Wiltshire's Ghostbusters

Researchers from Swindon's Paranormal Site Investigators set up their equipment and spent six nocturnal hours in an empty Victorian building — empty, that is, if you don't count the ghosts.

Like so many large, older properties, this building is being converted into flats, which is the reason for not revealing its location.

Potential buyers of a nervous disposition might be less keen to set up home in a place with the reputation of a haunted house — even though its reported ghosts seem benign and, actually, positively helpful.

British law does not recognise the existence of ghosts, but PSI's ethical policy is strict on providing anonymity where requested, making this an unusual report to be published on the Internet.

The team of eight researchers (plus one guest, a PhD candidate in parapsychology) did not include any self-professed mediums, but the first thing they did was conduct a brief but carefully controlled séance.

In the quarter of an hour allotted to the experiment, people reported feeling chilled, hearing distant shuffling noises, smelling scented cosmetics (researchers are forbidden from wearing perfumes on investigations), and seeing both flashes of white light and dark moving shadows, and one team member watched the figure of a person, 5' 6" tall, slip into a corridor and away.

Overall, the team was almost perfectly balanced, with an average 'belief in the paranormal' rating of 48% (based on Thalbourne's Paranormal Belief Questionnaire), and the person who experienced most phenomena in the séance rated their belief as being slightly less than the team's average, so this was clearly not the case of a gullible believer falling prey to suggestibility.

Intriguing as these early results were, they secured no conclusive evidence of paranormal activity. So, the team split into two groups to explore the rest of the site.

The premises has wide a range of ghost stories to its credit, including the sound of children both laughing and crying throughout the building, the feeling of being watched, an acute smell of burning, and sightings of a lady in grey and a young woman in a brown cloak.

On one occasion, four people gazed out of a window at a sphere of white light, the size of a tennis ball, hovering 5ft off the ground — it then moved quickly towards them, and disappeared.

Perhaps the most remarkable occurrence was experienced by a woman about to enter a room who found her way barred by a man dressed as a soldier and armed with a gun.

Denied access by that entrance, she nipped around to enter by another door. She found that not only had the guard vanished (he was neither seen before or after) but a large fixture had just fallen — exactly at the spot where she would have been standing, had she not been prevented.

Curiously, although participating team members are rigorously denied knowledge of the site under investigation, when one of them entered that room to conduct baseline readings (monitoring environmental conditions, etc) they felt something falling on their head. And the same thing happened later to another member of the team in the same room.

The team took 110 photographs, and ten hours of video. Of the 24 photos that showed some sort of anomaly none withstood subsequent analysis. The illustration shown above appears to show a spooky wisp of luminous ectoplasm, but actually shows light being dragged from the infra-red light source of a tripod mounted camcorder. Ah well.

When assessing evidence for paranormal activity, PSI prefers to err on the side of caution, and nothing from this investigation can be claimed as convincing evidence. However, an absence of evidence is not evidence for the absence of paranormal phenomena, so the search continues.