The problem now was that, when you’re ten or eleven, waiting for longer than twenty seconds to engage with a chatty wraith tends to test one’s patience, so most kids would give the sessions a bit of a helping hand by shoving the glass around the letters themselves while feigning shock and panic. You could always tell when one of your mates was manufacturing the mystery because whatever phantom they were pretending to be would have a penchant for words like ‘bum’, ‘bastard’ and ‘tit’, coupled with a curious eagerness to point out who around the table was, in fact, a secret homosexual. Thus 99 per cent of these initially sombre séances rapidly descended into farce.
Thus one day in Stephen Micalef’s house, Mark Jeffries, Tommy Hodges, Peter King and I all promised, promised, promised that we wouldn’t fake it and no matter how long it took we would wait until the glass began to move purely guided by an unseen force. After a few failed attempts at this avowed discipline – I believe a Mr John Arse put in an appearance at one point – we were off again with all our index fingers atop the beaker as it slid around the letters. The name George was forming up and, as usual, as the fourth letter revealed itself we were all noisily accusing each other of ‘pushing it’ and creating the kind of racket that might dissipate the chances of any drifting ghoul wanting to stick around. After the glass came to rest it was decided to ask a question that would flush out any charlatans, but we were momentarily stumped as to what that might be. Our ethereal chum waited patiently while we thrashed this out. Then I came up with the idea that I should remove a coin from my pocket and hold it in my hand without looking at the year engraved upon it. If the spirit guessed this date correctly then we knew we had a live one. I took a penny, one of the pre-decimal large ones, and without so much as glancing at it put it in my back pocket and sat down again.
‘I thought you were going to hold it,’ said Pete.
‘Well, you’d all say I nicked a look at it if I did, so now nobody can, can they?’ I replied. I wanted this thing watertight. Tom remarked that the ghost would be forced to look at my bum now to find out what year was on the coin and after a good chuckle at this we asked the question formally.
The glass began to slide: 1 . . . 9 . . . 1 . . . 3. 1913. Excitedly taking the penny from my pocket, I stared at the numbers beneath Britannia wielding her trident on the reverse: 1913. I showed this around and a strange sickly silence fell over us all. This was a bit weird. Placing our fingers back on the glass we started to ask each other what to request next. Our voices now were low and serious, all the effervescence knocked out by the inexplicable accuracy of the stunt. Before we could agree on a suitable enquiry, the glass began to move again: C . . . H . . . I . . . L . . . D . . . R . . . E . . . N.
‘Children!’ we all gasped as one, searching each other’s eyes for the deeper meaning of this. Then it continued on. S . . . T . . . O . . . P . . . N . . . O . . . W.
We paused and stared at each other, quite terrified. I broke the spell. ‘I don’t like it!’ I said, my voice rising with fear. ‘I don’t like this bit!’ And we all jumped up and ran to the front door to leg it into the square outside.
I have absolutely no explanation for what happened there. All those who were present can confirm the events as recorded, and even if you rationalize the coin revelation as mere subconscious chance, none of us can think of a single reason why any of us would have concocted the mundane yet petrifying phrase that followed it. It really happened and there it is.
Possibly I should have brooded upon this bizarre incident more and allowed it to influence my world view from then on but it was soon made light of and only many years later did we all start to question what we experienced that afternoon. Thankfully, none of us have drawn a single spiritual conclusion from it and, quite sensibly, keep the story in a box labelled Derren Brown rather than a crystal ball named Uri Geller.