Chasing ghosts - Nottingham

We hurried back inside after our dinner and I checked the email. The guys asked us to meet them at Annesley Hall, a ruined medieval manor house owned for centuries by the Chaworth family. (Mary Chaworth was the boyhood lover of Lord Byron). The place – a sprawling estate with a ruined Norman-era chapel, churchyard and stables on the grounds - was now in private hands, with estimates for its restoration at something like 20 million GBP. We were told that the Nottingham county government had wanted to purchase and open the place as a tourist attraction, but the owner wouldn't sell, evidently preferring to just sit on it.

Ghost hunting groups often have a weird vibe about outsiders; in the States, there is an undeniable undercurrent of competition amongst groups for outside media coverage and the usually limited availability of credible investigation sites, while the pool of amateur ghost hunters (and, technically, there’s no such thing as a professional group, for reasons which should be obvious) has exploded due the popularity of a ceaseless parade of reality TV shows around ghost hunting. There’s also a kind fraternal element to the subculture – groups pride themselves on the currency of their equipment and the quality of their evidence, exuding the same kind of pride you might find amongst classic car owners showing their rebuilt muscle cars, trading notes on parts and 0-60 strip timings.

But the bunch we hooked up with, who call themselves PAST Hauntings, were warm and welcoming to us.

Their directions in the email were a bit sketchy – no problem, I thought, we’d just look the place up on Google and pipe the directions into the GPS. Ah, but not so simple, since there were three or four properties in the area with the name "Annesley", so we kind of took the written instructions and triangulated against Google and figured we’d find it. And we kind of did, although we waited on a lonely dead end street for 20 minutes until climbing back into the car and prowling around a bit more until we found the right street.

Sean was the group’s leader, a stout, enthusiastic bloke of about 40, a Nottingham cabbie by day and longtime ghost hunter. His tech guy was Simon, who worked at a local casino (we didn't know that there were any casinos in England), and Sean’s daughter Sian and a younger fellow Ashley were also along, all piled in Sean’s tiny hatchback with a few suitcases of equipment.

We deployed the digitalia and spent a couple of hours walking around the ruined chapel, dodging and occasionally tripping over 18th century headstones, and outside the fence of the estate itself, as well as shooting pictures and doing some recordings down at the stable. Ghost hunting, especially in a group, tends not to be very spooky (at least not for us, anyway), since you're usually focused on team management and equipment, and a lot of the time we spent at Annesley was exchanging  notes with the group on English ghost hunting and sharing commentary on the current state of para-TV. But Sharon and I, after some years of stomping around private B&B’s and mansions in the US, couldn't resist  a palpable rush of excitement prowling around a centuries-old churchyard and manor grounds in England.

We caught one interesting piece of still photo evidence, shot through an open window in the stables:

We're cautiously writing off this unusual image as the flash-illuminated image of some cobwebs in front of the camera, although we'll concede we've never caught anything quite like it before. 

Also, in addition to one decidedly peculiar piece of audio captured on my video camera, below (the voice at the end of the clip, which sounds French to our ears, was not from anyone in the group - I know a little bit, strands and fragments from French class in high school almost forty years ago that I'm generally not predisposed to showing off to anyone, and no one else in the group knew any at all):


But later, I did witness what in even my most cautious estimate was probably something of note; down at the stables, against the dimly lit and 60-yard distant walls of the estate itself, I saw what looked a lot like a growing black mass, a cloudlike apparition that obscured the building across the courtyard. It only last a few seconds, but it was enough for me to exclaim “Holy crap, did you see that?” to Sean who was standing at my side at the time. “I did,” he said, almost matter-of-fact. “Yeah, people see that a lot here.” There was a dim veil of ambient light from some distant streetlamps, as well as occasional brightening and darkening from the very light traffic along that street, maybe a mile distant, but what I saw was definitely not a product of ambient light. 

An English ghost? Well, maybe…in any case, my camcorder wasn't running at the time (sounds a little odd, but despite the usual battery of devices and cameras usually deployed at one of these ghost hunts, a lot what does happen isn't captured on anything, for a variety of reasons...), and it may not have recorded the apparition anyway, since even with an add-on IR light, the camcorder is fairly feeble in low-light outdoor settings. But I have no doubt I actually saw it. We've been on several dozen no-evidence investigations, but this struck me as something like The Real Deal. We've got a post up on our other blog about the Annesley Hall investigation, here.

After a couple of hours, we piled into the cars (I told them I'd follow, making them promise not to lose me along the way, since we had no idea where we were going) and made our way over to Colwick Old Church, another ruined church (there were small trees growing within its roofless walls) and churchyard on the south side of Nottingham, and walked around there for an hour and a half, shooting pictures and running the voice recorder. There are stories about the sighting of a Lady in White who is seen breezing her way through the cemetery, thought to be the spirit of a certain Mrs. Saville, who was murdered by an enraged husband in the nearby woods in 1844. There is also the grave site of an Elizabeth Swinscoe, d.1777... 

with whom the PAST guys have had a number of interesting EMF Q&A sessions in past. We didn't capture or witness anything extraordinary at Elizabeth's grave, apart from admiring the truly amazing (though broken and repaired) headstone bearing her name. I had a couple of fleeting but notable hits on the MEL meter nearby the grave, but nothing corroborating the EMF spikes.  

At about 1 AM, we all decided to call it a night – we punched up the hotel on the GPS, thanked the group and headed back to Bestwood. Nottingham streets were all but deserted by this time; along Mansfield Road we drove by the famed Rock Cemetery, the old (1840’s) city cemetery at the north end of downtown Nottingham. This had been one of our target graveyards for the trip, we had been hoping to get into Nottingham early enough the day before to visit and shoot it, but a view from the car window, at 2 in the morning, was all we were going to get out of it. We had a lot of driving awaiting us the next day, with no time to drive back into downtown in the morning (to say nothing of finding a place to park, which we were told is a challenge), and we were looking at next to no sleep.

Back at the hotel, we decided to grab a nightcap. (There's always time for that.) The bar, we'd been told, was open 24hrs/day, but we had to find the night watchman to actually fix us a drink, which we sipped at a table in the front courtyard in the stillness of an early weekday morning. We finally got up to the room and dropped off into exhausted sleep around 2:15 AM, wrapping up what was a ridiculously ambitious but successful day. 

Shropshire and the West Midlands was next.