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I did warn you. It's a bit of a long one
I have attended many investigations in pubs. Almost always with very little results. Most of the time I found that a landlord calling in a team for an investigation had more to do with publicity and reputation for the business (ghosts are big business these days - see I told you I was cynical) or for a bit of a laugh with the regulars who they insisted in staying behind to hang around and get involved (some even advertised it as an event)
Many times they were disappointed with our findings of bugger all, and questioned why we didn't use table tipping, Ouija boards or a medium to pick up on things in our team, therefore getting more results (We opted to use a scientific rather than a spiritual approach) than the boring "sitting around in the dark with not much happening" method. They didn't want debunking. They wanted a monk floating around in the cellar and a murdered scullery maid on the stairs.
Apart from one particular pub that is. I am unable to name the location as they asked at the time for no publicity. They never asked us to "find ghosts" They simply wanted a team to come in and try to give them some answers as to what was going on.
It is a small pub in a seaside town in the UK. One bar area. Pump room. Small kitchen area. Apartment on the second floor used by the owners, a middle aged couple. I didn't expect much from the investigation. By this time I was toying with the idea of giving it all up. The passion I once had for the subject already on the wane.
As it turned out this was one of the most interesting and puzzling (for me, as a sceptic) investigations I ever did.
There were four of us in the team that evening. Having visited the location previously and seen how small it was we decided to keep numbers to a minimum. The owners left us too it. They gave us a key, said we had the full run of the downstairs area and they went up to their apartment on the floor above. The weather was wet with the occasional burst of lightning. I settled down to a night of twiddling my thumbs waiting for something that (I thought) wasn't going to happen.
For the first hour or so nothing much happened. All the audio booster were picking up was the sound of the owners watching TV upstairs. Motion detectors were quiet.
The owners finally turned off the TV and went to bed. Everything was quiet in the bar area. Myself and another chap were sat at a table next to the bar while the other two team members went off into the pump area behind the bar. All of a sudden from what seemed like right next to my ear there was a loud groaning sound. I can only describe it as sounding like something from a ghost train or fun house. It was such a typical "ghost" sound it was almost a cliché. The chap sat opposite me jumped so much he very nearly fell off his chair, as he was listening via headphones to boosted audio. It was loud for me with the naked ear so goodness knows how loud it was for him!
We called the other two back into the room and asked if they had heard anything where they were at the time. They hadn't. We had 3 audio recorders running that the time, spaced around the bottom floor. We immediately reviewed all of them. The one on the table with us clearly picked up the groaning sound. The other two picked up nothing. I was stumped. I even half jokingly accused the chap that was with me at the time that it was his stomach and he was covering up. He swore it wasn't and to be honest he seemed quite shaken by it (for a paranormal investigator he ain't half a scaredy cat)
About ten minutes later we were all sat together in the bar area quietly discussing the sound when one member of our team said he could see a shadowy mass moving across the wall at the far end of the bar area. We all looked. I couldn't see much as I had just been looking at a lit monitor screen so my night vision wasn't good, but the other team members all said they could see a dark shape moving across. This particular pub is not on a road way. It has a foot path leading up to it, and when we checked there was no one outside to throw a shadow through the window. We even got one team member to go outside and walk about a bit to try and recreate what the others had seen with no luck.
A short while later we were sat quietly when another team member jumped and almost knocked over my flask of tea! He said he had seen someone poking their head around a doorway leading from the bar area to the back room. I immediately got up to check and found no one back there.
We decided to set up some trigger objects and all go outside to the yard area. I was the last one out the door and as I was shutting it I heard a clear female voice calling out something I couldn't make out. The voice came from the bar area. I actually thought the landlady had come downstairs and called out to us. I went back in to see what she wanted but the bar was empty. Strange thing was it was only me that heard it even though the other team members were right in front of me when I closed the door, and our audio recorders didn't pick up any voice. Did I have an auditory hallucination?
We hung about out in the yard for a while but came back in due to the weather. Roughly 5 minutes after we came back in there was a loud crash in the opposite end of the room to where we were. You do tend to hear lots of loud noises in pubs at night, due to the pumps, fridges etc, but this was in an area where there was no equipment. It wasn't like a bang. More like a crash. It sounded metallic. Almost immediately afterwards a motion detector in the same area as the crash sound had come from started bleeping. Rather than dash over to that area I suggested we kept quiet and stay where we were to see if anything else would happen. There was 3 knocks, like someone rapping on one of the wooden tables. Then nothing. When we later checked the trigger object left in that area (an old Penny) it had moved quite a lot from where it had been placed. Unfortunately, as always seems the way with these things, all of our locked off cameras were pointing in different areas so we couldn't tell exactly how and when it was moved. Just that it was moved sometime after it was last checked by myself.
A second trigger object (a vintage tobacco tin placed on the bar) was also discovered to have moved later on in the investigation.
We experimented with a KII meter. Now I'm not convinced at all it can be used as equipment to communicate with spirits. Out of all the times I have seen it used in this way, this location was the only place it has ever seemed to show any sign that someone was controlling it. For about ten minutes only it would flash when asked to flash and stop when asked to do so. When asked to do the old "1 flash for yes, 2 for no" it just stopped flashing altogether. Almost like someone was refusing to talk. I'm not saying this is proof. Just that it was interesting for me.
The rest of the night was pretty quiet, apart from all of us kept hearing what sounded like whispering very close by. Not at the same time. We all heard it individually at different times. Now this could be put down to sounds traveling from the rain outside, or possibly sounds traveling from upstairs? I don't know. When I heard it, it sounded close and male.
Now when you compare all this to certain paranormal "excitement every minute" TV shows it seems pretty tame. But to me, who has investigated the paranormal for quite a few years, nights like this one are pretty rare. Any one who does it will tell you that 99% of the time nothing happens
We were all desperate to go back for another shot at the location, but unfortunately not long afterward it changed owners, and the new owners were not interested in having anyone in to investigate, telling us "we don't go in for that sort of thing"
