Paranormal Reason

Hellfire Caves, in Buckinghamshire, features strongly in the world of the paranormal, perhaps not surprising in view of its’ name. The entrance to the caves Whilst Laura and I have been there on a couple of occasions, it was our first visit to the location that perhaps sticks in the memory the most, as not only was it the first time that we’d been there, it was also one of the first locations that we went to when we first started working together. After an uneventful journey to Buckinghamshire in the early Sunday morning traffic, we found ourselves stood in the weak winter sunshine, in a garden centre car park a couple of hundred yards from the entrance to the infamous Hellfire caves. Excavated by hand in the 1750’s by the workforce of Sir Francis Dashwood, who undertook the project to provide work for unemployed farm labourers following a succession of poor harvests, the caves subsequently became host to the ‘Hellfire Club’ following the destruction by fire of the clu...

For those with just a passing interest in the paranormal, they will often encounter reference to a ‘ghostbox’ (or ‘spiritbox’) and openly wonder what an earth one of these things are. Effectively, it’s a modern radio that has been modified to repeatedly scan a radio band, to infinity, without stopping at the first radio station it comes across for which it was originally manufactured to do. How does it work? The theory behind the device is that spirits (or similar) can utilise the airwaves and use it to communicate with us in the living world, the same as someone may choose to use white noise to attempt to record EVP. The device is controversial on many levels and is openly criticised by some, even experienced, paranormal researchers. Effectively, those who argue against the voice suggest that people were just listening to snippets of radio broadcasts whilst the radio band was being scanned, whilst those who believed that something genuinely paranormal was happenin...

In most of our accounts that we have published, we often only hint at what we have recorded or found during our visit to a location. This intention is deliberate as, from a paranormal perspective, the information is no more, nor no less reliable than any other paranormal account you may read and, more importantly, if we do discover something that is different to what everyone else is reporting, we don’t want to put it in the public domain in case it ‘influences’ anyone else who follows us at a location.  We wouldn’t wish to put words in anyone else’s mouth would we? One such case that springs immediately to mind was our visits to The Bull Hotel, in the sleepy village of Long Melford, of Lovejoy fame, where what we found was different to all the published accounts you can read. What we found there was completely at odds to everything else that went before us. In spite of this, we were able to validate our ‘discoveries’, thanks to a respected local historian and hi...

When writing a blog about your experiences, it is inevitable that you sometimes unintentionally give the impression that the paranormal exists around every corner. To put it bluntly, it isn’t, if it exists at all, it’s about as rare as gnat’s teeth. That’s exactly why it’s called the paranormal. If it was an everyday occurrence, then it would just be considered ‘normal’ and we probably would have never had heard of Yvette Fielding after she left Blue Peter. The following account is just an illustration of how a lot of research turns out – unfortunately working in the paranormal field isn’t about chasing shadows at 3am in the morning, it’s about pouring over dusty, out of print books and reports, looking for obscure accounts that will assist you with a case, or even flag possible new cases to research and investigate. However, even if turns out that there is nothing worth researching, the work that you have undertaken can sometimes reward you in different ways, such a...

We found that our recent visit to Orford Castle has got us thinking quite a bit, particularly in relation to Laura’s experience of being compelled to seek out an ‘object’. At the time, Laura was of the opinion that this was the first time that she’d encountered this although after some reflection, we eventually recalled that a similar thing had occurred a couple of years ago, when we attended a conference, covering psychic questing, at Avebury, back in 2008.   An invitation to treat - how could we resist? The conference was organised and hosted by Andrew Collins and sought to examine the history of psychic questing and also cover more recent projects that he was working on. For those unfamiliar with Collins, he is a respected author in his field, writing almost exclusively about alternative history, science, archaeology and the paranormal for the last 35 years or so and who is also widely credited with rediscovering psychic questing for the 20th Century. Recent...