This episode has some great anecdotes - I think Stuart is particularly convincing because he otherwise seems so straight and business-minded. Diane gives the impression (viewing the video) that she's making it up as she goes along. But Eddie Burks is so plausible. You don't want to think that a gentle-looking old chap would be taking you for a ride. I find it very hard to believe there are actual 'spirits' just hanging around for centuries in hotels, waiting on the off-chance for some medium to come by. I can just about go for the 'recording' idea. But Eddie evidently believes in both varieties. What are the options? It's all true / He's picking up something and he believes it to be a spirit but it's not / He's imagining the whole thing but he genuinely believes in it / He's making the whole thing up and he doesn't believe in it at all. I'm kind of tending towards the mid-point, because I believe that at least some of the weirdness in the hotel is happening (Stuart's stories). I also like the (often annoying) Archie Roy's remark about all science having to start with a stamp-collecting stage. That sounds very much like Charles Fort's attitude.
Diane, Spiritualist: She just stands there. She’s solid. She’s
just the same as me or you or anybody else. And she just stands there, you open
your eyes and she’s there. It’s not in the mind. You do see her. And if she
touches you, you would feel her. She is solid.
Eddie Burks: So I’m asking her if she would just backtrack
in her memory, to the events around her death. [Breathing heavily and looking
discomforted] She died in great agony.
Narrator: This is the village of Ingatestone, in Essex in
south east England. It’s a village that lies on the old coaching route from
London to Colchester. It’s a place that has been somehow bypassed by all the
industrial developments around it. Much
of it looks very much as it did three or maybe four hundred years ago. And in
our researches around the country, we’ve found that places that have a long and
involved history like this do seem to have a multi-layered history of psychic
events, almost as if the events that the building has lived through are in some
way imprinted on its fabric. This building, for example, was built in
Elizabethan times. It was an old coaching in for almost three hundred years.
Then in Victorian times it became a bakery. Now it’s a restaurant and a bakery,
and many of the people who work here have no doubt they’ve seen and experienced
things they can’t possibly explain.
Lucie: As I’m walking out to the table, I feel like someone’s
looking at me, and it feels quite cold, so I’ve looked up, and there’s a lady
standing there, and she’s looking at me. She was quite short I think, but it
was quite quick, erm, and it was fairly dark as well, but her face was really
really white. Very very pale. And she didn’t have what you could say was hair,
she didn’t have like a bun, you couldn’t really see it. Erm and she had a
taffeta-y type black dress on. And, er, as I walked to get the book, she turned
and walked through, through the wall.
Mandy, Manageress: I went to serve this person, and I saw
this lady walk past in a black dress. But I knew it was just me and these
people in the restaurant, we weren’t busy. And no-one else appeared to have
seen her, but it was like there was another person, it wasn’t– you know people
say oh ghostly figures and that, but it
was nothing like that, it was like a real person.
Stuart, Proprietor: I was just working in the office one
afternoon and not expecting it at all. Um, I was sitting there, concentrating
on what I had to do for the following week, getting all my records ready. And
basically I could feel all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Erm, I
could feel it right on the back of my neck. And it was very quiet, I can hear
the main road from my office, [indistinct] and we can hear the cars going past,
and I couldn’t hear a single car. It was like I could hear a pin drop. I felt
it then, I just shook it off, and I got up and went to the toilet. It was a
natural thing to do, as you would, and I went through, and I sighted the woman
behind the ladies toilet door. And she sort of looked at me and sort of drifted
behind the door, and, and, first of all I stood in shock wondering what that
could be, because I thought I was the only one in the building. And, er, I
followed it through the back of the door, and there was nothing there, there
was absolutely no-one there at all.
Narrator: The Victorian lady most often appears upstairs.
Downstairs in the oldest part of the house there has been a continuous series
of strange events, mainly poltergeist activity, things moving around, loud
footsteps across a wooden floor that everybody knows is now carpeted. The sort
of thing that makes you doubt your own judgement, until you realise that
several other people have experienced exactly the same sort of thing.
Mandy: I was [indistinct] downstairs and we was all talking,
and we was standing by this fridge, and it’s a tall fridge. And the fridge
actually moved about three inches. And we all stood there and watched this
fridge moving, we just couldn’t believe it. And it took two chefs to move the
fridge back.
Lorraine: To lock up we go through everything by a system,
whereby I would turn off all the lights in here and then I have to walk through
the lounge (or what’s now known as the Macron’s Room, which was our staff
lounge at the time). Now the light switch is only on one side of the wall, now
as there are doors on both sides of the room, I had to walk through, through
the dark(!), to the other side of the room to turn the light on. As I
approached the door on the other side of the room, in the pitch black, I felt a
hand round my elbow. I actually felt the fingers like this around my elbow. I
presumed it was someone in the room trying to play some sort of joke on me. But
I was right by the door and the light switch at the time so I turned the light
on, and there was no one in the room with me.
Narrator: At the back of the house is the bakery, and
several people have seen here, in great detail in terms of dress and facial
expression and so on, the figure of a baker that actually died here of a heart
attack several years ago.
Stuart: I was teaching one of my trainees how to make a
salad, and this is about two o’clock in the morning. We’d just done a lot of building work in the
front of the building, which is now a restaurant, and I had this chap standing
near me, and obviously I wasn’t surprised to see him come through for some milk
or something in the evening, because there was no refridgeration in that part
of the bakery. And he ignored me as I talked to him, and I carried on
concentrating, doing my salads, and I turned round and he was very clear, it
was very clear as though it was a human being talking to me about five feet
away. And at this point I didn’t realise I’d sighted something that was the
paranormal. He had a white t-shirt on, he was very dusty with flour. Sort of
dark hair, curly, brown . And he had a brown belt on that was hanging down, as
most of the bakers seem to wear, with white trousers and black shoes that look
like they’ve been worn for the last forty years(!) with flour all over them. Um
and he ignored me, so as I was concentrating on this commis chef, he had turned
round as we’d talked to him the second time. And I just said, ‘have you got
your milk for the evening?’ for your tea, or something, and I carried on
getting this lad to concentrate on what he was doing. And he ignored me again,
as I turned round myself for the third time, and he had just disappeared so I
just assumed he was being arrogant or ignorant or whatever, he just didn’t want
to know what I was saying or just came to have a look and went. I presumed
nothing. So I went to see the night baker, who had only just come in in the
evening in the bakery, and said, you know, you don’t have to ignore me, I’m
here to help you, it’s best for us to get on, we’ll work as a team , it’s a
business we’re running. And he said, well I don’t know what you’re talking
about. And I said, well you’ve just been round there, I spoken to you three
times and you’ve ignored me. And he says, that door to the bakery there, he
said, I’ve been here thirteen and a half years and I’ve never been through that
door. And with that, a startling sort of effect and feeling on me, which was
quite horrible! And he said ‘you’ve probably seen a ghost’, which he’d not
sighted himself, but he’d heard many stories about over the years he’d been
there.
Lorraine: I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye a man
standing in the ladies toilets. Now he was in front of a full length mirror,
and he was wearing a white jacket. It looked like white trousers. And I only
saw the back of him. A dark haired chap. And at the time I thought it was just
a chef, sort of getting ready for work and checking the mirror. So I didn’t
really study him too closely! It wasn’t what I was expecting. So I looked away
and I went to busy myself and I suddenly thought, well why is this chef in the
ladies toilets? When they’ve got their own staff room and the mens, why was he
in there? So I looked back, and all I saw was my own reflection when I looked
back.
Narrator: Events like this have been going on for several
years now. Although nobody talked about them very much it became an
acknowledged part of the atmosphere of the place. And then one day Mandy the
manageress went to see a friend who had some experience as a psychic medium,
and was told to her surprise about some of the spirits or entities who the
medium claimed still inhabited the old coaching inn.
Mandy: So I’d been to see this lady. It was for fun, fortune
telling and things like that, so we went there. And she actually told me that
where I worked, it was haunted, and there was this young girl here. And she
described the building, and she actually told me that she watched me leave, and
I asked her why it was actually such a scary experience. And she said it’s
because she doesn’t want you to leave the building, she doesn’t want to be
there on her own. But she does actually watch you leave. And she even described
how I get in my car and speed up the road. Erm, she also said there is actually
a soldier here, but he isn’t nice. Whereas this young girl is nice, she likes
to be here. This soldier, he doesn’t like it here at all, he doesn’t like to be
here at all. And she said, that is not good.
Narrator: Eventually Diane the medium decided to go back to
Ingatestone to see if she could learn more about this person whom she called
Sarah, who seemed to have been a maid or a servant at the old Inn perhaps two
or more hundred years ago.
Diane, Spiritualist: The first time I saw Sarah she was in
long clothes, it was a skirt and top I think, and it was made of dark sacking
stuff, with a shawl over her head or round her shoulders. But the second, no
the third time I saw Sarah actually, she had a bonnet, which was her mother’s.
And Sarah said that she’s wearing this bonnet because it’s a special occasion
and she’s very happy, so she’s dressed up in her mother’s bonnet. Then we went
through the house. This was a nice room, she liked this room. There’s one room
upstairs she didn’t like, because she broke her arm, and she used to have to
nurse the sick in that room. And there’s another room where she always watches
Mandy go home safely. That’s what I call Sarah’s Room. And then she just showed
us all. But it was as it was, not how it now.
Narrator: A servant girl, a soldier, a Victorian lady and a
baker, all from quite different periods in history. The accounts of some of the
events in the old coaching in at Ingatestone were so intriguing, and they seem
to have been recalled in such detail, that we decided to bring in another
psychic medium to see if any of his perceptions matched the descriptions we’d
received. Eddie Burks has an international reputation for his work in this
field. And we took him to the house blind, so to speak, we told him nothing
about its history or what was said to have gone on there. And the extraordinary
fact is, that within a few minutes of his arrival at the house he felt as if he’d
been seized upon by somebody unseen. As he described her, a similarity to the
young maidservant Sarah was unmistakable.
Eddie Burks, Psychic Medium: I think she’s a serving girl, I’m
seeing her wearing an apron. And
[puffing slightly] a white apron and a white bonnet. Which, I’m not quite sure,
it’s not a mob cap, but it served the same purpose as a mob cap. Erm, it kept
the hair in order, part of her uniform, as it were. She’s wearing a skirt which
comes down to upper ankles, it’s not a full length skirt. Um, I think it’s a
brownish, a brown fairly coarse cloth. The apron is fastened over it. And she
has lots of hair, and I think the colour was brown, what I can see of it
anyway.
Narrator: This strange conversation, for that is what it
felt like, went on for over half an hour, and it seemed as though the servant
girl was increasingly unwilling to talk about her death, or why she felt
trapped.
Eddie Burks: She knows I want her to go back into the
reasons why she’s stuck, which means perhaps going back into her death
situation. Oh… no wonder she backed out of it. [Puffs a bit and looks
uncomfortable] It’s to do with childbirth, that went wrong. Ooh she died in
great agony. Possibly a breach birth that couldn’t be dealt with properly. But
she died and her thoughts are about the child – my child, my child, my baby.
Great grief allied with the memory of great pain, terrible pain – clumsy midwife.
Narrator: After that very disturbing experience, Eddie moved
round the house for a while and then made what he claimed was another contact
in the part of the house where there’d been so much poltergeist activity – the strange
sounds and the unexplained movements. The contact seemed to be, he said, of a
young man: a former soldier filled with anger.
Eddie Burks: I’m seeing a man in… in khaki, first world war
soldier. He was, he was either married or engaged to a girl. He was.. oof… he
was killed in France. As soon as he died, very swiftly, he came back here,
drawn by the need to contact this young woman. And what he found sort of
destroyed him. She was involved with someone else. There’s a lot of energy
there with him, and a lot of frustration, and a determination to make himself
felt.
Narrator: So it seemed that the two mediums had quite
independently, at quite different times, encountered the same spirits or
entities. That in itself is quite remarkable. But how are we supposed to
respond when we witness Eddie’s conversations? Here we have a man who is
clearly sane and reasonable, and of great integrity, claiming to have detailed
and intimate communication with people who lived and died eighty, a hundred,
even two hundred years ago. And not only talking, but sharing in crucial
moments in their lives. How does Eddie explain what he believes is going on?
Eddie Burks: Er, some people,
some ghosts are attached to places very specifically, some tend to be attached
to localities, some of them are adrift and occasionally I’ll pick up the ones
that are adrift. I, I sometimes think that if you’re psychic you do tend to
show some degree of illumination in the next levels, especially in the aetheric
level where these people are trapped. And that will draw them – so they will
know intuitively perhaps that possibly there is some help available. The world
they live in is a gloomy dark one, and therefore a small light will be an
attraction.
Narrator: But Eddie’s claims go
further. He believes that when he goes into an old building like this one which
has a long and involved multi-layered history, it’s possible for him (as it
were) to go back in time and peel off the various layers of the building’s
psychic history.
Eddie Burks: Imprints occur –
they’re occurring all the time in every building, in every place. And they are
the, erm, result very largely of the emotional content of events. And the
stronger the emotion the more deeply things are etched into this record of the
place. And I sometimes think that if I deliberately go into a place and I start
looking for the imprint aspect, which is very different from going in and
looking for the haunting aspect – but if I’m looking for the imprint I feel as
though I’m peeling the wallpaper off a very old building. And I’ll get an
imprint of something more recent followed by an imprint of something further
back, and so on.
Narrator: The fundamental
question of course, is what kind of conclusions can we draw from the research
we’ve carried out on this programme and indeed on this series? The sheer range
of events that we’ve looked into, the number of reliable witnesses we’ve
interviewed, and the quality of the historical verification – it would be very
difficult indeed to challenge the claims that paranormal events have taken
place. It’s just as clear that there is nothing that could be called conventional
scientific proof – nothing that could be weighed or measured or repeated in a
controlled environment. But that does not mean of course that they did not take
place. We think that there is clear evidence of a profound shift in the
scientific community away from an outright rejection of paranormal activity
towards an acceptance that it lies beyond the bounds of the scientific method
and may well require an entirely different scientific approach if we are to
come to any deeper understanding of what is going on.
Dr John Beloff, Psychologist: My
own philosophy is rather dualistic, I think one set of laws for the mind and
another set for matter. And that what science knows to a very advanced degree
are the laws that govern the behaviour of matter, and perhaps even the laws
that govern the behaviour of the brain. But over and above all that I believe
that the mind is a power in the universe, and that mind can achieve things that
are simply not allowed for in the accepted scientific scheme which is basically
a physicalistic picture of reality.
Bernard Carr, Professor of
Astrophysics: My own view is that psychical phenomena, even if you believe that
the probability that they are real is very small, their significance will be so
immense if demonstrated to be valid that it’s crucial that we should try to
investigate them.
Archie Roy, Professor of
Astronomy: I really wish we knew more about these cases. In fact it’s part of the
reason why one studies psychic phenomena in order to gather as many cases as
possible so that they can be compared. Every science begins with the
stamp-collecting stage where you collect all kinds of stamps, you have no preconceived
notions of where they come from or why they are printed in such colours, or
what the denominations are. But once you’ve got a large number of them, then
you can compare them, you begin to classify them, you begin to see family
resemblances, you begin to get some theory about why stamps exist. Where they
go, where they come from, why they have such denominations. You are beginning
to get beyond the stamp-collecting stage. And this happens with every science. And
I hope we are beginning to get beyond the stamp collecting stage with psychic
phenomena, but I sometimes have my doubts. But that these phenomena are real I
have no doubt whatsoever.
