Co - Founder Ian Wilce and Investigators Hella, Piers and Val arrived at the Britannia Inn at around 9:30pm. Our early arrival at the Inn allowed us to get a feel of the place and we had time to wait until they closed, but luckily enough they managed to close a bit earlier than normal so we drummed everybody together to have a little chat about the evenings plans and where the members of staff from the Inn would fit into the investigation.
Experiences
Shadows have been sighted in the bar area, and tend to move from the entrance around the left hand side of the bar towards the back hallway and toilet area. These shadows have been witnessed by all members of staff.
Pool table area - A presence has been felt around the pool table area on several occasions. The description that I received from the landlady’s son 'Scott' was as if someone was watching over the place from that corner. On one occasion he had the feeling that someone was stood next to him shouting at him from his right side, but the sound that he heard was more of a high pitched scream a little bit like a dog whistle sound. On another occasion he has been stood in the pool table area and has had somebody blow on the back of his neck. The pub is fitted with a CCTV system and is monitored from the apartment above. Scott has seen movement on the cameras after hours, and described as being like a sepia effect that you have on some cameras. the apparition was seen on all three cameras for a split second as if something was moving throughout the pub. A full bodied apparition has also been seen in the pub , and was described as tall male figure about 6 ft 1 and dressed in clothes that would have been worn before the 1900’s. The figure was seen by two different people on separate occasions and only for a second or two.
Hallway area - There has been a dog sighted in the hallway area which points towards residual activity, that was also seen on the CCTV camera, by the landlady's son. There were also reports of a cat being heard in the hallway.
Cellar area - Beer kegs are stored in this area, and there were four recent incidents that occurred here. It was reported that at the end of an evening shift one of the lager kegs had been changed. The system that is used involves the attached kegs are the nearest to the pipe and behind that they will have a full keg which is on a raised platform about 30 cm above the floor.
On this occasion the keg had been changed and the empty left behind the attached one. Scott had the early shift the next morning, and when he entered the cellar, the empty keg was lying on the floor. Nobody had entered the cellar until he came in the next morning. So how did the heavy beer keg move on its own and end up laying on the floor?
The night before we conducted our investigation one of the gas bottles had been moved from the first room to the second room , now this gas bottle weighs about 45 kilos and it will not fit through the door way on it’s side so it wasn’t rolled through it must have been carried .
The final incident was in the second cellar room there are the premix packs for the cola and lemonade and etc. The lemonade had been disconnected, which after inspecting the packs i found pretty difficult to do , so the evening sounded as if it would be interesting .
The Walkaround
We conducted a walk around with Charlie who showed us the most important places in the pub that we would be covering during the investigation, we had something interesting happen in the cellar area , Charlie had told us that the dogs had been down in the cellar and had been fixated on one point of the wall at the far end of the cellar, so we let the dogs down into the cellar again and sure enough they made their way straight over to the same spot that she had described to us, it was as though they were watching something that was moving up and down the wall.
We took this photo which seems to have a strange orb with a white line running through it.
The Base readings that we had in and around the pub were as follows
Bar area : 0.2 – 0.4 Mg EMF
Temperature: 18 C
Cellar : 0.2 – 0.4 Mg with fluctuations due to pump equipment
Temperature: 17 C
At 10:15 pm we started to set up tech headquarters which was in the apartment above the Inn. We ran our DVR and cameras from this point, and this would also be the area where the rest of the team members would hold their breaks between sessions or wait for the other teams to come back.
Due to the size of the location is was sensible to only have one team at a time in any one place, the sound did carry quite a bit which gave us the danger of contaminating evidence.
The equipment was set up in the following rooms:
In the bar area two DVR cams covering the area where the shadows had been seen, left and right .
In the hallway there was a Hi8 camera locked off to record any movement in the area between the bar and the toilets.
In the cellar we had also 2 DVR cameras monitoring each of the rooms where the barrels had reportedly moved, and also the area on the wall that had fascinated the two dogs so much. The cameras also kept the shelving unit where the premix pipe had been removed, and then we were ready to go with lights out.
Dead Time
Team 1
Ian
Charlie (Britannia Inn)
Ade (Britannia Inn)
Piers on camera
Team 2
Hella or Val depending on who was monitoring the DVR system
Scott (Britannia Inn)
Piers on camera
The first group to go downstairs was team 1, and we started in the bar area next to the pool table, where we didn’t get much in the way of results, the only thing that we had experienced was a drop in temperature in the corner where Scott had reported seeing an apparition on a previous occasion, but it could have been the fact that it's an outside wall and does lose heat rapidly.
Team 1 then moved over into the other part of the bar, where there had been reports of shadows moving through it on several occasions. We conducted some EVP sessions and yet again recorded nothing on our devices. The interesting thing was is that we started to gets hits on the K2 meter and Gauss Master, and it seemed to be every time we asked a specific question which was very strange because during the walkaround we had recorded a steady 0.2 – 0.4 mG
Now we seemed to be getting hits of up to 6.0 gauss in different areas of the room and it seemed to be moving around.
Was this the contact that we had been looking for?
We asked a series of questions trying to find out whether whatever was there was male or female. We recorded this event on camera.
We were able to determine that there may have been a male presence in the room that could have been one of the previous owners or one of the many guests that had regularly visited in it’s lengthy history.
We then decided to make our way down to the cellar where we conducted some more EVP’s, there seemed to be more going on down in the cellar than upstairs, and we were hearing a lot of strange sounds that didn’t seem to fit into the cellar.
Charlie had said that she had seen a sudden small light over near the shelving unit where a couple of nights before a pipe had been pulled off the premix. I thought that I had seen it out of the corner of my eye but was not sure if it had just been my eyes playing tricks on me.
I was sat on an empty beer keg in the cellar whilst conducting an EVP. There were two beer kegs located directly behind me and I clearly heard one of them move. The barrel that I was sat on was very sturdy and had definitely not moved. I was puzzled and could find no logical explanations as to why a full keg of beer had been able to move on its own.
We captured a strange EVP that seemed to come from upstairs. It sounded like somebody had hit the floor above us, and at the time Charlie, Adrian, Piers and I were all in the cellar and Hella, Val and Scott were all upstairs watching the DVR which means that nobody was in the bar above us at the time .
Apart from that we did not get much more activity so we decided to make our way back upstairs to have a break.
Hella´s Report
After Ian´s team came back up to our headquarters, where Val and I were monitoring the DVR-system, Val, Piers, Scott and I went down to the bar room. Val and I decided to start our investigation in the second room of the cellar.
As soon as we entered the room, we felt that the atmosphere was different to that of the cellars front room, a kind of dense and oppressive feel overwhelmed us.
Val took some measurements with the K2 and we started the EVP session. The K2 did not show any remarkable spikes, but as soon as Val moved to the middle of the room, she noticed a permanent measurement of 2.5 mG. She moved the device towards the floor and the ceiling and the reading went down to the normal base measurement . As soon as she measured in midair again, the K2 spiked again up to 2.5 mG. Val tilted the device and the reading went back down to normal. When she turned it back to the normal position, the spike came back. We thought, that the device might be defective, but when she measured in other areas, it worked perfectly.
We continued with our EVP questions and tried to record any audible or visual responses. After a while Scott had the feeling as if someone was standing behind him and asked us to have a look. We could not see anything, so Val went to the area behind him and measured the temperature and the EMF-field, but the readings were normal with 17 to 18 °C and 0.5 to 1 mG.
Shortly after that, we ended the EVP session and went to the front cellar room. Here we also We started an EVP session, but had to stop because of the loud noise caused by the pumps. This room also felt “empty” in a certain way, so we decided to continue our investigation upstairs in the pub itself.
As we got upstairs we first went to the pool table area. Val and I placed the K2 and the Dictaphone in the middle of the pool table and I asked Scott to get a pool ball, which I laid next to both devices as a trigger object.
We started the EVP experiment and asked a few questions. We also asked whatever might be present to move the ball, hoping that we might catch this incident with the DVR-camera we had set up. Unfortunately nothing happened, but Val, who was standing in a corner next to a small table sensed a change in temperature behind her and she had the feeling as if someone was standing there. She took a temperature reading and registered a fluctuation of 4 °C, instead of 18 °C it was now only 14 °C. Interestingly this happened in exactly the same area which Scott had reported that he had the sensation of something blowing on his neck and also felt a drastic change in the temperature around him.
We watched this corner for a while and recorded the temperature as it moved up and down but always between 14 and 19 °C. We hoped that we would find something on the recordings of the DVR-system later on during our analysis.
After about 15 minutes we ended the EVP session and moved further to the right hand area of the pub. On our way to that area, Val kept on measuring with the K II and suddenly noticed that the device would spike up to 3 mG whenever she came closer to me. I moved a bit over to the left, but the spikes were still there, always right around me. I was quite puzzled by this and moved over further,
where the readings went back to normal.
Where I was standing before, the readings were still high, but a few moments later the beer pumps started rumbling, and we were able to establish the cause of this incident. The reading was caused by the pumps fluctuating under the bar right where we were standing.
Following this debunking, we moved on to the right hand area of the bar. I had taken the pool ball with me and placed it on the mantelpiece, where one of our DVR-cameras was pointed. I propped up the K2 Meter next to it, and we conducted another EVP, again asking for the ball to be moved. We did not get any response, but Scott had the feeling, that the temperature in the room was rising and felt quite hot, myself and Val did not feel this .Val measured the air temperature, but it was showing a constant 18 to 19°C, which was the normal base reading for that room.
After a while we decided to finish our investigation and went back up to headquarters, to report what we had experienced.
This next part of the report is written by Ian Wilce (Lead investigator)
After Hella and her team returned from the cellar I went back down to the cellar with Charlie to conduct a couple more EVP sessions. We did have the feeling that somebody else was down there with us, and kept on getting the same sort of strange EMF readings that we had experienced before in the other rooms, but we did not get anything that we could call hard evidence in the cellar, so we decided to venture back up to the bar area. As we announced that we were leaving the cellar area due to inactivity. I turned off the voice recorder and we moved towards the cellar steps when we both heard a loud moaning sound which stopped us dead in our tracks. It was so loud and clear that it sounded as if somebody else was down there with us.
In the bar area we decided to conduct a further EVP where we had previously experienced K2 reactions. After Charlie had asked a question we did capture something on the recorder which sounded like a parrot or a dirty old man laughing. At the time we did not hear anything.
After this session we ended our investigation at the Britannia Inn .
Final Comments:
After reviewing the evidence that we collected, I would say that there is definitely paranormal activity at the Britannia Inn. Whatever is present there has been there for many years, and seems to living in harmony with the present tenants of the pub and its guests. There would be no reason to take measures to remove the 'spirits' from this pub.
