Posted on 04/26/2004 7:37:12 PM PDT by CurlyBill
Mike Chapple Meets A Ghost Hunter In Liverpool's Oldest - And Most Haunted? - Pub, Daily Post
"BEFORE I bought this pub about two years ago, I was a non believer. I don't believe in God or ghosts - when you're dead you're dead. We're just big bags of water that's all."
These are the unlikely words of Adam Franklin on a sharp, bright spring morning with the sun dappling the tables of the city centre's oldest pub, The Slaughterhouse in Fenwick Street.
A hostelry since 1723, under Adam's management it's become a thriving, vibrant boozer with olde world charm, whopping Ulster fry breakfasts and a popular comedy club down in the cellar.
Ah! the cellar. We'll come to that later.
Anyway, despite the pub's popularity, tales had reached these ears of strange visitations and a bar staff reluctant to spend time alone there.
Especially so late on at locking-up time when a wicked wind, whipping in from the Mersey Bar, is rattling the rafters.
Adam understands - he has, as they say, been there. "About three weeks after we arrived, it was two in the morning, I was standing by the bar after everyone else had gone home," said the 32-year-old ex-RAF man from Ellesmere Port.
"This bloke appeared and walked across the room right in front of me. As he walked past, he kept glaring at me intently until he disappeared.
"I can go into dark cellars on my own because I'm a cynical, pragmatic businessman who doesn't believe in these things, remember, but this had me completely spooked. I just bolted for the door went home - and didn't want to come back.
"I've seen the film - the young, good looking, dude always gets it first and I didn't want it to be me." Since then, of course, he has returned many times, as have the rest of the staff who've grown used to the shades that occasionally flick across the corner of the eye.
Martyn Jones and Brendan McAleer are two of the barmen who regularly see and hear the spooks. Like Adam, neither is keen to be on their own for lock-up.
Says Brendan: "After everyone else has gone I've been here in the bar with a pint of Guinness and you can hear the toilet doors downstairs opening and shutting, opening and shutting, and you know there's no-one down there."
Hasn't he ever gone to have a look?
Brendan delivers a look that questions the inquirer's sanity.
Figures have also been captured on the cellar's security CCTV cameras. Adam, Martyn and Brendan know that they're phantoms. Why? Because they've watched as people walked through them.
Many of the comedians have also had strange experiences.
BRENDAN Riley, along with other witnesses, saw a glowing ping-ball-sized orb of light - traditionally an indication of paranormal activity - flash past him.
Others are afraid to stay the night in the green room upstairs which female comic Janey Godley claims has two ghostly inhabitants. She is also petrified of the cellar stairs adjacent to the toilets. She claims there's something evil there.
"I think there's potentially a few dead slaughtermen down here or maybe a few restless cows," jokes Adam uneasily as we later pace the gloomy cellar bar, which possesses an undeniable edge to its atmosphere, a sort of low voltage shock that tingles the spine and shoulder blades.
Adam's aware of the popularity of UK Living TV's Most Haunted, in which flamboyant Liverpool medium Derek Acorah flounces through ghostly houses accompanied by a screamingly hyperactive Yvette Fielding and clodhopping cameramen making enough noise to, pardon the pun, raise the dead.
He's not impressed.
He is also not especially keen on any cheap publicity gimmick to pull in more punters. But he is genuinely interested in finding out what is going on.
However, when yours truly announces that he is a very reluctant volunteer to spend a night alone in the cellar he becomes genuinely concerned.
"Even if the Post was to pay me £5,000, I wouldn't spend a night down there on my own."
Stout man that he is, he strikes a deal. He'll spend the night too and promises to bring along Brendan and Martyn for support.
For my part I decide to look for expert help.
Billy Roberts is a well known Liverpool medium and claims to come from a long line of psychics. A sickly child, he spent much of his early life in Alder Hey children's hospital with a serious bronchial disease.
It was there that he first saw dead people walk and where he developed a fear of the dark.
"The darkness would act like a screen for the lights and faces I would see there," says 57-year-old Billy.
One of his earliest recollections is, as a three-year-old, the death of the old lady who lived next door to his Wavertree home.
His mum told him that she had "gone to heaven after being taken away in the box".
What he couldn't understand was why, after the funeral, she had come in through the back door to greet him - something she continued to do periodically for years afterwards.
WHEN he was about nine, he was walking home and saw a well-dressed man drop down dead in front of him.
"He then stood up from the body, walked away and disappeared," explains Billy matter of factly.
He didn't begin nurturing his gift until his 30s.
Before that he had spent much of the 1960s and early 1970s on the road with such bands as the Kruzads - who supported the likes of the Stones, Chuck Berry and The Moody Blues - acquiring a life-threatening heroin habit along the way.
Since then he has written a number of books about the paranormal and lectured about the phenomenon in colleges and universities around the world.
Billy is relating his truncated biography 48 hours later.
It's just before midnight on bleak, cold night inside the pub's eerie, dimly-lit cellar and we've been joined by Adam, Martyn,
Brendan and Billy's business partner, Joe Bielawski.
Joe claims he harbours a healthy cynicism for the histrionics of Most Haunted but admits to wearing protection all the same, a crucifix once owned by the saint, Padre Pio.
He's also carrying a "ghostometer" a hand-held detector that measures fluctuations in magnetic fields, a reliable indicator of paranormal manifestations. When a spirit comes calling, it's supposed to emit a high oscillating pitch and its dial indicator fluctuate wildly.
At the moment, it's purring quietly.
Billy doesn't need this device though. This is a visual aid purely for our benefit - being clairvoyant and clairaudient he says he can both see and hear the dead and doesn't need a machine to know that they're there.
"The voices that I hear can be very clear like a radio on inside my head," he says. "If there was something here I'd talk to it not like I'm talking to you. It will be a voice inside my head which is very specific."
So far he has heard and seen nothing - and has not been told anything of the manifestations he is expected to encounter.
Which is the way it should be. "I'm not easily led, I'm a very sceptical medium. And not all mediums are genuine and I don't like people filling my head with all kinds of s--t before I go into a place.
"I like to go in and work it out for myself. If we had a conversation on the phone beforehand, little things would be going into my mind. It can produce what's called retrospective analysis. The subconscious mind will hold on to things and bring them out later on when it's quite easy to imagine that you've felt or seen something."
Not all images are ghosts of the dead either, he maintains.
"WHEN people frequent an establishment, they impregnate these subtle atmospheres with a sort of energy that can become visual and create images so that anyone in here alone might see an old person and surmise that its a dead person's spirit when it might be the image of somebody still living."
We decide to go walkabout. On the "evil" stairs leading out, the ghostometer begins to sound uncomfortable and Billy claims he feels a presence but nothing too strong and certainly not malevolent.
We proceed through the main upstairs bar where the rain is clattering against the windows from the empty streets outside. On the first floor landing is the green room, complete with table, settee and empty beer bottle left behind by a previous comic occupant.
Again nothing really and the ghostometer remains well behaved.
It seems a good time to ask why hauntings and why, more especially, houses?
Billy says: "If you go into an old house, sometimes you can get a lovely warm feeling. That's because of the people who lived there. They impregnate the psychic structure of the house and that becomes the representation of those people.
"And it can work the other way whereby an evil or unhappy family who've lived there will influence the minds of the people who subsequently come along."
We proceed to the top floor and it's here, at the top of the stairwell, that Billy first detects something.
"The impression that I get here is that there was some kind of self destruction that somebody committed suicide. Somebody died in this area but it must have been some time ago. It was a man who hanged himself here."
The ghostometer duly goes slightly bonkers emitting a fluctuating whine like that of the dentist's drill. We head a little more quickly back downstairs where, back in the bar, it's thought that it might be a good idea if Billy went back down in the cellar, alone this time, so as not to be distracted.
Billy, for some reason, doesn't agree.
Minutes later Joe and I are perched on stools downstairs and after a brief surf with the divining rods - this area of the city apparently being awash with ley lines which convey psychic power - Billy has placed the ghostometer at the centre of the low stage at the far end of the room.
He then retreats to another stool on the far side where he sits occasionally stroking his chin apparently preoccupied in thought.
No words are spoken. The only sound is the warble of the ghostometer in mild distress.
Ten minutes later Billy springs up and walks over. "I've just been having a conversation," he says calmly and then points at the stage.
"It's a guy sitting over there. He says his name's is Walter Langton. He worked here in the 1800s. He's very rude and bad tempered and he says he wants to do me harm. I've told him he can't. He chooses to be here. He also knows that we are here and he wants us to go. But I don't feel intimidated."
Billy then says that there is another presence on the stage. It's a middle-aged woman dressed in grubby smock and bonnet. She's possibly from the 19th century and called Meg or Mary. She's unaware of us but is apparently looking for her son.
" He was crushed to death here," adds Billy simply.
Needless to say neither Joe or I have seen or heard anything - it is, unfortunately, the drawback of the medium's trade that concrete proof is hard to produce.
Nevertheless there's an unnerving feeling that we're not alone and there's relief in finding the stairwell behind the bar - and not adjacent to Walter's alleged spot at corner of the stage - to return to a curious Adam and co upstairs.
It's now 3am and, despite his recent encounter, Billy remains surprisingly magnanimous to his erstwhile opponent.
"There's a lot of paranormal here but nothing malevolent. Walter's been here so long he just lives here now so a blessing by a priest would not make any difference."
He's asked if there are any more spirits to be uncovered here.
"I'm sure there may be - but I'm not waiting around tonight to find out," he replies.
Was that a look of amused relief on his face.
If so, the feeling, rest assured, was entirely mutual.
Oh, was that you? I'm sorry. I thought you were the Fletcher sisters.
Signed,
The Kissing Bandit
Old joke I stole from television. Case of mistaken identity.
I dont recall "knowing" that it was my Grandmother at the time. All I recall was that I had this paralyzing fear, and I had no idea why I was having it. I do now regret that it was a terrifying experience though.
Just the overall creepiness of the situation, perhaps?
I think so.
Thank you very much for the ping! Yep, I'm one of those always lookin for this kind of thing. Planning a bike ride to a couple of allegedly "haunted" sites in the next few weeks, among them Bobby Mackey's bar in Kentucky. Have read a few articles about Mackey's, which this story reminds me of.
At Mackey's, the center of activity is supposed to be the mens restrooms. I'll let ya know what I find on my trip there.
Yeah, I would be interested. Feel free to Freepmail me.
But Jeffries is in Hell, if anybody is.
I have a lot of orb pictures from that building. I think most of them are dust, but there are some that are different colors, or look like they were moving.
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