“I don’t like being here in the dark,” says one of the house’s staff members, who has ironically been given the job of keeping us company until one o’ clock in the morning. Even with the lights on, Oliver Cromwell’s former residence is less than homely, with mannikins stationed around every corner and taxidermy animals hanging in the pantry. Soon, we won’t even have the luxury of being able to read the display on the decapitation of Charles I. The five-hour vigil will take place by torchlight.
There are twenty-two guests here tonight, as well as a sizeable investigation team. “It’s worth coming just for the crisps,” one man remarks, when he sees the impressive array of snacks spread out on the table at the entrance. Others are motivated by less corporeal concerns. The man in front of us has performed paranormal investigations at the house nine times already, while the women behind us talk about their ghost hunting kits and reminisce about a past experience in the graveyard of Borley Rectory.
Among so many who claim to have been touched by the supernatural, I feel like an outsider. Despite wandering around graveyards, descending into the cellars of The Mermaid Inn and staying the night in a supposedly haunted bedroom at Kentwell Hall, I’ve never had a ghostly experience in my adult life. Perhaps that’s due to my scepticism, although, like Danny Robins, I identify as a sceptic who wants to believe. Tonight, I am determined to put myself in the middle of any spooky phenomena.
We split into smaller teams, and I’m delighted to begin in the bedroom: a cold, musty-smelling chamber with bare plaster walls and a life-sized model of Cromwell languishing in bed. More exciting still is the talking board (also known as a Ouija board) set out near the middle of the room.
We don’t dive straight in with the chit-chat, though; the investigators introduce us to a variety of other methods of communication, including ‘cat balls,’ which flash like police sirens when moved, bells and an ovilus. The theory behind the latter is that it picks up environmental signals from the room, including the electromagnetic field, and outputs the information as words, hence allowing you to communicate with spirits. I ask if we’ll be told about the history of the room, but am given a firm ‘no’—the team doesn’t want to influence us. So, ovilus switched on, balls and bells set up around the dismal space, we set about introducing ourselves to the mysterious spirit, emphasising that we are here out of love, respect and curiosity, and beseeching it to communicate with us.
No phenomena immediately forthcoming, we attempt glass divination on a tabletop. I place my finger on the upturned tumbler along with three other guests. After we’ve introduced ourselves again and invited the spirit to use our energies, I ask if there is a presence in the room with us. The glass slides to the top left. Everyone, including me, gasps in astonishment. There we have it: the ideomotor effect on display! Or possibly something else entirely.
“Ask another question,” one of the investigators tells me. “It likes your voice.”
I came prepared to talk to ghosts. I also came prepared to witness enthusiasts manipulate the equipment to ‘prove’ there is a spirit with us. What I didn’t prepare for was silence. And yet here I am, lower back aching, finger turning into a refrigerated cocktail sausage, trying to winkle another response out of the energies in this room. Whatever moved the glass the first time, however, is reluctant to perform the deliberate manoeuvre again.
Then, an investigator (the same one, I think, who didn’t want to influence us earlier) suggests that he senses the spirit of a child in the room. A narrative soon develops. An empathic lady who works in a nursery feels cold spreading from her feet to her legs. My friend, sitting on the floor, feels a chilly patch on her thigh as well, as if a child has casually perched there. An idea springs up that the glass does not move for us because the infant in the room is afraid of something—perhaps getting into trouble, perhaps the sheer number of living people in the bedroom, perhaps another presence in the house. All the while, my legs remain stubbornly child-free. We try the talking board, but with no success. The spirit, if there ever was one here, has made itself scarce.
After a break, I go downstairs to the kitchen, where I find Mr Nine Times A Ghost Hunter.
“This room is one of the most active,” he tells me, as he places cat balls in strategic locations. “I’ve had some experiences in here that have scared the s*** out of me.”
It would appear that he’s right—the kitchen is indeed active. The cat ball on the table lights up twice, seeming to confirm that a spirit has joined us. The living also move into the room, and, soon, almost the whole group has gathered here (it is the warmest place in the house, after all). One man is adamant that the spirit is the same one he encountered earlier, from whom he garnered a surprising amount of information: he was a soldier who fought in the War of the Roses, knew the Duke of Gloucester and died of kidney failure. However, the ovilus offers different clues, throwing out the words, ‘farmer,’ ‘chains,’ ‘treason’ and ‘around the world’ among several others, and the ‘Spirit Talker’ app on my friend’s phone is bent on spewing a bemusing mixture of threats and names such as Vernon.
When we move one of the balls into an alcove, a more coherent dialogue gets going. A few times, the ovilus generates words that coincide with the flashing of the ball, with the spirit appearing to tell us that its body is buried very close by, possibly in the hearth or in the land under our feet. Once placed in the fireplace, the ball lights up again in response to a couple of our questions.
Despite the pleasing back-and-forth responses at times, I remain sceptical, especially of the Spirit Talker app and ovilus, which to my eyes are nothing more than random word generators. Some of the words are tacitly discounted by the group, while others are seized upon and made to connect with others. Overall, there’s a lack of consistency. The soldier narrative is eventually dropped in favour of one about a farmer who did not pay his taxes and was sent to prison.
The final activity of the night is the ominous-sounding ‘human pendulum.’ It entails standing in the middle of two others and acting as a receiver for the spirit, which moves your body to either a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ position (forwards and backwards, or vice versa). Having seen a couple of other people topple back and forth, I have high hopes. Maybe I’ll feel a small hand push my lower back. Maybe I’ll feel something cold clamber inside my skin.
I choose the people to stand before and behind me, and close my eyes. The first thing I notice is that the floor is uneven, making the tilt forwards more comfortable than the tilt backwards, possibly accounting for the high number of ‘yes’ answers we receive as a group (the forward position is always chosen as the affirmative). I’m also very much aware of the need to provide an answer to a question. You can’t stand still—the social pressure to move is too great. Therefore, even if your answers are inconsistent and nonsensical, you give them nevertheless. Deprived of your sense of sight, surrounded by rapt gazes, you come to embody the ideomotor effect.
Through the power of group storytelling, any ‘mistakes’ are smoothed out. My fall backwards gives the answer that there is no nanny in the house; another guest falls forward and confirms that the children in the house are afraid of the nanny, and that is why they weren’t communicative in the bedroom earlier tonight. People are much happier with this version of the tale than mine, which does not fit the story that has been weaving itself into existence over the evening.
***
Back home, I research the phenomena that have been reported at the Cromwell house. An article of 2022 tells of a young girl seen talking to guests (our child?), orbs in the bedroom and a figure in the kitchen window; an event page by another paranormal investigation team refers to sleep-walking and possible time-slippage in the bedroom. More intriguing, perhaps, is the fact that Cromwell was known as the ‘Farmer of the Tithes’—could this possibly account for the ‘farmer’ reference in the kitchen?
I doubt it. Many words were thrown out by the ovilus, and it is natural that only the more significant ones stick in my mind. Additionally, there are endless ways to analyse such random pieces of information. At one point, we were all discussing why ‘port’ popped up on the Spirit Talker app straight after ‘to the right’ came up on an ovilus. One explanation was that the port is on the right-hand side of a boat, depending on which direction you’re facing. Another interpretation was that you pass the port to the right of the host at social occasions. There was a bottle of sherry on the kitchen table, which was also on the right side of some visitors. The interpretation game could go on until you hit upon a meaning that connects with other pieces of the puzzle and seems to form a complete picture. But the picture may be completely wrong.
However, many people left last night feeling that they’d had a genuinely supernatural experience. It may be that I am trying to make everything fit my sceptical narrative. The divination glass did move once, did it not? If the ideomotor effect was in play, why didn’t the glass move all the time? You would expect it to be zooming around as our questioning grew more intense, in response to our desires to communicate—but it barely twitched. We also got more activity from the cat balls in one part of the kitchen than in others. Was that to do with the tilt of the mechanism, or, as the oldest room in the house, could the kitchen harbour the spectral presences of both farmers and soldiers?
And yet, if there is no objective way to prove that ghosts do or do not exist, we can only assess subjective experiences—and, on that basis, I remain unhaunted, but also undaunted. Somewhere out there is my spectre-mate, the spirit which will clearly and unequivocally reveal itself to me. The ‘Official Most Haunted’ team is hosting a couple of events at Cromwell’s house in February and May of this year, and while I make no plans to return to the residence imminently, I’ll be following the investigation with interest on social media. Maybe they will have more luck in encountering the Lord Protector. Then again, if there is a presence in the house, it is perhaps unlikely to be Cromwell, given his last words were said to be, ‘My design is to make what haste I can to be gone.’
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