Spirit Hunt

It’s Saturday night.  It’s dark, it’s raining and I’m walking down Totnes High Street to the museum.

Inside, the glow of a monitor illuminates two people.

I knock on the window – I’m here for the paranormal night, the spirit hunt, I pantomime through the  leaded glass. “We’ve been expecting you” says a kindly man as the heavy side door opens.

“They are waiting upstairs.”

I climb the creaking wooden flight to the top floor.  Women in black welcome me. “Cuppa tea?”

I am here to observe what has become a money spinner for the museum –  visits by ghost hunters, spirit seekers, believers in and perhaps sceptics of the spectral world.  Several companies run such tours, and tonight it’s Dark Shadows Paranormal, owned by Sophie Chapman from Newton Abbot.  “I’ve been interested from a teenager.  Me and my sister saw a spirit in a graveyard and we kind of couldn’t believe it, but that got

me interested,” she tells me.  So you believe, I ask? “Yeah yeah, there are some things I am sceptical about, so I’m not 100% believer.  If some things happen in the evening, I will try and find another explanation for it.  But, from personal experience…”

Like what?

Sophie tells of a sinister happening  elsewhere recently, where she felt she was being strangled.  She shows me a photo on her phone of the red mark on her neck.  I remark that when she tells people what she does for a living, I bet a lot of them go what a load of old nonsense? “Very much so, very much.  I say to people that’s fine, prove to me a scientific reason, another reason for something, especially when it comes to something physical happening to you.”

Tonight’s paying guests are arriving.  Locals mostly, but also Emma and Ruby, a mother and teenage daughter who’ve come all the way from Weston super Mare.  Ruby has seen a ghost in her granny’s house, Emma says.  All are anticipating a good night, unfazed at the thought they might encounter the unexplainable in the next few hours.

Tea finished, vapes stowed and phones on airplane mode  ( to not interfere with the spirit seeking equipment), we venture downstairs to the building’s front room, where museum volunteers Alan and Lou are  sitting in the dark watching the CCTV camera monitor which show the darkened rooms.

Dark but not, perhaps, entirely empty.   Alan – I am a total sceptic myself, he says – and Lou are watching for orbs.

Orbs?

“That’s what we call them anyway,” says Lou. I squint at the monitor showing an upstairs room.  Blobs of light flick randomly through the  greenish gloom. “You only see the orbs through the monitor,” Lou tells me. “Some rooms are more lively than others.” Alan chips in.  “Logic tells me it’s dust, but I’ve never seen dust move like that.”

Inches away the guests are forming a circle, holding hands, with Nivana in the centre. Stacey and Zoe, the paranormal leaders, are breaking  out the tech.   Flashing balls (cat toys by day), K2s and REM PODS are placed around the circle.  These bits of kit will light up when spirits make themselves known.

the hairs on the back of my neck went up too

Nivana  and the others are  guided by Zoe to imagine a white light above their heads coming through their bodies, joining them and protecting them.  “Spirit, we have Nivana in the middle.  Would you be able to move Nivana forwards or backwards for an answer for yes, please?”

Nivana sways forward for yes. “And an answer for no please?” She sways backwards for no.

The conversation continues, with Nivana swaying with each reply from the spirit, who is apparently a male. With a daughter who died. “Spirit can you set one of the cat balls off for us”, Zoe asks.  (They only flash when moved)  “Give it a little push.” I see no cat balls light up, although the K2 lights flicker from green to orange occasionally.

Some in the circle say they feel cold.  Zoe, optimistic, asks the spirit to make them perform a Mexican wave.  By now I am confused.  I think another spirit has joined in the chat, a murder victim who possibly died in the museum.  Like detectives they question the spirit – was he married, did he have children.  Backwards and forwards.

Nivana is feeling lightheaded, so Zara steps in to the middle and engages with the spirit  (now a little girl it seems), swaying back and forward.  Zara, who tells me later that she’s a practising witch, feels a weight on her legs, like a child wrapping themselves around her. The conversation meanders for a while but no cat balls flash.

Then suddenly the door latch rattles.  

The spirit is asked to repeat this.  Nothing happens, but it’s agreed this was a massive burst of energy from somewhere. The group moves into the next room to try again. And Alan – a total sceptic –  tells me an interesting story about this room, named the Bennett room after Bill Bennett, a well respected historian and  mayor of the town, who died in 2004. “I was volunteering here one day and a woman came back and I said, did you have a good trip around the museum, Oh yes she said your volunteers are very knowledgeable, I was talking to one in that room who was telling me all about Totnes. And I actually felt the hair on the back of my neck going up because there was nobody in that room. I knew there was nobody in the room, but she’d come out of the room convinced that she’d been talking to somebody.”

At this point the hairs on the back of my neck went up too. Alan goes on.  Bill Bennett, he whispers, died in that room.  “Or very close to it.  He died in the museum. This is what I’ve heard anyway.”

Listening back to my recording of this on my phone, I noticed interference, a crackle.  That hadn’t happened during the spirit chat.  Only when Alan – a total sceptic, remember – spoke of Bill Bennett who may, or may not, have died in the museum.

Activity in the Bennett room seemingly limited to a few flashes of light on the K2 monitor, I wonder if they are looking for Mr Bennett.

“Oh I’m not going to tell them,” Alan says.  “I’m not going to tell them about it until they tell me about it.  If they say we have sensed a presence in that room, can you tell me about it then I will tell them.” For a total sceptic, Alan is doing a remarkably good job of selling the museum as a paranormal venue.  Charging £200 a night to companies like Sophie’s raises around £1500.

 

During the ten pm teabreak, I ask Nivana what she felt while in the circle. “Extremely lightheaded. You know, when you are drunk and you feel a bit all over the shop? You just feel the push and pull.  I don’t like to claim it but I get downloads, random info, you know. It’s like a memory that’s not yours.  I have had it since I was a child.” She has divining rods in her hand, which twist. “I got them from the witchcraft museum in Boscastle.  I live the spirit world but I don’t always like to talk about it because people can take the mickey.”

Zara, too felt the push and pull, she says. Was she frightened? “Not at all.  It’s a hobby. I have had quite a few things happen in my old house.  Cups flying off the end of the sofa, pictures coming off walls, a ghost of a Springer and a black Lab.  The elderly lady who lived there before had various dogs.” Including a Springer and a black Lab.

By ten thirty we are convening in the master bedroom of the museum, an Elizabethan merchant’s house.  Disconcertingly two of the mannequins in the room are headless. It is cold and very dark. Time to get the spirit box in action. I decline a turn with the box, which to me looks like a radio and sounds like it’s tuned to a frequency from a galaxy far, far away.

Another guest, Charmain, volunteers to listen in on headphones for any voices from the spirit box.  But despite appeals for the spirit to communicate, no lights flash.  After an hour, Charmain tells me she heard sounds so fast she couldn’t make them out, but could have been a man and a woman.

For me, it’s time to leave.  The paranormal party will continue for another hour or two, when Alan will be able to escort them out and  lock up. As I walk through a deserted town, the clock chimes midnight. The radio news reports the claimed death by American forces of Iran’s Supreme Leader.  The world is a dangerous and depressing place at the moment.

I remember what Zara said, that her witchcraft is used for positivity and light, “because we need more of that in the world.”

Whether one believes, or is agnostic, or a total sceptic, looking for positivity and light in the spirit world seems a harmless enough pastime to me.