14
Later that same evening, I left the Cage for an hour to meet with Vanessa. Although she had been willing to escort Stephen and I around her former home on the day of our arrival, which had taken place during the daytime, she flatly refused to enter the property after dark, under any circumstance. Therefore, in order to gather a little more history and backstory, I agreed to meet her in The King’s Arms pub next door, on the understanding that I would drink no alcohol.
While I interviewed Vanessa, the other members of the team remained behind to hold down the fort and continue their investigation. When our meeting was over, I saw Vanessa to her car and then returned to the Cage on foot. I was just about to place the key in the lock when my phone beeped, indicating that I had just received a text message.
It was from Stephen: Do you by any chance have your phone networked to your computer?
“No, of course I don’t, you silly bugger,” I called out cheerfully, pushing open the front door and stepping inside. “That laptop came with me from America. There’s no wireless network here in the Cage, so it’s about as disconnected as it could possibly be.” In fact, there was no Internet connectivity of any kind inside the Cage, other than that provided by our cell phones.
“That’s what I thought,” Stephen replied, pulling out his phone and holding the screen up for me to see. “It was a long shot, but we wondered whether you might be remote controlling your computer through your phone or something like that. Because your laptop was doing this … ”
Curious, I peered at the screen of Stephen’s phone, which was now showing a video of what I soon realized was the screen of my laptop. Prior to leaving the Cage earlier that night, I had been working on a Microsoft Word document that contained a log of everything noteworthy that we had experienced during our investigation so far, along with additional notes and observations concerning each occurrence. The document was six pages in length already, and I had left it up on the laptop screen before heading out with the idea that one of the other investigators could add to it in my absence if anything interesting were to happen.
It hadn’t taken long for the laptop to start behaving in the most extraordinarily erratic way. Squinting at the tiny video screen, I watched with growing amazement as somebody—a completely unseen somebody—began to scroll through my note file, as though they were scanning it during a speed-reading session. The screen would then shoot back to an earlier part of the document once again, almost as if the reader wanted to start over from the beginning.
Plainly, nobody was touching the mouse or keyboard. Stephen had made sure to capture the entire laptop within the frame of his shot.
“It just stopped doing that a second before you walked in,” Caroline said, “but it’s acting strangely. Look at the cursor.” She gestured at the real laptop’s screen, where the arrow cursor was bouncing around like a crazed dervish. I frowned, thinking that the wireless mouse might be going haywire: picking it up, I flipped it over and switched the device off. It made no difference: the cursor continued to fly around the screen in a totally random manner.
Sitting in the front room, the three researchers had just finished a dowsing session in which they had attempted to reconnect with the spirit named Heinrich. Once the dowsing rods began to give meaningful answers, Stephen and the ladies had invited him to use as many of the available energy sources inside the Cage as he needed in order to manifest physically. The session had generated a pair of knocks on cue when Heinrich was asked to knock, both of them coming from somewhere inside the Cage itself—somewhere very close to where the team’s laptops were set up. The twin dowsing rods had both turned to point toward the open doorway that led into the Cage, which was completely deserted so far as the eye could tell.
“That’s when your computer started acting up,” Lesley explained, “straight after the dowsing rods pointed toward it, and we offered up the energy for Heinrich to use.”
That’s quite the coincidence, I thought to myself, if indeed it actually is a coincidence.
Still determined to troubleshoot my laptop’s erratic behavior, I unplugged the USB wireless mouse receiver from the port in its side. It made no difference: the cursor continued to bounce around. It could easily be a fault with the laptop, I knew; perhaps one of the electronic components was wearing out and acting up, for example. I had owned the laptop for four years, and it had been a reliable platform for that entire period of time; indeed, I had written several books on it. Not once had it behaved in such a way.
The laptop went back to behaving normally within minutes, continuing to do so for the rest of the investigation. No root cause was ever found for the episode of bizarre technological trickery; a large portion of the book that you now hold in your hands was written on that same laptop, and the strange behavior has never repeated itself since it left the Cage.
For my part, I remain convinced that my laptop’s strange behavior comes down to more than just simple coincidence. Did one of the spirits of the Cage want to read the notes that I had been making about them? If so, then it seems that curiosity is one attribute that we take along with us when we leave our mortal bodies behind …
Regular visits from both Mikey and my good friend Linda kept me relatively sane during those dark days of my pregnancy. I had known Linda ever since I was a young teenager. She knew the Cage all too well, having had direct personal experience of the house; some good friends of hers lived there during the late 1990s.
Linda had made a point of warning me about the Cage when I first told her that I wanted to buy it. Linda advised me in the strongest possible terms that the house was haunted—it was, in her words, “a bad house”—but I was so blinded by desire for my dream home that her sound advice fell on deaf ears. With hindsight, I should have listened, but when it came to the Cage, all common sense seemed to have abandoned me.
When I asked her about it, Linda was very willing to share her experiences with me. She told me that on one occasion when she was visiting her friends, they were all sitting in the front room, enjoying a chat, when suddenly an almighty crash came from the upstairs landing. Startled, they all jumped up and went upstairs to investigate.
On reaching the top of the stairs, they discovered that all of the books from the bookcase on the top landing had been dumped onto the floor. The bookcase itself was still standing (it hadn’t fallen over), and its contents had been scattered across the landing. Linda knew that there was nobody else in the house, as the couple lived there alone. No windows were open, ruling out the possibility of a sudden gust of wind being the culprit. It looked to Linda and her friends as if a petulant visitor had simply tossed the books everywhere in a fit of pique.
On another occasion, Linda’s friend had just climbed into bed and had hardly begun to doze off when she suddenly felt the covers being pulled slowly back. Before she could react, something the size and shape of a child of perhaps six or seven years old snuggled into her body. Although her friend had heard stories of ghostly children haunting the Cage, she had never experienced anything quite like that before.
Hearing stories like that from a trusted source helped to cement my belief that the Cage had been haunted long before I ever took ownership of the place. Although the last thing I needed to hear was more ghost stories, there was a degree of comfort and validation in knowing that I wasn’t the only one being plagued by the paranormal while living in that house.
On Christmas Eve of 2007, after twenty-four hours spent in hard and painful labor, I gave birth to my son, Jesse Caleb James Mitchell. My friends Kirsty and Neil had kindly driven me to the hospital and stayed with me throughout the birth.
When I held my son in my arms for the very first time, I felt nothing but joy and a sense of wonder. Now that my baby boy had come into this world, however, I knew it would be down to me, and me alone, to make sure this precious little bundle stayed safe and happy when I took him home. And that raised the disturbing question: what kind of home for an infant was a haunted medieval prison? It was already weighing on me that the Cage was a poor excuse for a home.
How on earth was I going to be able to keep Jesse out of harm’s way in there, when I couldn’t even protect myself?
I tried to put a brave face on it when I took Jesse home for the first time. As the weeks went by, I slowly but surely taught myself how to look after my son. I learned how to distinguish the hungry cries from those of happiness or a wet diaper and how to burp him properly after feeding to ensure that he didn’t cry afterward with the pain of trapped wind. I learned how to bathe, dress, and change my son, falling into a completely new routine and rhythm of life that placed the needs of my son above everything else.
I knew that Jesse absolutely had to stay where I could see him at all times, and I needed no reminder that I was raising my firstborn son in a house that possessed a dark energy all of its own—one that had proven itself time and time again to be both unpredictable and dangerously hostile. I lived in constant fear of how the Cage and whichever entities were haunting it would react to this new and completely helpless arrival.
It was our final night spent investigating the Cage, and my team and I were taking advantage of another one of our many tea breaks to plan our next move. We all agreed that we wanted to find out more about the entity who had referred to himself as Heinrich. But what, we wondered, would be the best method of communication? Several options were debated before the team finally settled on a simple technique known as scrying.
The term “scrying” refers to the age-old method of using a reflective surface in an attempt to establish a window into another time or place. There are many different ways of doing this: some proponents of the technique gaze into crystals, for example; others prefer mirrors; both smoke and flame have historically been used, as has the surface of water. It was this final medium (a variation on scrying that has sometimes been given the name hydromancy) that we finally settled upon.
There was nothing mystical about the preparations. All that was needed was a small saucepan of water, which Stephen filled and placed carefully on the floor in the middle of the front room, and the always-important open mind. I was admittedly skeptical, having never used the technique before in any of my paranormal investigations, but I was willing to make the attempt and see how things turned out. I took up a position on the couch and began to video the proceedings as Caroline, Lesley, and Stephen sat cross-legged on the floor, clustered around the saucepan. We had set the lights to a very low level, which allowed me to use an infrared camera to record the session.
As usual, the Cage was bitterly cold. Caroline cranked up one of the electric heaters to maximum and rolled it into close proximity to the three sitters. Taking the lead, Lesley called upon Heinrich, asking him respectfully to show himself in the water if at all possible.
When there was no response, Caroline asked if there were any other entities present that would care to make their presence known. She reached out and gently shook the pan, agitating the water just a little. Stephen quietly echoed her call, inviting the old lady who was known to appear in the chair next to the fire to appear and communicate with them. He sat quietly, peering down over the rims of his spectacles into the rippling liquid.
Still nothing.
“Heinrich,” Lesley tried again, “if you could please show us your face, we would really appreciate it. We would very much like to see the face of the person that we have been speaking to.”
The other three investigators nodded in agreement.
No matter how nicely they asked, no matter how much they entreated Heinrich and the other spirits of the Cage to appear, the water remained completely empty.
Taking a quick break, we decided to change gears. If water wasn’t working, then what about another medium?
“What about that?” Stephen asked, pointing up at the large mirror that hung on the wall. He removed it carefully, placing it on the ground and propping it upright so that it stood vertically, facing the chair next to the fire. “Who wants to give it a try?”
Lesley stepped forward enthusiastically. Settling herself into the armchair that had given her such a shock when she first arrived at the Cage, she willed herself to relax as much as she possibly could and began to stare into the mirror. The front room was still dark and shadowy, but enough light crept in through the open doorway that led to the Cage itself for her to see by.
For the first few minutes, nothing happened. The three other investigators looked on, growing a little bored as time passed uneventfully. Then, in an instant, Lesley’s eyes widened. She sat bolt upright in the chair.
“What is it, Lesley?” Caroline asked expectantly.
“There’s a man,” Lesley began to explain, the disbelief apparent in her tone of voice. “He’s … hard to see. No, wait. He’s getting clearer.”
“What kind of a man?” I asked, craning my neck to get a better look at the surface of the mirror. I couldn’t see anything amiss, just the reflection of the room itself.
“A middle-aged man, but he’s not from this time.” Lesley went on to describe a man with dark hair that was slicked back from his forehead with something like hair oil or Brylcreem, in the style that was so popular in the 1920s or 1930s. She estimated his age at somewhere between 35 and 40. “He’s looking right at me! He’s trying to tell me something … ”
“What?” Stephen wanted to know. “What is he saying to you, Lesley?”
But try as she might, Lesley couldn’t make out the words. The man was becoming more and more insistent, trying to convey some sort of message to her. He locked eyes with her own, fully aware of Lesley’s presence and the fact that she was watching him through the mirror somehow.
Lesley watched intently as the man spoke to her, trying his very best to get his point across. It just wasn’t happening; Lesley couldn’t lip-read, and none of the other investigators could see the man when they looked into the mirror for themselves.
Then the man began to disappear, fading slowly into the shadows behind him. Finally, nothing was left except for Lesley’s own reflection, staring back at her with a vaguely troubled expression on her face.
“I don’t know what it was that he wanted to tell me,” she said, blinking rapidly to clear her eyes, “but he seemed to think that it was really important … ”