Alone With Ghosts

Well, I’ve got permission to do this, and I’ve confirmed the dates and times with the security staff at the Town Hall, so it looks like it’s going to happen.

In the daylight, I feel quite blasé about it all. Lying in bed at night, however, I’ve noticed that I’m already starting to get just a little bit worried by it all. No doubt, when I go down into that basement on Halloween, it’ll be one of the creepiest experiences of my life. Possibly even worse than the week I spent in an old convent, when a phantom nun climbed into bed with me one night… but that’s another story.

I don’t know whether it’s a good idea to go and visit the place – because I have to be honest at this point and declare that I’ve never been. I’ve just heard stories and read about its reputation. I haven’t decided whether it’s better to just show up on October 31st and deal with it, or do a recce and have some kind of strategy for the night.

From photographs, it’s a bigger space than what I imagined initially. The museum consists of the renovated parts, yet from the looks of things there are a whole lot of unrenovated areas.

Mannikin in one of the cells. Oh dear... © Tony Mould: My Brighton and Hove website.

In a space that big, inevitably all kinds of things will be going on at night: walls and floors contracting; insects or spiders scuttling – who knows what else? When you’re sitting alone in the dark, every little sound will seem like something intentional. The bigger the space, the less of a handle I’ll have on what’s making noises. The best tactic might be to head off with a torch in the direction of any sounds – if I can find the courage. Otherwise my imagination will start up and that will make the fear even worse.

Some of the exhibits include dummies. Yep, that’s right, life-sized mannikins dressed up in uniforms, or lying on beds in the old cells. I’m really not looking forward to those.

Sussex Paranormal Investigators spent a night down there in November last year, and their report is available online. Apart from a banging door with no obvious cause, there were no dramatic physical phenomena. However, their team psychic had a very eventful night: the spirit of a former Police Chief announced itself to him by name, ‘Henry Solomon’. The name proved to be correct.

I’m always intrigued by the role of psychics on paranormal investigations. Either they’re going to produce material that can be verified by historical records, or what they say will be unverifiable. If it’s verifiable, then you can never quite rule out prior access to historical information, even though that might be subconscious, or maybe even achieved by telepathy or other psychic means rather than communication with objective ‘spirits’.

The value of psychics is in the paranormal phenomena (if it is paranormal) that they produce. In other words, psychics don’t shed light on stuff; they are that stuff, they make things happen!

I really hope I don’t discover on Halloween that I’m psychic…

This entry was posted on July 2, 2010 at 5:17 pm and is filed under a slightly nervous state with tags fear, psychic, Sussex Paranormal Investigators. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.