Looking back over my years of investigating the anomalous, I have to admit there have been very few incidents that I can honestly say have reduced me to a gibbering wreck. There have been times when I’ve felt uneasy – hell yeah! Put any rational person in an unusual and unfamiliar environment, tell them it’s haunted and it’s only natural that you’ll illicit a fear response from them, but I’ve never really experienced the Oh, my days, tear evoking emotional malarkey that some people seem to encounter around every corner in this field of study. Truth is, I’m not one of the thrill seekers, and I’m not in it for the fear factor. I research the strange and unusual mainly because I don’t scare easily. Sure I’ve felt uneasy at times – who wouldn’t in a dark environment that someone has said may play host to some weird and wonderful phenomena we don’t understand or can’t explain, but I’ve never really felt that gut clenching, heart stopping hand of fear, at least not while in an investigative environment. Except for this one time…

During my formative years, I was contacted by the landlady of a public house in the village of Dronfield in South Yorkshire regarding some bizarre phenomena that she claimed herself, her partner and her staff had witnessed. Her account read pretty much like the early scenes of the film ‘Poltergeist’ – object movement, footsteps, things getting broken – and at a time when paranormal programmes were at their absolute pinnacle, I have to admit that it all did sound slightly exaggerated to my then highly sceptical mind. Needless to say, I dutifully attended the location and conducted interviews, what I then considered to be thorough ‘baseline’ EMF tests  (oh, how naive I was…), and arranged to return the following weekend to conduct a monitoring session of the environment.

During the week that followed I did a little research into the pubs history and location, and found no significant events, no previous reports of activity, nothing at all of note, and with possibly the lowest level of expectancy ever recorded in an investigator before an investigation, off I went with the team to see what we could, or rather couldn’t, find.

We split into two groups, established radio contact between both, and settled in to basically monitor the environment, rationalising the reported temperature fluctuations, noises etc. as we experienced them, half hoping that some of the more profound reported events – lights switching on and off, televisions moving of their own accord or audible footsteps – might occur during the night.

The first ‘odd’ event of the evening occurred around an hour into the investigation when Chris, one of the team suddenly hit the deck. One minute he was stood beside me, quite happily chatting away, the next he was slumped in the corner looking a bit glassy eyed. Chatting to him later when he had regained composure it seemed our new investigator had got a little bit over excited during the build up to his first investigation. He hadn’t eaten properly and spent the day pretty much working himself into frenzy. We put his ‘funny turn’ down to a combination of over excitement and a possible drop in blood sugar levels and sent him to sit and chill out for a while. He in turn earned himself the nickname Betty, which has stayed with him to this day.

Several other events occurred during the night, many of which were rationalised – footsteps heard ascending the stairs were first confirmed to only occur after someone had walked up the stairs – a factor in the original report being of a ‘presence’ that followed people upstairs – we then realised that the boards were actually just settling back into their normal positions, creating a fascinating, but purely normal, echo effect. The oven was reported to turn itself off and on a few times, lights appeared to have turned themselves on or off, but never when we could definitely say nobody had been present to do it, or hadn’t mistakenly left the lights on or off.

At some point, when everyone was in the lounge area having a cuppa, we all heard the unmistakable sound of a crate full of bottles being dropped come from the bar downstairs. I think four of us went down to investigate the cause, I don’t remember exactly who was with me, but I stood with my back to the bar while the others conducted a search of the area. Oddly there were no crates there, the only place crates were stored was in the cellar, behind a heavy door which was closed. It seemed odd that we would have heard a noise from the cellar so clearly when we were all the way upstairs. It seemed even odder that there was no one in the cellar to have moved the crate so that it could make the sound in the first place, but we couldn’t find any explanations, so we got ready to return to our colleagues upstairs, I made a mental note to check outside later to see if any crates had been left there.

As I stepped away from the bar a bottle, which had been stood on the display shelf a good ten feet away from me, smashed on the floor about a foot to my left. Nobody else was in the area it had come from, and I wasn’t anywhere near it either.

At this point can I just say that I really don’t think that there are ever going to be any serious challengers to my award for ‘Person Doing The Best Scooby-Doo-Jumping-Into-Shaggy’s-Arms Impersonation’ which I earned that night, (except for my daughter Gee, who during a big cat investigation was ‘startled’ by a peacock doing a Lenny Henry impersonation, but she was only ten at the time) My only regret is there was nobody there to catch me when I jumped.  I can honestly say that I well and truly ‘Bottled’ it, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

As I said, this investigation was carried out in my formative years. To be honest, I very nearly didn’t get past my formative years after that. I didn’t have a clue where the bottle had originated from. Later the landlady (who was making me a cup of hot, sweet tea at the time) told me it had been on the shelf behind the bar. She also said it had been full, but there was no spilt liquid in the area it smashed in as I remember. It had travelled around 10 feet or so, describing a delightful arc, no doubt, as it fell (I can’t confirm the delightful arc on account of how I wasn’t watching because I wasn’t expecting any bottles to be flying around)…

…and that’s pretty much all I can say about it. I can however confirm that since that day I have made it my business to know where everything and everyone is during investigations, and that every possible thing that can be noted, recorded, taped or logged is, because in my honest opinion if anything weird is going to happen, it’ll happen in exactly the place where you didn’t expect it to.

T5HCMUKDU793