Gaelic-speaking 'ghost' caught on recording

on tape by a radio producer.

Debbie McPhail claims to have made a recording of a ghoulish voice hissing the words: "Get out" or "Go away" in Gaelic.

Mrs McPhail described herself as "a cynical person by nature" - but said she had no explanation for the ghostly voice.

The otherworldly voice ruined a recording she was making in Edinburgh underground vaults with the former rugby international Norrie Rowan, who owns a section of the underground city.

Mrs McPhail said: "I found the place so creepy, I let the presenter go down to do the interview himself.

"When I was listening back to it, I could hear Norrie Rowan chatting and then I heard another voice.

"It was close by to the microphone because you can tell if voices are far away or not. I knew it wasn’t the presenter or Norrie because the voice had a slightly Irish accent.

"When the presenter came back up I asked him who they had met in the vault and he said nobody. I asked a colleague who spoke Gaelic and she said they could be saying ‘get out’ or ‘go away’."

Gordon Stewart, assistant director at Mercat Tours, which conducts visits around the vaults said the recording could be the first actual evidence of psychic phenomena in the vault.

"It is an unusual story and quite chilling. I think it could be the first time anything like this has been recorded in Edinburgh.

"People who come on our tours have been scratched, had their hands jostled and come into contact with unknown things."

Psychologist Richard Wiseman, who has conducted research into the paranormal goings on beneath Edinburgh’s South Bridge, said a third of the subjects in his study had some sort of experience in the vaults, including having their clothes pulled, hearing their names whispered or feeling tugs on their clothing.

But he said the phenomena could have been psychological effects suggested by the damp dripping walls and the dark dismal atmosphere of the underground city.

Dr Paul Stevens, a research fellow at Edinburgh University’s Koestler Parapsychology unit, said: "The vaults are not mapped in places and you don’t know what walls are backing on to.

"At one time someone there thought they were hearing strange sounds, but the wall actually backed on to a massage parlour and that was where the funny noises were coming from.

"It is very creepy down there, so even water dripping can sound like footsteps."

I've got a personal ghost story that is really creepy--unbelievable, but it is the honest to God's truth.

I was doing a paper on a mental hospital in Maine for college a couple of years ago. It was called Pineland, in Pownal Maine. It had been shut down for a long time.

When I looked into the long history of Pineland, I found all kinds of horrible things. The patients sat around naked in their own feces for days, or just chained up and forgotton about. The conditions there were extremely bad for a long time--mostly because they had no staffing, but also because of the view the medical establishment had about mentally retarded folk back then. There were a number of sadistic doctors that worked there, and many people died at a young age in Pineland. I don't think that place saw many happy days.

Well, I found out that a humanitarian group had bought Pineland and decided to renovate it. I decided that I could augment my paper by taking some video footage of Pineland before it was gone forever. So I rounded up a friend and we rolled out around five, after we knew the construction workers would be gone.

Now, Pineland is huge. It is not one building, but a cluster of about fifteen buildings. So the property is huge. We get on it and start looking around. A lot of the buildings had already been gutted, windows and doors gone but boarded up.

I started filming, talking a little about each building and what it had been used for. It was then that we heard some noise in the building.

There was no wind that day. We heard loud, loud pounding inside the building I was filming. But no one was inside! You know how I know? The doors were all padlocked and the windows were boarded. There was no way in.

Sufficently creeped out, we began to stalk around some other buildings. We found a ground window without a board, and stuck the camera in it. We heard the same pounding noise. Then, nothing. Then, BANG! Right next to the camera!

I screamed and pulled out of the window. We decided to do the ultimate test--get into one of the buildings.

We looked around for a building with a way in. Finally we found a forgotten back door on the side of what had been the hospital. We squeezed through the opening and went up some stairs.

We were in a huge, empty room. There was a wide corridor to the left, and then an identical large room. We were silent as I slowly panned the camera around.

Then we heard the banging. At first it was above us. Then it was quiet. Then the banging started in the other room. We edged to the stairs. Then came a bang in the hallway, and we ran for it.

We ran out the building, down the driveway, and into the car. When we got home, freaked out, my friend and I decided to make my husband watch the tape.

On the tape, all the noises can clearly be heard, and even some weird noises that I didn't hear while there. The creepy part? On the tape, when we enter the hospital and are going up the stairs, you can see little balls of light zipping around the screen. Diagonally, horizontally, and vertically. They form clusters and are sometimes lone. They were going across the screen the entire time we were in the hospital. When the noises occured, the balls of light intensified. I DID NOT SEE THIS WHILE FILMING.

My friend took her video camera home with the tape in it. She was going to make copies of it for me. While she was at work the next day, her teenage son used the camera to film some footage of their new dog. He taped over our Pineland visit.

So, I had proof but the tape was destroyed. Argh!

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Gaelic-speaking 'ghost' caught on recording

CLAIRE SMITH