Reply With QuoteWent to Chillingham Castle , very spooky place with dark history but didnt see anything, they host some fun evenings and you can stay overnight
So my wife is really into her ghost hunts with a couple of companies, I've never been.
She's been to:
Clink Prison
Kelvedon Hatch
Skirrid Inn
Newsham Park
Ashwell Prison
Armley Mills
Margam Castle
Pendle Hill
Shepton Mallet Prison
I'm sceptical about it all but she loves it.
Anyone else been to interesting places or had anything interesting happen?
Went to Chillingham Castle , very spooky place with dark history but didnt see anything, they host some fun evenings and you can stay overnight
York’s Ghost walks are good fun. Also people are going mad for trinket ghosts from York Ghost Merchants in The Shamble. If she hasn’t got one it’ll make a nice little gift.
Thanks for that just registered with their site.Originally Posted by chrisparker
Got married (first time around) there and stayed over night. No ghosts...didn't really feel that spooky to be honest.
if you want to be scared fast just go down to any london centre pub and order a round.
The Ancient Ram Inn, Wotton Under Edge is a fascinating building and I have spent a night there, nothing happened though. One of those many many buildings in England that claim to be the most haunted.
Bodmin Jail….quite a horrible damp smelly and dingy place. One of our chocolate labs flipped out ithere and wouldn’t go inside.
Don't think she's been to that one bet she'd be interested 👍
My wife and I went on a 'ghouls' walking tour in Berlin once, just for something fun to do in the evening. When we turned up we were a tad concerned to find we were the only customers. The chap was friendly but exceedingly strange/creepy (which to be fair may have been exaggerated for the purpose of the tour). The tour seemed to be never-ending, so after 2 hours we politely made our excuses and went back to the hotel, felt like the guy was planning to have us there until sunrise..! No ghosts were seen but there was some interesting glimpses into the gruesome side of the history of Berlin (beyond you know... the obvious).
I think the creepiest location we've been to was the Eastern State Penitentiary. Prisoners were kept completely segregated, as it was believed it would be the only way to allow them to integrate back into society. Tiny concrete rooms and horrendous masks they had to wear outside of the rooms so as not to see or be seen. Got to be a top contender for a good haunting..!
Wife and I went to Edinburgh Vaults with another couple we are friends with. I’ll say upfront that I don’t generally believe in any of the spirit stuff… however I’m unable to explain what happened with their camera.
Our friends brought a digital camera with them, and had taken photos of us in bars prior to going to the vaults.
During our visit to the vaults they continued to take pictures, and then again afterwards when we were back in various bars.
Towards the end of the night we decided to have a look through the photos. Every single photo they took in the vaults just showed up on their camera as “card error”… every one without exception.
Yet all photos prior to and after the vaults visit were totally fine.
They said they’d never seen that error before and never had it since. Spooky.
The real Mary kings close is also quite grim in Edinburgh……https://www.realmarykingsclose.com/
Stayed there too! Special charter with a Dorset based paranormal society. I was in the Bishop's Room. Very creepy place with all the weird ornaments curated by the very eccentric owner. Basement has a pit where supposedly children were sacrificed. Allegedly there's a succubus that sexually assaults male visitors. None of this happened to me although I can't say I had the best night's sleep
My son and his friend went to stay the night camping at Dering woods (the screaming woods) which is apparently the most haunted woods in Britain, from starting out all brave and blasé it didn’t last long until they abandoned camp and all their supply's and drove out as quickly as possible, apparently they heard screaming, masses of spiders falling on the tent and strange lights randomly appearing in the woods
https://www.donkeyjunk.com/post/the-...f-dering-woods
That’s fascinating and alarming in equal measure. How do you begin to explain the twenty dead bodies found in the woods in 1948? And the four students who disappeared there in 1998? Definitely something for Mulder and Scully to investigate.
Ghosts. Pah.
A nice little earner for certain locations to help the tourist trade from the gullible and hard of thinking, and in certain disgusting circumstances, to exploit the bereaved.
I used to work with a very stupid woman, who once said, telling a story of when she visited a friend; "My dog can see the souls of dead people."
That statement raised a number of questions, to say the least. I started with the obvious one; "How did she tell you that?"
Irrational twaddle.
David
Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations
That's a completely fabricated story from creepypasta. Four students go missing and the police close up the investigation after three weeks?! Both news articles are made up and I believe the photo in the news article is from the holocaust. The "1948 newspaper article" has a facebook website address in the photos caption!
Last edited by Christian; 30th October 2022 at 11:07.
Thanks for driving a coach and horses through that claptrap😊
I did think it was funny and said to my son it was most probably foxes making the screaming noise and I’m sure it’s not uncommon to get spiders in the woods and I’m sure there was a natural reason for the lights, I thought it was a bit careless to leave the tent and supply’s to be honest
But he wasn’t having any of it a told me I wasn’t there and why don’t I try it if I don’t believe him I said no thanks lol
Yeah, wouldn't be surprised if there are a few badger sets around that wood.
Do ghosts only materialise during dark misty periods as seen on any tv progs ive seen.And why is it any departed loved ones only make themselves known to "believers",surely my Brothers and Dad would want to make themselves known to me to prove me wrong and see they are having a great time on the otherside.And why are ghosts perceived to be scary if they are your friends or family.
Comforting thoughts for the living is what it is......
Last edited by P9CLY; 30th October 2022 at 13:16.
It’s always fascinated me also why dearly beloved family members communicate from the other side to strangers with very tenuous connections using the initials from their names and how they died.
When in reality they would just say yeh, my name is Bob Smith, I lived at 24 Westwood Avenue- the missus was Vera and she’s sat just there, 2nd from left with the pink top on.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Exactly.....why be so vague,just get to the point.
But as with most things,someone is making money out of this dribble.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_...rmal_Challenge
Sent through the ether by diddling with radio waves
Maybe all the 1000 participants were really non believers,and anyway no money can be made in this field as its unethical to profit from a ghost.
Went there one grotty December day a few years ago. There seems to be an obsession with the hanging of inmates and their grizzly associated tales. About as grim a place as you could find wrt a day out when the sun won’t come out to play in Cornwall
Sent from my iPhone using TZ-UK mobile app
When Sony once did a product exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall my electrician was called to install extra plug points for the products.
After the exhibition finished, he had to go under the floor to dismantle various things.
It was quite late and as he was working he turned to see a man in brown overalls watching him. Mark said, in his Boro accent, "Alright mate" but no reply came.
Mark carried on working and when he finished, he told security that there was still someone in the basement. They told him it was ok and that it was a ghost called George who was often sighted.
I've posted this in the past, but one of the strangest things I've experienced was whilst working very late one night a number of years ago.
I was the only person on the top floor of the building that night and decided I needed to go to the khazi, as you do. There were three cubicles in the mens and I opted for the first one.
I'd just finished wiping my arse and stood to pull up my trollies when the handle on the cistern went down all on its own accord and the loo flushed. Just like that.
I have no rational explanation for what happened, I certainly don't believe in ghosts, I wasn't psyched out by it at the time, but it still puzzles me to this day.
Then, of course, there were the Glowing Prawns; but that's another story....
Best Regards - Peter
I'd hate to be with you when you're on your own.
I grew-up on a diet of ghost stories as a child and relished TV series like 'Beasts' (of which 'Baby' creeped me more effectively than anything I've seen since!), plus Hammer Studios' unceasing output, but by the age of Thirteen I had realised that not only were those abject, romantic nonsense, so too were religions of every kind: nothing more than Bronze Age ghost stories contrived to explain the inexplicable and impart moral lessons to humans who had no other more-rigorous explanations for most phenomena.
As a young adult I worked in an old hospital - one of those that had been built right next to a railway line, so the literal-wagonloads of mutilated men returning from the various fronts of World War One could be treated. There, I worked in operating theatres, and saw plenty of trauma and death in my time, and as needs must, I often wandered the quiet corridors and empty wards, and trucked the occasional unlucky husk to the mortuary - nights and days. Death can be a remarkably slight thing if you are not emotionally-involved.
Subsequently, I spent a some years transferring my clinical knowledge into an IT context for the NHS. There, my first office was in a huge, isolated, stark, and run-down Victorian lunatic asylum, which - thanks to so-called 'care-in-the-community'- was all-but empty of its erstwhile inmates save for the most intractably, hopelessly institutionalised cases. Odd though it seems, we were there at-all because IT was in its rapidly-growing toddlerhood in the NHS, and expediency dictated we were sited where there was ample low-cost space while infrastructure caught-up with technology.
Later still, and by means as implausible as they are true, I migrated into academia, working as a palaeontologist and geologist in first the Natural History Museum on Cromwell Road in London, and subsequently in the University Museum of Natural History, on Parks Road in Oxford. I loved these jobs very much, and loved the truly remarkable, elaborated neo-Gothic buildings even more - with their large, neglected Gormenghastian inner reaches lurking unseen like the submerged portion of the proverbial iceberg, far beyond the eye of the mere gallery-visitor. I often worked late into the night undertaking my own research and cataloguing finds.
Back then, besides the millions of specimens, animal and vegetable, both institutions held large collections of human remains of greater and lesser antiquity, because to the scientific mind humans are (rightly) considered no-more than another rather maladapted species of ape. Many of those remains have now been repatriated (some meaningfully, others misguidedly), though I do wonder what became of the entire family of Kalahari bushmen - taxidermied, with carefully sutured bullet-wounds, which had ceased being on public display over a century earlier: excessively strong meat, even for Edwardian sensibilities!
I've also lived in a variety of old houses, including a former doctor's surgery, as well as a slew of Victorian and Georgian buildings of greater or lesser mundanity, spread right across Britain. Briefly, my wife and I had the use of a high ceiling-ed and silent apartment in San Francisco, in what was once a Foreign seamen's hospital - begirt with a neglected and mostly-unmarked graveyard.
Last in this befuddling parade of the inconsequential - for some years I have taken to walking the dogs shortly before I go to bed. This may sound barmy, probably because it is, but one dog is intensely dog-reactive, and both are rescue lurchers with little respect for carpets if a full bladder or dodgy stomach presses its case overnight. So, around midnight every night we go for a nice, uneventful walk along the abandoned, unlit lanes and woodland tracks of the arable wilderness amidst which we live. Only twice in six years of doing this have we ever met another living person afoot, cars are few, and lights are out in every home - all quite usual in rural communities where labour commences at daybreak. Tawny owls hoot, foxes scream, muntjac bark, sparse lorries thunder between farms and food-factories, and the occasional drunk/drugged driver fatally impales themselves into trees or plunges into the deep, wide drainage-dykes that characterise the fens - two in the last six years on my nightly sojourn!
Now, all this self-referential waffle serves only to illustrate that I first fed my imagination with ample feverish phantom-fertiliser, and then spent PLENTY of time in exactly the kind of places beloved of spook peddlers and ghost-guides...
And yet, never once have I experienced anything at-all significantly strange - at least, nothing clearly involving a non-living person. As for my erstwhile colleagues and related shenanigans... That's quite another tale for another time.
Still, this is not to say I've not had a smattering of experiences that I personally struggle to explain to my own complete satisfaction. Of course, others who did not experience them may easily dismiss them with any explanation they choose, and that is both fine and reasonable. You did not experience them, and for most of us any rational explanation is preferable to the irrational and 'supernatural' - me included. They are all united by just one thing outwith myself - and that is their utter mundanity.
Of these, the most tenuous, but by far the most bloody unpleasant resulted from my parents' move to a wholly unremarkable 1930s semi in Strouden Park, Bournemouth, when I was in my teens. As a teenaged boy, any thoughts of anything at-all that did not revolve around the female anatomy and the seemingly-unattainable art of copulation was VERY far from my mind.
I was assigned a bedroom by my autocratic mother (last choice as usual...), and this resulted in a profoundly dull room facing north-east by means of a steel-framed windows and 'decorated' in about forty years worth of tarry brown nicotine. Over a period of weeks I removed the carpets down to the (unmarked) pine floorboards and scrubbed every inch of the room as free as possible of the foul, cancerous ichor. I then hung the inevitable woodchip (badly), and repainted the whole thing. My dad worked hard, so it fell to me to DIY, and that was fine. From the outset that room felt inhospitable, and of course fate and fortune had conspired to build it that way, but after dark it translated into something else again - because even before the light was out I had the irrational but unshakeable sense of being constantly observed and intensely loathed. And I really emphatically mean that - deep hatred radiated from something unseeable and intangible. It never stopped, ever, until I was out of that room. When I slept, every single night was literally haunted by nightmares of pursuit, of oppression, of a crushing weight upon me, of an implacable enemy stronger than me that I could not evade.
Dreams though, never anything tangible.
It was probably a minor contributory cause towards me leaving home aged just 15 and not returning except to visit - but home life was fraught anyway, I'd got into trouble at school and with the police, I was slated to fail all my O-levels, and with youths my age in the thrall of punk, dossing with friends and then taking-up with an older woman came naturally and very happily. I never looked back, I never went back, and I never slept in that room again. I wish I could write a proper ghost story and so unveil for your delectation a horrible death in that very room years before, but the truth is as mundane as truth always is - the house was demolished in the early 2000s to make way for a shopping centre expansion. I have no idea why I experienced what I did - I hadn't before, and never did again - no doubt it was nothing more than hormones and teenage angst, but it felt utterly real and palpable at the time.
Shooting forward a number of decades to my present home in South Lincs - this is an oversized farmhouse built in two stages 100 years apart - first a double-fronted Georgian two-story with arched lower windows, and then a Victorian second floor and extensions blew-out in most directions, which more than doubled the house's size. It's built on stable river loams, but can creak and sway when a forty-tonne lorry thunders past at 60mph as some inconsiderate swine do; it's drafty, it leaks, rats and mice take shelter in the winter and scuttle behind the wainscot at all hours - thus, curious and unsettling sound-effects tend to be the norm. None of which explain the presence of a cat, unseen but often heard by my wife, myself, and a number of visitors, day and night. Of course, we have a cat - but it lives its life confined to the sunroom and its own section of the garden, because it would rapidly cease to exist if the lurchers met it! Thus it cannot get into the rest of the house, and because its stupid idiot life depends upon it, we are vigilant in ensuring this. Betimes, at random times of the day or night, something meows outside bedroom doors, and then scampers across the floor overhead, mews again, and then is disconcertingly absent when searched for. Perhaps our cat has unprecedented ventriloquist skills? Perhaps we have yet to discover a secret cat-flap.
At least it is not alone, as human footsteps are also sometimes heard, crossing rooms overhead, going from room to room, or up the stairs. None of this is common or regular, nor does it feel in any way unpleasant or threatening. Indeed, there is a sense of the ordinary to it. And most probably it is ordinary: an artful shifting of floorboards and water-pipes as the wonky old house settles its feet a mite deeper into the loams. Certainly there is no convenient back-story to explain the presence of some hypothetical restless spirits. No doubt a few aged inhabitants breathed their last within these walls in the house's ~300 year existence, but there are no local legends of wrong-doing done here.
Oh, and there was the time an unplugged and redundant network camera left in the hallway started moving around on its own - started to rotate, motor whirring until I picked it up and put it deep in the bin. TBH, I try not to think about that one too much. A capacitor belatedly discharging perhaps? Lady Sod who saw it too loves scaring guests with that one. She is of Stern Stuff.
It did come not long after a good friend from my time in Oxfordshire had died - carried off young with appalling rapidity by glioblastoma. Neil loved a practical joke, and it was tempting to think it would have been very much his M.O. - you know, if dead people could manipulate material objects... Such is the emotionally-overwrought mindset of the bereaved.
Last, and chronologically reversed in sequence, is the most tangible, the most satisfying, the unscariest, and arguably the most easily dismissed.
When I was eight, my family moved in with my maternal grandmother as our usual domicile was being refurbished. Our usual domicile was a literal slum: two-up-two-down with rising-damp to every elevation, no heating, a well in the middle of the kitchen, no bathroom, outside toilet, &c. Proper 'Four Yorkshiremen' stuff. I used to dig over the garden at my nan's, as I'd developed a taste for growing small plots of veg - handfuls of radishes, lettuces, courgettes, and suchlike. In so-doing I unearthed some small bones which I realised belonged to a cat, and once the realisation that it had been someone's pet sunk-in, I reburied it - in spite of my chidlish morbid-curiosity.
Months later - still at my nan's - I awoke in the dark hours of a late-winter night for no reason that I could immediately recall. That bedroom was always well-lit because a Sodium-flare streetlamp shone a bright piss-yellow through the thin curtains in both windows. As I came-to, I realised that what had wakened me was a smallish cat that had hopped-up on to my bed. This was a fairly unsurprising event because my grandmother had a smallish cat. However, this was not that cat. Nan's cat was skinny and short-coated, and cared only for her lap by day or the great outdoors by night - where she (the cat...) murdered uncountable numbers of rats. The new arrival was a darker ginger with no white, and densely furred, bordering on fluffy. It was also very friendly, warm and purring like a motor. I petted this very solid and real animal for a while, to its evident pleasure, and it then settled at the end of the bed by my feet. Contented, I pulled the covers up and slept until morning. Come the morning and I was disappointed to find the little moggy gone - I think I rather hoped we might adopt it if it had proved to be homeless. Although the impression it had made in the eiderdown was still there, there was no trace of the cat itself, which puzzled me greatly, because the door to my bedroom was - as always - closed, and the windows were too: of course it was winter, but in any case the windows had been painted shut years before. I pottered downstairs and asked my mum and nan if they'd let this cute little cat out, which caused puzzlement as they'd seen no other cat than our unimaginatively-named resident, 'Sandy'.
"What did it look like?"
Before I got to the end of my description, and to my tremendous consternation and dismay, my poor mum was in tears.
As you may have guessed, when she was a child living with her parents in that house, she had owned a cat - a delightful little dark ginger cat with no white, densely furred, bordering on fluffy. It was very friendly, and had, by all accounts, purred like a motor and relished sleeping at her feet. Sadly, the poor mite had lacked any trace of road sense and so had come to a premature end on the road outside, to the misery of the little girl who was to become my mother.
I have to say, I truly have no idea what any of this may mean. Almost-certainly it means nothing at-all. I've formed no notions from these experiences. I trust what my senses have told me at these times, but to understand how they came about - psychosomatism, or something else - is like trying to grasp hold of smoke or weave a rope from sand... They do not make sense. They cannot make sense.
I do still believe that life is near-random happenstance that arose in a suitably-stimulated chemical-cocktail billions of years ago, and also that death is unshakably absolute, but I can somehow still entertain the notion that slight ripples may sometimes disturb tiny portions of the cosmic inevitability of it all...
Posting Permissions
