Derek Acorah’s Ghost Towns. Derek Acorah

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