Things that go bump in the night - Britain’s most haunted

Apparitions. Glowing orbs. Objects that move of their own volition. Unusually cold areas.  Doors that open or close by themselves. Lights that unexpectedly turn on or off. Unearthly bumps, bangs and other noises.

Britain is a nation rich in paranormal phenomena, if one believes the countless reports made over the years by thousands of seemingly sane, sober and sensible people of all ages and social classes. 

Interest in the paranormal is so great nowadays that all manner of allegedly haunted stately homes, castles, inns, hotels, former jails and other properties have thrown open their doors for all-night ghostly vigils by ordinary members of the public as well as research groups conducting serious, science-based investigations.

Aptly-named Fright Nights (www.frightnights.co.uk) has organised more than 1,000 overnight visits, 400 field trips and 400 haunted weekends at some of Britain’s spookiest properties during the past decade.

Warwick Castle, Dudley Castle, the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham, Bodmin Jail in Cornwall, Woodchester Mansion near Gloucester, Alton Towers, Edinburgh Vaults and ‘the seriously haunted village’ of Castleton in Derbyshire have all been the subject of investigations and visits by Sheffield-based Fright Nights.

A paranormal investigation group-cum-ghost-themed events company, Fright Nights was formed by Martin Jeffrey.

“It began as a hobby,” he said. “Then, in 1999, a friend of mine, who was looking after a castle, said ‘why don’t you organise ghost hunts for the public?’ I didn’t for a moment think anyone would want to sit in a cold, old castle overnight, but my friend talked me into it, and Fright Nights was born.

“Now we do everything from ghost suppers and overnight stays to weekends at haunted properties.”

Jeffrey says he loves taking people to haunted locations and watching their reactions when something spooky occurs.

The “most amazing” Fright Nights encounter to date occurred several years ago in the chaplain’s undercroft at Dudley Castle in the presence of 24 people.

It was just getting light and not too much had been happening. Jeffrey got everybody to hold hands – apparently to boost spiritual energy and ensure nothing was faked. Suddenly a chair eight to 10 feet away moved by itself. Then it tipped over.

Not surprisingly, many of the visitors began freaking out. Next, a sound resembling static electricity from a television or a sweet paper being crinkled was heard coming from a corner of the undercroft where there was a stone coffin.

“Just above the coffin was a swirling mist,” said Jeffrey. “Slowly, a head and shoulders manifested itself. Everybody went berserk. I said ‘don’t talk, go outside and write down what you saw’. All of us had seen exactly the same thing: an apparition of a black-haired girl between 12 and 14 wearing a red dress with a necklace or chain around her neck. She was looking into the middle of the room.

“It wasn’t mass hysteria and it didn’t relate to any ghost encounter story we had described earlier. In fact, we didn’t know anything about this young girl.”

All types of people from all walks of life participate in Fright Nights events.
“We get a complete cross-section of society and ages – people from 18 to 60 and beyond.”

Some people attend a Fright Nights experience for a dare or as a bit of a lark. Others simply want to know one way or the other whether paranormal phenomena really do exist.

“It’s quite easy to sit in an armchair at home in front of the television and dismiss something you’ve seen on one of the Most Haunted programmes as rubbish, but it’s quite another to spend a night at a haunted property,” Jeffrey told me. “Some people have shaken my hand after a vigil and remarked, ‘that was the most incredible night’.

“I think even the deepest sceptics who attend our events are curious. It’s amazing how many sceptics leave thinking ‘there’s something to all this after all’.

Warwick Castle is one of Britain’s most haunted castles with more than 400 years of reported paranormal activity. The ghost of poet and statesman Sir Fulke Greville (1554-1628), who turned the castle into a luxurious palace and was stabbed to death by his manservant during an argument over money, is said to haunt the Ghost Tower.

I spent an entire night at the castle, along with more than 20 other members of the public, a Fright Nights host and a medium. During a vigil in the bedroom of the Ghost Tower, I certainly heard odd noises. One person felt sick, another very cold. A third person described an oppressive atmosphere.

“There is little doubt something is going on there,” said Jeffrey. “On one occasion, we clearly heard footsteps thundering in from outside while we were in the top room of the Ghost Tower. We ran downstairs thinking there was an emergency or something, only to find nobody there. It turned out the nearest group of people was in the dungeon on the far side of the castle.”

While at Warwick Castle, medium Pete Bradshaw claimed to have been pushed from the dungeon by the spirit of someone who didn’t want him there. Later he sensed the presence of the same spirit when we all gathered in that grim place.

During the vigil, a woman suddenly rushed out saying she couldn’t stay in there any longer, while a man complained of pains in his chest.

Earlier in the evening, I ventured into the dungeon on my own. After reaching the bottom of the steps, I switched off my torch and stood silently in the inky darkness for several minutes waiting to see if anything untoward happened. It didn’t, unfortunately. Perhaps you have to be on the right wavelength to experience paranormal phenomena. Or perhaps the spirit world has the same distrust of journalists as the ‘real’ one!

I also visited two other allegedly haunted properties – the Edinburgh Vaults and Woodchester Mansion.

Outwardly, at least, there is nothing at all remarkable about the locked black door sandwiched between two shop fronts in Blair Street, Edinburgh. In fact, most people walk right past the windowless door without giving it a second glance. Behind it, however, at the bottom of a flight of well-worn stone steps, is the entrance to a hidden world. A world of dimly-lit vaults used for both legal and illegal purposes down the ages. And a world of strange, ghostly encounters.

The Edinburgh Vaults were created in the late 18th century when South Street Bridge was built to span Cowgate Valley. The road bridge was supported by 19 stone arches, 18 of which were enclosed on both sides by shops and houses. The nineteenth arch was left open so traffic could pass through Cowgate below.

The insides of the arches were turned into vaulted chambers and used as workshops, storage areas for wine and beer, dingy taverns known as oyster cellar bars and living quarters for servants or apprentices.

The vaults were dark, damp and almost certainly unventilated. The only light would have come from smelly fish oil lamps and flickering tallow candles.

Hidden from the public at large, the vaults were ideal for various nefarious activities. In 1815, following a tip-off, Customs and Excise officers found an illicit whisky still. The hooch makers had siphoned water from the houses above and used a ranting, raving old woman to smuggle out the flagons of whisky in a big green bag. There is also evidence that some of the vaults were used during the early 1800s as a repository for human corpses stolen from graveyards.

Bodies were sold to the local medical school which needed a regular supply of cadavers for dissection purposes. Serial killers Burke and Hare obtained bodies not by robbing graves, as is commonly believed, but by murdering people. They plied their hapless victims with alcohol before suffocating them.

Many of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who have ventured into the forbidding depths of the vaults have described seemingly paranormal experiences. So, too, have some of the tour guides.

Apparitions of a tall, dark-haired man wearing knee-high boots, a bald, white-shirted cobbler, an angry woman in black and a malevolent man dressed in a dirty blue overcoat carrying something jagged in his hand have all been reported. The Edinburgh Vaults are undoubtedly fascinating. But they are certainly not for the faint-hearted.

All manner of seemingly strange things happened during my all-night stay with two dozen other people at Woodchester Mansion – a masterpiece of Gothic architecture abandoned by its Victorian builders before it had been completed.

The mediums in our group reported seeing or sensing hooded, monk-like figures in the chapel, a Roman soldier, an American war-time serviceman and a girl named Ruth aged 10 to 12 who had been murdered because she witnessed rituals.

One of the young ladies among us became hysterical for a brief period after claiming to have suddenly seen a face in front of hers while taking part in a vigil in the cellars.

Woodchester Mansion is an especially spooky place on a dark night when the rain is lashing down outside, as it was during my visit, and its resident bats are flitting silently from room to room.

The Gothic structure stands on the site of a country house built at the start of the 17th century. Woodchester Park, which is reported to have its own community of ghosts, dates back much earlier and is even mentioned in the Domesday Book.

Whatever the truth is behind the mysterious sights, sounds and sensations reported all over Britain, clearly Fright Nights is meeting a need, for more and more people are keen to discover if Hamlet was right when he remarked to his friend: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”