me repeatedly for the chance to accompany me on a paranormal investigation, and now she was going to get her wish.

Caroline, Vanessa, and Lesley.

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Our investigation team.

Down to earth and always ready with a pragmatic solution to a problem, Lesley would prove to be a willing and capable volunteer. She also made a mean cup of tea, which biased me enormously in her favor when it came down to deciding who would come on board for the investigation.

She would go on to experience several inexplicable things within the walls of the Cage that would permanently change the way in which she viewed the world.

Caroline (or ‘Caz’ to her friends) was notoriously camera-shy. It was a rare thing indeed to catch her unawares in a photograph. She was forty-one years old and worked as a nurse in the community. I liked the idea of having a fellow

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medical professional on the team, as such people tend to perform well under pressure and are often the go-to people in a crisis.

“I’ve never really believed in the paranormal, to be honest,” she told me during an interview, “and unless I see something with my own eyes or experience it for myself, I don’t think that I ever will.”

Perfect, I thought to myself on hearing that. An absolute skeptic without any preconceived notions from other paranormal investigations. She’ll be the one that keeps us all grounded if our imaginations start running away with us.

Stephen is a red, white, and blue-blooded American through and through, whereas I am an Englishman born and bred, albeit one who had relocated to the United States and earned dual nationality—I’m fiercely loyal to and proud of both countries. Lesley and Caz are also both Brits, making it a very Anglo-centric team.

It would prove to be a week that none of us would ever forget.

Considering that 75 percent of the team was British, the first order of business was an obvious one: make a cup of tea.

Although everybody would take turns making tea over the coming week, Lesley seemed to make twice as much as everybody else—one of the advantages of her stellar reputation.

After giving them a tour of the Cage and passing on much of what Vanessa had told us, I suggested that we all take a seat in the front room and begin devising a game

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plan. Although a full working week sounded like plenty of time to unearth the mysteries of the Cage, both Stephen and I knew from past experience that the time would soon fly by once things started happening.

Lesley chose the armchair just to the left of the main window. It had seen better days, but it was comfortable enough.

Stephen and I dropped down onto the couch (my bed for a portion of the night before) and Caz leaned against the wall.

“I’m bored,” Lesley complained, only halfway seriously.

“I wish something would happen. Something paranormal.”

It was her first ever paranormal investigation, and Stephen reminded her of the fact that 90 percent of the time spent during an investigation involves sitting around fruitlessly, either waiting for something to happen or trying to stimulate it through experimentation.

Because of its status as a historic old building, the Cage isn’t particularly well-insulated, which probably explains why it is always cold, no matter how balmy the weather might be outside. However, one soon gets used to the small drafts, which are usually very minor in nature. In fact, shortly after Lesley sat down in the window seat, a heavy eighteen-wheeler truck rushed past outside at a worryingly high speed. Despite the buffeting of air that such a massive vehicle would kick up, Lesley experienced nothing more than a minor breeze, barely enough to rustle the hair on the back of her head. It certainly wasn’t cold.

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The team quickly became engrossed in a discussion, laying plans for the evening ahead. What goals did we want to accomplish over the coming week’s investigation? How much attention did we want to devote to each room? Which research methods would work the best … Ouija boards? K2 and Trifield EMF meters? The human pendulum? EVP digital voice recording sessions? Scrying? Dowsing? There were a lot of options spread across the entire spectrum from the more esoteric metaphysical and spiritual techniques to the high-tech gadgetry and gizmos that seem to be the hallmark of the twenty-first century paranormal investigator.

There was no single approach that worked best. Sometimes the electronic evidence came thick and fast, while the planchette (pointer) on the Ouija board obstinately refused to move. At other times, the planchette would fly around the board at the lightest touch from the participants, but absolutely no anomalous voices would be heard when the digital recordings were played back. It was simply impossible to tell which would be true at any given location, and so the four newest inmates of the Cage were going to run the gamut.

It was all too easy to forget the most obvious paranormal research tool of them all: The human senses themselves. Whether we are skeptical, true believers in the paranormal, or somewhere in-between, we can all agree that most human beings have five basic senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing. Others claim to have additional senses that allow them to perceive different realms, such as

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the world of spirits. Vanessa claims that she possesses such abilities, as does Stephen, to a certain degree.

We reminded one another that one of the best “spirit detectors” (if not the best) was often the human body itself.

The team had been talking for the better part of thirty minutes when suddenly Lesley let out a cry. Leaping to her feet, she turned around to face the chair. The other three investigators sat bolt upright, all of them staring at Lesley with quizzical looks upon their faces.

“What is it, Lesley?” Caz asked.

“Bloody cold!” Lesley exclaimed, hugging herself in the manner of somebody who was outdoors in the middle of a winter snowstorm. “I’ve suddenly gone ice cold!” She took several steps backward and shot the chair an accusatory look. It was completely unoccupied, as far as the human eye could see, at any rate.

Stephen reached for a digital thermometer and used it to test the ambient air temperature just above the chair. It turned out to be one and a half degrees cooler than the rest of the room, which is hardly significant, and certainly couldn’t explain Lesley’s disproportionate reaction.

Nor did Lesley’s body measure any colder when we checked it with a thermometer. Yet over the course of the next fifteen minutes, she reported feeling chillier and chillier.

Finally, she began to shiver, and her teeth began to chatter.

“I give up,” Lesley muttered, reaching for her heavy winter coat. It was only after she had slipped her arms into

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the sleeves and zipped the coat up to her chin that she began to feel warmer once again.

“You’re the one who wanted something to happen,” I smirked, less than graciously. “I’d say that your challenge was accepted. Wouldn’t you?”

Lesley shot me a look that would curdle milk at fifty paces.

“Be careful what you wish for,” Stephen added with a distinct twinkle in his eye.

Caz, Stephen, and I all took turns sitting in the same chair for a while. None of us experienced anything even remotely similar to that which spooked Lesley, and so we were forced to conclude that her experience was either psychogenic in nature (essentially a product of her own mind, rather than an objective temperature drop) or was a genuinely inexplicable experience … possibly an interaction with one of the spirits of the Cage.

Lesley pointedly stopped expressing her feeling of boredom after that.

“Do you know that feeling you get when you say, oh, somebody just walked over my grave?” Lesley explained afterward. “Well, that’s exactly how it felt. But it was quick … so quick. A freezing cold sensation that shot right through my chest and then all over my body.”

It looked as though another cup of tea was in order, if for no other reason than to help warm Lesley up a bit. After roughly fifteen minutes had passed, she was back to feeling

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like her self again and felt comfortable enough to take off her jacket.

The team began to discuss the possible causes of Lesley’s unusual experience. It would be foolish to ignore the psychological aspects: after all, when you are spending the night in what is reputed to be one of Britain’s most haunted houses, there is a very real tendency for the brain to interpret every creaky floorboard as a ghostly footstep and every moving shadow as a spirit form. Could Lesley have suffered some sort of panic attack, brought on by what she knew of the Cage and its fearsome reputation?

Choosing my words carefully and remaining as tactful as I possibly could, I asked Lesley about her medical history. Completely up front about it, Lesley said that she had never experienced a panic attack before and had never been diagnosed with anxiety or any other similar conditions— nor had there been any apparent emotional stressors at the time. The whole team had been relaxed, chatting casually with one another and settling into their new environment.

The mood was one of general optimism and healthy camaraderie, and Lesley reported feeling absolutely calm.

While this did not absolutely rule out the possibility of her experiencing her first ever anxiety attack in that chair, it did make it extremely unlikely. At the time of writing (September of 2016), Lesley has not experienced anything even remotely like it.

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The episode had struck like lightning out of a clear blue sky and resolved itself fairly quickly. Although Lesley’s symptoms were all entirely subjective in nature, and her experience could quite possibly have had an entirely rational explanation, it did make for an intriguing start to the week.

Just as Vanessa had told us when we first arrived, welcome to the Cage.

7

HELLOWEEN

During that first October spent living in the Cage, I experienced more paranormal activity then I could ever have thought possible. The pokers and brushes that hung from the mantelpiece above the fireplace would swing back and forth without any breeze to push them; often, the door at the bottom of the staircase would fly open and then slam violently shut, with no human force to move it; knives, forks, and spoons took to flying off the draining board in the kitchen all by themselves, and objects that had been left in the front room would often levitate up into the air, as though they had been picked up by some unseen hand.

The electrical equipment in the house was still going berserk, along with the lights, which switched themselves on 93

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and off at all hours of the day and night. The atmosphere got progressively thicker and darker—it seemed to me as if an energy or intelligence of some kind was now present in the house, one that was hell-bent on taking over and influencing the way in which Nicole and I lived our everyday lives.

The thick fog now arrived in the village practically every afternoon, as regular as clockwork, blanketing the ground before rising up slowly as afternoon gave way to the evening until finally, only the heads of the deer and stag could be seen in the deer park across the street from the Cage.

Cawing from the murders of black crows now echoed on the still evening air. The seasonal change was palpable, and as the mood and atmosphere in the ancient little village of St Osyth changed, so did the Cage.

All Hallows Eve had nearly arrived, and quite frankly, both of us were glad to see the back of what had been the worst month in the house yet. Tensions within the house were close to reaching breaking point. Nicole and I were both wound up so very tightly, a direct result of living constantly on a knife edge.

Finally, as a last-ditch effort to perk up our mood, we both had the somewhat inspired idea of throwing ourselves a Halloween party. Neither of us particularly wanted to spend Halloween in the house by ourselves, so it seemed as though the perfect solution was to surround

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ourselves with good friends, good music, and some good drink in the guise of a witches’ brew that was liberally laced with an entirely different type of spirits to those that we were getting used to living with inside the Cage.

All we wanted was to have a little fun, let our hair down, and simply get through the night without a major incident, forgetting our worries and cares for just one special evening. We decided that we would dress up as witches, complete with long black capes and tall, pointy black witches’ hats.

Early on that Halloween afternoon, Nicole and I decked out the house in fake spider webs, strategically positioned plastic skeletons, big black rats, and cockroaches all around the Cage, and then set to carving out pumpkins into all manner of spooky faces, before lighting candles inside them to make for some appropriate mood lighting. At around 5:30 pm, we both went upstairs to get showered and ready for our big party night.

A short while later, I was just about to open my bedroom door to head into the bathroom when I heard the sound of heavy feet clumping down the stairs. The footsteps were either both heavy and very forceful—the sort that a large man might make—or Nicole was really angry about something. That was unlikely, because she had been fine when I had seen her just a few minutes before.

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Puzzled, I opened my bedroom door and stepped out onto the top landing. No sooner had I gone out there than I heard an almighty slam. It was the door at the bottom of the stairs—the slam was so loud that when I craned my neck to look, I saw the door physically shake in its frame with the force of impact.

I could feel my face flush with anger: the door is an original, made of very old wood that was no longer in the best of condition. It would damage easily when it was slammed that forcefully. Bloody hell, I thought to myself, what’s the matter with her! I stood at the top of the stairs for a moment, looking down the twisted flight of scuffed wooden steps, took a deep breath, and bellowed: “Jesus, Nicole, who’s pissed you off!?! Why are you slamming that door?”

It was a very bewildered Nicole that came up from behind me and asked what all the yelling was about.

Fully believing that I was alone upstairs, I nearly jumped out of my skin when she emerged from her bedroom.

After I made a hasty apology for shouting at her, Nicole and I looked at one another with dawning horror when we realized that if it wasn’t either one of us that had stormed downstairs and slammed the door so violently, then who else was inside our home? Our minds were conjuring up images of armed intruders and psychopathic axe murderers, which wasn’t all that hard for us to believe on Halloween night.

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Hesitantly we both crept downstairs, ready to solve this mystery and confront the intruder as a pair. After all, wasn’t there safety in numbers? We were getting angrier with every step we took. Any burglar would have a real challenge on his hands, forced to take on two enraged girls who he dared threaten in their own home.

When we reached the bottom of the staircase, Nicole and I found that the door that led out into Coffin Alley was securely locked; no early party guests had let themselves in, and no intruder was to be found anywhere inside the Cage after we had searched high and low. The old house was empty and quiet, apart from the occasional crackle and hiss coming from the kindling inside the wood burner.

In stunned bewilderment, we stood there in the middle of the front room, just staring at one another. We both heard the footsteps and the resultant slam. With the Cage being locked up tight, who else could have been responsible but one of the resident ghosts? And from the sound of it, this particular entity wasn’t in a friendly mood.

We both sat down on the sofa, pouring ourselves a large, fortifying glass of punch and tried to make sense of what had just happened—something that we failed spectacularly to do. Finally, we decided that the wisest course of action would be to go back upstairs and just carry on with what we were doing before we were so rudely interrupted.

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“The show must go on,” I laughed, in a feeble attempt at lightening the mood. There didn’t seem any other option, so we both went back upstairs to continue getting ready. The first of the party guests would start arriving at any moment, and we still had to get washed and dressed up in our costumes. I went into the bathroom and stood by the sink, looking into the mirror and getting ready to run some hot water.

I sensed instantly that something was suddenly very wrong, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on exactly what it was. The bathroom light was on, and as I looked at my own reflection in the mirror, the reason for my newfound sense of fear was suddenly made clear.

Standing right behind me, reflected clearly just over my right shoulder, was the tall, dark figure of a man— another shadow figure, just like the one that had stopped to stare at me in the kitchen weeks before. Based upon its large, intimidating build (not to mention my own intuitive sense), I was sure that this was a man rather than a woman. The shadow man glared back at me with what appeared to be two deep, white holes where his eyes ought to have been. The entity was standing so close to me, lurking just inches behind my right shoulder, that I could actually feel an icy chill rippling across the skin of my neck … a very physical, completely tangible sign that the spirit was all too real.

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The fear I felt in the pit of my stomach was growing with every passing moment. It paralyzed me, rooting me to the spot. This was my encounter with the shadow man in the kitchen all over again, but with one crucial difference: before, there had been the length of a room between the dark entity and myself. Now, he was practically pressed up against my back, trapping me within the confines of the small little bathroom.

I hardly dared to breathe; my limbs were locked solidly into place, refusing to move a muscle no matter how hard I willed them. I wanted nothing more than to turn and run, but the shadow man was standing between me and my only possible exit; maybe that’s why my feet remained rooted to the spot. All that I could do was stand there, bending slightly over the sink, whimpering quietly inside because of the stone cold fear that now held me tightly in its grip and stubbornly refused to let go.

And then, just when I thought that I couldn’t bear the tension for even a second longer, our stalemate ended: the dark man slowly became less solid, fading out until finally there was no trace of his ever having been there.

It was as if he had just evaporated, but I knew better; although I could no longer see him, I was utterly certain that this malevolent spirit was still around and could still see me. The bathroom was thick with his presence.

I don’t know exactly how long our standoff had taken, because it felt as though time had actually stood still, as

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though the world all around us had just stopped. Now, the clocks seemed to be running normally again. I let out a breath that I hadn’t realized I had been holding. But I was never going to trust that bathroom again, not for as long as I lived. If I close my eyes, I can still feel that cold, unnatural breath on my body with perfect recall like it happened yesterday, even though it happened years ago.

This was the second time that the shadow man had stalked me in my own home, paralyzing me with fear and then disappearing into thin air. What was his game, I couldn’t help but wonder—what did he want, this dark spirit? Was it simply to cause fear and anxiety? If so, he was being more than successful. Perhaps the loud footsteps that Nicole and I had just heard were his, clomping their way down the stairs and then slamming the door so violently.

The bigger picture was also something that was very much on my mind. After all, what I had once believed to be the home of my dreams had somehow become a place ripped straight from the darkest of nightmares.

Why was I being haunted by the spirits of the Cage? I was convinced that I had been chosen somehow, either by the house itself or by someone—or something—that lurked within it. There was no imaginable way that the reasons for that could be good … could they?

Running some cold water and splashing it across my face, I made every effort to pull myself together. The party itself was a great success and proved to be just what

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the doctor ordered; Nicole and I got the much-needed opportunity to spend our first Halloween in the Cage surrounded by our friends. The makeshift dance floor that we had set up in the front room was great, although I have to admit that it was a little surreal to dance the night away in a room filled with vampires, skeletons, witches, and all manner of other supernatural creatures, so soon after my terrifying encounter with the shadow man in the upstairs bathroom.

Finally, having blown off some steam and having imbibed just a little too much punch, we both flopped down into my bed at the end of the night, clinging to each other for comfort and security. We didn’t wake up until late the next morning, which was now All Saints’ Day. We both suspected that the spirits of the Cage had more surprises to throw our way, and we weren’t to be disappointed.

8

HEINRICH AND REDFAST

T

his is the bathroom here?” Lesley asked, stepping off the landing and pushing open the wooden door. It creaked ominously on hinges that were in dire need of oiling. “This is the one where Vanessa saw the shadow man?”

“That’s the one,” Stephen agreed. “No wonder she hates that room. Can’t say I blame her in the slightest.”

“It looks pretty ordinary to me,” Lesley said doubtfully.

I tended to agree with her; the bathroom looked totally peaceful and quiet. It was only later, when I spoke to other investigators, that I would come to learn that the bathroom could sometimes take on a life of its own.

“You’re standing right where we were when the old lady’s voice came through as an EVP,” I pointed out. Lesley looked all around her, but said that she didn’t feel anything

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out of the ordinary. EMF levels were also normal, and the temperature was no colder than anywhere else in the Cage.

“Do you want to start investigating in here tonight?” asked Caroline. After thinking about it for a moment, I shook my head, explaining that I wanted to start our own research downstairs.

“This building is called the Cage, after all,” I pointed out, “but only a small part of it was actually that ancient structure. The rest is all much newer and more modern. I do want to hit the upstairs bedrooms, bathroom, and landing, but let’s start out with the historic part first, shall we?”

Nobody objected to that, so the four of us trooped back downstairs to set up in the Cage itself. After a fortifying cup of tea and some snacks, we settled upon using the Ouija board as our first means of communicating with any resident spirits.

As the old cliché goes, it really was a dark and stormy night. The wind was howling outside and fat raindrops were spattering on the window panes in the kitchen when we assembled.

A stout wooden table occupied pride of place in the center of the Cage, a holdover from the recent filming of the extremely popular TV show, Come Dine with Me. Four comfortable wooden chairs surrounded the table, and it was easy to forget that the rug on which the table stood covered a trapdoor that was nailed firmly in place, covering a hole that was some six feet deep. Skeletal remains had

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been found down there by a former owner, some of which obviously belonged to animals, and others that may possibly have been human.

Clearing off a small mountain of paranormal research equipment and a pair of laptops, Stephen and Caroline carefully placed two candles in glass enclosures, one at either end of the table, and lit them before turning out the lights. It was then time for them to set up a Ouija board in the center between the two dancing flames.

The board that Stephen had chosen looked suitably ornate and gothic, seemingly perfect for its purpose. It had been left behind in the Cage by one of its most recent residents, a writer and musician who had been looking after the place for Vanessa. The board was painted entirely in jet black and then highlighted with gold embossed lettering. All twenty-six letters of the alphabet were represented, sweeping across the board in a series of gently curving rows; they were further augmented with numbers ranging from one to zero, along with the words hello and goodbye on either side. Sitting proudly in the very center was a pentagram, a five-pointed star that was enclosed within a circle—not, as some mistakenly believe, necessarily a satanic symbol, but rather one indicative of occult magic.

Stephen performed a brief ritual in order to clear the board of any negative influences, making sure that it had not been clandestinely dedicated to the use of some form of dark magic: It was not that the former occupant would

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have done such a thing, but we knew nothing of the person that he had inherited the board from. They were said to have been a medium who was not local and had refused to take the board with when they left the Cage for the last time.

“It is now irretrievably tainted with darkness … ” They had allegedly said.

All of the boards that Stephen uses at home have been personally blessed by his bishop, which he firmly believes will protect them from malign forces and attachments.

“We still need to be very careful,” Stephen told the team gravely. “Whenever I’m working on a case that has some sort of demonic involvement, I get a very specific sensation … right here.” The priest pointed to a spot slightly behind his left ear.

I asked him to describe the feeling as best he could.

“The best way that I can explain it is some kind of combination of pressure and ringing in the ear, a lot like tinnitus.

There’s also a certain amount of pain, which is what usually seals the deal and signifies the presence of a dark entity.”

“Why haven’t we heard about this before?” Lesley wanted to know.

“Because I haven’t experienced anything like it on this entire trip—right up until now … ” All four investigators looked at one another hesitantly.

After a very brief discussion, it was determined that despite Stephen’s instinct that there might be a dark, possibly demonic presence in the room, we were going ahead with the

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Ouija session anyway. I put in my two cents, explaining that I had always felt the term “demonic” to be overused, and that far too many of the people with an interest in the paranormal jumped to label anomalous activity with that word. Just because something was negative did not necessarily make it demonic, I suggested as diplomatically as I could.

Stephen did a creditable job of not rolling his eyes. To him, demonic entities were all too real, and it was a foolish investigator indeed who was willing to take them lightly. I also have to admit that sitting there at a Ouija board in the middle of a haunted witches’ prison, watching the candlelight dance upon the faces of my three companions and hearing the drumbeat of heavy rain on the roof above us, it wasn’t all that difficult to see things from Stephen’s point of view!

Prior to beginning the Ouija session, the three of us that were participating—Stephen, Lesley, and myself, with Caroline taking a safety nap—determined that a safe word would be in effect for this particular session. Each of the participants had the option to simply call out the word stop at any time, and was then to simply remove their fingers if they felt even the slightest bit uncomfortable. Once the rules were agreed upon, all three of the sitters placed the tip of their index finger lightly on top of the planchette, the smooth sliding pointer that was used to indicate specific letters and numbers on the board.

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The lights were already out, leaving just the candlelight for the team to see the Ouija board. This was further enhanced by a third candle, which Lesley lit and placed inside an ornate glass-lined box next to the Ouija board. I started a digital voice recorder running and set it down next to the board, watching the seconds begin to tick away.

Stephen cleared his throat, and began: “This board is opened up for the use of positive energies only—no negative entities or energies will be permitted to use it to manifest. Now … are there any spirits or entities present here with us inside the Cage? Would you like to contact us? If so, please move the planchette … ” It took less than ten seconds for the planchette to start moving—slowly and feebly at first, barely making it from letter to letter, despite there being three different fingers placed lightly upon it, and therefore the combined energies of three living people. It limped wearily and without enthusiasm, as if it was simply too much effort for it to spell out words properly.

The planchette began inching its way toward Stephen, at a speed that can best be described as glacially slow. At this rate, it would take all night to spell out a single message. Whether it was a problem with the board itself, one or more of the three sitters, or simply that the spirits of the Cage did not feel particularly talkative, it was impossible to

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say with any degree of certainty. Perhaps it was a combination of all of those factors, and maybe more besides.

Frustrated, the three paranormal investigators tried mixing things up a little, and began switching themselves out. For the first attempt, I went back to the bench while Stephen and Lesley stayed on the board. When that little shake-up yielded no noticeable improvements, Stephen dropped out and was replaced by me once more, which also failed to speed things up in the slightest.

“Let’s try changing the board, then,” Stephen suggested with a weary sigh. After all, there was a second board waiting in the wings, just itching to be given a try. Lesley slid the black and gold Ouija from the tabletop and stuffed it back into its place on the shelf at the side of the fridge. It would remain there for the rest of the week, untouched and gathering dust.

Whereas the first Ouija board was all ostentation and style, its replacement was just about as plain Jane vanilla as it was possible to get; it was one of the official Parker Brothers boards, of the same kind that is still sold by the thousands at toy stores around the world each year. It naturally appeared far cheaper and generic than the first board, because it was: This board was mass-produced and should not have had the history that its counterpart did.

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Caz, Stephen, and Lesley using the Ouija board.

All three of us returned to our original seats around the table and placed two fingers on the planchette, which was positioned squarely in the center of the new board.

“Is this board easier to use?” Stephen asked, though whether he was addressing the spirits of the Cage or his fellow sitters was never made quite clear.

The planchette immediately slid across the board, coming to a stop on top of the word YES. Bingo, I thought excitedly. We’re in business!

“Can you please tell us your name?”

R-E-D-F-A … then suddenly the planchette slid across to the word NO.

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We looked at one another in puzzlement. REDFA? What kind of a name was REDFA? It made absolutely no sense at all. Perhaps a fresh start was needed, we reasoned.

On request, the planchette moved smartly back across to the middle of the board and sat there, waiting. This Ouija board was already proving itself to be light years ahead of its predecessor.

Going back to the beginning once more, we asked the spirit to spell out its name again. At first, the planchette seemed reluctant to move—if, that is, such an inert piece of plastic could appear reluctant at all. By the flickering candlelight, however, the sliding pointer seemed to be imbued with a personality and energy all of its own.

Stephen offered whichever spirit was trying to communicate with the team an infusion of free energy, theirs for the keeping if they could simply drain it from any of the electrical devices that were scattered across the tabletop.

They would be spoiled for choice: A K2 EMF meter, digital voice recorder, TASCAM, or any of the other recording and sensing tools that festooned the table.

Less than an hour later, when conducting an EVP session on the second floor landing at the top of the staircase, the battery in Stephen’s TASCAM digital voice recorder— which had been removed from the factory packaging and freshly installed in the device at the start of the Ouija session—would die. It had been sitting next to the Ouija board throughout this session, and should have lasted for many

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hours longer than it actually did … another example of the unexplained power drains that are so common at haunted locations, particularly when bursts of paranormal activity are about to occur.

The planchette moved from R to E to D once more, on to F, then A to S and then rested on T, before making its way back to the middle of the board again.

R.E.D.F.A.S.T. Redfast.

Acting purely on a hunch, I removed my fingers from the planchette for a moment and pulled out my phone. I began browsing through various Google search entries for the term red fast, until finally I discovered something very interesting indeed: One particular website claimed that Redfast was a medieval nickname for a person who was “red-faced.”

One particularly fascinating aspect of this revelation was that none of the sitters had ever heard the word redfast before, let alone knew of its meaning. So much for the theory that the Ouija Board was tapping into our own subconscious knowledge or memories.

“That sounds like a nickname,” Lesley said when I excitedly showed her the article on my phone. “Was it?”

Without hesitation, the planchette went directly to YES. “But what’s your GIVEN name?” she asked. “Mine is Lesley. What’s yours?”

ME, the board answered smartly, causing the three sitters to roll their eyes in unison. Was the spirit being smart or sarcastic, or was it simply being an absolute literalist?

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Once the planchette finally gets rolling, the key to successful and meaningful Ouija board communication is usually the way in which the questions are couched. Phrase them in the wrong way, and you’ll get stonewalled or gibberish.

Phrase them in exactly the right way, on the other hand, and you can learn a surprising amount.

Growingly increasingly curious, we doubled down on our attempts to uncover the entity’s real name. H-E-I-N-R was the best that it seemed capable of. “Is your name Heinrich?” Stephen intuited, earning himself a satisfying YES. My follow-on question (asking whether Heinrich was a German) garnered the same answer—although when further pressed, the board went on to say that it was not actually born in Germany.

Stephen asked Heinrich about the year in which he had died. The best date that the Ouija could provide was the year six hundred and something, but Heinrich did state that he had been forty-six years old when he had passed away: if true, this would have been an exceptionally long lifespan for that particular era.

One long-accepted theory among the skeptical community is that users of Ouija boards may not be communicating with the spirits of the dead at all. Rather, the sitters are instead being influenced by their own deeper selves, with the resulting answers being a product of their own subconscious desire to please. Bearing this in mind, I

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framed my next question with as much tact and delicacy as I could manage.

“I ask this very respectfully,” I began cautiously, “but are you a figment of our imagination?”

The answer was an emphatic and very definite NO. When asked if he was a friendly spirit, Heinrich claimed that he was indeed. Nor was he the only entity around. Other spirits were also present in the Cage tonight, according to the board, though it appeared that the “mic” was his—at least, for now. Others repeatedly tried to break in, but the one who called himself Heinrich would always shove them aside in short order and begin to answer questions once more.

Heinrich did not miss Germany, he claimed, which made sense considering his former statement of not having been born there; he had lived in the village just after it had been named St Osyth, during the seventh century (years after the girl named Osyth herself had been butchered and martyred) and denied being either a prisoner or a jailer within the Cage. He was, the spirit claimed, a local man who had herded and tended to livestock on behalf of the church.

Suddenly, Stephen sat up straight with a jolt. “Somebody just touched my right hand!” he exclaimed in surprise. “Tapped it, at least. Twice. Tap tap. I’m getting the feeling that Heinrich—or whoever this is—is standing right there.” The priest nodded toward his right. Lesley

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and I stared expectantly over his right shoulder, hoping to catch the slightest glimpse of Heinrich, even if it was just his shadow figure … Yet we could see nothing apart from the bolted wooden door.

The board then claimed that Heinrich didn’t trust either Lesley or myself, and in fact even admitted to fearing us both a little—for reasons that it refused to make clear. Heinrich went on to say that he did trust Stephen, however, mostly due to the fact that he was a man of the cloth. This seemed to lend credence to Heinrich’s earlier claim that he had worked on behalf of the church, and had perhaps retained some of his old loyalties after shedding his earthly body.

Heinrich refused to touch either Lesley or myself, no matter how politely we asked or what assurances we offered.

Working discreetly underneath the table, I connected the FLIR (forward-looking infra-red) attachment to my phone.

This piece of cutting-edge technology handily converted my iPhone into a thermal imaging camera, allowing it to both see into and record images and video footage in hot and cold portions of the spectrum. With my eyes still fixed on the empty air behind Stephen, I fired up the FLIR underneath the table and slowly raised it to cover Stephen, placing special emphasis on his right side; whoever (or whatever) Heinrich was, he did not register as a source of appreciable heat or cold … if, of course, he was ever actually there at all, a possibility that could not be entirely discounted.

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The small liberty that I had just taken without asking permission may well have angered Heinrich, because the planchette suddenly swept forcefully across the surface of the Ouija board, landing firmly on the word GOODBYE. The pointer abruptly stopped moving, and from then on remained obstinately still. Try as we might, pleading and cajoling, none of us were able to coax it into starting back up again. It was almost as if Heinrich had slammed down the receiver of the telephone and had gone off in a huff to sulk.

The cold gray light of dawn was now visible through the cracks in the curtains. Another long night had passed inside the Cage. Stifling a yawn, Stephen suggested that we take a break from using the Ouija board and review some of the audio files from the last Ouija session right there on the spot, to see whether Heinrich (or any other spirits of the Cage) had decided to make their voices heard.

“Sounds like a good idea,” Lesley agreed. “I’ll put the kettle on and make a cup of tea.”

Considering how tired the three of us were by that point, the extra jolt of caffeine seemed like an inspired idea.

Once three cups of hot and steaming tea were sitting on the table in front of them, Stephen copied the raw audio files over from each of the digital voice recorders and onto his laptop’s hard drive. I plugged in the external speakers to the audio jack, and the three investigators sat down to listen.

Stephen cranked up the volume, filling the Cage with the

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hiss and crackle of static, followed by the sound of his own voice opening up the Ouija session for business.

Ask most paranormal investigators, and they’ll tell you that they hate doing evidence review. It’s one thing to commit hours and hours of video and audio data to hard drives during an investigation, but something else entirely to wade through those same hours with headphones in place, straining your hearing in order to try and make out potentially anomalous sounds or voices. The work really is drudgery, and something in the region of ninety-nine percent turns out to be fruitless (sometimes one hundred percent on nights that are a complete bust).

Everything on the audio recording was unremarkable for the best part of a quarter of an hour. Stephen, Lesley, and I sipped our tea, quietly munching on chocolate biscuits for sustenance.

At fourteen minutes and seventeen seconds in, Stephen hit pay dirt.

“Bloody hell,” exclaimed Lesley, leaning forward excitedly when she heard a guttural moan that sounded grossly out of place in the middle of a hushed and respectful séance.

“Run that back and play it again, Stephen, will you?” Stephen nodded, and with a couple of mouse clicks he slid the file back precisely to the fourteen minute mark and hit play.

The noise that we all heard next was unmistakably made by a fourth person in the room—one that we could neither

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see or hear. It certainly hadn’t originated from one of the investigators. What sounded like a strangled, guttural, and gurgling cry of augur blasted out through the speakers. The three investigators looked at one another, nodding their unspoken agreement that it had not been made by any of them.

“Was that Heinrich?” Lesley asked, giving voice to the question that they had all been thinking.

Stephen snapped his fingers. “Wait a minute,” he said, minimizing the playback window on his laptop and opening a new one with just a couple of clicks of the trackpad.

“What are you doing?” I asked, immediately intrigued.

“Just listen.” Stephen fired up a second audio file and ran it through the speakers.

“Is there a light in here?” It was my voice, recorded on that very first afternoon inside the Cage, when Vanessa was giving us our impromptu tour.

“Yes,” rasped the guttural and now increasingly familiar voice, as they had all listened to it multiple times. “In the bathroom.”

When he had replayed the in the bathroom audio clip three or four more times, Stephen repeated the newer EVP, with the harsh, guttural uuuuuurgh that had been recorded at the beginning of their Ouija session. After going back and forth and comparing the two audio files, one thing became clear: Our newest EVP sounded very similar indeed

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to the voice of the old lady that was captured on the upstairs landing.

We hadn’t been alone in the Cage that night, after all.

Far from it …

9

DARK CHRISTMAS

With Halloween behind us, our first winter spent living inside the Cage was already upon us. My birthday on November 4th came and went with some homemade cocktails courtesy of Nicole and my visiting friend, Heather, who was courageously fighting against cancer.

The girls made my birthday a very special night indeed, one that was spent in the very best of company.

Apart from the usual activity in the house, my birthday passed without a hitch. The sound of the children running backward and forward upstairs (a noise that Nicole and I had now grown fully accustomed to) seemed a little bit louder than usual; when it happened, the three of us would momentarily put whatever it was that we were talking about on hold and look up to the ceiling. The thuds of small 121

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feet belting around up there never failed to give me the chills, but apart from that, the Cage was relatively calm.

It was the calm before the storm.

As the days of November passed by one at a time, the paranormal activity inside the Cage steadily grew in intensity, until it finally reached a fever pitch at the end of the month. The haunting now seemed relentless; whether it was the distant voices of grieving women moaning and crying their distress in rooms that I knew full well to be empty, or the sudden terror of objects taking flight out of the blue and whizzing across the room, the old witches’ prison seemed determined to make us feel unwelcome.

Christmas was approaching fast, and the house was quite literally freezing. Even with the log fire burning downstairs and the electric radiators upstairs set to their maximum settings, the Cage was as cold as a morgue.

Come to think of it, the atmosphere inside probably wasn’t all that different either.

The condensation that lay in a film on the singleglazed wooden glass panes dripped constantly onto the ledges below each window, leaving tiny little puddles of water that only seemed to add to the overall feeling of cold.

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In my lower moments, I asked myself why the hell I hadn’t had the sense to buy a nice modern house—one that came equipped with double glazing and central heating, and perhaps most importantly, one that didn’t come complete with the spirits of both tormentors and the tormented alike. I could easily picture myself curled up in front of a nice gas fire in a new home without a horrifying history, toasty warm and basking in the peace and quiet.

I should be so lucky …

Then I decided that I’d done enough wallowing in self-pity. Christmas has always been my favorite time of the year, going all the way back to my childhood. I loved everything about it, not just the holiday itself but the entire season and everything that went along with it—I’d be damned if I’d allow even the dark spirits of the Cage to put a dampener on my Christmas. No matter what they tried (and there was no doubt at all in my mind that they would try and derail it somehow) we were going to have some festive Yuletide spirit around here.

We put up a real fir Christmas tree, festooning it with decorations and baubles, and decked the Cage with tinsel, ribbons, and the other traditional trappings of Christmastime. I strung colored lights all around the place, along with festive candles, holly, and mistletoe.

Although it seems almost laughable to me now, with the benefit of hindsight, the Cage almost felt like one of those scenes from a Victorian era Christmas postcard once we’d

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finished decorating it. I found myself looking forward to December 25th, just as I always did.

Things were almost tolerable until the second week of December. I was sitting in the front room, enjoying a cup of tea and the overall sense of festive cheer, when I first saw it: what I can only describe as an amorphous black mass, which slowly formed out of thin air.

Despite all that had happened to me in the Cage up to that point, I still had a hard time believing what I was seeing. This was happening in broad daylight, not the middle of the night. I was wide awake and watching with horrified wide-open eyes as the dark cloud coalesced, expanding and becoming thicker.

I was overcome with a sense of overpowering malevolence. Whatever this dark form, this entity, was—I remain convinced to this day that it was both intelligent and utterly ruthless—I knew somehow that it meant me nothing but harm. In fact, it isn’t going too far to say that the black mass was absolutely evil, ungodly even.

Once again, I was powerless, unable to move or call out for help. Besides, I was all alone in the house—there was no help to be had. As if to demonstrate its sheer disdain for me, the thing moved lazily but deliberately in the direction of the prison room, passing through the open doorway and disappearing out of sight within the Cage itself. Looking back on it now, I think that this may well have been the powerful dark spirit that underpins

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the entire haunting of the Cage: the man who had once served as its jailer and, by extension, its chief tormentor.

As I have already mentioned, the Cage was always cold—but this time, a deeper cold seeped into my body.

This was spiritual, rather than physical, and I could do nothing to fight it off, other than to wrap my arms around myself in the most ineffectual of hugs. The black mass wanted to hurt me: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I sensed that it was born of pure malice, and that familiar everyday concepts such as compassion or conscience were totally alien to it.

I began to cry, the tears streaming down my face in an expression of the fear and powerlessness that had me in its grip once more. And that’s how Nicole found me when she came home, sobbing and rocking myself backward and forward on the couch, fighting to come to terms with this harsh new reality of life inside the Cage.

The mood inside the house changed that day and throughout the month of December. I was sensing a streak of cruelty and spite that hadn’t quite been there before, no matter how scary the haunting had been. It felt as though the darkest of the spirits knew how much I loved Christmastime (which was no secret, I had mentioned it out loud often enough) and wanted to destroy my enjoyment of it once and for all.

I wished for a white Christmas, which I did every year. The snow never came, but the spirits of the Cage

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certainly did. I was terrified at the prospect of spending the holidays without Nicole, who was going to stay with her father, but fortunately my then-boyfriend was on hand to provide some much-needed company, and the cavalry finally arrived in the form of my good friend Jacqui, who turned up early in the day on Christmas Eve like a genuine ray of sunshine.

When it came to the holidays, my philosophy has always been the more the merrier, so I was thrilled to hear that we would be joined later on by Jacqui’s new boyfriend and my brother Christian, so I wouldn’t lack for company. Jacqui and I set up a rolling sofa-bed for her and her boyfriend inside the Cage itself, and she waved off any concerns about having to sleep in a place where so many had been imprisoned and tortured.

I made Jacqui a cup of tea while she unpacked, and we started to gossip about the new man in her life. Without any warning, a plastic magnet detached itself from the fridge door and flew across the room, clattering down on the work surface opposite.

My heart sank. Although Jacqui hadn’t seen or heard it, I knew deep down that this was the opening salvo of a much larger barrage. Visitors weren’t going to deter the spirits of the Cage from making their presence felt, and I shuddered to think what tricks they had up their sleeves this time.

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Still, I did drum up just a little bit of optimism when her first night sleeping inside the old prison room passed uneventfully. Maybe she and her boyfriend weren’t going to be disturbed after all …

On Christmas Day, we all sat in the front room, enjoying one another’s company and getting into the festive spirit. Jacqui got up off the couch and headed upstairs to use the toilet, preferring that one to the downstairs restroom for some strange reason (after my encounter with the shadow figure, wild horses wouldn’t have dragged me back in there!)

I was sitting directly opposite the door that led to the staircase. As I watched, Jacqui opened the door and walked through it—eventually. For a moment, she paused at the foot of the steps, frozen in mid-stride. Her attention seemed to be fixed on something at the top of those stairs.

Jacqui shot me the strangest look just then, one that I still find impossible to put into words. Before I could ask her what the problem was, however, she made her way upstairs, and so I just shrugged it off and went back to the lively conversation that was going on. By the time she came back downstairs, I had completely forgotten about her strange expression, and Jacqui said nothing more about it.

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The staircase that leads to the bathroom and bedrooms.

Incredibly, the spirits of the Cage seemed to have settled upon a cease-fire as their Christmas gift to us.

Jacqui and her boyfriend left on the 27th, and the holiday

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cheer continued all the way into the new year. The allout assault of paranormal activity that I had been so afraid of had never come to pass.

It took two weeks for Jacqui to visit me and fill me in on what had actually happened to her on Christmas Day and the reason why she had given me such a bizarre look from the bottom of the stairs. I listened with growing dismay as Jacqui described opening the door at the foot of the stairs, placing her foot on the first step, only to catch sight of a stranger standing at the very top. The figure was that of a man dressed in old fashioned, scraggly brown clothes, looking very much as if they belonged to a different era; he had lank, greasy shoulder-length hair that was pulled back into a pony tail.

“This man looked dirty, Vanessa—filthy, like he hadn’t washed or bathed in weeks,” Jacqui said. “When he looked right at me, his eyes were angry and forbidding.

I could feel that I was very unwelcome there.”

Jacqui went on to explain that the man radiated a kind of evil energy, of a type that she instinctively knew was utterly vile. As if that wasn’t enough, this was accompanied by a sickening, rancid stench that was stronger than anything that she had ever smelled before. Searching for the right words, she finally described it as the stink of ground-in dirt and sweat, but far stronger and more potent than even the worst body odor she had ever encountered.

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Possessing great strength of character, Jacqui was not a woman who was easily intimidated. She had heard stories about my house being haunted and knew that the man at the top of the stairs was no living, breathing human being. After all, what kind of intruder broke into a tiny house on Christmas Day without making even the slightest bit of noise, and wearing clothes from yesteryear into the bargain? Besides, she reasoned, if this truly was a home invasion, the first thing that the intruder did should have been to either attack the woman who had just discovered his presence or try to make his escape. The dirty man did neither, choosing instead to simply stand at the top of the staircase beneath the wooden crossbeam and glower at her, quietly radiating menace and hatred.

Well, Jacqui knew there was no way in hell that this man—whoever or whatever he was—was going to get the better of her! This was her friend’s home, not his, no matter what he liked to think, and if he thought for one moment that she was going to be intimidated by him, then he had another thing coming!

“I gave you a look that basically said, is this really happening, Vanessa? Then I started putting one foot in front of the other,” Jacqui laughed. She locked eyes with the phantom and kept on climbing, gripping the handrail tightly. He never broke eye contact or so much as blinked for even a second. With every step, she felt the man’s loathing and hatred for her grow, intensifying until it felt

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almost tangible, a nearly physical wall that stood between the two of them. This was fast becoming a contest of wills between Jacqui and the male spirit.

Unfortunately for him, I know my best friend inside and out—he had no chance whatsoever of scaring her off.

Finally reaching the top of the stairs, Jacqui was still engaged in a stare-down with the scruffy man. She kept expecting him to speak, to say something at the very least, but he remained mute, communicating his malice nonverbally. His message was clear: I don’t want you here!

You don’t belong here, woman! GET OUT! But she wouldn’t get out. No man was going to scare Jacqui away, let alone a dead one! Almost nose to nose now in a ghostly game of chicken, the male entity was the first one to blink. He took a step backward, and then another. Triumphantly, Jacqui stepped forward onto the landing, right into the space where he had just been standing, then took another step … and walked straight through him.

She didn’t feel anything particularly strange when she passed through the spirit’s ethereal form; no sense of coldness, electricity, or any other form of energy. One minute he was there in front of her, seemingly as solid as any of the living human beings who were celebrating raucously downstairs, and the next she had walked through him as if he had never been there at all. When she reached the bathroom door and turned around, the apparition had completely disappeared.

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All that remained behind was the lingering sense of hatred and vindictiveness that had accompanied him, giving Jacqui the distinct impression that although the angry spirit could no longer be seen, he was still very much around … and was watching her.

What followed was the fastest trip to the toilet she had ever made in her life.

“Why didn’t you tell me all this at the time?” I asked her incredulously. Laughter came from the other end of the phone line.

“Because I didn’t want to spoil the holidays for you!

Besides, that wasn’t the only strange thing that happened … ” Jacqui had been sitting alone in the small enclosed yard at the rear of the house, enjoying a quiet cigarette in peace and simply collecting her thoughts. It was early in the afternoon, and gray clouds hung low over the Cage. The December air was cold and crisp, but actually seemed slightly warmer than some of the rooms inside the old prison did. Everything was calm and peaceful—until the funeral procession came through my kitchen wall.

Two men, each wearing long coats and tall hats that looked to be at least a hundred years or more out of date, were grunting and straining as they pulled along a cart. The cart had two large wheels and a yoke, and bore a wooden coffin on top of it. The two men were really putting their backs into it, heads down and arms locked as they forced the cart along, emerging from the kitchen wall behind Jacqui and moving

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slowly out into the yard. My friend was so shocked that she simply stood there and watched, mouth agape, as what she could only assume were the ghosts of undertakers’ assistants pulling their macabre burden out through the exterior wall of the yard and into the aptly-named Coffin Alley.

Neither of the men reacted to Jacqui’s presence, seeming totally unaware that she was standing there, a silent witness to their grim exertions. By the time she had regained her composure, the funeral procession had disappeared, never to be seen again.

10

THE JAILER

I

t was just past four o’clock in the morning, and Stephen, Caroline, and I had joined Lesley outside, keeping her company while she partook in a cigarette of her own. St Osyth is a relatively small village with little in the way of light pollution, so as I craned my head to look up, I was treated to a brilliantly clear night sky stretching out on all sides above us. Our breath was coming in misty plumes, the cold air burning our lungs, but I had to admit that Vanessa had been right—the cold outside the Cage felt somehow different to that inside … healthier or less threatening, perhaps, if that makes any sense.

“This is about where the coffin came through the wall, when Vanessa’s friend saw it,” Stephen said, pointing to a spot close to the exterior window. His hand kept tracking

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around in a big half-circle. “Then it must have passed through here into Coffin Alley.”

We stepped out into the alley, which was pitch black and deserted at that time of the morning, apart from a single tabby cat that eyed us warily from on top of one of the garden walls.

I’d done some research on the locality and discovered that the cemetery at Clay Lane had opened for business in 1855. The first body to be interred there was that of a sailor whose identity remains unknown to this day; his drowned corpse had washed up on the beach at St Osyth that very same year, and this unknown mariner was but the first in a chain of burials there that have continued to this very day.

Coffin Alley was seen as a convenient route for carting the deceased from the village undertakers’ premises to their final resting place.

Just to stretch our legs after a long night spent cooped up inside the Cage, we decided to walk the length of the alley and back. As we strolled along beneath the starry night sky, the four of us discussed the nature of Jacqui’s ghost sighting, finally coming to the conclusion that it was most likely either a time slip or a residual haunting. We would probably never be able to tell for sure which of the two it was, but my money goes on the latter.

A time slip, just as the name implies, is a paranormal incident in which present-day witnesses seem to go backward in time to a bygone age (to my knowledge, there are

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no documented cases of observers traveling forward in time, into the future) and encounter a previous part of history.

Perhaps the famous example occurred in France during the year 1901, and is now referred to as the “Moberly-Jourdain incident,” after the names of the two ladies who were the principal witnesses.

Using pen names to conceal their identities, the ladies— Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain—published a book that detailed an extraordinary occurrence. If their account was to be believed, then the two authors had visited the magnificent Palace of Versailles in 1901, and had somehow been thrown back in time to the late 1700s, into the royal court of King Louis VI. As they wandered around, Moberly and Jourdain encountered people from that same time period, including one whose description was eerily close to that of Marie Antoinette herself.

After initially searching for a conventional explanation (had they unwittingly stumbled upon a fancy dress party or historical reenactment that had been taking place on that day?) Charlotte and Eleanor finally concluded that they had either traveled back in time or encountered the ghosts of a France now long gone. Publishing a narrative of their escapades some ten years later titled An Adventure, the ladies received more than their fair share of ridicule. The story— and indeed, the supposedly paranormal nature of it—was a subject of great controversy at the time of its publication in 1911, and remains so today, with some believing that the

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two ladies did indeed open a window backward in time, whereas others maintain that the whole account is either a fabrication or nothing more than a gross misunderstanding or delusion.

The paranormal literature is replete with examples of possible time slips, but I don’t think that Jacqui’s burial party quite fits into this category, mainly because the two men that were hauling the coffin did not interact with either Jacqui herself, or with the twenty-first century environment. If one studies accounts of supposed time slips, the witnesses generally speak with the people they encounter during the episode, and the buildings, objects, and landscape around them seem to obey the normal laws of physical reality, including being completely solid to the touch. The two undertakers’ assistants (as it seems most likely they were) walked through walls, even though they appeared entirely solid themselves, and were therefore more likely to be either apparitions or hallucinations.

A residual haunting fits the bill much better. It may help to think of such apparitions as a form of psychic recording mechanism—one which we do not yet fully understand, and certainly cannot explain (although there are several theories). In the same way that we can use our phones to record video footage and play it back when we choose to, a residual haunt replays the events of the past, over and over again on a continuous loop.

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Most commonly, residual hauntings seem to be found in locations where there was great emotion. Sometimes this can be very negative emotion, such as the violent death and carnage found upon battlefields, and at others it is the polar opposite, which is why some residences and places of work are haunted by those who loved them a great deal during their lifetime. I have investigated two haunted firehouses in my career, and in each case, the men who lived, slept, worked, and played in them loved the building and the second family that they lived with inside those four walls. Is it any wonder, then, that some of that strong positive emotion should have left behind a psychic residue of some kind, one that can be perceived by the right observer under the proper circumstances?

I find it very telling indeed that neither of the two men that Jacqui claims to have seen either spoke to her, made eye contact, or interacted with her in any way. Walking through walls is, of course, another strong indicator that Jacqui may well have witnessed a paranormal recording.

After all, the kitchen and exterior wall were only added on to the Cage during the twentieth century; before, that particular stretch of ground would most likely have been a part of Coffin Alley.

As we turned and walked back toward the Cage, we began to discuss the other residual phenomena that plagued the Cage. Many of the sounds that Vanessa described, such as the childlike footsteps running around upstairs and

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some of the sounds that had been reported, could easily have been residual in nature, and so could the apparition of the emaciated woman who has been seen peering out of the master bedroom window (she has frightened more than a few passing motorists who thought she was a Halloween mannequin!)

“There’s residual activity here for sure,” Stephen agreed as he turned the key in the lock and let us back into the Cage. “But the most disturbing stuff is all intelligent.”

“The shadow figure that Vanessa encountered when she was in the kitchen,” Caroline put in.

“And the man standing behind her in the bathroom,” Lesley added.

“Right,” agreed the priest. He thought about shrugging off his jacket, but the air inside the Cage (even with the electric heaters working at maximum output) was so cold that he decided to leave it on. As he passed the door to the staircase, he rapped on it with his knuckles. “It also sounds like Jacqui’s friend at the top of the staircase is pretty intelligent.”

“Intelligent, and nasty,” I pointed out. “Could that have been Redfast, do you think?”

“I don’t think so,” said Lesley, shaking her head. “Redfast seemed quite nice, though it’s hard to tell for certain when you’re communicating through a Ouija board. It’s a bit like texting.”

We all laughed.

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“I think that the dark entity here is the one that Vanessa warned us about,” Stephen said quietly. “The jailer.”

“He sounds like a right nasty piece of work,” Caroline shuddered.

“Doesn’t he just?” I looked around, wondering if that particular dark entity was silently watching us and listening to every word. “Maybe we should just bite the bullet and ask him … ” The human pendulum is a relatively controversial technique in paranormal research circles. Basically, it purports to allow disembodied spirits to interact with their living counterparts by manipulating their physical bodies. I had first learned of the technique during my investigation of an abandoned old hospital in Tooele, Utah, and had been sufficiently intrigued to add it to my repository of investigative techniques. I felt that the jury was still out on its validity, and so I made a point of using it whenever I wanted to attempt communication with a spirit entity.

The technique itself is a relatively simple one, requiring just two volunteers: One acts as the human pendulum itself, whereas the other serves as a questioner, asking a series of questions to which the answer must either be a yes or a no. When acting as the pendulum, it is only necessary for the volunteer to stand in a relaxed fashion and to passively allow the process to take place.

If the volunteer is susceptible to the technique (which in my experience, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent

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do seem to be), then they will respond physically when the questioner asks any spirits who might be present in the room to respond with answers. The first time this happens, particularly when the volunteer is an avowed skeptic, the look upon their face when their body begins to involuntarily move can often be priceless.

It must be noted, however, that some of the people who are susceptible are responding subconsciously, due to the ideomotor reflex: a well-documented physiologic phenomenon in which specific thoughts manage to provoke a physical response from the human body. It is important to note that this is not fraud on the part of the subject; they truly have no conscious knowledge of what their body is doing. Scientific researchers have also laid the outcomes of such activities as the Ouija board and automatic writing (sometimes known as “spirit writing”) at the door of ideomotor activity, pointing out that the only “entity” being communicated with is the subject’s own subconscious. When it came to our experiment, I wanted to include some additional control measures that ought to make it a more valid test.

Once again, all four of us had congregated inside the Cage itself in order to attempt our first session. Lesley gamely stepped up to be a test subject, even though she didn’t know exactly what it might entail.

“You have one job, Lesley—to relax,” I reassured her, and then went on to explain the few very simple rules.

Once everybody was on the same page, the session began.

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Stephen and Caroline helped to observe and also used cameras to record the session for future reference.

Acting as the questioner, I addressed the spirits who (we all hoped) would soon be using Lesley as a means of communication. “Please show Lesley her no position.”

Lesley tilted backward at the waist, her head and shoulders going back at least twenty degrees in one single, smooth motion. When the spirits were asked to move Lesley to her yes position, she shot forward. Stephen and I exchanged a look of surprise. It was rare for the human pendulum to kick off so rapidly and forcefully. Was that a measure of just how strong the energies inside the Cage had become?

And yet, when attempts were made to get the spirits to answer even the most basic of questions, Lesley’s body stubbornly refused to move. Finally I asked in exasperation, “Do you want somebody other than Lesley to be the human pendulum?” In response, Lesley rocked backward on her heels, firmly into the no position.

“Well, that’s pretty clear. Let’s look at the flip side of the coin. Do you want somebody other than me to ask the questions?”

The answer was an unequivocal yes.

“Alright,” I sighed. “Can’t argue with that. That’s me out. Take it away, Stephen and Caroline.”

Caroline jumped in first with, “Did you used to live in this house?” No.

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“Were you a prisoner in the Cage, kept here against your will?” No, again. There was no response when Caroline enquired whether the spirit was simply a visitor, but when Stephen asked whether they had died in the Cage, we received our third straight no in a row.

Ignoring the entity’s apparent dislike of me, I asked whether the spirit had been the jailer here in the Cage.

Yes. The human pendulum claimed that it had indeed been the jailer.

“Oh,” I replied, mustering a sense of levity that I really did not feel. “We’ve heard all about you … ” Caroline enquired as to whether the jailer had liked his job, and she was told that he did. This fit with what Vanessa had told us about the prison’s vicious overseer—that he had been a cruel and malicious man, one who had possessed an unhealthy relish for his work. After all, it took a very specific type of personality to delight in the torture and incarceration of men and women who had been falsely accused.

“He’s a right nasty piece of work, that jailer,” Vanessa had warned me when I had first arrived. “Watch out for him, Rich.”

Stephen asked whether plague victims had ever lived in the Cage. The pendulum again confirmed that they had.

“Was this before your time?” No. “After, then?” Yes. A subsequent check of the records revealed that a woman named Rose Hallybread or Hollybread had died of

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the plague while locked up in the St Osyth Jail, sometime around the year 1645. She had been imprisoned on charges of witchcraft.

“Are there other spirits here, apart from you?” I asked.

Yes. “Are you keeping them here?” No. Which seemed like rather an odd thing for the spirit of a jailer to say, and one that certainly did not fit with the man’s reputation. The investigators began to wonder whether this spirit really was the same dark man that had stalked and tormented Vanessa during her tenure living in the Cage … or whether we were being lied to.

“Are they innocent, these spirits?” I continued. There was no answer. Lesley just stood there, unmoving. Finally realizing that I had phrased the question in a way that was much too open-ended, I tried again: “Are they innocent of the crime of which they were accused … the crime of witchcraft?”

No. “Are you a friendly spirit?”

Based on how quickly and forcefully Lesley was shoved, the answer was a clear and unequivocal no, which caused us all to look at one another with raised eyebrows. If he was being honest, then this entity was unfriendly to them and could quite possibly mean us harm. On the other hand, it was possible that some discarnate trickster was simply playing a prank on us, trying to string us along and perhaps instill a little fear. That was something that Stephen and

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I had seen during other investigations, something actually quite common. It was simply impossible for us to tell whether that was the case this time.

When asked if he was angry, the spirit chose not to answer—yet when asked if he was happy to be here, he claimed that he was not. That struck all four of us as being somewhat odd. If this really was the jailer, the spirit of a man who had liked his job to such an unhealthy extent, then why was he now unhappy to still be in residence here at the Cage? Was it because he was much less able to physically torment the people who visited here with the same impunity that he had once enjoyed?

The answer wasn’t long in coming. “Are you trapped here? Stuck here?” I ventured. Yes, replied the pendulum. So this spirit wanted to move on, but claimed that it was caught somehow and couldn’t escape. Whether “here” meant within the Cage specifically, or just on the Earth plane in general, was yet to be determined.

“Can we help you to move on?” went unanswered, but Lesley tilted straight to the yes position when my question was rephrased as, “Would you like to move on?” As the representative of the clergy present at the scene, Stephen had already agreed that he would try to assist any spirits who were Earthbound in moving on to the next plane—assuming that they wanted to, of course.

The session tailed off, with more and more questions going unanswered. Perhaps Lesley was getting tired and

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run down, I mused, or maybe the energy of the spirit that claimed to have been speaking through her was starting to dissipate. Either way, we all recognized the fact that we had run up against a brick wall, and we quickly agreed that a break was in order. Everybody could recharge their batteries with a cup of tea and a few biscuits before picking it up again with a new pendulum.

11

“I CAN’T FIGHT A GHOST!”

A

fter topping up the tanks with caffeine and sugary snacks, we reconvened inside the prison room for a second session a half hour later. Once again, I acted as the questioner, but this time it was Caroline who volunteered to be the human pendulum. It was something that she had never tried before, and she was eager to find out whether she was a suitable candidate or not. After Stephen and Lesley pushed the chairs and tables aside, she picked a spot in the center of the Cage, shook her limbs and body out like a dancer getting ready to perform, and signaled her readiness to begin.

“If there are any entities present, be aware that Caroline has volunteered herself to serve as a human pendulum.

Please show Caroline her yes position,” I said, still feeling

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slightly foolish to be addressing thin air like that. It’s something I still haven’t quite gotten over to this day.

Immediately, the slender nurse began to tilt from the top down. First her head and shoulders, followed by her chest and torso, slid forward while her feet remained firmly rooted to the spot. For a moment I couldn’t shake the surreal impression of the late Michael Jackson doing something similar during his concerts.

“That’s forward for yes,” I stated approvingly, telling Caroline to relax and return herself to the neutral position. She resumed standing up straight once more, a little nonplussed at the way in which her body had just been manipulated. The motion was a little jerky in nature, and she admitted that when she felt herself beginning to move forward, her natural instincts kicked in and tried to override the movement. Having done it myself and experienced the strange feeling personally, I sympathized, but I asked her to try as hard as possible to override those instincts, explaining that I had yet to see anybody fall flat on their face during a session acting as a human pendulum.

“Now,” I addressed any spirits that may be present inside the Cage, “please show Caroline her no position.”

Once again the response was immediate. Caroline’s upper body began to tilt backward, and once again she caught herself. Cursing softly under her breath, she returned to an upright, relaxed stance. It was now very clear that backward constituted Caroline’s no.

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When questions weren’t being asked, she swayed neither backward nor forward but instead remained in a relaxed stance with her arms held loosely by her side. At a nod from Stephen, I decided that it was time to begin asking some serious questions.

“Are there any spirits present here that wish to talk with us through Caroline?”

Yes, came the answer, straight away.

“Are you the same spirit that communicated earlier through Lesley?”

No. “Are you still willing to let the priest help you move on at the end of this evening’s session?” I asked, referring to Stephen’s earlier offer to assist any earthbound spirits that might be resident inside the Cage to cross over. No sooner had the words move on left my mouth than Caroline was pushed forcefully forward, indicating a most emphatic yes.

“Are there any other spirits here that would like me to help them cross over?” Stephen interjected. Yes. Once again, the answer was a very forceful push. “Are there more than three?” No. “My vision is starting to blur,” Caroline said, blinking furiously. “It’s going completely fuzzy, except for the one tiny spot that I’m focusing in on. That’s never happened to me before.”

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“Are you okay?” I asked, concerned for her welfare.

Caroline indicated that she was and that she wanted to continue the session.

“Is the second spirit a female?” Yes. “Do you trust us to help you?” No. Lesley chimed in with, “Would you like Richard and I to leave the room?” Another emphatic yes. Lesley and I obediently trooped out of the prison, heading next door. We sat down on the couch in the front room and allowed Stephen and Caroline—not to mention their unseen guest—to continue the human pendulum session with some degree of privacy.

“Do you travel throughout this house?” Stephen asked.

Caroline rocked backward, signaling that the spirit did not.

The implications of this answer were not wasted on either of the two investigators: If this spirit truly did not (or could not) move throughout the house, then it was confined to the Cage. Trapped, just as prisoners would have been during their earthly lifetimes …

“Can you physically manipulate items in this house?”

No. Then, just like that, all communication ceased. Caroline’s body failed to move in any direction, no matter what questions were asked. It seemed as though the lines of communication had been cut. No matter what he tried, Stephen was unable to get the pendulum working again. Personally, I wondered whether it was because Caroline was growing

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fatigued, or it could be attributed to Lesley and I leaving the room and taking our energy with us.

“Let’s call this session finished for now,” Stephen sighed, turning off his video recorder. “Maybe the spirits are as tired as we are … ” For a while, Nicole’s boyfriend Jim moved in with us. He was an old friend of mine, one who insisted that he didn’t believe in ghosts and the paranormal, and who was I to argue with him? The spirits of the Cage didn’t care whether he believed in them or not: all that mattered was that they believed in him.

When they discovered that she was expecting a baby, Nicole and Jim naturally wanted to get their own place, and I really couldn’t blame them. Jim had experienced more than his fair share of ghostly goings-on inside the Cage. In fact, it soon reached the point where he flatly refused to be left alone inside the house. The three of us made a pact that under no circumstances would we leave any one of us alone inside the old prison, for any reason at all.

We began to plan our lives and daily schedules around that single, unbreakable rule. If two of us ever went to bed, then the third would immediately follow, rather than sit downstairs alone watching TV or listening to music.

We felt vulnerable in our solitude, clinging to the idea of there being strength in numbers. Constantly watching one

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another’s back became our way of life, the only way in which we were ever able to feel safe.

It was hell.

One of the very last straws for Jim happened one night when he was upstairs in the bedroom that he shared with Nicole. He suddenly heard a sound coming from somewhere outside his door, fairly quiet at first but growing louder by the second. Jim recognized it at the thudding sound of heavy footsteps—male footsteps—coming up the main staircase.

Except that there were no men in the house, apart from himself …

Whoever it was seemed to take forever to climb the stairs; it was almost as if they were trying to do it in the most frightening, intimidating way possible. When he related the incident to me afterward, he admitted that he had thought about throwing open the bedroom door to confront what he knew had to be a ghostly visitor, but that something had warned him not to … an indefinable sense or feeling, one that told him in no uncertain terms that opening that door could be a very bad thing to do.

“I’m not scared of any man, Vanessa,” he had said, and I believed him. Jim could handle himself in a fight. “But how am I supposed to protect us all against something I can’t hit? I can’t fight a ghost!”

Jim stood there inside his bedroom, fists bunched and feeling helpless. What was he supposed to do, other than

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wait? The menacing footsteps finally reached the landing at the top of the stairs, pausing outside his bedroom door.

Jim waited, heart pounding inside his chest, trying to breathe as silently as possible.

The latch on his bedroom door jiggled, and then lifted itself up. With a loud and ominous creak, the door swung slowly inward. Jim squared off against whatever was on the other side of it, but the landing was utterly deserted. I believe that he had just had a run-in with the spirit of the jailer.

When it finally came time for them both to move out, Jim was well and truly glad to see the back of the Cage.

Nicole was concerned about leaving me all on my own in that haunted place, but I put on a brave face and told her not to worry; behind the mask, though, I was absolutely terrified.

After I waved them off for the last time and went back inside, I knew that I was completely at the mercy of the dark entities that dwelled there.

I have been able to perceive spirits ever since I was a child, and being able to constantly sense their presence can really take it out of you, not only physically, but also emotionally and mentally. After a few years I soon learned to live with my gift … until I moved into the Cage.

Living inside the Cage was grueling and debilitating, the longest slog of my life. It drove me to the brink of exhaustion and nervous breakdown, and I’ll never forget

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it as long as I live. Gone was the cheerful, happy-golucky Vanessa that my friends and family knew and loved. She had been replaced by a sad and angry woman who sometimes felt like she was a stranger, even to her own self. Slowly but surely the Cage was grinding me down, stripping me of all hope and plunging me into a permanent state of despair and anxiety. My health was suffering, my career was suffering, and I had nothing that resembled a social life any more.

But then, one encounter gave me just a little hope, demonstrating that not all of the prison’s ghostly inhabitants were evil.

On a bright, sunny afternoon, I was sitting on my couch, which at the time backed onto the main window in the front room. I was enjoying a much-needed day off from work, all alone inside the Cage, and doing the best I could to try and relax by watching something mindless on TV. Without any kind of warning, I suddenly sensed that something out of the ordinary was going on. I looked in the direction of the small lobby and could hardly believe my eyes. There, directly in front of me, stood a young man with long black hair and deep brown eyes. His face was lined and weather-beaten, with crow’s feet around his eyes, something that seemed unusual because his overall looks appeared to be that of a man in his early

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twenties. The lined and careworn face didn’t seem to match up with his age.

I sat absolutely still, not daring to move a muscle.

Unlike most of my previous encounters with apparitions inside the Cage, I was thrilled to find that there was no fear this time. I was just so enthralled with what I was seeing. My eyes were glued to the young man’s, and we both stared at one another curiously.

Neither one of us seemed willing to look away first.

Thanks to the early afternoon daylight, I could see him with absolute clarity, picking out every detail of his clothing.

This was a poor man, with ragged apparel that reflected his lack of means, and the style of dress was hundreds of years out of date. His skin, just like his clothing, was dirty and grubby, but he seemed happy nevertheless.

It wasn’t until I looked down to where his trousers and shoes should have been that I realized something important: he was only visible from the waist up. Everything below the belt line was gone. I could see the back door and the bottom of the garden window where his legs ought to have been.

I don’t know exactly how much time passed—minutes, certainly—but the man looked away first, gliding slowly past the lobby. Somehow, I knew that he could see me in exactly the same way as I was seeing him. This man wasn’t a residual apparition, a paranormal recording whose energy was replayed only when a person with the ability to see them turned up; this was an intelligent spirit, one who

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possessed consciousness and sentience. We were equally aware of one another, and I felt a flicker of brief, unspoken understanding pass between us. As he disappeared right in front of my eyes, I actually felt comforted by his presence— more importantly, I felt slightly less alone.

I named the man Jack, just because that name seemed right to me somehow. The residue of his presence stuck with me inside the house for weeks after our encounter.

It was a genuine novelty to meet a spirit inside the Cage that I wasn’t in fear of. This man brought with him a sense of kindness, and he gave me the impression of being a lost soul. I knew that he couldn’t stay there forever, and I also felt that he either wanted or needed to move on to whatever it is that comes after this life.

After giving the matter some thought, I finally decided that the best way to help Jack was to call in the local vicar.

I contacted the St Osyth church, which belonged to the Church of England, and the vicar agreed to come over and visit. He was a lovely man and didn’t hesitate to see what help he could offer to Jack.

We sat together in the front room and had a long chat. We finally agreed that he would bless the house with holy water and follow up by saying prayers in every room of the Cage in an attempt to help Jack cross over. I didn’t trouble the visiting vicar about the other paranormal activity in the house; not only did it seem too bizarre a subject for me to broach, but I also wanted to keep the

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focus of this evening’s ritual where it belonged—on Jack, not on myself.

The vicar went upstairs first and walked around the house, getting a short, informal tour from me; then he came back to the front room and began to prepare for the delivery of his blessing. Donning his robes, he produced a small vial of holy water and set out what looked like a miniature altar. He told me that he was now ready to begin God’s work.

We climbed the stairs together for the second time, and then suddenly stopped dead in our tracks as we heard the sound of fast-running water coming from both taps in the upstairs bathroom. The vicar looked at me in surprise. We both knew that they were not running when he was up there five minutes before.

The only thing I could think of to say was, “You see?”

I never saw or heard from Jack again after the vicar’s visit, so I like to think that with a little help from the local man of the cloth he was able to cross over into the next realm of existence. The Cage was definitely colder and darker without Jack’s presence, and it became very clear to me that the Church of England blessing ceremony hadn’t driven off the darker residents. The atmosphere of gloom and doom returned with a vengeance, and I fell back into the grip of despair.

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And then, just like that, my entire world changed. All it took was a single visit to my doctor, the results of which left me stunned to my core.

I was pregnant.

12

“MAYBE THE GHOSTS JUST DON’T LIKE HER … ”

L

ater on, my small team of paranormal investigators and I elected to try another human pendulum session. This time, however, we chose the master bedroom as our venue.

With the exception of a large inflatable air mattress and a single wooden chair, the room was completely empty. As I played the beam of my flashlight around the room, causing it to glint against the mirrors on the fitted wardrobes and cabinets, I couldn’t help but imagine Vanessa lying here on that very same mattress, all alone and terrified in the darkness.

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The master bedroom.

Caroline wandered over to the window, the same window from which the figure of a skeletally thin old woman has been seen peering out past the thick curtains at the traffic and pedestrians moving along Colchester Road. Vanessa told me during one of our many conversations that she had been contacted by an angry driver once who told her disapprovingly that she really ought to remove the mannequin from her upstairs window. “What mannequin?� Vanessa had asked, puzzled. The driver went on to describe something out of a horror movie: a wizened, emaciated old crone with long, stringy gray hair that framed a blank, expressionless face.

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The upstairs window where ghostly figures have been seen.

Apparently more than one villager thought that Vanessa had planted a creepy-looking Halloween decoration in her master bedroom in order to scare the life out of those who saw it.

Needless to say, Vanessa had no idea what she was talking about. She didn’t even own such a mannequin. Would the spirit of the old woman come through the human pendulum and speak to us tonight?

I wanted to add an extra measure of control to our human pendulum sessions, which included putting headphones in the subject’s ears and piping in music from an iPod. For maximum annoyance, I’d gone for the soundtrack from The

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Lego Movie at maximum volume. That way the person acting as pendulum shouldn’t be able to hear a thing, and therefore shouldn’t be influenced by the questions themselves.

Once again, Stephen and Caroline recorded the proceedings while I asked the questions. Lesley volunteered to be the pendulum, and after a brief statement of intent that was designed to protect us from unwanted spirit entities, we were off to the races. Lesley began to tilt almost immediately, responding to questions in a way that suggested that a male spirit was present in the room with us.

She rocked backward into her no position when I asked whether the spirit had died inside the house, but then tilted forward in response to the question, “Did you live inside this building?” Which raised the possibility that we were talking with either a former tenant of the house itself, the jailer, one of his cronies … or a prisoner.

“Were you a prisoner?” The pendulum indicated that it was not. “Were you happy in this building?”

The response was such a forceful no that Lesley was almost knocked off her feet and had to throw out her hands to steady herself. “Somebody was pushing on my shoulders at the front!” she exclaimed, gesturing excitedly. It had been a very powerful shove indeed, and in my experience, such occurrences were quite rare. Usually the forces involved with the human pendulum technique were a little more subtle, almost gentle, the majority of the time. Not so tonight, here in the Cage.

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“Do you like having people here?” A very definite no.

“Are you the reason that Lesley went cold downstairs, when she was sitting in the chair?” This time, the answer was an equally firm yes. All four of us looked at one another with a growing air of unease. We were all thinking the same thing: an unhappy male entity that didn’t like having company claimed that it was alongside us tonight inside the Cage, and it was willing to shove Lesley around in order to get its point across. What else might it be prepared to do in order to get its way?

This was beginning to remind us all of Vanessa’s warnings concerning the dark man. On the other hand, perhaps this could also be the spirit that referred to himself as Heinrich. After all, Heinrich had not been a resident of the Cage itself, nor a jailer or an inmate (if he was to be believed); rather, he claimed to have been a local shepherd who decided to communicate by Ouija board with the four investigators for reasons known only to himself.

After discussing it with my colleagues, I decided that the best policy was to simply ask the spirit whether it meant harm to any of the four investigators. The resulting answer came in the form of the most aggressive shove yet, one that quite literally slammed Lesley backward and off her feet.

Her arms windmilled desperately in the air as she fought for balance. Fortunately, she managed to keep herself from falling flat on her back.

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“This feels horrible!” Lesley said with a nervous chuckle, trying to laugh off the unnerving sensation of being handled by something that none of us could see. Nobody was buying into her false bravado, but Lesley was no quitter, and she resolutely insisted on continuing the session so the team could try and uncover more information. Although it was slightly reassuring to be told that the entity that was speaking through Lesley meant them no harm, we were all too aware that one shouldn’t put too much trust in the veracity of information received through any occult technique. Stephen reminded us that we would be wise to keep our guard up at all times.

“Are you,” I asked, deciding to cut right to the chase, “or were you … a witch?”

Yes. And then, yet again, our contact with the entity was cut off abruptly. No more answers were forthcoming, no matter who stepped into the role of pendulum or questioner. We tried rotating everybody through each of those roles, all to no avail. With a frustrated sigh, we concluded that this particular well appeared to have dried up for the evening. If we wanted answers, then we would have to look somewhere else.

But not tonight. The sun was already coming up, and our beds were calling.

The following day’s investigation kicked off at just after two o’clock in the afternoon. Stephen, Lesley, Caroline, and I had snatched a few precious hours’ worth of sleep in

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our nearby hotel rooms. The hotel beds were a real luxury when compared to the lumpy couch and cold floors of the Cage, where all of us had taken a safety nap at one point or another during the week.

It was amazing just how much difference a shower and a change of clothes could make, particularly when they were topped off with some hot tea (or coffee, for our visiting American friend). The team was looking forward to the coming night’s investigation, ready for anything that the Cage might throw at us.

True to form, the February air was cold, with only a very light breeze to rock the bare branches. I inserted the key into the lock and turned it, then pushed the creaky back door open slowly. As always, it seemed much colder inside the Cage than it was outside. Caroline immediately set to firing up the electric heaters, while Lesley made a beeline for the kettle.

Before we had left the Cage at sunrise that same morning, Stephen had asked any entities who may still be present inside the Cage to move something around while the house was empty. Why not, the priest had suggested politely, stack some of the equipment on the wooden tabletop? Now that we were back, we were all disappointed to find that, contrary to the priest’s request, none of the objects and equipment that had been left strewn across the table that day had moved even an inch. It seemed that the spirits of the

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Cage were not willing to perform on demand—not unless it suited their own purposes, anyway.

Moving with a practiced smoothness born from three nights of carrying out the very same routine, we fired up our laptops and began to place all of the equipment that we would need for the coming night on charge. We had noticed that, as with so many haunted locations, batteries seemed to drain very quickly inside the old prison. Many paranormal investigators believe that the drained electricity is being used as a power source, one that allows ghostly phenomena to manifest.

Once all of the equipment was either fully charged or had gotten factory fresh batteries inserted, Lesley popped outside to take a quick smoke break. As the only smoker among the team, she preferred to exit via the back door and stand outside in the small enclosed yard, keeping an eye on the exterior windows and taking the occasional peek along the length of Coffin Alley.

Lesley had been outside for less than five minutes when the back door slammed shut with a loud thud, one that could easily be heard over the noise of the traffic rumbling along the busy Colchester Road.

All three of her colleagues were located within eyesight of one another, sitting in either the kitchen or around the table inside the Cage itself. Even if there had been any question of fraud (which there wasn’t), there was absolutely no way that any one of us could have snuck out and slammed

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the door closed behind Lesley—at least, not without one or both of the others noticing. It would also have required all three of us to be in collusion with one another, in what would have been a prank conducted in the poorest of taste, and contrary to all of the rules under which we had agreed to operate.

To be clear, a sense of humor is a very helpful attribute for a paranormal investigator. The nights can be both long and boring, and the occasional lapse into a silly joke helps the dead time to pass a little more quickly. But for the professional paranormal investigator, one who is truly serious about his or her trade, practical jokes are an absolute no-no.

The problem is that once a piece of so-called paranormal phenomena has been faked, even though it is simply just for a laugh, and the joker confesses to it afterward, all trust and credibility has now been lost. It is then extremely difficult, if not impossible, for it to be regained.

As the nights wore on inside the Cage, and the four of us grew increasingly exhausted, every single one of us had gotten a little punchy on at least one occasion, and we all ended up giggling and cackling at some pretty terrible jokes. At one point, when all four of the team members were gathered around the table, somebody—nobody can quite remember exactly who came up with the idea—halfseriously suggested the idea of making a TV pilot episode that would be a mash-up of ghost hunting and the London gangster scene, as popularized by Guy Ritchie in such

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movies as Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.

The proposed title for this cultural masterpiece is a little too offensive to list here, but suffice it to say that when the three Brits on the team tried to induce Stephen to speak like a Londoner, they were soon reduced to tears and howls of laughter when the American priest gamely made his best effort at imitating Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

But that was as far as the joking went. At no time did anybody play any practical jokes inside the Cage. To do so would have crossed a line that would have compromised trust and integrity. In order to maintain an acceptable standard of professionalism, the four of us had agreed at the very outset of the case that we would not play tricks for any reason.

After unlocking the back door in order to let Lesley back in (the lock kicks in automatically when the door closes, and can then only be opened from inside the Cage, or with a key from the outside), the nonplussed team clustered around it and began to search for a logical explanation.

We began by pushing the door mostly shut, but left it ajar by roughly three inches, which had been how Lesley usually pulled it behind her when she took a smoke break. Then we started to experiment with actually closing the door, starting out with gentle pushes, and ending up with fairly violent, forceful slams (which sounded exactly like the noise the door had made when Lesley was trapped outside). Our ultimate goal was to determine exactly how much force it would take to close the door firmly and securely against its frame so that

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the lock would automatically engage itself. The answer, as it turned out, was quite a lot. It required a hearty shove with one arm at the very least in order to get the warped old door to sit somewhat snugly against the jamb.

The most obvious explanation for the door suddenly appearing to close itself was, of course, that of a breeze.

Could a sudden gust of wind have been responsible for slamming the door? On the face of things, it seemed rather unlikely. Lesley had left the door ajar, open by perhaps two or three inches, she explained, which had become a habit over the course of the week. The hinges were positioned in such a way that the door swung outward against its frame when it was shut, which meant that in order to close it, the motive force would have had to have come from inside the house. Air flow from outside the Cage would have blown the door farther open, not closed.

Besides, there was barely any wind at all outside. The branches of the trees were not swaying, and nor was the grass in the pub’s beer garden moving at all. Then the team went from room to room inside the house, checking on each and every one of the doors and windows. Most of the doors and absolutely all of the windows inside the building were closed. When the investigators checked more closely, not even a slight breeze was blowing through the house—just the usual minor drafts, none of them even close to being strong enough to slam a door. (They assessed this by using the time-honored, highly technical method of holding a

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sheet of paper up to each doorframe and recording how much or how little it was blown—in most cases, the answer was not at all.)

“Besides,” I pointed out, my brow furrowed in consternation, “this is our fourth night here. Lesley takes seven or eight smoke breaks each night. That means that on the first three nights, she would have been outside for, what … roughly twenty-one times? And in all those times, not once does the door slam shut behind her.”

“And last night was a lot windier than tonight,” Stephen pointed out, gesturing toward the few leaves left on the trees, which were hardly even rustling, let alone swaying. “There’s barely even a breeze tonight. What about vibrations from the passing traffic, though? There are some heavy trucks on the road, and they pass by the Cage pretty fast.”

“That’s not a bad theory.” Thinking about it for a moment, I positioned myself directly behind the door and began to jump up and down as hard as I possibly could. I had to be careful not to bang my head on the low plaster ceiling overhead. Weighing in at some 270 pounds (plus the clothes and heavy boots that I was wearing, which were probably good for another ten pounds), nobody could have accused me of being a lightweight; yet the constant thud-thud-thudding of my thick soles on the floor failed to move the door even fractionally, let alone slam it shut. It soon became obvious to us all that the vibration theory just wasn’t going to fly either.

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We unanimously agreed that neither a sudden gust of wind nor the vibrations from a passing vehicle provided a satisfactory explanation for the manner in which Lesley had gotten locked out. When I texted Vanessa with an update on what had happened to Lesley, her reply offered as good a reason as any other: maybe the ghosts just don’t like her …

I couldn’t hide my grin when I showed Lesley the text message. The instant Vanessa’s words sunk in, she visibly blanched. It looked as though we could be in for an interesting night.

13

ATTACKED

I’ll be the first to admit that when it came down to matters of the heart, I’ve sometimes made some bad choices. When the doctor told me that I was pregnant with my first child, I was just coming out of the tail end of a disastrous relationship. It had left me in a serious amount of debt, and most frightening of all, I was now even less capable of escaping my prison than I had been before.

My back was truly to the wall, and I now had no choice but to stay and face whatever this house had to throw at me. But if I had thought that things had been difficult before, now the fear and pressure had increased tenfold: this time, I was both alone and pregnant. I soon found out, as many pregnant women do, that the few friends who dropped by to visit me suddenly stopped 175

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coming around. After all, what young person wants to spend their nights at home with a cup of tea and an early bedtime, unless they absolutely have to?

Word had gotten out about the paranormal activity at the Cage. It’s reputation as a haunted house had already put most people off from coming over to visit, let alone staying over for the night. My dear friend Heather had been an exception, but she had very sadly passed away.

I still grieved for her and missed her and longed for her company and support.

The last time that I had seen Heather was after her funeral. We were at her wake, which was being held in a pub. I happened to glance over at the Christmas tree that occupied one corner of the room, and there, smiling radiantly, was my darling Heather. She was smiling broadly, and looked so happy that it brought tears to my eyes. Not being in permanent pain made all the difference.

To make things even better, standing next to her was my brother Scottie, who had passed on years before.

As was his habit, Scottie appeared totally calm, looking every bit as peaceful as Heather was enthusiastic. She and I had talked at great length before her passing, and I had promised her faithfully that my brother would be the first to meet her once she arrived on the other side. The fact that they had never met made no difference at all, so far as I was concerned, and I was overjoyed to see that Scottie had kept the promise on my behalf.

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Now, much to my dismay, it was pretty much me, myself, and I, all alone for seven nights a week. I had never missed Heather more. My mood sank to an all-time low. I hated how trapped and lonely I felt, particularly as the fear of my own house never went away. I didn’t feel even remotely safe inside the Cage, either by day or by night; everything felt utterly helpless and hopeless, and I couldn’t see how I would ever be able to get myself out of this tangled web.

As the baby grew and my due date drew nearer and nearer, my fear grew as well. I started to have nightmares about trying to raise a new life inside this hellhole.

Thankfully, there was one ray of sunshine: my good friend Mikey O’Connell. Mikey was great comic relief and also provided a bit of very welcome company for me, on those occasions when he would pop round just to see how I was doing. I had known Mikey since I was eighteen, and he knew that the house had become a genuine danger to me and my unborn child. Rather than simply being the typical haunted house, he accepted the fact that the haunting of the Cage was something far darker and much more evil.

It was nothing short of miraculous that he still came over to visit me, considering the fact that Mikey had suffered his own physical attack inside the Cage. He was fixing the light at the very top of the stairs one day, just above the landing, which was so paranormally active.

No sooner had he finished changing the bulb for the

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umpteenth time (it was constantly flashing on and off, or failing to light up at all) when he was suddenly shoved hard in the back by a strong pair of hands.

He fell head over heels down the stairs, landing in a crumpled heap at the bottom step. Thankfully he was unhurt, but he was very badly shaken. I couldn’t blame him: he was lucky not to have broken his neck.

On another separate occasion, Mikey had just finished replacing the bulb in the outside yard light, and had hung around out there for a while to chat with me. From out of the blue, the light suddenly exploded, blasting apart with such force that the glass from the lamp was blown clear across the enclosed yard. We threw our hands up to cover our eyes, instinctively turning away from the blast. It was a good thing we did, because both of us were showered with wickedly sharp broken shards of glass, some of which embedded themselves in the top of Mikey’s bald head.

We both knew with absolute certainty that the explosion was not down to bad workmanship or cheap materials.

Mikey knew what he was doing and had purchased high quality bulbs. Once again, the Cage was wreaking havoc with electronics, and this time it had drawn blood.

My deep terror of the house reached an all-time high one morning in the upstairs bathroom that I had grown to fear and despise so much. It was around half past seven, and I was brushing my teeth before going to work. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular.

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Suddenly, just as I was leaning forward over the sink, something smacked me violently across the buttocks.

This wasn’t a playful swat, which would have been scary enough, considering the fact that there was nobody but me inside the bathroom. No, this was an angry slap, and it was going to bruise. I was so shocked and hurt by the vicious blow that I screamed at the top of my lungs, spitting out a mouthful of toothpaste and splattering it across the mirror in front of me. My toothbrush flew high up into the air, landing in the basin with a clatter.

As had become my policy, I kept what had happened to myself, mostly due to the fear of being branded either a lunatic or a fantasist. Yet the physical attacks would grow more frequent and more severe, leading me to genuinely fear for my life.

Perhaps the most disturbing assault of all happened when I was standing at the top of the staircase, just outside my bedroom door. I was looking at myself in the full-length mirror that was mounted on the wall next to the landing, making sure I looked OK before heading to work.

What happened next took me completely by surprise.

Two unseen hands slammed into me, pushing me violently to the ground. I fell sideways in the direction of the spare bedroom, and found myself lying on the floor, having fallen onto my side. For a moment I was frozen in shock, fear, and pain, but daren’t move. I was heavily pregnant and was worried about trying to get up, in case the baby

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was hurt—it wasn’t unthinkable that the stress might push me into early labor. And so I just lay there on the spare bedroom floor, utterly alone in the house, praying that my baby would be unhurt.

As the seconds became minutes, tears began rolling down my cheeks. Once they started coming, they simply wouldn’t stop, becoming choking sobs as the gravity of what had just happened to me sank in. What if I had fallen onto my belly instead of my side? The physical trauma could easily have caused an internal bleed that was potentially life-threatening to both my unborn child and to me.

“Just leave me alone!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, giving vent to months of bottled-up emotion. “It’s not fair! IT’S. NOT. FAIR!” My outburst went on until I had no more energy left, no reserves of strength with which to fight back against my invisible tormentor. When it was finally over, I struggled to pull myself up off the floor, using the wall for leverage.

As I slowly made my way downstairs, with the intention of sitting outside in the yard for a while, a temporary escape from the confines of the Cage, I had a horrifying realization: I could so very easily have been pushed in the opposite direction, which would have resulted in me being left helpless and seriously injured at the bottom of the stairs.

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Vanessa on the stairs.

I was eight months pregnant when I finally had to admit that installing a new bathroom suite couldn’t be put off any longer. The current one had been on its last legs for the last twenty years by the looks of things, and as a new baby was to arrive soon, it needed to be taken care of.

I enlisted the help of my cousin Toby, who was a plumber, and when the new white suite arrived, Toby started work on removing the old bath, sink and toilet, and replacing it with the new ones. Fortunately I was on maternity leave, so when Toby arrived one morning, I

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took the opportunity to pop round and have a cup of tea with my mum Ruth, who lived just two minutes away at the other end of Coffin Alley.

After no more than an hour or so, I heard a frantic knocking at Mum’s front door. Being heavily pregnant and not so fast on my feet, I remained on the sofa and waited for Mum to answer the door. Within one second of the door being opened, a furious and red-faced Toby marched into the front room, and in a raised voice said, “I’m not going back into that house again alone! If you want me to finish the work you will have to come back with me now!”

Toby was clearly very distressed, which couldn’t be more out of character for him. He was a plumber by day and a doorman by night, and wasn’t prone to getting worked up. Precarious situations never fazed him. Obviously, that day was an exception. I told him to calm down, and tell exactly what had happened to stress him out so.

It transpired that when I had shouted upstairs to Toby, telling him that I was going out to my mum’s, he was already hard at work in the bathroom. He called back down to me, hollering that it was no problem, and that he would see me when I returned later.

A little while later, Toby heard me come back into the house, along with a friend. He said that he knew I wasn’t alone, as he could clearly hear two people talking downstairs. He couldn’t hear the specifics of the

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conversation and really wasn’t interested in listening, as he was on the floor removing the toilet, but he did shout down, “Ness, put the kettle on please!”

Minutes passed without a response, so Toby assumed that I had simply not heard him the first time. He could still hear general activity downstairs, so he called down once again for me to put the kettle on. Toby carried on with the job in hand and thought no more about it till around ten minutes later, when I still hadn’t responded to him, when he finally got up from the bathroom floor and leaned over the upstairs banister to call down for the third time.

After a few minutes, he heard footsteps in the downstairs lobby, followed by the black iron latch of the bottom staircase door snapping up. Finally, he thought to himself, I was bringing him a cup of tea at last! Toby heard footsteps on the stairs, walking out onto the ancient wooden floorboards on the landing.

Toby was lying down on the bathroom floor now and said, without getting up, “Thanks! Just leave it out there. I’ll get it in a second.” There was no reply, which he thought was unusual, so he called my name in an attempt to strike up a conversation. Yet again, there was no answer. In that second, Toby knew that something was very, very wrong, and he quickly got to his feet to stand in the bathroom doorway, looking out into the small upstairs hallway where he believed I would be standing.

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To his utter consternation, there was nobody there at all. Toby’s mind raced, trying to make sense of where I had gone and just how I had managed to get down the stairs so quickly without making a sound. Failing to come up with an explanation, he finally decided to go downstairs and see if his cousin and the person she had been talking to were down there.

Toby searched the Cage high and low, stunned to find the house completely empty, with the door still bolted shut and absolutely nothing out of place. That’s when it finally dawned on him that I had never actually come back to the house in the first place, and neither had an intruder come in; he was all alone, and he had been from the moment I had left about an hour before.

So who was it that had been talking and had opened the staircase door and come up the stairs into the hall? Toby didn’t want to stick around any longer in that house alone to try and work out what had happened, so he literally ran out, jumped into his van, and drove over to his Auntie Ruth’s house, where he knew that he would find me.

Toby then expressed a sentiment that I had heard more than once before when he said, “I can’t fight what I can’t see!”

It had, he said, rendered him completely helpless. Over the next few days, Toby did reluctantly return to the house to finish the job—but only on the condition that I not leave the house under any circumstances, and that the staircase

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door would be open at all times so that he did not feel alone and isolated upstairs.

In a way the whole incident had brought me a certain amount of comfort—not because my younger, tough cousin had been scared halfway to death, but for the fact that again it showed that it was not completely personal.

Whatever the reason for the haunting, it was willing to make itself known to others who had no connection to the house.

14

THE SCRYING GAME

L

ater that same evening, I left the Cage for an hour to meet with Vanessa. Although she had been willing to escort Stephen and I around her former home on the day of our arrival, which had taken place during the daytime, she flatly refused to enter the property after dark, under any circumstance. Therefore, in order to gather a little more history and backstory, I agreed to meet her in The King’s Arms pub next door, on the understanding that I would drink no alcohol.

While I interviewed Vanessa, the other members of the team remained behind to hold down the fort and continue their investigation. When our meeting was over, I saw Vanessa to her car and then returned to the Cage on foot. I was just about to place the key in the lock when my phone beeped, indicating that I had just received a text message.

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It was from Stephen: Do you by any chance have your phone networked to your computer?

“No, of course I don’t, you silly bugger,” I called out cheerfully, pushing open the front door and stepping inside.

“That laptop came with me from America. There’s no wireless network here in the Cage, so it’s about as disconnected as it could possibly be.” In fact, there was no Internet connectivity of any kind inside the Cage, other than that provided by our cell phones.

“That’s what I thought,” Stephen replied, pulling out his phone and holding the screen up for me to see. “It was a long shot, but we wondered whether you might be remote controlling your computer through your phone or something like that. Because your laptop was doing this … ” Curious, I peered at the screen of Stephen’s phone, which was now showing a video of what I soon realized was the screen of my laptop. Prior to leaving the Cage earlier that night, I had been working on a Microsoft Word document that contained a log of everything noteworthy that we had experienced during our investigation so far, along with additional notes and observations concerning each occurrence. The document was six pages in length already, and I had left it up on the laptop screen before heading out with the idea that one of the other investigators could add to it in my absence if anything interesting were to happen.

It hadn’t taken long for the laptop to start behaving in the most extraordinarily erratic way. Squinting at the tiny

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video screen, I watched with growing amazement as somebody—a completely unseen somebody—began to scroll through my note file, as though they were scanning it during a speed-reading session. The screen would then shoot back to an earlier part of the document once again, almost as if the reader wanted to start over from the beginning.

Plainly, nobody was touching the mouse or keyboard.

Stephen had made sure to capture the entire laptop within the frame of his shot.

“It just stopped doing that a second before you walked in,” Caroline said, “but it’s acting strangely. Look at the cursor.” She gestured at the real laptop’s screen, where the arrow cursor was bouncing around like a crazed dervish. I frowned, thinking that the wireless mouse might be going haywire: picking it up, I flipped it over and switched the device off. It made no difference: the cursor continued to fly around the screen in a totally random manner.

Sitting in the front room, the three researchers had just finished a dowsing session in which they had attempted to reconnect with the spirit named Heinrich. Once the dowsing rods began to give meaningful answers, Stephen and the ladies had invited him to use as many of the available energy sources inside the Cage as he needed in order to manifest physically. The session had generated a pair of knocks on cue when Heinrich was asked to knock, both of them coming from somewhere inside the Cage itself—somewhere very close to where the team’s laptops were set up. The

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twin dowsing rods had both turned to point toward the open doorway that led into the Cage, which was completely deserted so far as the eye could tell.

“That’s when your computer started acting up,” Lesley explained, “straight after the dowsing rods pointed toward it, and we offered up the energy for Heinrich to use.”

That’s quite the coincidence, I thought to myself, if indeed it actually is a coincidence.

Still determined to troubleshoot my laptop’s erratic behavior, I unplugged the USB wireless mouse receiver from the port in its side. It made no difference: the cursor continued to bounce around. It could easily be a fault with the laptop, I knew; perhaps one of the electronic components was wearing out and acting up, for example. I had owned the laptop for four years, and it had been a reliable platform for that entire period of time; indeed, I had written several books on it. Not once had it behaved in such a way.

The laptop went back to behaving normally within minutes, continuing to do so for the rest of the investigation. No root cause was ever found for the episode of bizarre technological trickery; a large portion of the book that you now hold in your hands was written on that same laptop, and the strange behavior has never repeated itself since it left the Cage.

For my part, I remain convinced that my laptop’s strange behavior comes down to more than just simple coincidence.

Did one of the spirits of the Cage want to read the notes

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that I had been making about them? If so, then it seems that curiosity is one attribute that we take along with us when we leave our mortal bodies behind …

Regular visits from both Mikey and my good friend Linda kept me relatively sane during those dark days of my pregnancy. I had known Linda ever since I was a young teenager. She knew the Cage all too well, having had direct personal experience of the house; some good friends of hers lived there during the late 1990s.

Linda had made a point of warning me about the Cage when I first told her that I wanted to buy it. Linda advised me in the strongest possible terms that the house was haunted—it was, in her words, “a bad house”—but I was so blinded by desire for my dream home that her sound advice fell on deaf ears. With hindsight, I should have listened, but when it came to the Cage, all common sense seemed to have abandoned me.

When I asked her about it, Linda was very willing to share her experiences with me. She told me that on one occasion when she was visiting her friends, they were all sitting in the front room, enjoying a chat, when suddenly an almighty crash came from the upstairs landing. Startled, they all jumped up and went upstairs to investigate.

On reaching the top of the stairs, they discovered that all of the books from the bookcase on the top landing had

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been dumped onto the floor. The bookcase itself was still standing (it hadn’t fallen over), and its contents had been scattered across the landing. Linda knew that there was nobody else in the house, as the couple lived there alone.

No windows were open, ruling out the possibility of a sudden gust of wind being the culprit. It looked to Linda and her friends as if a petulant visitor had simply tossed the books everywhere in a fit of pique.

On another occasion, Linda’s friend had just climbed into bed and had hardly begun to doze off when she suddenly felt the covers being pulled slowly back. Before she could react, something the size and shape of a child of perhaps six or seven years old snuggled into her body.

Although her friend had heard stories of ghostly children haunting the Cage, she had never experienced anything quite like that before.

Hearing stories like that from a trusted source helped to cement my belief that the Cage had been haunted long before I ever took ownership of the place. Although the last thing I needed to hear was more ghost stories, there was a degree of comfort and validation in knowing that I wasn’t the only one being plagued by the paranormal while living in that house.

On Christmas Eve of 2007, after twenty-four hours spent in hard and painful labor, I gave birth to my son, Jesse Caleb James Mitchell. My friends Kirsty and Neil

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had kindly driven me to the hospital and stayed with me throughout the birth.

When I held my son in my arms for the very first time, I felt nothing but joy and a sense of wonder. Now that my baby boy had come into this world, however, I knew it would be down to me, and me alone, to make sure this precious little bundle stayed safe and happy when I took him home. And that raised the disturbing question: what kind of home for an infant was a haunted medieval prison? It was already weighing on me that the Cage was a poor excuse for a home.

How on earth was I going to be able to keep Jesse out of harm’s way in there, when I couldn’t even protect myself?

I tried to put a brave face on it when I took Jesse home for the first time. As the weeks went by, I slowly but surely taught myself how to look after my son. I learned how to distinguish the hungry cries from those of happiness or a wet diaper and how to burp him properly after feeding to ensure that he didn’t cry afterward with the pain of trapped wind. I learned how to bathe, dress, and change my son, falling into a completely new routine and rhythm of life that placed the needs of my son above everything else.

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Vanessa and her son, Jesse.

I knew that Jesse absolutely had to stay where I could see him at all times, and I needed no reminder that I was raising my firstborn son in a house that possessed a dark energy all of its own—one that had proven itself time and time again to be both unpredictable and dangerously hostile. I lived in constant fear of how the Cage and whichever entities were haunting it would react to this new and completely helpless arrival.

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It was our final night spent investigating the Cage, and my team and I were taking advantage of another one of our many tea breaks to plan our next move. We all agreed that we wanted to find out more about the entity who had referred to himself as Heinrich. But what, we wondered, would be the best method of communication? Several options were debated before the team finally settled on a simple technique known as scrying.

The term “scrying” refers to the age-old method of using a reflective surface in an attempt to establish a window into another time or place. There are many different ways of doing this: some proponents of the technique gaze into crystals, for example; others prefer mirrors; both smoke and flame have historically been used, as has the surface of water. It was this final medium (a variation on scrying that has sometimes been given the name hydromancy) that we finally settled upon.

There was nothing mystical about the preparations. All that was needed was a small saucepan of water, which Stephen filled and placed carefully on the floor in the middle of the front room, and the always-important open mind. I was admittedly skeptical, having never used the technique before in any of my paranormal investigations, but I was willing to make the attempt and see how things turned out. I took up a position on the couch and began to video the proceedings as Caroline, Lesley, and Stephen sat crosslegged on the floor, clustered around the saucepan. We had

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set the lights to a very low level, which allowed me to use an infrared camera to record the session.

As usual, the Cage was bitterly cold. Caroline cranked up one of the electric heaters to maximum and rolled it into close proximity to the three sitters. Taking the lead, Lesley called upon Heinrich, asking him respectfully to show himself in the water if at all possible.

When there was no response, Caroline asked if there were any other entities present that would care to make their presence known. She reached out and gently shook the pan, agitating the water just a little. Stephen quietly echoed her call, inviting the old lady who was known to appear in the chair next to the fire to appear and communicate with them. He sat quietly, peering down over the rims of his spectacles into the rippling liquid.

Still nothing.

“Heinrich,” Lesley tried again, “if you could please show us your face, we would really appreciate it. We would very much like to see the face of the person that we have been speaking to.”

The other three investigators nodded in agreement.

No matter how nicely they asked, no matter how much they entreated Heinrich and the other spirits of the Cage to appear, the water remained completely empty.

Taking a quick break, we decided to change gears. If water wasn’t working, then what about another medium?

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“What about that?” Stephen asked, pointing up at the large mirror that hung on the wall. He removed it carefully, placing it on the ground and propping it upright so that it stood vertically, facing the chair next to the fire. “Who wants to give it a try?”

Lesley stepped forward enthusiastically. Settling herself into the armchair that had given her such a shock when she first arrived at the Cage, she willed herself to relax as much as she possibly could and began to stare into the mirror.

The front room was still dark and shadowy, but enough light crept in through the open doorway that led to the Cage itself for her to see by.

For the first few minutes, nothing happened. The three other investigators looked on, growing a little bored as time passed uneventfully. Then, in an instant, Lesley’s eyes widened. She sat bolt upright in the chair.

“What is it, Lesley?” Caroline asked expectantly.

“There’s a man,” Lesley began to explain, the disbelief apparent in her tone of voice. “He’s … hard to see. No, wait.

He’s getting clearer.”

“What kind of a man?” I asked, craning my neck to get a better look at the surface of the mirror. I couldn’t see anything amiss, just the reflection of the room itself.

“A middle-aged man, but he’s not from this time.”

Lesley went on to describe a man with dark hair that was slicked back from his forehead with something like hair oil or Brylcreem, in the style that was so popular in the 1920s

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or 1930s. She estimated his age at somewhere between 35 and 40. “He’s looking right at me! He’s trying to tell me something … ” “What?” Stephen wanted to know. “What is he saying to you, Lesley?”

But try as she might, Lesley couldn’t make out the words.

The man was becoming more and more insistent, trying to convey some sort of message to her. He locked eyes with her own, fully aware of Lesley’s presence and the fact that she was watching him through the mirror somehow.

Lesley watched intently as the man spoke to her, trying his very best to get his point across. It just wasn’t happening; Lesley couldn’t lip-read, and none of the other investigators could see the man when they looked into the mirror for themselves.

Then the man began to disappear, fading slowly into the shadows behind him. Finally, nothing was left except for Lesley’s own reflection, staring back at her with a vaguely troubled expression on her face.

“I don’t know what it was that he wanted to tell me,” she said, blinking rapidly to clear her eyes, “but he seemed to think that it was really important … ”

15

“IT HAS NEVER BEEN HUMAN . . .”

C

oming to the end of our investigation, Stephen, Caroline, Lesley, and I all sat down to try and make some sense of the bigger picture. One of the first questions that we needed to address was: Did the cause of the haunting originate here, or did it come to the Cage from outside in some way?

“The process of constant turmoil, constant turnover, and above all else the constant drama and negativity does cause certain things of a baser nature to settle in a place like this,” explained Stephen. “Things that thrive on all of those unpleasant energies … and it’s not unusual for physical reactions to occur in response to that.”

The kind of reactions that Stephen is referring to include illnesses, particularly those of an emotional and psychological nature: constant stress, tension, and distraught feelings.

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In such cases, the people who live in environments like the Cage for extended periods of time may, he says, be prone to depression and severe anxiety. “Feeling suicidal would be a large part of that negativity. Something may have been attracted here from outside, something that feeds upon feelings like that. The Cage may have been cursed.”

“Cursed is a very loaded term,” I countered, meaning that it had very definite occult connotations and should be employed very carefully in cases such as this.

“Yes, and it’s a word that Vanessa has used several times,” the priest pointed out, “and so have more than a few other occupants and visitors to the Cage. It’s not strictly accurate, in that nobody has actually cast a curse on this place. Perhaps affliction is a better way of putting it. People who live here are afflicted by it.

“To cut a long story short,” Stephen went on, “Every location that has its garbage will draw feral animals. That’s every bit as true in the psychic and spiritual world as it is in the physical.”

He then explained that such entities will often do their very best to create mayhem and instill fear, with the express purpose of keeping the flow of negative energy—their food supply, for all intents and purposes—going. Without it, they would starve. Stephen believes that this is why the more recent owners of the Cage have been subjected to some of the most frightening paranormal activity imaginable.

“It Has Never Been Human … ” 201

“So is it possible that this dark force, dark entity, whatever you want to call it, who is the center of all of this, is somebody who used to live or work here—like the jailer?”

Lesley wanted to know.

“No,” Stephen responded flatly. “Because it has never been human. We aren’t talking about a person who is stuck here after death. Well, with some of the entities we are.

But they’re not the real reason that the paranormal activity here is so malevolent. This entity has never incarnated as a human or as an animal. It has always been what it is.”

“Could it have been masquerading as the jailer,” I wondered, “projecting itself as this dark, shadowy man in order to terrify Vanessa and the other people that encountered it?”

“That’s certainly possible.”

I sat back in my chair, sleepy and physically exhausted, trying to process this new perspective on the haunting. It was only necessary to talk with Vanessa about the so-called jailer and watch the expression on her face change to one of genuine fear in order to gain some appreciation for how frightening this entity had been. If Stephen was correct, then this was an entirely new twist: the Cage was being haunted not just by human spirits, but also by one that was inhuman.

No wonder Vanessa had fled in fear for her life.

As the weeks passed by and my son slowly grew, I couldn’t fail to notice that he seemed to be entertained by something that I couldn’t see. Whatever it was, it

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provoked a great sense of delight in Jesse, making him laugh and gurgle quite happily.

It didn’t allay my fears about the house itself, but it did give me a certain amount of comfort to think that there may well have been good energies living there with us.

Constantly during this time Vanessa understood with absolute clarity that if she didn’t find a way to leave and escape the house she could never live a normal happy and safe life and that wasn’t the life she wanted for her beautiful innocent son.

Vanessa had by now lived in the Cage for three long years and unbeknownst to her something was about to happen that would see her escape from her prison and finally give her the strength to set herself free from the living hell.

Not long after Jesse’s birth, Vanessa had moved completely into her bedroom; it became untenable for her to live in the house as a whole, and the best way to ensure her safety was to confine herself and Jesse to a single room.

On a cold and dark winter’s evening that I will never forget, I had just finished work and collected Jesse from his babysitter. Removing him from the car, we stood outside the Cage for a moment while I wrapped him up in my warm winter coat, snuggling him up against my body in order to keep him warm. I remember very clearly

“It Has Never Been Human … ” 203

standing just outside the gate amongst the lightly falling snowflakes, trying my hardest to build up the courage to go inside.

So, I thought to myself miserably, it had finally come to this. I had to force myself to walk into my own home in the face of every instinct screaming at me to keep out.

If it hadn’t been for the snow and freezing temperatures, which for once were actually colder outside than inside, I would have stayed outside for a while longer. But my baby would soon grow cold, so I knew that I had no choice but to walk through that gate and up to the door.

I peered in through the small panes of glass in the door before opening it, something that I always did, just to check and see if there were any shadow people visible.

Thankfully, there were not. I stepped cautiously inside and, as had become my new routine, went straight upstairs to my bedroom without looking behind me. Long before now I had abandoned my ritual of getting up early in the morning to set the downstairs fire; there didn’t seem much point anymore, as I was living almost entirely in my bedroom, where I had electric heaters plugged in.

Turning on the TV, I settled down in my room with Jesse and broke out some sandwiches that I had picked up earlier for dinner. I had outfitted my bedroom with all of the necessities of a one-bedroom flat, all so that I could avoid going into the rest of the Cage whenever possible.

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Later that evening, I realized that I had no clothes left to wear for work the next day, as I hadn’t done the ironing for a while, so with great reluctance I steeled myself to go downstairs and iron some clothes as quickly as I possibly could. Jesse was sleeping soundly in his cot, and because downstairs was bitterly cold, I took the risk on that one isolated occasion of leaving him there alone to sleep; normally, I would have been adamant about taking him downstairs with me … but not that night.

The ironing board was kept in the prison room itself. I set it up quickly and got on with the job in hand. Suddenly, three of Jesse’s battery-operated toy trains, which until now had lain dormant in the corner of the room, decided to switch themselves on and started to chug their way around the floor of the Cage, playing their nursery rhymes as they looped around my feet and the legs of the ironing board.

My very first knee-jerk reaction was one of anger at myself for even coming downstairs in the first place. A voice inside my head practically screamed, you should have known that something would happen! Next came a surge of pure fear, and in that instant, I cursed myself for leaving my baby son alone upstairs, out of my sight … and vulnerable.

Switching off the iron and grabbing my clothes, I practically flew out of the prison room, running through the front room and out into the lobby where the door

“It Has Never Been Human … ” 205

to the staircase stood. Swinging the door open, I braced myself to sprint up the stairs.

That’s when I saw him.

Standing at the top of the stairs on the small landing was a man. I can see him in my mind’s eye now with absolute clarity. He was wearing brown trousers and a white shirt, and I was immediately struck by the fact that this apparition was not like the others I had seen in the house; he was wearing modern day clothing, and instead of being dirty and disheveled as the others had been, this man seemed clean and neatly groomed. This was a ghost from our own time, not one from hundreds of years ago.

He was staring down at my son, watching him sleep.

Panic flooded through me in a sickening wave, forcing me to fight for control of myself. With growing horror, it dawned on me that he was standing in between me and my baby, and that he was no more than a meter away from the cot where my darling Jesse lay quietly sleeping.

That’s when my maternal instinct kicked into high gear, drowning out the fear. The only thing that mattered was the safety of my son.

I ran up those stairs screaming like a banshee, running straight through the apparition of the man and into my bedroom. I slammed the door as hard as I could behind me, then grabbed Jesse from his cot and dived under the covers of my bed. It may sound silly or futile, but it was the only way I could think of at the time of trying to put a

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layer of protection between us and the ghostly man lurking outside my bedroom door.

I waited under the covers in silence, my chest aching from the strain of my racing heart. Incredibly, Jesse hadn’t been disturbed by the incident, and still slept soundly in my arms. I waited for what felt like an eternity, and when nothing else happened, I finally peeked out from beneath the covers. The bedroom was empty, silent, and dark. I turned on the lights and the TV at low volume, just to add a little cold comfort.

Later that night, I eventually dozed off out of sheer exhaustion. I awoke with a start sometime around three o’clock in the morning. Jesse was still fast asleep next to me. Both the lights and the TV were still on. Then I realized what it was that had woken me up: somebody was rattling the iron latch on my bedroom door.

The fear and dread were back with a vengeance.

Although I was totally exhausted, my mind and all of my senses were yet again on full alert. Looking over toward the bedroom door, I could clearly see the black iron latch being snapped up and down, as though somebody was manipulating it from the landing outside. The latch cracked loudly every time it smacked against itself. This started off relatively slowly, but within seconds the heavy latch was slamming up and down with such ferocious speed that it forced me to cup my hands round my ears in order to try and block out the almost deafening sound.

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By now I was totally convinced that something was going to burst through the bedroom door at any moment: the dark man, the jailer, or whatever I wanted to call the entity that was terrorizing me was going to show itself again, and it would leave me no choice but to confront it head-on, whether I wanted to or not.

Except it never happened. Despite all of my panic and apprehension, the bedroom fell silent once more. The door latch that had been moving so violently just a few seconds ago now sat motionless, as though daring me to get out of bed and go to investigate.

But I didn’t. I daren’t throw open that door and confront the entity that was at the heart of all of my misery, the spirit that had terrorized me since the moment I had first stepped foot inside the Cage.

I didn’t have it in me to stay and fight any more. The spirits could have this place, so far as I was concerned. I couldn’t take the darkness any longer, the constant, everpresent feeling of fear, let alone subject my son to it.

Although I was its owner, the Cage was no longer my home. I wanted out before the haunting claimed my sanity.

I genuinely believe that if I stayed here for much longer, the dark entity was going to win: I would either be driven mad, or worse still, my beloved son would come to harm.

There was no way I was going to let either of those things happen. When I finally came to accept that this

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was a fight I was never going to win, I began to think seriously about an escape plan. Jesse and I needed to get out before it was too late.

16

“SAINT MICHAEL ARCHANGEL, DEFEND US IN BATTLE�

I

t was just a few hours before sunrise on what was to be our last day living inside and investigating the Cage. Overwhelmed by nausea late the night before, Caz had gone to spend the rest of the night in a hotel room; A good idea, when one considered that she was due to drive the rest of the sleep-deprived team to Southampton the following morning.

We had endured a long and trying week, living primarily on a mixture of caffeine, enthusiasm, and raw adrenaline. It was sobering to think that what we had experienced was only a small fraction of what Vanessa had suffered in the very same house.

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In the front room, I dozed fitfully on the couch, my feet extended toward one of the electric heaters to try and stave off the cold. A blanket covered me from my thighs to my neck, and I was snoring softly and rhythmically, snatching a precious few hours of sleep before daylight brightened the curtains once more.

Lesley did much the same thing in the armchair next to the fireplace, curling up with her legs tucked underneath her and her head resting on a cushion.

Only Stephen seemed incapable of sleep. The priest had spent the past hour deep in thought, sitting at the sturdy wooden table inside the actual prison itself. His mind had ruminated on many things: The nature of the evil entity that was said to be found at the heart of the Cage; the likelihood of other spirits, possibly innocent spirits, finding themselves trapped here, earthbound because of its malign influence; and lastly, perhaps most importantly of all, the possibility of ridding the Cage of this dark and vicious overseer once and for all … if it was still here at the present moment, that is. Personally, Stephen had his doubts.

Although he believed Vanessa’s stories concerning her encounters with the dark man, he was not picking up on the presence of a specific spirit in this place right now.

It was his belief that in addition to having a static number of entities remaining earthbound within its walls, the Cage was also something akin to a spirit portal or a vortex: a sort of psychic bus station or a rail terminus, a place from

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which entities could cross back and forth from the other planes of existence.

In his view, there were a significant number of spirit visitors passing through the old prison; some were good, some were middle of the road, and some … were just plain evil.

Malevolent replies had certainly come through in answer to specific questions that the team had posed during their question and answer sessions. During his time in the Cage, Stephen had indeed picked up on feelings of malice and evil intent, but they had tended to ebb and flow in waves, rather than form the constant backdrop that Vanessa had experienced. Could it simply be that she was more attuned to the atmosphere and energy shifts within the Cage, due to a combination of her sensitive capabilities and through sheer longterm immersion in that environment?

The atmosphere was quiet and peaceful, as borne out by the sight of the two investigators snoozing contentedly in the adjoining room. Stephen had turned down the lights, leaving the front room immersed in darkness. Only a single light was on inside the Cage itself, allowing him just enough light to make out shapes and general outlines. By all accounts, the predatory forces that lurked here usually preferred it that way, avoiding the spotlight where possible.

Yet they had not put in an appearance so far, and Stephen was beginning to doubt whether they ever would. The darker entity or entities seemed to be scared of the visiting

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investigators, or at the very least were reluctant to show themselves openly to them.

Stephen narrowed his tired eyes. Different tactics were obviously needed if he was going to draw anything out. He would get to that presently.

The door leading from the front room to the Cage itself and the kitchen had been left ajar, letting a soft glow through the small gap between it and the frame. The priest had been turning the events of the past evening (and the entire week) over and over in his mind, examining them from every possible angle, making connections between data points, and assessing and discarding extraneous or doubtful information where necessary.

His mind kept going back to the dowsing experiment, the Ouija sessions, and the human pendulum techniques.

All had implied that the Cage was the site of a number of “walk-ins” or “drop-ins,” terms used by mediums to denote entities that were not rooted at a particular location but became present when the mood took them in order to interact with those who resided there.

Searching for something useful to do, Stephen finally settled upon analyzing just one sample of the many hours’ worth of audio data that the team had recorded over the course of their investigation. He had already copied the audio files from the digital voice recorders onto the hard drive of his laptop. Now he cued up one of the recordings at random, slipped the earphones into his ears, and hit play.

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It wasn’t long before the priest found himself completely immersed in the playback process, listening with a half-smile to events that had taken place in this very room several days before.

And then he felt it. The presence was subtle at first, but it was most definitely there. Frowning, Stephen hit the pause button and took out the earphones, laying them gently on the tabletop in front of him. He was being watched.

Had one of his fellow investigators woken up? He listened carefully. My snoring had now reached chainsawesque proportions, and in between the gaps he could hear Lesley’s softer inhalations and exhalations.

Both of Stephen’s companions were fast asleep. This was something else entirely. At first he considered the possibility that it was simply a week’s worth of jet lag, sensory overload, and cumulative fatigue catching up and playing tricks upon him. The investigators were all strung out, running on fumes.

But as the seconds gave way to minutes, the feeling gradually strengthened, until finally there was no doubt about it whatsoever: a spirit was present. He could sense it.

Letting out a long sigh, Stephen got slowly to his feet and closed the screen on his laptop. This new, palpable presence within the Cage was still unidentified, but it was best to take no chances, particularly as the team was leaving later that coming morning. The last thing that anybody wanted was for a spirit to attach itself to them, taking along an invisible psychic hitchhiker back to their home. It was

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time for Stephen to offer up a little protection, both for himself and for the rest of his team.

A simple ritual of cleansing should suffice, the priest thought to himself as he opened up his backpack and began to rummage around for the bag of salt. He had blessed the salt with great care, over one week and almost five thousand miles ago, and now it was time for it to earn its keep.

There were three prayers that Stephen wanted to employ.

“Our father, who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass again us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.”

As he intoned the prayer under his breath in order to avoid waking his colleagues, Stephen went from room to room inside the Cage, sprinkling the blessed salt carefully around each and every doorway and window. He left a thin trail of the mineral substance on every window ledge, above each doorframe and on either side. Wherever there was a possible point of entry into the structure, no matter how large or small, he made sure that it was covered.

“Hail Mary, full of grace. Our lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

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This time Stephen followed up on the salt with a trail of holy water. His final prayer was one commonly chosen by those who were about to engage in spiritual combat with dark forces. Given the testimony of Vanessa and so many other visitors that spoke of an evil presence within the Cage, this would be the most important prayer of them all: The Prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel.

“Saint Michael Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.

May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do thou, O prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl through the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.”

The cold, gray light of a February dawn was seeping through the windows of the Cage by the time Stephen had finished. Although he went upstairs to bless each bedroom, the bathroom and the landing, he focused the majority of his time and attention on the ground floor … particularly on the prison itself.

“I am now speaking to any and all tortured souls who are bound against their will to this location,” Stephen intoned, standing in the center of the Cage with a Bible held loosely in one hand. “You may now use this opportunity to leave this place, for now and for all time. Your torture is over, and I invite you to move on in order to receive peace, tranquility, and your just rewards.”

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There were so many stories of innocent spirits haunting the Cage: men, women, and children falsely accused of witchcraft and then imprisoned within its walls under the most horrific of conditions, tortured by the jailers for little more reason than their own sick sport. Like some sort of spiritual traffic cop, the priest was trying to direct any such earthbound souls toward the freedom that they had been denied for so very long.

Once the ritual had been repeated on both floors of the house, Stephen poured what little remained of the holy water and blessed salt into small jars that he had brought along for just such a purpose. He placed the jars behind other, larger jars that sat high up on shelves in the kitchen, silent sentinels that would stand watch over the troubled old prison. They remain there to this day.

Soon it was time for him to wake his fellow investigators.

Lesley, Stephen, and I went from room to room collecting our equipment and giving the place a quick once-over, policing up any trash and straightening things up in preparation for the next tenant of the Cage.

I had been the first team member to enter the Cage nearly a week ago, and now I was the last one out, turning out the lights behind me and hiding the key in a place where only Vanessa would be able to find it. Just as we had done at sunrise every day that week, we gathered outside the big wooden door and took a celebratory survivors’ selfie. Our eyes were bloodshot and puffy, but there was an overall mood

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of optimism and accomplishment. The past week had been a roller-coaster ride, full of ups and downs, highs and lows, and it was one that we wouldn’t have missed for the world.

A pair of headlights emerged out of the darkness. Caz pulled up in front of The King’s Arms pub and popped open the back hatch of the car. It only took a couple of minutes for the team to load up their cases full of gear, Tetris-like in the back, and then we hit the road.

As the prison receded behind us in the rear view mirror, I couldn’t resist taking one last look back, wondering whether I might see the apparition of the skeletally thin woman standing in the window of the master bedroom, staring down at us as we left. But there was nothing. The Cage was silent and dark, empty once more and awaiting the next visitors who would try to unlock some of its many secrets.

Caz was totally focused on driving while Lesley acted as navigator, guiding her away from St Osyth and toward the motorway that would take them to Southampton. For his part, Stephen hoped that the ceremony he had performed would bring some measure of peace to the current and future occupants of the Cage … whether they happened to be living or dead.

17

CHASED AWAY

A few days after I encountered the apparition that was watching my son sleep in his crib, I sat down for a frank discussion with my friend, Kerry. When I poured out my heart about our nightmarish situation, she was sympathetic and immediately offered Jesse and I a new home.

Kerry lived in Colchester, right next to the castle in a lovely three-bedroomed house with a garden. Jesse and I would have a room each, and there was the added luxury of a garden for Jesse to have a paddling pool.

Kerry lived alone, and had been one of my best friends for many years, so it was the perfect solution for us both.

We wasted no time in making plans for the move, and over the next few days I made regular trips in the car to transfer my belongings to our new home. Kerry would 219

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come home from her job as a dental nurse and place all of my things away in my new room to make way for the next lot of boxes to arrive.

The morning of the move soon arrived, and I can hardly convey my joy and relief at the fact that our longawaited escape was finally at hand. My cousin Kirstine and Nicole came to help me, and Mikey pitched in with his van to help move the heavy furniture, so I was well on my way to beating a hasty retreat from my living hell.

Kirstine was brave enough to go upstairs alone to continue packing up my belongings while Nicole and I were doing likewise downstairs. After a while Kirstine came downstairs and announced that the majority of the work was done, so we all felt justified in taking a break for a cup of tea. We gathered in the front room for a little down time and began to chat about nothing in particular.

From somewhere directly above our heads there came a loud thud, then another, and another. There was nobody upstairs. The three of us girls were the only living people inside the Cage, which made it feel all the more sinister.

The three of us got up from where we were sitting and all ran in the direction of the kitchen, practically clinging to one another. The noise upstairs grew louder and changed position, thuds coming from different parts of the ceiling. We listened fearfully, unwilling to go upstairs and confront what we knew had to be a spirit.

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That’s when we heard an all-too familiar sound, one that I had heard many times before. Somebody was coming down the stairs, banging and thumping on every step. This was a man, by the sound of things, and a big one at that. He also didn’t sound very happy with us.

It was then that Mikey burst through the door like a knight in shining armor, walking into the front room only to be instantly mobbed by three terrified girls. We ran to him like scared children, talking over one another as we competed to tell him what had happened. Mikey listened for a moment, and when we finally gave him the chance to speak; he said that he had arrived just two or three minutes ago and had parked the van outside and had happened to look up toward the bedroom window as he got out.

In that window Mikey had very clearly seen a man and was able to describe not only his facial features but also the top half of his body. The man struck him as being menacing, with piercing, evil-looking eyes. Mikey added that the man’s hair was tied back and slick, but with grease and dirt (rather than the neat and oily slickness of the contemporary apparition that had driven me out of the house). The man wore old-fashioned clothes of a brownish color and was as solid as any human being.

Mikey was visibly shaken when he related what he had seen, and he said that he knew without a shadow of a doubt that the man he was looking at was a ghost.

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When he finished speaking, all four of us strained our ears. The footsteps on the staircase had stopped. Silence had descended on the Cage once more, and we weren’t going to waste it.

We packed up the rest of my belongings with great speed. In our haste we left behind stuff I would have absolutely taken under normal circumstances. I had very deliberately made sure I left behind anything that had been tainted by the spirits of the Cage, such as Jesse’s toy train engines, which remain there to this day. I didn’t want to risk bringing back any spirit attachments with us when we moved into our new home.

Mikey, Nicole, and Kirstine walked out of the door first. I went last, and in one final defiant act, I closed the door securely behind me, taking one last look inside the house through the small panes of glass in the door window. This had become a habit before entering the Cage when I came home from work, and I always took just a little reassurance when I found that there were no shadow figures to be seen.

This time, things were different.

Right there in the front room, as though he wanted to see me off for the very last time, was a shadow man: A seven foot tall, dark, blurry mass was moving slowly across the room, seeming to taunt me with the fact that he had won and I had lost. He had driven me out, and now the Cage was all his …

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Jesse and I settled easily into our new house and life with Kerry. The relief of living in a safe house was palpable, and I underwent a noticeable change in mood.

I felt as if a huge black cloud had been lifted from my shoulders. The depression that had gripped me dissipated almost immediately after we left the Cage. Now I could truly live again, as opposed to simply surviving each passing day under the most horrendous of circumstances.

So many things had changed for the better with our escape from that cursed house, but there was still the problem of what to do with the Cage. Being a single parent, I was living on just my own wage, and making ends meet for Jesse and I was hard enough, but now there was extra rent to pay in addition to the mortgage on the Cage. This state of affairs couldn’t continue for long before I would be bankrupted.

As luck would have it, I was approached by a former coworker named Sharon, who asked if she could rent the Cage from me. Sharon was fully aware of the building’s recent suicide history, and I also filled her in on the details of the haunting.

“I’ll rent it to you,” I told Sharon very seriously, “but on your own head be it.”

Sharon wasn’t fazed by the reputation of the Cage, and moved in shortly afterward. A few months into the new tenancy, I received a panicked phone call at work. It was from Sharon, who was in a terrible state. She claimed

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that she had been attacked the night before whilst she was lying in bed, and that this was the last straw.

“Vanessa, you have to do something!” she insisted.

After talking to Sharon at length that day, I found out that some strange incidents had taken place since Sharon and her teenage son had moved into the Cage. Cushions were thrown across the front room; the electrical mayhem that I knew so well had continued to plague Sharon; doors would open and close themselves, slamming whenever they felt like it; and her Staffordshire terrier dog had been behaving oddly ever since she moved in.

I had paid for the electrical wiring to be checked and certified before Sharon and her son moved in, as the law requires when a property is rented out. The phone call had been provoked when Sharon was held down in her bed at night by something that she couldn’t see, but she felt two heavy knees digging into her chest with great force.

She tried to call out to her son in the next room for help, but due to the force on her chest she wasn’t able to draw breath. Sharon had felt utterly defenseless, and it frankly scared the wits out of her. I knew exactly how she felt.

She was right: I had no choice but to engage the help of a medium. The haunting was never going to simply just go away, and there was no point in pretending otherwise, especially with the safety of my tenants at risk. This time Sharon had escaped relatively unscathed … but who was to say that she would be so lucky next time? At some point

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somebody was going to sustain a serious injury inside the Cage, and I just couldn’t let that happen.

One morning after I had just dropped Jesse off at the nursery, I was approached by a woman in the street that I had never met before. The woman introduced herself as Mandie Ward. Mandie said she also lived in St Osyth and asked, “Are you the same Vanessa that owns the Cage?”

I replied that I was, but with a certain amount of hesitation, as I really didn’t know who this lady was, or why she would want to know about my connection with St Osyth’s most notorious haunted house.

The lady proceeded to tell me about an alarming experience she had had just a few weeks before while driving past the Cage one morning. Mandie remembered the time exactly: 10:10 am. She was on her way to her nursing shift and was running a little late—normally, she would drive past the Cage at 10:00 am.

As she turned onto Colchester Road from the village crossroads, Mandie had a clear view of the Cage.

Something unusual caught her eye—something in the top bedroom window.

Mandie emphasized that she regularly passed the house each day and had never noticed anything particularly unusual before. But this morning she caught sight of a bizarre figure, and she was so surprised by its appearance that she slowed right down to a snail’s pace in order to get a better look. Mandie said that she saw, as plain as day,

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a strange woman standing there, clearly visible from the waist up, looking out of the master bedroom window.

The woman was old, in Mandie’s estimation, somewhere in her seventies or eighties. She had very thin hair that was straggling down the sides of her face, with a face that was so thin and hollowed out that it was almost skeletal. She appeared to be wearing some type of night dress, one that was both very worn and old fashioned.

I had heard of this lady many times before. She was always seen in the same place, looking out of my old bedroom window, but I had never seen the lady herself.

Mandie’s description was very detailed, and tracked with the other eyewitness accounts.

“Vanessa, I work with the dying. I’ve seen many corpses, those of the patients that I look after, and I can tell you that’s exactly what she looked like … a corpse.”

Days later when I was at work, a customer came in that happened to be a member of a nearby spiritualist church. He told me of a lady named Kelly Bebbington, who he said was renowned as a clearer of dark energy and earthbound spirits. She sounded like the type of person who may be able to help, and I felt that it was certainly worth giving her a try.

That afternoon, I called her. Kelly introduced herself and told me of the ability she had possessed from childhood to see, hear, and communicate with the dead, and the skills she had developed in dealing with the paranormal.

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Kelly told me that she specialized in the mitigation of dark energy, demonic entities, troubled and hostile spirits, and the lifting of curses. Kelly made me feel very comfortable talking about the house, and for the first time I was willing to open up and tell somebody the entirety of what had been going on over the past three years, and the depths to which it had affected me personally.

Kelly agreed to take on the case, but warned me that there were no guarantees. I was also impressed that she didn’t ask for a fee or any kind of publicity. She simply wanted to help.

By the time Kelly came to the Cage in person a few weeks later, Sharon and her son had packed up and left.

Their tenancy in the house had ended abruptly, which is a long-running tradition with the old prison. I met Kelly and her husband Steve on a chilly evening outside The King’s Arms and showed them into my empty, troubled house.

Inside it was dark and still. I was still terrified of the house, and I was unwilling to cross the threshold again; I waited outside in the evening drizzle while Kelly and Steve walked through the house and soaked up the atmosphere.

Steve did not have her specialized skills, but was a sensitive and helped provide protection during some of the more extreme cases Kelly encountered.

Kelly took a large crystal pendulum inside, along with a crucifix on a chain and several other artifacts that would aid her in communicating with the spirits. Unfortunately,

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that evening there was no electricity in the house, so Kelly and Steve went in practically blind. Time passed slowly for me as I paced up and down outside, nervous and fretful about what was happening inside.

After about an hour or so, Kelly and Steve emerged from the house looking somewhat pale and worn. Kelly clutched the remains of the beautiful crystal pendulum that she had taken in whole, but was now shattered into pieces. She told me that it had been ripped out of her hand by a hostile entity in the prison room itself and smashed into pieces on the hard floor. Kelly had gone from room to room trying to communicate with the spirits in the house and encountered (as she had suspected from the outset) bad and negative energy, or what she would call “demons.”

Kelly’s psychic connection with the house had started on the day of the first phone call and grew in strength from then on; it became stronger in the car on the way to the house, so Kelly knew what to expect when she did finally step foot inside the medieval prison.

From the yard outside, I could faintly hear that Kelly was speaking in Latin and saying words that I didn’t understand. Watching through the windows, I noted that time was taken in every part of each room, as Kelly made sure that no spot was missed or overlooked. Kelly’s very first words to me when she emerged were, “You are very

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strong to have survived in there for that long—you must be very protected by spirit.”

Kelly explained that the energy in the house was some of the darkest she had ever come across, that it was putrid with negative and destructive energy, and that it would not be an easy task to restore peace or normality to the house, if indeed it was possible at all—which, after their first experience, Kelly and Steve very much doubted that it would be. Hundreds of years of sorrow, grief, injustice, and death had seeped into the fiber of the very fabric of the house, and that, along with the many energies haunting there, would be an insurmountable task for anyone to take on.

She went on to tell me that inside the Cage a number of spirits were grounded, trapped here on the earth plane—confined within the ancient prison walls. There were also spirits that came in visitation, meaning they had free will to come and go, and also hostile, angry spirits that had the capability to harm and cause physical and mental damage to people. (That aligned with Stephen’s assessment of the place when he later investigated as part of Richard’s team.)

She also told me that there were demonic entities in the house whose sole purpose was to cause harm and destruction in any way that they could. They had no conscience whatsoever. That night, Kelly had set the wheels in motion to begin the cleansing attempt, and in

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doing so she had called upon guides and angels in order to come and, as she put it, “wash down your walls,” starting a process that would be both lengthy and unpredictable.

After several weeks of the Cage being uninhabited, the financial strain of paying the mortgage and rent reared its head again, and the house was once again rented out. Needless to say, its streak of chasing out new tenants continued unbroken, and within just four months it was empty and abandoned once more. This time I didn’t know the details leading up to the second tenants’ disappearance, as they were handled by an agency, but let’s just say that I wasn’t surprised in the least. But what was unusual this time around was that the tenants had left behind most of their belongings. It looked very much as though they had simply run out of the door without looking back.

18

FRESH PERSPECTIVES Days turned into weeks. The Cage lay abandoned. The shell of a house sat lonely and still, in a state of limbo, just waiting for time to pass.

I did not venture anywhere near the place, nor did I try to rent the house out again; I knew that it wasn’t fair on unsuspecting innocents, so I made the decision that no matter what it took, I could not risk anybody else living there while I was the owner.

The necessary authorities were notified: the water supply was turned off, the door was locked and bolted for the foreseeable future—or until Kelly’s return, at least.

One afternoon not long after, I unexpectedly bumped into Marie, an old friend that I had worked with for many

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years. We hadn’t seen one another in a long time, and it was good to catch up.

We hugged right there on the street. Marie told me that her friend from Scotland had just been staying with her in the village, and that they had passed the Cage quite often on their journeys into and out of the village. Quite out of the blue Marie added that on one occasion they had driven past the Cage when her friend said, “I thought that your friend’s house was supposed to be haunted?”

Marie replied that it was, and asked her why she brought it up.

“Well, if that’s true, then why has she got a mannequin of an old lady standing in the upstairs window?” Her friend then went on to explain that she had just seen what she thought was a mannequin, visible only from the waist up, standing in the upstairs window. She added with a degree of disdain that if the house was a real haunted house, why would it be kept? It looked silly, she said, and would make people think that the haunting was a hoax.

Letting out a long breath, I looked at Marie and told her that the house had been disused and locked up for several weeks now, and that there has never been a mannequin placed in either that window or any other window of the Cage. It seemed that the apparition of the old lady had put in yet another appearance.

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I was still no nearer to finding out this old lady’s identity. Who was she, I wondered, and why has she been seen gazing from that same window for so many years?

As promised, Kelly returned to the Cage for a second visit.

After spending more time in there, her conclusion regarding the house and its history was completely unexpected. Kelly explained to me that the house has considerably more history than just the witchcraft trials, imprisonments, and the deaths that have occurred there over the hundreds of years.

She claimed that, in her opinion, the prison was built on a demonic ritual site of some kind that dated back to several hundred years before the Cage was ever built.

One of the problems with the house is the land that it is built on. Kelly advised me that the house is unsafe to live in for any length of time, as it takes on a life all of its own.

Kelly had performed a clearance ritual on the Cage, but said that the energies there are embedded in the walls, framework, and fabric of the house itself and have taken root there over hundreds of years. She said she had never come across such dark, negative energy manifesting in a property that people live in from day to day.

“The only way to rid a house of that kind of darkness is to knock it to the ground,” she said flatly, “but even then, the land would still be heavily influenced by the darkness.”

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Based upon more than forty years of experience in working with dark energy, Kelly was convinced that this was a house that could not be cleared fully. When I asked her about the clearing process, Kelly told me that she uses various guides, angels, and what are called dark moon angels. All earthbound spirits are released from a property and brought to her home, where Kelly can either pass them over or send them back to where they came from originally. Her spirit guides will then cleanse the haunted property and shut down any negative portals that make it easier for a spirit to get in. Then guides who are the spirits of former Catholic priests would then be sent in to bless the house.

Although no cure-all existed for a location that was as dark as the Cage, Kelly did tell me that all was not lost; there were things she could do that would offer some protection from the malign forces that inhabited the house. Kelly said that for my protection and the protection of others who would enter, she would enclose the Cage inside a kind of spiritual bubble, one that would prevent the more negative entities from entering.

Kelly also promised to continue with the lengthy task of clearing and passing over individual spirits, particularly those that were trapped inside the house and wanted to leave. She emphasized that this would take a long time, and the outcome was far from certain.

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She explained to me that this was nothing like a Hollywood movie where just one session would expel the darkness and bring in the light, with everything smelling of roses afterward; things of this nature just aren’t that simple.

As the weeks turned into months, the Cage still lay empty … of the living, at least.

My time in Colchester with Kerry, although fantastic and a very happy time, proved to be short-lived; she had found her future husband and quite understandably would be leaving to go and live with him, so I once again found myself in need of a new home for Jesse and I. I didn’t particularly want to remain in Colchester on my own, so the obvious choice was to return to St Osyth, where my friends, family, work, and Jesse’s nursery were … so the hunt began for suitable accommodation.

October 2005 was fast approaching when I received a call from a man who introduced himself as David. David said that he was a professional paranormal investigator, and that he had heard about the Cage and its reputation.

He explained to me that he and his two lead investigators, Amy and Pete, liked to visit various haunted locations in search of ghosts, and would I allow him and his team to investigate the Cage.

The house was currently empty and useless, and my efforts over the last year to sell the place had led nowhere; I could no longer rent it out to tenants, so why not allow

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a paranormal investigator access? I agreed to the idea of David and his team going in to try and unlock the secrets that the Cage held within its walls.

The Cage was obligingly active on the date of the team’s visit, and the night, in paranormal terms, was a great success. After hearing of the evidence that was captured that first night from David, Amy, and Pete, many other groups contacted me to request permission to investigate the medieval prison for themselves. David himself became a regular visitor to the house, and he spearheaded the quest for answers in what quickly became known as one of England’s most active haunted locations.

Others would follow.

John Fraser first heard about the Cage when Vanessa contacted the Society for Psychical Research in 2009, long before it had gained any sort of notoriety. She explained that she had a haunted property in which she could no longer stay, and John was the paranormal investigator committed to giving her advice on what to do next.

Along with a colleague named Rosie O’Carroll (from the renowned Ghost Club) John went to interview Vanessa in person. Both found her testimony, in John’s own words, “both interesting and consistent.” In fact, during our interview, John had remarked that unlike many other cases, her story of the events has not changed significantly.

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John kept in touch with Vanessa over the years, watching as the Cage became more and more famous. In 2014, with the backing of both Vanessa and the SPR, he embarked on a project to interview as many of the major witnesses to the phenomena as he possibly could. He was looking for something known as similar fact evidence, a situation in which multiple unconnected individuals experience the same phenomena. When this occurs, it is regarded as being particularly compelling evidence.

At the end of his study, John concluded that there were indeed several instances of similar fact evidence. Some of these were: disembodied footsteps on the main staircase; the unexplained opening and closing of doors; several unrelated episodes of people being touched, scratched, and injured by unseen entities; and many unexplained emotional breakdowns, such as that experienced by Lesley during my own investigation.

John and Rosie did spend a couple of sessions inside the house themselves, experiencing nothing particularly unusual on either occasion. “That does not really diminish what is, overall, strong evidence for a haunting/anomalous event,� he clarifies.

Rather than the more common type of field investigation, John performed a broader analysis of the eyewitness testimony. The fact that so many different people have experienced consistently similar phenomena inside the Cage without being in contact with one another lends additional

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credibility to the case. The frequently recurring types of phenomena that John identified would be experienced again and again after his survey had ended, as we shall see when we meet a team of investigators from Pontefract.

Everybody on my team hoped that Stephen’s attempt to bless and cleanse the Cage had been successful. Even Vanessa had her fingers crossed, though she was considerably less optimistic than the visiting investigators. If all had gone according to plan, then the darker entities that haunted the old prison should have been banished, which in turn would have freed the more innocent spirits to cross over into the next realm if they so choose.

Sadly, that would not turn out to be the case.

When Stephen, Caroline, Lesley, and I had left, the Cage remained quiet for no more than a few days. Then the activity began to pick up again, until in almost no time at all, it was business as usual for visitors to the old witches’ prison.

The team known as East Drive Paranormal derive the name of their organization from one of the world’s most famous haunted properties: the small, unassuming private residence at number 30 East Drive in Pontefract was the scene of an infamous poltergeist haunting in the 1960s, when the resident family were terrorized by a malevolent entity that came to be dubbed “The Black Monk of Pontefract.”

The author Colin Wilson wrote about the case in great detail in his superb book Poltergeist: A Classic Study in

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Destructive Hauntings, now a recognized classic among the paranormal research literature. Thanks to extensive newspaper coverage at the time, the haunting soon became national news, and at its height, crowds of people were regularly found camped out overnight outside the house, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ghostly goings-on.

Fifty years later, interest in the case was still going strong, having been reignited by a 2012 film dramatization of the case (When the Lights Went Out) and multiple visits to the house by the television show Most Haunted. Unlike most typical poltergeist cases, in which the phenomena typically fizzle and die out completely after a relatively short period of time, the paranormal activity at 30 East Drive was said to be still going strong after half a century. The men and women who came together to form East Drive Paranormal were all local to the area and had bonded over their mutual love for and fascination with what people were now referring to as the Black Monk House.

No matter how many days and nights they would spend uncovering the mysteries of 30 East Drive, however, the investigators from East Drive Paranormal did not confine their efforts to just that one location. Word had already reached them of the Cage, and everybody agreed that it seemed like a golden opportunity to investigate another extremely active property that was just a few hours’ drive away.

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The team visited the Cage on a Friday evening in May 2016. Due to their long association with the Black Monk House, each of the seasoned investigators went in with an open mind and a willingness to square off against the worst that the Cage could possibly throw at them. They had plenty of equipment, a sufficient number of investigators to cover the entire building, and had worked out a solid plan of attack before even stepping foot across the threshold.

Everybody felt confident and ready for anything.

It was an attitude that would be sorely tested during the course of that night.

The investigators arrived just after six o’clock in the evening, which gave them plenty of daylight. They took advantage of that by conducting a walk-around of the building’s perimeter, photographing it from all angles and getting to know the lay of the land. Apart from the constant buzz of traffic along the busy Colchester Road and the muted sounds of early-evening drinkers at The Kings’ Arms next door, all was fairly quiet. Every so often a local resident would pass by along Coffin Alley at the back of the house, walking a dog or heading to the pub for a pint or two.

The weather was warm and muggy, and the still air managed to feel close and oppressive. As always, it was colder inside the Cage than it was outside when the team first made their way inside.

This was the calm before the storm.

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Vanessa had arrived and unlocked the back door for them. She had made sure to get there long before dark.

The first order of business was for the team to conduct a walk-through, going from room to room in order to get a feel for the house. Did some of the rooms feel different to the others? After spending years in the field investigating tens or even hundreds of haunted places, many paranormal investigators will begin to develop a certain instinct when they enter an active location. Call it a sixth sense, if you will, but whatever it is, it can often be a reliable gauge as to how paranormally active the property is going to be during the course of that night’s investigation.

Personally, I use what I like to call “the sleep test,” which simply means that if I feel that a location is sufficiently calm and quiet enough for me to curl up and go to sleep, then nothing noteworthy is going to happen during the course of the investigation. Although there is no scientifically rational explanation for this particular instinct, it proves to be right more often than not.

Following the initial walk-through, Claire took a seat in the front room, parking herself in the chair next to the fireplace. After just a few minutes, she was suddenly overcome by a feeling of terrible sadness, which seemed to strike her like lightning out of a clear blue sky. There was no apparent reason for her to feel this way; one moment she was fine, and the next she was suddenly distraught.

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This is the very same chair where Lesley was overcome by a feeling of great coldness during her first day spent inside the Cage, and feelings of great sadness and melancholy would also afflict her after having sat in that chair.

Could this be a coincidence, or something more?

“I had only been there for a couple of minutes, and then all of a sudden I was just absolutely heartbroken,” she explains, still unsure of exactly what had come over her. “I started crying for no reason at all.”

Claire got up out of the chair and went into the kitchen, wiping away her tears. “Take her outside,” Carol suggested gently. Scott took her by the arm and led her outside, intending to get her a breath of fresh air and to put a bit of distance between Claire and the Cage for a while.

She took a seat outside on the bench, enjoying the fact that she was out of the oppressive atmosphere inside the old prison building. After a moment, Claire stood up and stepped out into Coffin Alley. As she lit a cigarette to try and calm her nerves a little, she watched a cat slink into view. It stopped and watched her for a few heartbeats, before wandering past her and disappearing over a nearby wall.

As though caught in a daydream, Claire began to walk slowly along Coffin Alley. She had no particular destination in mind, and in fact felt quite detached from the world around her. No sooner had she reached the halfway point that she heard the pounding of footsteps running along the

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alley behind her. Claire turned to Scott, who seemed a little concerned that she might wander off and get lost.

“Do you want some company, Claire?” Scott asked politely.

“What are we doing here? Why are we walking?” she asked, obviously confused as to how she had ended up halfway along Coffin Alley. Claire remembered leaving the house and standing outside, but the intervening moments were hazy and disjointed, seen almost through a daze.

“Come on,” Scott said, “let’s go back, shall we?” The two investigators turned and began to walk back toward the Cage. No sooner had she taken that first step, Claire began to feel what she could only describe as a heaviness settling over her chest and her head. It intensified with every step they took, becoming more and more uncomfortable the nearer they got to the old witches’ prison. It wasn’t exactly painful, per se, but felt more like a pressure, as though some heavy constricting bands were tightening around Claire’s chest and skull.

The strange feeling went away after she rejoined her teammates, but the feeling of intense pressure would come back to plague Claire later on that evening … when she returned to sit in the very same chair next to the fireplace.

19

“WE NEED TO GET OUT. NOW.”

J

ason claimed to possess mediumistic abilities, and he wasted no time in trying to engage the spirits of the Cage in active communication. As he asked questions, Claire could feel an invisible something tickling her skin. It was more of an irritant than anything else, like a flea or some other insect constantly brushing against the back of her neck. She tried to swat it away irritably, relaxing back into the fireside chair as best she could.

But then the itching became a burning. It wasn’t long before the back of Claire’s neck felt as if it was on fire. And suddenly the tidal wave of negative emotion was back, only this time it was both stronger and much more intense than it had been before. Claire burst into tears, choking off a sob as her entire body began to tremble and shake.

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When she had been overcome with emotion before, Claire hadn’t the slightest idea why she suddenly felt the way that she did; this time, however, the reason was abundantly clear to her. She was crying for her children. They had been taken away from her when she was imprisoned, and she missed them with all of her broken heart. She felt helpless and powerless, unable to do even a single thing to help either herself or her children.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, Claire remains convinced that she was empathically picking up on the torment suffered by one of the female prisoners who were kept within the Cage during their trial for witchcraft. When one considers what happened to Lesley in that very same chair (and the two women have never met one another, nor even spoken with each other), it seems very likely that the epicenter of this paranormal emotional cyclone is focused upon either that piece of furniture itself (unlikely, as it is relatively modern in design) or more likely upon the section of the front room located between the fireplace and the main window.

“I just knew that I was never going to see them again,” Claire related during an interview with one of the authors.

She still finds it traumatic to relive the experience to this very day, dredging up the memories of heart-rending feelings that were suffered by a forlorn mother who was held captive within the Cage. “I have never experienced anything like it in my entire life, either before or since.”

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While Claire fought to calm herself down once more, Angie asked the assembled team whether they could hear a chuckling. It sounded as if it was coming from somewhere within the Cage proper, though it was hard for her to pin down the exact source. It was difficult for most of the investigators to hear it, thanks to the constant stream of traffic passing by just inches away from the front window.

Angie suddenly experienced a vision, a flash of psychic insight. Sitting in the chair next to the fire was an old woman. She had tough, leathery skin, black gimlet eyes and a long, thin face that ended in a pointed chin with a wart on the end—in other words, very similar to the stereotypical witch as seen on Halloween decorations and throughout popular culture, although she lacked the pointed hat.

Unbeknownst to Angie, she had been describing somebody who was all too real. Up until now she had paid little attention to the old monochrome photographs that hung on the wall facing the downstairs toilet. The next time she went to the bathroom, she paused to examine the frame full of aged pictures, and found to her astonishment that one of the people who appeared in those photographs looked very familiar: It was the old woman that she had seen sitting in the chair just a few moments before.

The team decided that it was time to split up: Half went upstairs while the rest remained downstairs. Carol took up position in the kitchen, where she could keep a watchful eye on events via the video monitor feeds, whereas Eileen,

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Jason, and Scott decided to try their luck in the children’s bedroom. This team of three simply sat in the semidarkness for a while, lettings their senses adjust to this new environment.

Eileen and Jason didn’t notice it at first, but as the three of them sat there quietly on the floor, Scott was beginning to grow increasingly agitated. When they finally realized that he wasn’t quite acting like himself, they asked him what was wrong. “I feel strange,” Scott explained awkwardly. “It feels as if I’m a woman, and I have been wrongly accused of something … ” Suddenly, he began to empty his pockets, divesting himself of everything that was in there except for a cigarette lighter.

Then he walked over to the fireplace, which was completely cold and dark. It had been quite some time since a fire had burned in that particular grate. Scott simply stood there, just looking at it.

Finally he said, “I just want to be in there. I just want to burn. I need to burn. I’ve done nothing wrong, but they burned me anyway … ” It is interesting to note that one of the modern tropes concerning witches is that of the accused witch being burned at the stake; yet the truth is that British witches tended not to suffer this brutal method of execution at all, for they were much more likely to be either hanged or drowned.

Jason decided to enter into a trance and see what information could be gained. He began to describe the figure of

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a man standing there in the room with them. The man was wearing a long dark coat or cloak and was busily writing things down on paper, some of which he then screwed up and discarded. When pressed for more information, Jason told them that he was getting the impression that this man had been a judge, and that he had the power to decide who was to live and who was going to die. Could this have been Judge Darcy, who had presided over the trial of the St Osyth witches at nearby Chelmsford? He would certainly fit the description.

Temporarily mollified, Scott sat back down to listen to Jason’s description of the powerful man. Suddenly both men were on their feet, and squaring off against one another.

Jason began rolling up his sleeves, as though preparing to start a fight. Scott walked right up to Jason, invading his personal space, and growled, “I’ve done one thing wrong … and you’ve gone and killed me for it!”

For her part, Eileen could only look on in astonishment as the two men faced each other down. A fight seemed to be brewing, and things had the potential to turn violent in an instant.

What was the “one thing” that Scott (or whoever it was that was making their emotions felt through Scott) had done wrong? “It was some kind of a spell or incantation,” Scott explained during our interview. “I’m not saying that the people who were accused of witchcraft genuinely had supernatural powers, but people around here certainly

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thought that they did. I became convinced that I had tried to use those powers in public, that it had gotten me locked up in the Cage.”

Suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, Jason collapsed. He hit the floor with a resounding thud, making Eileen wince. She had no idea why he had just fallen, because Scott hadn’t laid a finger on him. She quickly called for help.

The rest of the team came pounding upstairs, removing Scott from the room first because of his bizarre behavior and shunting him into the relative safety of the master bedroom.

Phil and Kenneth then set to work tending to Jason, who was by now totally unconscious.

The two men grunted as they lifted Jason and maneuvered the dead weight out through the doorway, intending to get him downstairs as best they could. Once they reached the well-lit upstairs landing, Jason’s faculties began to return. Moaning groggily, his eyelids fluttered open. He had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there.

While all of this drama was taking place in the children’s bedroom, Claire and Steven had been sitting quietly in the master bedroom. Claire had taken up residence in the chair nearest the window (the same window in which the emaciated female apparition has been reported by many local motorists) while Steven made himself comfortable on the floor.

Taps and knocks began to be heard on the walls behind and to the side of Claire. Their source of origin would have

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had to have been either outside (when the investigators looked through the window, they saw nothing unusual out there) or in the neighboring bedroom, which was being staked out by Jason, Scott, and Eileen.

“I’m starting to feel cold,” Claire reported.

Curiously, Steven broke out a thermometer and analyzed the air temperature next to her. Sure enough, the air was several degrees colder to one side of her than the other … the same side on which the taps appeared to originate.

The sudden loud thud from next door was, of course, Jason’s body hitting the ground. Steven rushed into the master bedroom to help when Eileen called out for it. Interestingly enough, Claire seems to have undergone some kind of missing memory episode at this point, because the next thing she remembers is the other investigators looking at her with great concern. Of the intervening time period, she can remember nothing to this day.

“What?” she asked warily, confused as to why her colleagues were all looking at her like that.

“Don’t you remember?” one asked.

“No, what?” Claire insisted.

Claire was astonished to hear that she seemed to have entered something similar to a trance state herself, and when she was questioned by the other team members, she had demanded to know why they were accusing Kenneth. The other members of East Drive Paranormal were every bit as confused as Claire was; after all, nobody was

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accusing Kenneth of anything. He had been standing quietly in a corner, minding his own business. Yet Claire was getting increasingly distressed, bursting into tears and sobbing due to an overwhelming sense of sadness that had overcome her.

The team collectively decided to take a well-earned tea break, a good opportunity to regroup and gather their wits once more. Jason, Claire, and Scott were all soon back to their normal selves, although the mood was a little less cheerful than it had been to begin with. It was decided that for the remainder of the investigation, under no circumstances would Scott be permitted to go back upstairs after what had overcome him in the children’s bedroom. The risk of him doing harm to either himself or to another member of the team was judged to be too great.

During their next foray into the master bedroom, three of the investigators (Eileen, Jason, and Phil) felt as if the floor was burning up, almost as if it was actually on fire, while the fourth—Sarah, sitting in the same chair that Claire had occupied earlier—experienced the polar opposite, insisting that the air around her was ice cold. Sweat was pouring from the investigators who were sitting on the floor, whereas Claire was actually shivering.

No temperature variations were recorded to support either claim, rendering the experience a totally subjective one—but no less intriguing for that.

After a short break, Jason, Phil, and Eileen elected to spend some time in the cramped bathroom. This is the

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same bathroom in which the intimidating male apparition had made his presence known to Vanessa in the most unpleasant way. Simply fitting everybody inside the small room was no mean logistical feat: Jason stood in the bath, whereas Eileen took up residence on top of the toilet, and Phil claimed a clear spot on the bathroom floor.

It wasn’t long before the K2 EMF detection meter that had been placed on the floor began to light up, indicating the presence of a strong electromagnetic field. There were no electrical devices in the bathroom capable of making this happen, nor does the Cage have any wireless routers or other computer equipment that might explain it away.

When my team and I investigated the Cage, we had sniffed for any wireless networks in the area and had found none.

Another potential culprit would have been cell phones and tablet devices, but like all good teams, the crew from East Drive Paranormal all set their phones to airplane mode at the start of the investigation—no stray communications signals would be broadcast, which often spoof K2 meters when phone calls, texts, and Internet browsers are communicating with the cellular network.

Whatever this energy field was, it wasn’t coming from any of the investigators.

Intrigued, Eileen prompted Jason to move the K2 around a little to see how widespread the field might be. He swept it around the bathroom, raising it high to the ceiling and lowering it down to the floor. The meter stayed pegged at the

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high end, indicating a very strong field that simply hadn’t been there before. To make things even more interesting, the field was intermittent; it was there one minute and gone the next. No explanation for what might have just generated this electromagnetic field was ever found.

“There’s somebody in here with us,” Jason insisted suddenly. Eileen and Phil looked at his outline in the darkness.

“We need to get out. Now.” The three investigators got up and left the bathroom immediately. “Don’t ask me why,” Eileen told us months later during an interview, “but we all got up and charged out of that bathroom. I’m still not sure of the exact reason.”

Jason felt compelled to leave, and the team had learned to trust his instincts when it came to such things.

After another tea break, the investigators decided to give the bathroom a second try. They didn’t much like the idea of leaving unfinished business with whoever had put up Jason’s hackles. Angie, Eileen, Carol, Jason, and Phil all crammed themselves into the bathroom in what looked like a crazy game of Twister. Getting three people in there initially had been a challenge; nearly doubling that number was a real squash, but somehow the team managed it through a combination of standing, squatting, and leaning around the bathtub, toilet, and sink. Carol was the last person in. She carefully closed the door, which latched with a gentle click, shutting the team inside. Then she turned out the light.

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For their part, Scott and Claire had both chosen to remain downstairs, keeping watchful eye over the entire house by way of the video monitors. There was also unspoken agreement that after his bizarre experience earlier by the fireplace in the children’s bedroom, it was probably not a good idea to let Scott go upstairs again.

For a short time, all was quiet inside the confines of the bathroom. Nothing stirred, other than the occasional rustle of an investigator shifting position in order to get more comfortable, and the steady, rhythmic breathing of six people waiting patiently in the dark.

Then the door latch raised itself.

From her vantage point right next to the door, Carol was looking right at it when it happened. At first she thought that her eyes must be playing tricks on her. The latch lifted itself up and dropped straight back down, as though somebody was trying to get into the room. One side of Carol’s body was in direct physical contact with the stout wooden door, and she actually felt it move.

Through the crack between the door and the frame, Carol saw what she thought was a person walking past, their shadowy figure blocking out the light on the landing for a split second as they passed between it and the bathroom door.

She threw the door open, half expecting to find either Scott or Claire standing on the other side of it, and yet she

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knew that it was impossible for a flesh and blood human being to climb those stairs without causing so much as a single creak or groan from the old wood.

Nobody was standing there. The upstairs landing was completely empty. Carol quickly checked that the door at the foot of the stairs was still shut, satisfying herself that nobody was lurking in either of the two bedrooms. Just as she had expected, the entire upper floor of the Cage was deserted.

Impressed, Carol closed the door again, making sure to latch it once more.

“Do you feel that?” one of the investigators asked.

There were mumbled voices of assent from the rest of the team. The floor was vibrating. It was almost as if a miniearthquake was going on, causing the wooden planks to tremble beneath their feet. Downstairs in the Cage itself, Scott and Claire felt nothing at all. Nobody had been observed walking on the landing since the investigators had taken up residence in the bathroom either; Claire and Scott had both been watching carefully.

Eileen felt something touch her leg, giving her quite the scare. Despite the bathroom being almost completely blacked out, she was well aware of the positions of her fellow investigators, and remains convinced that it was not one of them who touched her. When asked, they all firmly denied having done so.

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The rest of their session inside the bathroom proved uneventful, and so Carol and Angie decided to relocate to the children’s bedroom. A number of taps and bangs were heard while they were sitting in the darkness there, many of which seemed to originate inside the cupboard by the fireplace. When the investigators checked it thoroughly, the cupboard turned out to be completely empty.

After they had been in there for a few minutes, the ladies reported seeing a tall shadow figure flitting past the drawn curtains. It seemed as if it was inside the room with them, but there were no other physical signs of its passage, such as a draft, breeze, or drop in the temperature. Did they both truly catch sight of one of the denizens of the Cage, or were their eyes simply playing tricks on them?

Not all of the team’s experiences that night were as subjective as catching a glimpse of this shadow figure. Shortly before the end of their investigation, Claire was sitting at the wooden table in the Cage itself when she suddenly heard the chains rattling gently on the wall. This is a phenomenon that many visitors to the Cage have reported experiencing, and when one considers the relative weight of the iron chains, it is extremely difficult to debunk by attributing it to breezes, drafts, or the vibration caused by traffic passing along Colchester Road outside.

Reaching for her camera, she began to snap a sequence of photographs. She covered the kitchen and the Cage

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itself before moving on into the front room, where Kenneth (their driver for the return trip) was fast asleep on the couch. She also took photographs of the rear atrium and stairwell. Conditions were very low-light, and most of the building was in heavy shadow.

Though she had seen nothing unusual with the naked eye, Claire was to get quite a surprise when she checked her photographs afterward. The shadowy figure of what appears to be a tall adult male could clearly be seen on one of the images standing in the doorway at the base of the staircase and tentatively poking his head around the corner.

The question must be asked: Who was this shadowy man at the foot of the staircase? Several obvious possibilities suggest themselves. Firstly, could it be the jailer, the same dark entity that had terrorized Vanessa and visitors to the Cage when she lived there? One would think that, based upon his blatantly aggressive actions in the past, he would be more than willing to appear in a photograph if the opportunity were to present itself.

Alternatively, what about Judge Bryan Darcy, the man who had tried the St Osyth witches and condemned two of them to their deaths? Scott and Jason’s disturbing experience upstairs would lend credence to that theory, but it must be pointed out that to the very best of our historical knowledge, Judge Darcy never visited the Cage in person. He would have

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had no reason to, for the accused prisoners would have been brought to him before his court at nearby Chelmsford.

A third, equally disturbing possibility also suggests itself. The staircase is where a former owner of the Cage sadly took his own life by hanging himself from a beam at the very top. Was it possible that his spirit still remained earthbound there, having never left the home in which he was so unhappy during his lifetime?

The truth is that we will probably never know for sure.

“I have to point out that we hadn’t locked the back door,” Claire admitted, “so it’s possible that somebody randomly wandered in from outside. Maybe on the way back from the pub.”

While technically true, such an explanation seems highly unlikely. Even leaving aside the fact that nobody heard the back door open, how reasonable is it to contend that a drunken intruder would enter the house, lurk in the stairwell long enough to be photographed, and then leave again, all without anybody catching sight or sound of them and without leaving any trace of their presence whatsoever? It is also worth mentioning that a member of East Drive Paranormal was assigned to watch out for potential activity on the video monitors during the course of the investigation, adding an extra layer of protection against unwanted visitors of the physical variety.

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When comparing notes at the end of the investigation, most of the investigators agreed that they had not liked the feel of the staircase in the slightest. It had felt fundamentally wrong somehow, in some indefinable way.

Carol related to the team that she had picked up on the identity of some of the spirits of the Cage. One whose presence she felt very strongly was that of Ursula Kempe. This may have been validated by Phil, who was using a computer application named Ethereal, which the application designers claim will allow users to interact with spirits by means of radio signals. Such applications and devices have generated a great deal of controversy among the members of the paranormal research community since their inception, with some maintaining that they do exactly what their designers say they can do, whereas their critics insist that all that is really being heard is white noise and random, meaningless sounds that the listener fools themselves into believing are meaningful messages.

Whichever side of the debate that you happen to come down on, it is safe to say that the jury is still out on spirit boxes and their purported ability to communicate with the dead. When Phil fired up his device inside the Cage, one of the words that came through happened to be a name that is rather uncommon in modern-day England … Ursula.

Carol also believes that she sensed the energy of a child, one that she claims is trapped inside the children’s bedroom,

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unable to move on. The spirit child gives the impression of being a little girl who is still searching for her mother, hundreds of years after both of their deaths. Looking back at some of the activity that took place inside the Cage during Vanessa’s tenure, we can see that the running footsteps of a child were heard coming from the upstairs bedrooms on more than one occasion. This phenomenon was reported by multiple witnesses. Was the young girl the daughter of one of the accused St Osyth witches, either imprisoned in the Cage alongside her mother, or perhaps allowed to visit on occasion while her mother was tried by Judge Darcy?

Perhaps most intriguing of all was Carol’s report of the spirit of an elderly male, one who was deeply attached to the Cage and did not wish to leave under any circumstances. She sensed that he had owned the building at some point during its long history, and that he wanted everybody else to leave so that he could enjoy its peace and quiet all by himself.

Last, but by no means least, is the spirit of the man who used to be the jailer. Both Carol and Jason picked up on the presence of this particular entity, the dark force who seems to lie behind most of the negative, frightening, and violent activity within the Cage. He does not like to show himself plainly, as some of the other spirits are willing to, but rather he prefers to lurk in the shadows, playing mind games with visitors and attempting to generate as much fear as possible.

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The men and women of East Drive Paranormal packed up their gear and left shortly after two o’clock the following morning, having spent the better part of eight hours inside the Cage. It was a one-night prison sentence that none of them would ever forget.

Nor does their story quite end there. In the days and weeks that followed, Angie experienced a considerable run of bad luck. She wasn’t feeling quite her usual self, instead becoming unusually moody and low of spirit. For several weeks, she felt increasingly emotional and severely depressed.

Angela and Jason both told her (independently of one another) that she had picked up an attachment during her night spent investigating the Cage, and she had brought it back home with her.

An attachment tends to be a spirit, often (but not exclusively) a negative one, that somehow grafts itself to a living person when they visit a haunted location and then piggybacks along with them when they leave. They are often described as a combination of spiritual hitchhikers and parasites, particularly the negative entities, which some people believe will draw on the life energy of their living host and use it for sustenance.

Angie worked with a friend who was also a medium in order to rid herself of her unwanted guest. At the time of writing she is feeling much better. The men and women of East Drive Paranormal feel a compulsion to return to

“We Need to Get Out. Now.” 263

the Cage when the opportunity presents itself, because many of them hold the very strong belief that their team has unfinished business to take care of, with whoever—or whatever—still haunts the old witches’ prison.

20

TERRIFIED

D

ebbie Burman’s experience with the Cage began because her mother lives near St Osyth and had a friend who had told her in passing that she knew of a little cottage on Colchester Road with a most unusual feature: a plaque mounted outside, referring to the place as an old witches’ prison.

Knowing that she was interested in anything connected with the night side of nature, Debbie and her mother decided on the spur of the moment to go and take a look for themselves. On a sunny morning, the two ladies went along to the Cage, full of curiosity and fascination. Both of them were struck by how old the place looked, practically bleeding the accumulated history and character of the past four hundred years.

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Peeking in through the windows, they were more than a little disappointed to find that the place appeared to be deserted. The next day, however, Debbie was able to track down Vanessa, who said that she would be only too pleased to offer them a tour of the house. As the following day also happened to be her mother’s birthday, Debbie arranged to take her mother, her friend, and Debbie’s own daughter along for a look around the Cage.

They had already read some of the ghost stories of the Cage on Google, and found the stories of its ghostly activity to be enthralling. On arrival the next day, Debbie parked directly outside the Cage on the concrete apron. Vanessa was there to meet them, and after inviting them to join her in the kitchen, their hostess wasted no time in telling the four ladies all about the history of the house, her own disturbing encounters with the spirits of the Cage, and then finally the reason why she had fled the place.

As Vanessa told her story, Debbie made a point of looking around and taking in as many details as she possibly could. She noticed that there were more than a few condiments sitting on the kitchen surfaces, along with a liberal amount of cutlery scattered around. Vanessa continued to talk as she led her visitors through into the front room, blissfully unaware that the spirits of the Cage were about to make their presence felt.

Suddenly, all five of them heard the clatter of knives, forks, and spoons being manipulated from behind them

Terrified 267

in the kitchen. Vanessa stopped mid-sentence, turning back to face the open doorway that they had all just passed through. She wasn’t particularly surprised; given some of the incredible paranormal phenomena that seemed to happen all the time inside the Cage, the rattling of some tableware was nowhere near the top ten.

Intrigued, Debbie went back into the kitchen. The knives and forks were still there, just as they had left them.

Then came the growl, loud and animalistic, seeming to come from thin air right in front of her.

At first, the astonished Debbie genuinely thought that she was hearing things. Her ears must have been playing tricks on her, surely? She asked if either Vanessa or any of the visitors had heard the growl. But Vanessa was nowhere to be seen.

Acting purely on instinct, Vanessa had bolted from the house, running outside into the small, enclosed back yard that looked out onto Coffin Alley. When the visitors went outside, she explained why she had fled: the growler was well-known inside the Cage, and was believed to be the spirit of what both Vanessa and several visiting psychics were convinced was the prison master.

“He’s evil through and through,” Vanessa went on, looking anxiously over Debbie’s shoulder toward the interior of the Cage. “When he’s around, he’s always up to no good. He’s the main reason I couldn’t live in this place any more, not for a million pounds … ”

268 Twenty

Adamantly refusing to go back inside, Vanessa nonetheless told the visiting ladies that they were more than welcome to go and have a look around … if they dared. Vanessa remained outside while Debbie and her family went back indoors, making their way to the kitchen once more.

It wasn’t long before Debbie felt something grab her skirt. Startled, she whirled around to see which one of her companions was playing tricks on her. Nobody else was within touching distance of her. She also heard a whispering voice say the word “Tommy.” The word was spoken very softly, and although nobody else heard it, Debbie absolutely maintains to this day that she heard it.

The visitors split up and began to explore the Cage.

Debbie’s mother remained in the kitchen, watching the video monitor. White specks of light (known as “orbs” to some) filled most of the camera output screens. In my years of investigating the paranormal, it has been my experience that roughly 99 percent of so-called orbs are actually little more than dust or an insect; however, occasionally one will be either seen with the naked eye or behave in an unusual manner. As Debbie stood in the master bedroom, she was overcome with a sudden sense of overwhelming sickness and nausea. At the very same moment, her mother, still watching the video monitors, noticed that one of the blobs of light seemed to have approached her and hovered around her.

Terrified 269

“I felt awful,” Debbie related during our interview, “I had a horrible headache and could feel sharp, stabbing pains shooting through my skull.”

Nothing happened after that inside the Cage. Nevertheless, Debbie was impressed by the auditory phenomena that she had heard. After the visitors had thanked her for her time, Vanessa left, obviously glad to be leaving her former home behind her once more.

Giving the Cage a backward glance, Debbie and her companions all climbed into her BMW and headed home, talking excitedly about the bizarre events they just experienced. Just as they were pulling out into the traffic on Colchester Road, the fasten seat belt warning light suddenly lit up on the dashboard—even though everybody was already securely belted in.

Over the next few days, the electrics in Debbie’s car (much like those inside the Cage) seemed to take on a life of their own. The lights began to flicker on and off intermittently, despite the fact that the keys were nowhere near the ignition. Then the dashboard lights began to turn themselves on and off. Growing increasingly concerned, Debbie took the car to the BMW dealership for a thorough mechanical and electrical inspection. The automotive technicians failed to find a single fault; as if to mock their efforts, the lights obligingly continued to turn themselves on and off before their very eyes in the BMW garage.

270 Twenty

“I think you might have better luck with a priest, instead of a car mechanic,” Debbie joked, earning herself a wan smile from the senior technician. When all was said and done, the BMW dealership staff ended up admitting defeat and footed a £2,500 bill, the cost of totally replacing all of the electrics inside her car—including its electronic nervous system and brain, the motherboard, which was an extremely costly proposition indeed.

For a while the car seemed to be just like its old self again … yet every so often, it began to act in the most bizarre manner, almost as if an invisible somebody had taken the wheel. Fortunately, the BMW’s erratic behavior didn’t cause any accidents, but it did make Debbie more than a little bit nervous.

After hearing all about his mother’s experiences inside the Cage, Debbie’s son was so intrigued that he wanted to visit personally and see what would happen to him. Wanting answers to her own questions, Debbie contacted Vanessa again and arranged for an evening visit to the Cage.

She and six friends and companions arrived promptly at six o’clock in the evening, fully prepared to stay until their appointed finish time at two o’clock the following morning.

During their eight hour stay, Debbie and her companions experienced a diverse range of phenomena that convinced them beyond all shadow of a doubt that the Cage was well and truly haunted. One of the more bizarre occurrences was when a bag of potato chips—one of the many snacks

Terrified 271

that the group had taken along to help keep their energy up throughout the night—somehow took on a life of its own.

The bag of chips was opened earlier, promptly forgotten about, and now sat mostly uneaten on the kitchen countertop, while the attention of the investigators was glued to the video monitors. Suddenly, they all heard the bag rustle. Turning around, Debbie’s daughter could hardly believe her eyes. Grabbing her mother’s hand, she jerked her around to take a look for herself.

Although the kitchen, like the rest of the house, was always cold, the temperature had suddenly plummeted to what felt like near-freezing levels. The bag slowly unwrapped itself, as though invisible fingers were going to dip inside it to take out a handful of chips, and then slid across the countertop in front of four witnesses. Debbie felt the hairs rising up on her arms, partly due to the cold, but also because of the jolt of fear that suddenly coursed through her.

“We talk about being scared stiff,” she told me during our interview. “Well, that’s the first time it has ever literally happened to me. The cold air inside that room felt suddenly thicker somehow—and yes, I know that sounds silly—but I don’t know how else to explain it.”

Once the bag stopped moving, the four would-be investigators simply stared at one another, too stunned to speak.

Only then did it dawn on them that not one of them had thought to whip out a cell phone and video the paranormally moving object.

272 Twenty

Debbie also heard the word “Tommy” spoken once again, reinforcing the experience from her prior visit. She wondered what the significance of that particular name was: could it be the identity of one of the spirits of the Cage?

Although she had gone online and read up on some of the ghostly happenings that visitors had experienced inside the old prison, she hadn’t really delved into the backstory of Ursula Kemp. It was only later that Vanessa would tell her the tragic story of Ursula’s young son, Tom, who was deprived of his mother thanks to her incarceration within those very same prison walls.

One of Debbie’s friends returned to staking out the video monitor, watching the particles of dust dance through the air of each deserted room. Suddenly, he called the rest of the group over and excitedly asked them whether they could see anything unusual on the screen. They all peered expectantly at the monitor, eyes sweeping from one camera output to the next.

At first, none of them could see anything out of the ordinary.

“There it is,” Debbie said at last, pointing toward the monitor that covered the front room. “Look at that!”

“I see it too,” her son nodded. “It’s a face. Look, right there on the living room floor.”

Just in front of the sofa at ground level, the face of an old woman had somehow appeared out of thin air. It wasn’t attached to a body, and didn’t seem to be moving around;

Terrified 273

rather, it was simply staring off into space. It had developed slowly, in the same way that a sketch artist gradually shades in the parts of a drawing, but it seemed to be growing clearer with every passing moment.

From what they could see on the monitor, the woman looked very old, with a thin, almost haggard face and dark eyes and a prominent nose. There was a frailty to her that struck everybody who watched her face appear on the monitor.

Realizing that the front room was only ten feet away, two of the visitors went to take a look. The face appeared as little more than a shadow to the naked eye, yet Debbie insists that it stood out in stark contrast on the monochrome TV screen. It’s possible that what the team encountered was a case of pareidolia (the tendency of the human brain to falsely interpret random patterns as being either faces or human figures) although it is impossible to say for sure. Although the visual phenomenon stayed around long enough to be photographed, the captured images are dark and indistinct, which rules them out as evidence.

After a few moments, the old woman’s visage faded and disappeared.

Understandably, this was a bridge too far for some of Debbie’s companions; three of them admitted that they had had enough and wanted to leave straight away. The four hardy souls that remained inside the Cage made a point of staying together after that, by unspoken agreement; nobody

274 Twenty

wanted to be left alone; none of them felt comfortable inside the old prison.

Sticking together, the four visitors agreed to spend some time upstairs. Their first stop was on the landing at the top of the staircase. Vanessa had told them about her terrifying experiences inside the bathroom, and, being relatively local, they were all fully aware of the former owner having hanged himself there. Unwilling to turn out the lights, the group elected to simply stand there in silence, watching and waiting.

A few minutes passed in silence, save for the occasional nervous cough. Then the noises started. Four sets of eyes looked up in unison, their attention drawn to the thick, black crossbeam that ran across the top of the staircase.

They all heard what sounded very much like something rubbing on the beam, causing it to flex and creak, as if a great weight was pulling down on it. The air suddenly became freezing cold, even by the nearly sub-zero standards of the Cage, causing them all to shiver. When they compared notes afterward, all of the investigators agreed that they had been looking at the exact same spot—midway along the crossbeam. As suddenly as the creaking had started, it stopped. The would-be investigators were never able to determine its cause.

They agreed that the next target for their investigation should be the master bedroom. But no matter how hard they pushed, the door flatly refused to open. Grunting and

Terrified 275

straining, each of the four visitors tried their hand at forcing the bedroom door open, all to no avail—it remained obstinately shut. It felt as though somebody strong and heavy was holding it closed from the inside. Frustrated, all four of them ganged up and really put their backs into it, but still the door presented an impassable barrier.

Then suddenly it appeared that whoever (or whatever) had been toying with them seemed to tire of the game, because the stout resistance that had been applied to the inside of the door was simply gone. The four companions all fell through the door as it opened with ease, swinging freely on creaking hinges.

The bedroom was, of course, completely empty.

Debbie freely admits that by this point in time the entire group was feeling very uneasy. There seemed to be a game of some sort being played within the Cage; a game to which none of them knew the rules, and one that was being orchestrated by an unseen force. She and her companions all sat in the front room, mostly just talking and enjoying a snack.

That was when the banging started. They started out as knocks or raps, fairly unobtrusive, coming from the walls, floor, and the ceiling; but they grew progressively louder, the bangs were growing more and more forceful, until finally, one particular bang was so loud that the entire floor shuddered as a consequence.

276 Twenty

Looking all around them with an air of desperation, Debbie and her friends began talking excitedly about the bangs, speculating upon their source. Could it have been the passing traffic? Unlikely, they reasoned; Colchester Road had been much busier earlier in the evening than it was right now, as the clock was closing in upon midnight, so why would the passing cars and occasional truck make the house shake now? But what other explanation was there, short of a paranormal one? They were locked inside the house, and the TV cameras plainly showed that there were no uninvited guests lurking within the Cage, intent on messing with them—or at least, none of the flesh and blood variety …

And then, suddenly, they had more immediate worries.

The four visitors stared in astonished silence as the wooden door leading to the staircase began to rattle. It was plain to see from their vantage point in the front room. The heavy door was shaking in its frame, rattling on its hinges with increasing violence as the seconds passed. Debbie’s son became so agitated that he finally shouted out that he had enough, and was leaving. True to his word, within a minute, he was gone, leaving only his mother and two of her female friends remaining in the Cage.

Upping the ante even further, Debbie heard the low, menacing growl once again, causing her heart to race, as she fought to keep control of a growing sense of fear. The stairway door continued to rattle violently, but as far as Debbie was concerned, the growl had been the final straw.

Terrified 277

As fast as they possibly could, the three women hastily collected their belongings and fled.

“Whoever, or whatever, was inside the Cage that night was definitely not happy, and it terrified us,” Debbie admitted to me during our interview. The three of them ran to the King’s Arms pub next door, where the other members of their group had gathered to wait out the rest of the evening. They remarked on the fact that Debbie and her two companions were absolutely white and could very easily see that they were in a state of panic.

That was the last time that Debbie and her friends ever visited the Cage, although she professed to still be fascinated by it, and says that she would definitely go back again someday. She continued to be plagued with car troubles, culminating in a major component of the engine failing, despite the fact that the car was only two years old at the time. Once again, the BMW mechanics admitted that they were stunned that such a new car could experience so many bizarre and extensive failures—something that is practically unheard of in this particular make and model of car.

To make matters worse, the car was then stolen from outside Debbie’s house. The BMW was subsequently found, but unfortunately it had been completely written off; police officers discovered that it had been involved in a significant hit and run collision that involved three other vehicles.

“To sum it up,” Debbie says, “leaving my car outside the Cage just twice ended up requiring a total of £10,000

278 Twenty

worth of diagnostic and repair work be done, all of which BMW insist they have never experienced fixing before on a car that was only two years old! The car was then stolen and written off. We still talk about the Cage to many people, and of course, many of them don’t believe us, but the four of us will always know. We know what we saw, and I know what I heard. We don’t really put much effort into trying to convince people any longer, as it’s really not worth it, but we all know it’s true. Something very, very unwelcoming is resident inside that house and I truly believe there is a child entity called Tommy who is particularly active.”

Could this be the earthbound spirit of Ursula Kemp’s son, Tom, still looking for his mother after all these years?

Equally fascinating is the face of the old woman that Debbie and her companions claim to have seen appear and then disappear on the floor in the front room. Is it possible that this was a manifestation of the same old woman that passers-by along Colchester Road have reported seeing in the master bedroom window upstairs? Debbie’s description—a female face that was old, thin, and frail—does match with the descriptions of the ‘emaciated mannequin’ that Vanessa received complaints about.

Epilogue

L

est we be tempted to write off Debbie’s car troubles to something as mundane as mere mechanical or electrical failure, we should turn our attention to another automotive oddity that relates to the Cage.

The Cage has stood unmolested in its spot on Colchester Road for many hundreds of years, situated next to a village pub and just a stone’s throw from a crossroads. To the very best of our knowledge, the building has never sustained any kind of major damage, whether by accident or by design.

All of that was to change on the evening of Wednesday, July 27, 2016, when a local man lost control of his car just seconds after he had passed the road intersection. The runaway vehicle (a BMW, just as Debbie’s was) slammed

279

280 Epilogue

headlong into the front of the Cage and the house next door, shattering not only the brickwork, but also parts of the window frame.

Fortunately, the driver was not seriously injured. When Vanessa arrived to survey the damage, she was horrified to see that large chunks of the building’s yellow exterior plaster had been smashed, littering the narrow strip of pavement directly outside. Long, jagged vertical cracks ran vertically up the front wall of the Cage, like a spider’s web of structural damage.

We are so lucky that nobody was home this afternoon, Vanessa thought to herself as she shook her head in disbelief. They could so easily have been killed.

The front end of the BMW was crumpled like a tin can.

When the police officers asked the driver what exactly had happened, he had an interesting story to tell. He claimed to have just turned right at the intersection, having driven past the pub and the entrance to Coffin Alley, when suddenly the back end of the car “went nuts, spinning out of control for no reason at all.” The BMW spun out, and despite his best efforts it made a beeline for the Cage.

“I was only doing 25, maybe 30 miles per hour,” the stunned driver claimed.

Why would a car suddenly veer wildly out of control at such a relatively low speed? It is, of course, possible that the driver was simply distracted, or was actually traveling faster

Epilogue 281

than his stated 30 miles per hour. Either possibility would provide a perfectly rational explanation for the collision.

On the other hand, it does seem awfully coincidental that he should suddenly lose control directly outside of what Vanessa believes with all of her heart to be a truly cursed building. “The curse of the Cage strikes again, was my first thought when I heard the news,” she says. The Cage is a relatively small building, and it is only one of many similarly sized houses along that same stretch of road. Any of them could have been hit. And yet, none of them were hit: only the Cage.

Coincidence—or something more?

You be the judge.

Ultimately, I found a little bungalow to rent back in St Osyth and was able to move back into the village of my childhood.

Kelly returned to the house many times over the following months to try and ease the darkness it held within its walls and to make it a safer place altogether.

The activity in the house did not abate with the passing of time, and it seemed as though the more interest that was shown in the house, the more the house wanted to communicate with visitors.

Richard and his team were only one of many paranormal research teams to spend time trying to unlock the mysteries of the Cage. Some did not last long during their

282 Epilogue

investigations, I can tell you of several groups that chose to leave long before the night had ended, usually because the activity was too strong, and they got a little more than they had bargained for. Many reported they had seen entities and black masses that had terrified them, whereas others had witnessed poltergeist activity in the form of objects moving and flying across the room unaided. Still others were physically attacked and left with injuries that included burns, scratches, and hand prints on their skin.

The Cage is a haunted location that rarely disappoints.

At the time of writing (Christmas of 2016) I am still the owner of the Cage, and although the house has been available for sale for many months, there has thus far been nobody willing to take it on. The former prison stands empty and unlived-in. Its reputation as one of the most haunted houses in Britain, not to mention its thick, rancid atmosphere make it an undesirable dwelling for anybody who might be looking to purchase a happy home. It is my heartfelt belief that the property will not be sold again until the house itself chooses another owner, as it did with me.

The Cage has courted great interest from around the world, with many countries sending film crews to try and capture some of the unusual happenings, and to ask about my story at first hand. I feel a huge sense of obligation to share my story as a warning for others: the

Epilogue 283

dark side of the paranormal does indeed exist, and people would be wise not to make light of it.

The activity in the house still continues, and Stephen’s attempt to cleanse the Cage is just the latest of many efforts made over the years to rid the house of its curse, and lay the restless spirits there to rest.

Much has been discovered about the house and its history over the years and the evidence collected has been very illuminating. After I was able to get my hands on the house deed records that go back many generations, I discovered that the house has changed hands on average every three and half years since it was first built, with the exception of only two cases … one example being that of a man who purchased the property for £150, and sold it on a matter of weeks later for just £100. In those days, £50 was today’s equivalent of £50,000—so why would he be willing to accept such a significant loss in such a short space of time?

The answer, of course, has been the same for so many occupants of the tragic house on Colchester Road: the spirits of the Cage.

I often look back to those days, and wonder just how on earth I got through it all alive and safe. My mind’s eye plays it out as though it was all a movie. I see myself cooking in the kitchen, then turning to see the shadow figure lurking behind me; I see myself in the bathroom, reeling in pain and shock after I had been hit so hard by

284 Epilogue

a force that I could not see; I see myself sitting crying on the landing in turmoil in the dead of night, with no real recollection of how or why I was there. But still, to this day, the thing that I remember most clearly is the everpresent sense of total and utter despair and helplessness that I felt. Standing outside my home one dark winter evening, leaning against the wall with my baby son wrapped up inside my coat, trying to keep us both warm while the snow fell silently all around us. I vividly remember knowing that I had to go inside sooner or later, but not wanting to with all my heart and soul, because I had become so scared of what my home was doing to me.

One thing that I knew with absolute certainty was that it was never going to stop … I had lost all hope that things would go back to being normal again.

My time spent as a prisoner of the Cage has fundamentally changed the way in which I see the world.

Beforehand, I thought that physical attacks, the approbation of objects, and so many of the other things that I experienced there were completely made up, the invention of overly imaginative Hollywood script-writers.

I know now beyond any shadow of a doubt that the dead can choose to come back, and that if they chose to do so, they can inflict a great deal of physical and mental harm to the living.

I also know that I am never truly safe from those spirits of the dead, and will always be wary of them returning

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to finish what they started. I feel that what happened to me was an intelligent attack that was targeted upon me personally. It was neither random nor harmless; in fact, I strongly believe that its ultimate objective was for me to take my own life inside the Cage, and then be trapped there forever. I feel lucky to have escaped that house with my life and sanity intact.

My time there has left me with as many questions as it has answers. The one question that perpetually eats away at me is this: Why has God allowed the children to stay there, trapped in a kind of purgatory, and not sent down his angels to rescue them? I can’t begin to understand why the trapped souls cannot leave their endless torture, especially the children. Where are the angels? Where are God’s angels to rescue their little innocent souls? I feel nothing but despair when I hear some of the EVPs recorded inside my house, such as those that say, “I am looking for my Muma,” “Where is my Muma,” and “Am I dead?”

Visiting investigators have recorded the sounds of women screaming and being whipped, and the voices of disembodied males saying the most disgusting and degrading things about women—myself included. I have heard the cries and pleadings of terrified little children, and the desperate wailing of trapped souls that have found no way to the eternal light, and are forced to remain earthbound in their own personal hell.

286 Epilogue

I feel that I was chosen somewhere along the line by something—some guiding intelligence, force, fate, call it whatever you will—to buy that house and experience everything that I did. I believe that it was for a specific purpose, and I suspect that the purpose is to find a way to release those lost souls and to help them home. It is entirely possible that I myself was incarcerated within the Cage hundreds of years ago, and I have now reincarnated in this body and at this time to help put right some of the wrongs that were done there.

Ultimately, I may never know the truth with any certainty, but I have ceaselessly tried and am still trying my utmost to find a way for every prisoner of the Cage to finally be at peace. I will not quit until that is done, no matter what it takes.

One thing for which I am grateful is the way in which my experience with the Cage has changed my perception of death. The old witches’ prison has afforded me a glimpse into the world beyond the veil. I no longer have any fear of what will happen when my time finally comes to cross over, and I shall do so without hesitation, secure in the knowledge that I will see my brother, my nanny, and my dear friend Heather once more.

At the time of writing, it is my favorite time of year: Christmas. I am currently pregnant with my second child, a brother for Jesse who shall be named Jude. My journey has been one of fear and uncertainty, yet it has taken a

Epilogue 287

turn for the happier, and I am truly content. Not only did I survive the Cage, despite the very best efforts of the dark spirits that haunt it, but it has made me a stronger person, and for that, if nothing else, I am grateful.

Acknowledgments

Vanessa Mitchell I would like to say a special thank you to the one true love of my life, my beautiful son Jesse Caleb James Mitchell, who gives me inspiration to do and be better daily and without whom I would be lost To Richard Estep, whose faith, help, and trust in me made it possible for me to tell my story.

I would also like to thank everyone involved and named in the book who had their own experiences in the Cage, including my dearest and beloved friend Heather McEwan, who sadly went back to God while I was still living in the Cage.

A special thanks to my dear friend James Hayden, who has supported me in many ways since writing this book.

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290 Acknowledgments

And finally, a loving thank-you to my fiancé, Ross, who has encouraged me endlessly with my writing since day one.

Richard Estep My wife, Laura, for supporting (and at times tolerating) my writing habit, and the inevitable grouchiness that goes along with it.

The “Paranormal Slags”—Stephen Weidner, Lesley Bridge, and Caroline Skelly, who lived half of this book along with me. You’re all great people to be alone in the dark with.

The team at East Drive Paranormal—Phil Bates, Claire Cowell, Angie Cowlishaw, Sarah Dickinson, Carol Fieldhouse, Eileen Hill, Kenneth Hill, Scott Hill, Steven Kerr, and Jason Lindsay—for their friendship, and willingness to contribute their recollections and expertise.

Vanessa Mitchell, for saying yes and giving me the keys to her house for a week before ever actually meeting me.

Debbie Burman, for kindly contributing her experiences to this book.

To John Fraser, for taking the time to share his findings.

The men and women of American Medical Response, Boulder Division—the EMTs and paramedics who drop everything and come running when a stranger calls 911.

I’m proud and honored to work with you.

My friends and coworkers at the historic Stanley Hotel Tour Department, who share their ghost stories with tens of thousands of visitors each year—and look damn good doing it.

Acknowledgments 291

My partners in crime, Jason and Linda Fellon, Sean Rice, Kira and Seth Woodmansee, Michael and Caren Kraft, Catlyn Keenan, Randy Schneider, and Robbin Daidone, for coming along with me into dark and haunted places—and still coming back for more!

And last but by no means least, to you, the reader, for supporting my work. It means a lot to me.

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In Search of the Paranormal

The Hammer House Murder, Ghosts of the Clink, and Other Disturbing Investigations

Richard Estep

From exploring the Tower of London to investigating a haunted Colorado firehouse, paranormal researcher Richard Estep takes you behind the scenes for an up-close-and-personal encounter with a fascinating legion of hauntings. This collection reveals some of the most chilling, captivating, and weird cases that Richard has investigated over the past twenty years in England and in the United States.

In Search of the Paranormal is filled with rich historical detail, present-day research, and compelling eyewitness accounts. You are there with the team at each haunted location: walking through a desecrated graveyard, shivering in a dark basement, getting thrown into The Clink, watching a “ghost-lit” stage in an old theater. Employing a variety of investigative methods—from high-tech gadgets to old-fashioned practices such as dowsing, table tipping, and Ouija boards—Richard Estep and his team uncover the dark mysteries of the paranormal realm.

978-0-7387-4488-9, 5.25 x 8, 264 pages To order, call 1-877-NEW-WRLD Prices subject to change without notice

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$15.99

The Uninvited

The True Story of the Union Screaming House

Steven A. LaChance

In this true and terrifying firsthand account, Steven LaChance reveals how he and his three children were driven from their Union, Missouri, home by demonic attackers.

LaChance chronicles how the house’s relentless supernatural predators infest those around them. He consults paranormal investigators, psychics, and priests, but the demonic attacks— screams, growls, putrid odors, invisible shoves, bites, and other physical violations—only grow worse. The entities clearly demonstrate their wrath and power: killing family pets, sexually assaulting individuals, even causing two people to be institutionalized.

The demons’ next target is the current homeowner, Helen.

When the entities take possession and urge Helen toward murder and madness, LaChance must engage in a hair-raising battle for her soul.

978-0-7387-1357-1, 6 x 9, 264 pages

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$16.95

Blessed are the Wicked

The Terrifying Sequel to The Uninvited

Steven A. LaChance

Living with a paranormal storm looming on the horizon, constantly feeling the darkness trying to penetrate his soul, Steven A. LaChance discovers that the aftershocks of a demonic possession can be more dangerous than the initial haunting itself. Marked by the supernatural trauma inflicted by the Union Screaming House—as chronicled in his first book, The Uninvited—Steven and his family find that no matter where they move, no matter what they do, they are still vulnerable to otherworldly attacks.

As malevolent forces continue their relentless assaults, Steven and his close-knit community fight for their sanity and their lives. Blessed Are the Wicked is one man’s account of the repressed horror and pain that nearly tore his world apart.

978-0-7387-3896-3, 6 x 9, 264 pages To order, call 1-877-NEW-WRLD Prices subject to change without notice

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Haunted Asylums, Prisons, and Sanatoriums Inside Abandoned Institutions for the Crazy, Criminal & Quarantined

Jamie Davis Whitmer

Explore frightening ghost stories and true paranormal encounters at ten well-known haunted institutions across the United States.

This unique collection of investigations is filled with terrifying photos, spooky highlights from on-site tours, and historical information about each location.

Haunted Asylums, Prisons, and Sanatoriums explores the country’s scariest institutions, including the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, West Virginia Penitentiary, and St. Albans Sanatorium. Discover creepy conversations between the authors and restless spirits, interviews with facility staff and knowledgeable ghost hunters, and helpful tips gathered from each investigation.

You’ll also enjoy an introduction to basic ghost-hunting equipment and detailed information about organizing your own visits to these haunted establishments.

978-0-7387-3750-8, 6 x 9, 240 pages To order, call 1-877-NEW-WRLD Prices subject to change without notice

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The House Where Evil Lurks

A Paranormal Investgator’s Most Frightening Encounter

Brandon Callahan

This is not a Hollywood tale; it is a true account of the most malevolent home that Brandon Callahan and his team have ever investigated. A former funeral parlor, the demon-infested property had a dungeon and a sinister past that included murder, suicide, and vile rituals.

When Brandon Callahan answered the homeowner’s plea for help, he had no idea what he was getting himself into. A monstrously tall entity in a dark-hooded cloak moves through the embattled home it considers his domain. An expressionless phantom follows one of the investigators home. Innocent bystanders and paranormal investigators alike are plagued by physical attacks and bleed-through phenomena: inhuman laughter, bloody scratches, disembodied shrieks and growls, horrific nightmares, and escalating threats. The House Where Evil Lurks is Brandon Callahan’s terrifying true story.

978-0-7387-4066-9, 5.25 x 8, 264 pages To order, call 1-877-NEW-WRLD Prices subject to change without notice

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Body, Mind & Spirit / Supernatural

Publication date: September 2017 Price: $15.99 US Pages: 312 • Trim size: 5.25" x 8" ISBN: 978-0-7387-5193-1 • Paperback Original Llewellyn Publications 2143 Wooddale Drive Woodbury, MN 55125-2989 1-800-THE MOON (1-800-843-6666) For publicity queries, contact Kat Sanborn KatS@llewellyn.com These examples are just a taste of the terrifying phantoms and tortured souls that dwellReview in the Cage, a cottage in Essex, Print England, that was used to • National Coverage • National & Online Advertising th imprison those accused of witchcraft in the 16 century.

When Vanessa • Regional Author Appearances / Regional Book Tour Mitchell moved into the Cage, she had no idea that a paranormal night• National and Regional Radio Bookings mare was waiting for her.

• Featured Title at Regional Trade Shows From her first day living there, Vanessa saw apparitions walk through her • Extensive Digital Marketing and Social Media Campaign room, heard ghostly growls, and was even slapped and pushed by invisi• Special ARCofMailings to Booksellers and Mediamoved ble hands. After three years hostile paranormal activity, Vanessa • Available on NetGalley out, fearing for her young son’s safety. Then paranormal researcher Richard Estep went in to investigate. Spirits of the Cage chronicles the time that Vanessa and Richard spent in the Cage, uncovering the frightening Richard Estep (Boulder, CO) firstwho gotlurk involved with paranormal reand fascinating mysteries of the spirits within it. search in 1995 in the UK after attending an overnight investigation at the infamous St. Botolph’s (“Skidbrooke”) church. He spent the next five years the haunted hamlets of Great Britain RICHARD ESTEPinvestigating has been a paranormal researcher since 1995. He spent asfive a years member of Andrew Leicester-based team. as a member of AndrewWright’s Wright’s Leicester-based team before relo-Richard cating to the US and cofounding Boulder County Paranormal Research Society co-founded Boulder County Paranormal Research Society (BCPRS) (BCPRS) with his wife, Laura. Visit him online at www.RichardEstep.net. with his wife, Laura, after relocating to the United States in 1999.

VANESSA MITCHELL is a sales worker who lived in a haunted cottage known Vanessa Mitchell (Essex, a sales who lived a hauntas the Cage from 2004 to 2008. UK) Afterisbeing drivenworker out by violent ghostsinand the Cage with Richard edparanormal cottage phenomena, known as she thecowrote Cage Spirits from of 2004 to 2016.

AfterEstep. being driven out of the Cage by violent ghosts and paranormal phenomena, she co-wrote Spirits of the Cage with Richard Estep. $15.99 US

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