Alone With Ghosts

So I went and had a longer chat with the guy I mentioned last time, who accidentally found himself locked in the cells under the Town Hall as night was falling.

He asked me not to mention his name, because he feels rather embarrassed at having lost track of time whilst he was working down there, and not surfacing before the building closed as he was supposed to.

‘Did you experience anything paranormal?’

‘Nothing whatsoever,’ he said. Indeed, he’d been far more concerned with avoiding spending the night down there, and finding a way out as soon as possible. ‘Yes, it was creepy,’ he reported, ‘and a bit dangerous in the dark, and there were loads of weird noises, but I didn’t notice very much because the only thing I cared about was getting home.’

Having discovered that the basement area consists of two (or perhaps three) levels of cells, the deeper ones more decrepit than those above, and the deepest of all (according to his memory) merely a narrow pit beneath a hatch, with a step ladder that descended into a forbidding, utter blackness – finally he discovered a fire exit and made his escape.

Nothing paranormal here, then. But I think this experience is nevertheless interesting when compared with one from the opposite end of the spectrum.

Since the last time I wrote I’ve had the pleasure of chatting by email with Nathan Harrison, a member of Sussex Paranormal Investigators (SPI), the team that spent a night in the cells last year. Nathan is the group’s ‘intuitive’ member. (‘I hate the term “psychic”,’ he says.)

‘Absolutely, the place is active,’ he told me. ‘The old police Chief Constable Henry Solomon is still very much a presence there. I was actually prodded by him in the basement and had a bruise to show for it.’

You can check out the bruise for yourself, because the local newspaper was on hand when the team emerged from their vigil. Nathan is featured in a video talking about his ordeal (available from The Argus website) and looking not a little the worse for wear, I hope he won’t mind me saying.

Ghost Hunters at Brighton Town Hall. A video from The Argus. Click to view on The Argus website.

I asked whether being an intuitive opened him up to this sort of thing. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘it does leave me open to all kinds of experiences, and not just attacks.’ Indeed, the SPI’s vigil in the cells was definitely Nathan’s night! Reading his case report, the majority of the activity in the cells was psychical rather than physical, which placed Nathan in the front line. Most remarkable of all, Nathan was able to discern correctly the name of the person who supposedly haunts the basement, without – it seems – any prior knowledge of the history of the site.

So a haunting, we might conclude, is very much a game of two halves. On the one hand there is the location and on the other hand there’s what we bring to it. If you unexpectedly get locked into a place, you’ll probably notice nothing paranormal in your frantic attempts to get home for the night. But if you go into a place looking for ghosts, with your mind open on an intuitive level to experiences that aren’t necessarily physical, then you may well experience something different altogether.

Me, I’m hoping I might fall somewhere between the two. I’m not expecting to be punched by a ghost, but I’m not expecting a complete absence of anything ghostly either.

‘There’s no reason to be afraid,’ Nathan advised me. ‘But I can tell you that Henry is quite offended when people don’t recognise him – so I advise just every now and then calling his name. You might feel daft doing this, but what have you got to lose?’

Exactly. And I’m grateful to Nathan for this advice. Because if it seems to me, whilst I’m down there, that this might save me from a bruising, then I’ll surely be putting it into practice.

This entry was posted on August 11, 2010 at 9:31 am and is filed under a slightly nervous state with tags Henry Solomon, Nathan Harrison, Sussex Paranormal Investigators, The Argus. 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.