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At the time of writing, I have just completed the second live show, which took place in Halifax. The second series is on air and a third series is underway. The show is going from strength to strength and I’m loving every moment of it!
Wherever we’ve been, we’ve had fun, had fascinating experiences and, I hope, helped people to understand the world of spirit. Our ‘open-minded sceptic’ has certainly had a lot of food for thought.
‘It’s hard to be sceptical, because Derek can often prove you wrong. And in a way it’s easy to dismiss things and it’s often more difficult to believe, because then you have to work out why something’s happening and what it means.’
Angus
But where next? My mediumship has already taken me to America, Canada and New Zealand, and I would love to take this show there too – and even further afield. It has already been sold to Canada, the United States and Iceland.
‘Ghost Towns is a roller-coaster ride of a show and the fun’s only just begun … Our aim is to take Derek to the world – and beyond! – and to keep the Ghost Truck rolling.’
Paul
As for the future, we’ll see. But now, let’s go back to the very first series that went out on air…
‘I’d heard that Faversham had a lot of stories, a lot of spiritual activity. I was expecting something. I wasn’t quite expecting this much.’
Angus
Chapter One Faversham (#ulink_32d19965-1ab8-5bcb-bc82-527e12db9d46)
As I arrived at Faversham, I wondered what spirits still haunted these old streets. The ancient Kentish town lies between the Downs and the sea. One of the famous Cinque Ports, it has a picturesque market square, a traditional brewery and many fine historic houses. But what else would we find there?
The Ghost Truck arrived at about nine in the morning and it wasn’t long before it was packed with residents telling stories of strange phenomena and ghostly sightings. By midday we had hundreds of reports. There were many haunted places to choose from for our investigation, but when the Ghost Towns team heard the legend of a local pub, the Shipwright’s Arms, they knew we had to start there.
The Shipwright’s Arms (#ulink_48d23274-60ba-5ba2-9e45-a40ec44f2ee5)
‘I felt really privileged to be part of that, with that activity going on.’
Danniella
Neil Cole, who lives at the Shipwright’s Arms, and Honda Rye and Trisha Philpot, who work there, told the Ghost Towns team that there had been many strange events in the old pub. A customer had disappeared right in front of the barmaid’s eyes, a gas lamp had flown across the room, mysterious phone calls had been made from the pub when no one was there – it just went on and on. The level of activity had been constant over a long period of time and had been witnessed by many people.
Even as we were in the Ghost Car travelling to the pub I found I was picking up energy. It often happens that as I approach a property I am able to start sensing the energies present. If there is negative energy there, I feel a kind of anxiety or depression and know I have to prepare myself. In this case, I could feel a pull of psychic energy and I knew we were going to encounter spiritual activity.
Once we had arrived at the pub and been made welcome, we decided the easiest way to find out what was happening would be to hold a séance.
Séances
The word séance is French for a ‘sitting’. A séance is when a group of people gather together to make contact with a spirit or spirits. It is not absolutely necessary for an experienced medium to be present, but I always consider it to be advisable. The people taking part in the séance arrange themselves in a circle, often around a table, place both feet on the floor and either hold hands or, if a table is being used, place their hands palms down upon it with the little finger of each hand touching the little finger of their neighbour on either side to form a chain of energy.
It is often a good idea to place a lighted candle in the centre of the table, as the flickering of the flame can indicate a spirit’s movement through the atmosphere.
Everyone then closes their eyes and empties their mind of all thoughts, whilst the medium recites a prayer of invocation and protection for both themselves and the people taking part in the séance. Protection is highly important, as it is impossible to predict what sort of spirit or spirits will come to the group. Before I start any kind of psychic work I always perform an ‘opening up’ meditation to ask for protection from any negative energies. I call this my‘spiritual waterfall’ and I visualize white light cascading down on me and protecting me from any negative energies.
During a séance, once contact with the spirit world has been made it is no longer absolutely necessary to maintain physical contact with the neighbouring person and people may rest their hands on their lap or on the tabletop if they wish, palms upwards to keep the energy field of the physical body open.
Although the medium leads the communication with the spirit or spirits, anyone can talk to them or ask questions of them. Participants are also encouraged to say how they are feeling at any time and to just go with the experience.
A séance should end with the medium ‘closing the circle down’ by thanking the spirits for their presence and offering a prayer of thanks and protection to help them to return to the spirit realms.
Séances can be a very useful way of getting in touch with the spirits who are present in a certain place and finding out more about them. At the Shipwright’s Arms, this certainly proved to be the case.
We sat around a table in the oldest part of the pub, lit a candle and all held hands. Once we had opened the circle, it wasn’t long before I made contact with a spirit presence. I just wanted to scream out, ‘Splice the main brace!’ I took a deep breath and asked my spirit guide Sam to help him to step back. He was an angry spirit.
At that point I became aware of a strong smell of tobacco. ‘He’s got boxes and boxes and boxes of tobacco,’ I said. ‘He’s piling it up. That’s what he did.’
Who was he? I knew he was a strong man, but a weary man. He was a man of the sea. The reason he kept coming back to the pub was that he resented the way he’d lost his life. Sam told me that he’d barely made it this far. His ship had gone down, but he had not perished with it. He had got out of the water, but after that he had been walking blindly. He had had no idea where he was going.
The smell of tobacco was overwhelming. I had to ask Sam to back it off. I couldn’t believe that no one else could smell it.
Then I caught a whiff of another smell.
‘Ugh!’ I wrinkled my nose.
‘That’s amazing,’ said Angus, who was sitting on my right. ‘That’s horrible!’
‘Can you smell it now?’ I asked.
‘I can smell it,’ he said.
It was the smell of tar. It began wafting around the room and soon everyone started to smell it.
‘When I first smelled the smells I just thought, “Oh, it’s probably all in the mind,” but it was really, really strong. I could really smell the tar. It was just like roads being laid.’
Trisha
‘That happens all the time,’ Neil said, ‘and it’s always around this area.’
Then I got a name: Frederick Symes. ‘That’s his name,’ I stated.
‘My favourite part of this investigation was actually putting a name to the sailor.’
Neil
Hardly had I said the words than Angus looked puzzled and asked,‘What’s started swinging?’
Everyone looked up, startled. A lamp that was hanging above the bookshelf behind us was rocking back and forth. Its moving shadow was what had caught Angus’s attention.
‘That’s got to be phenomena,‘I explained.’ No one’s touched it. ‘I felt really pleased that we were getting such a good response.‘Come on,’I said encouragingly,‘give it a really good swing!’
Suddenly Danniella exclaimed,‘That’s moving, that one, that’s moving as well!‘She and Angus both pointed at once. A miner’s lamp which was hanging near the other lamp was also swinging gently. The spirit man was responding to us.
‘When we saw the lamps moving, we all stopped in our tracks.’
Angus
There was no window, no draught, no breeze, no physical reason why the lamps should be moving, and the wonderful thing about it was the way that the momentum kept up. There was no one near the lamps anyway, but if they had been physically pushed, sooner or later they would have slowed down and come to a stop, but the pace remained the same for six or seven minutes.
While we were still gazing at the swinging lamps, there was a sudden thud near the bookcase. Angus jumped and turned towards the noise. ‘Did you hear that?’ he said. ‘Like a thud on the floor.’ Everyone had heard it.
Danniella was still looking at the miner’s lamp, screwing her eyes up. ‘That really is moving, isn’t it? It’s not just me, is it?’
We could all see the base of the miner’s lamp moving slowly from side to side.
Then Trisha noticed something else. ‘That book, that’s just moved out as well.’
‘It has!’ I cried. ‘It has! You are right!’
A book on the top shelf had moved forward, just as if a hand had pulled it towards the edge of the shelf.
‘That was totally unexpected. You don’t expect books to move out of line when they’ve all been in a perfect line… Yeah, that was strange, very strange.’
Trisha
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you for doing that.’ The old sailor was really showing us that he was still around!
All this time the lamps were still moving. The first lamp was now moving randomly round and back again rather than swinging from side to side.
‘I just had to smile. I knew that the old captain, as I call him, was going to show that he was still around.’
Honda
Danniella was curious. ‘Neil, how does that make you feel? You live here.’
Neil wasn’t bothered by it. ‘It’s fine,’ he said. He smiled and shrugged. ‘He’s never done anything to me.’
I knew he never would.
Having succeeded in communicating with the spirit, we decided to finish the séance. I thanked everyone for their participation and closed the circle down.
When we looked up again, the lamps had stopped moving.
I was thrilled. In all my years I had never been in an investigation where I had got three responses like that in a matter of minutes. And, as Danniella said, the fact that the phenomena stopped once the séance was over was also interesting, as it showed that the energy had just backed right away.
Neil was amazed at what had happened in his pub. ‘It was totally unexpected, because I’ve lived here for so long now and nothing’s ever happened like that, ever, and it was amazing. I couldn’t believe it.’
I found out afterwards that according to local legend, one Christmas Eve the captain of an old Dutch barge had been taken ill and had come banging on the door of the Shipwright’s Arms. The bar manager at the time had thought it was a punter trying to get back into the pub and hadn’t opened the door. When he did open it the following morning, he found the captain’s body lying there. He had frozen to death during the night.
‘We can tell them the real story now,’ Trisha said, laughing.
The parapsychologist’s view
Dr Simon Sherwood from the University of Northampton has been examining our results from a scientific perspective.
‘There was no question that the lantern was definitely moving from side to side. One possible explanation is that the wooden beam that the lantern was suspended on was contracting due to the temperature cooling down and this may have caused it to move from side to side. So that’s something that we would need to rule out. I actually measured the temperature along the beam that it was suspended on and found that there was indeed a temperature difference along it.’
‘As for the book, I spoke to the landlord earlier and he said that very often when he goes to bed at night and locks the place up everything’s in order and he comes down in the morning and finds that some of the books have been taken off the shelves and arranged in particular formations on the table. So it’s interesting that that happened on the same shelf. I don’t have a definite explanation.’
The local historian’s view
‘When we are doing our initial research into a town we will always come across the name of a noted local historian, and usually they are glad to help. We try to get the main local authority if we can, or if not, someone they have recommended. They come from a variety of backgrounds – they can be people who run museums, retired academics, and so on – but their local knowledge is always invaluable to us.’
Natalie
In the case of Faversham, the local historian was a gentleman called Dr Arthur Percival. He told us:
‘The building was opened by a shipwright who had a yard there building sailing barges and, partly for his workforce and partly for people living in the area, he decided to open a beer house. Undoubtedly he did a very good trade with seafarers of various kinds and therefore it’s possible that somebody, some seafarer, turned up and was turned away. You know, it’s a feasible thing, certainly.’
The Crouch Family Home (#ulink_7f6032b6-16a6-5e65-8bac-3ab4f9b1e1d6)
‘My name’s Jo and I live in Faversham. And I believe our house is haunted.’
Jo Crouch
Mother and daughter Janet and Jo Crouch are part of a local Spiritualist circle, so are familiar with spirits – they even have several at home! They told us their house was haunted by a little girl and three boys. ‘Tommy’s a bit mischievous,’ Janet explained, ‘and he runs up and down stairs and shakes stepladders.’
‘And their father’s there as well,’ Jo went on, ‘and there’s a lady in the bathroom. She’s rather strict sometimes.’ This definitely seemed a place worth investigating!
We met Janet and Jo in their dolls’ house shop and as they led Danniella and me through to their home, I was hit by the atmosphere. A whole congregation of energies was coming in! We went up the stairs to the first floor and as we paused outside the bathroom I was aware that a lot of psychic activity had been going on there.
As the ladies themselves were so sensitive to spirit, Danniella suggested that we went straight into a circle to see what we could pick up. I thought that was an excellent idea. There were so many spiritual energies there that someone was bound to communicate in one way or another.
Spirit communication
The spirit world is on a much faster vibration than ours – that’s why most people can’t pick spirits up. A medium has learned how to slow these vibrations down so that they can see and hear spirits more clearly. Spirits, too, have to learn how to slow down their vibrations in order to communicate. Those who have recently passed may not have learned how to do it yet and in these cases Sam passes their messages to me.
Spirits who are not able to communicate directly for one reason or another may be able to show their presence by a particular smell, perhaps a favourite perfume or the smell of something they were associated with – such as the tobacco and tar of Frederick Symes at the Shipwright’s Arms – or by sending a ‘psychic breeze’ swirling past.
Some spirits can only pass on odd phrases. These can sound like snatches of conversation and you have to try to piece them together. Others can’t express themselves in words at all, so they pass on emotions and sensations instead. Sometimes these can be highly unpleasant, especially if the spirit is showing how they died, but they all have a purpose, and that is to communicate with the living.
At the Crouchs’home, the first spirit that came through made himself known initially by a tight feeling across my chest. It was really painful. Then I saw him working with a hammer and metal. He was a proud and hardworking man, a strong man with thick-set arms.
‘I had a strong vision of barrels, so we’re pretty sure he must have worked in the brewery at some point.’
Janet
He had passed to spirit after a sudden heart attack at work. The pain I had felt was his way of showing me what had happened. I knew he was at the Crouchs’ home regularly but he was a spirit in visitation, not a grounded spirit.
Spirits in visitation
Some spirits aren’t in this world all the time but just pop in now and again for a visit. They often come to see loved ones or to visit places that were important to them in life.
Grounded spirits
Grounded or ‘earthbound’ spirits are those who stay on Earth after they have left their physical bodies rather than move on to the spirit realms.
There are many reasons why this can happen. Sometimes spirits don’t realize they have passed. They may have died very suddenly, perhaps in an accident, and not understand what has happened to them. They may be very young and confused and so they don’t go into the light. They remain here, often in a very bewildered state. They can’t understand why people aren’t taking any notice of them, so they make noises or move objects and try to draw attention to themselves.
