18
Days turned into weeks. The Cage lay abandoned. The shell of a house sat lonely and still, in a state of limbo, just waiting for time to pass.
I did not venture anywhere near the place, nor did I try to rent the house out again; I knew that it wasn’t fair on unsuspecting innocents, so I made the decision that no matter what it took, I could not risk anybody else living there while I was the owner.
The necessary authorities were notified: the water supply was turned off, the door was locked and bolted for the foreseeable future—or until Kelly’s return, at least. One afternoon not long after, I unexpectedly bumped into Marie, an old friend that I had worked with for many years. We hadn’t seen one another in a long time, and it was good to catch up.
We hugged right there on the street. Marie told me that her friend from Scotland had just been staying with her in the village, and that they had passed the Cage quite often on their journeys into and out of the village. Quite out of the blue Marie added that on one occasion they had driven past the Cage when her friend said, “I thought that your friend’s house was supposed to be haunted?”
Marie replied that it was, and asked her why she brought it up.
“Well, if that’s true, then why has she got a mannequin of an old lady standing in the upstairs window?” Her friend then went on to explain that she had just seen what she thought was a mannequin, visible only from the waist up, standing in the upstairs window. She added with a degree of disdain that if the house was a real haunted house, why would it be kept? It looked silly, she said, and would make people think that the haunting was a hoax.
Letting out a long breath, I looked at Marie and told her that the house had been disused and locked up for several weeks now, and that there has never been a mannequin placed in either that window or any other window of the Cage. It seemed that the apparition of the old lady had put in yet another appearance.
I was still no nearer to finding out this old lady’s identity. Who was she, I wondered, and why has she been seen gazing from that same window for so many years?
As promised, Kelly returned to the Cage for a second visit. After spending more time in there, her conclusion regarding the house and its history was completely unexpected. Kelly explained to me that the house has considerably more history than just the witchcraft trials, imprisonments, and the deaths that have occurred there over the hundreds of years.
She claimed that, in her opinion, the prison was built on a demonic ritual site of some kind that dated back to several hundred years before the Cage was ever built. One of the problems with the house is the land that it is built on. Kelly advised me that the house is unsafe to live in for any length of time, as it takes on a life all of its own.
Kelly had performed a clearance ritual on the Cage, but said that the energies there are embedded in the walls, framework, and fabric of the house itself and have taken root there over hundreds of years. She said she had never come across such dark, negative energy manifesting in a property that people live in from day to day.
“The only way to rid a house of that kind of darkness is to knock it to the ground,” she said flatly, “but even then, the land would still be heavily influenced by the darkness.”
Based upon more than forty years of experience in working with dark energy, Kelly was convinced that this was a house that could not be cleared fully. When I asked her about the clearing process, Kelly told me that she uses various guides, angels, and what are called dark moon angels. All earthbound spirits are released from a property and brought to her home, where Kelly can either pass them over or send them back to where they came from originally. Her spirit guides will then cleanse the haunted property and shut down any negative portals that make it easier for a spirit to get in. Then guides who are the spirits of former Catholic priests would then be sent in to bless the house.
Although no cure-all existed for a location that was as dark as the Cage, Kelly did tell me that all was not lost; there were things she could do that would offer some protection from the malign forces that inhabited the house. Kelly said that for my protection and the protection of others who would enter, she would enclose the Cage inside a kind of spiritual bubble, one that would prevent the more negative entities from entering.
Kelly also promised to continue with the lengthy task of clearing and passing over individual spirits, particularly those that were trapped inside the house and wanted to leave. She emphasized that this would take a long time, and the outcome was far from certain.
She explained to me that this was nothing like a Hollywood movie where just one session would expel the darkness and bring in the light, with everything smelling of roses afterward; things of this nature just aren’t that simple.
As the weeks turned into months, the Cage still lay empty … of the living, at least.
My time in Colchester with Kerry, although fantastic and a very happy time, proved to be short-lived; she had found her future husband and quite understandably would be leaving to go and live with him, so I once again found myself in need of a new home for Jesse and I. I didn’t particularly want to remain in Colchester on my own, so the obvious choice was to return to St Osyth, where my friends, family, work, and Jesse’s nursery were … so the hunt began for suitable accommodation.
October 2005 was fast approaching when I received a call from a man who introduced himself as David. David said that he was a professional paranormal investigator, and that he had heard about the Cage and its reputation. He explained to me that he and his two lead investigators, Amy and Pete, liked to visit various haunted locations in search of ghosts, and would I allow him and his team to investigate the Cage.
The house was currently empty and useless, and my efforts over the last year to sell the place had led nowhere; I could no longer rent it out to tenants, so why not allow a paranormal investigator access? I agreed to the idea of David and his team going in to try and unlock the secrets that the Cage held within its walls.
The Cage was obligingly active on the date of the team’s visit, and the night, in paranormal terms, was a great success. After hearing of the evidence that was captured that first night from David, Amy, and Pete, many other groups contacted me to request permission to investigate the medieval prison for themselves. David himself became a regular visitor to the house, and he spearheaded the quest for answers in what quickly became known as one of England’s most active haunted locations.
Others would follow.
John Fraser first heard about the Cage when Vanessa contacted the Society for Psychical Research in 2009, long before it had gained any sort of notoriety. She explained that she had a haunted property in which she could no longer stay, and John was the paranormal investigator committed to giving her advice on what to do next.
Along with a colleague named Rosie O’Carroll (from the renowned Ghost Club) John went to interview Vanessa in person. Both found her testimony, in John’s own words, “both interesting and consistent.” In fact, during our interview, John had remarked that unlike many other cases, her story of the events has not changed significantly.
John kept in touch with Vanessa over the years, watching as the Cage became more and more famous. In 2014, with the backing of both Vanessa and the SPR, he embarked on a project to interview as many of the major witnesses to the phenomena as he possibly could. He was looking for something known as similar fact evidence, a situation in which multiple unconnected individuals experience the same phenomena. When this occurs, it is regarded as being particularly compelling evidence.
At the end of his study, John concluded that there were indeed several instances of similar fact evidence. Some of these were: disembodied footsteps on the main staircase; the unexplained opening and closing of doors; several unrelated episodes of people being touched, scratched, and injured by unseen entities; and many unexplained emotional breakdowns, such as that experienced by Lesley during my own investigation.
John and Rosie did spend a couple of sessions inside the house themselves, experiencing nothing particularly unusual on either occasion. “That does not really diminish what is, overall, strong evidence for a haunting/anomalous event,” he clarifies.
Rather than the more common type of field investigation, John performed a broader analysis of the eyewitness testimony. The fact that so many different people have experienced consistently similar phenomena inside the Cage without being in contact with one another lends additional credibility to the case. The frequently recurring types of phenomena that John identified would be experienced again and again after his survey had ended, as we shall see when we meet a team of investigators from Pontefract.
Everybody on my team hoped that Stephen’s attempt to bless and cleanse the Cage had been successful. Even Vanessa had her fingers crossed, though she was considerably less optimistic than the visiting investigators. If all had gone according to plan, then the darker entities that haunted the old prison should have been banished, which in turn would have freed the more innocent spirits to cross over into the next realm if they so choose.
Sadly, that would not turn out to be the case.
When Stephen, Caroline, Lesley, and I had left, the Cage remained quiet for no more than a few days. Then the activity began to pick up again, until in almost no time at all, it was business as usual for visitors to the old witches’ prison.
The team known as East Drive Paranormal derive the name of their organization from one of the world’s most famous haunted properties: the small, unassuming private residence at number 30 East Drive in Pontefract was the scene of an infamous poltergeist haunting in the 1960s, when the resident family were terrorized by a malevolent entity that came to be dubbed “The Black Monk of Pontefract.”
The author Colin Wilson wrote about the case in great detail in his superb book Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Hauntings, now a recognized classic among the paranormal research literature. Thanks to extensive newspaper coverage at the time, the haunting soon became national news, and at its height, crowds of people were regularly found camped out overnight outside the house, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ghostly goings-on.
Fifty years later, interest in the case was still going strong, having been reignited by a 2012 film dramatization of the case (When the Lights Went Out) and multiple visits to the house by the television show Most Haunted. Unlike most typical poltergeist cases, in which the phenomena typically fizzle and die out completely after a relatively short period of time, the paranormal activity at 30 East Drive was said to be still going strong after half a century. The men and women who came together to form East Drive Paranormal were all local to the area and had bonded over their mutual love for and fascination with what people were now referring to as the Black Monk House.
No matter how many days and nights they would spend uncovering the mysteries of 30 East Drive, however, the investigators from East Drive Paranormal did not confine their efforts to just that one location. Word had already reached them of the Cage, and everybody agreed that it seemed like a golden opportunity to investigate another extremely active property that was just a few hours’ drive away.
The team visited the Cage on a Friday evening in May 2016. Due to their long association with the Black Monk House, each of the seasoned investigators went in with an open mind and a willingness to square off against the worst that the Cage could possibly throw at them. They had plenty of equipment, a sufficient number of investigators to cover the entire building, and had worked out a solid plan of attack before even stepping foot across the threshold. Everybody felt confident and ready for anything.
It was an attitude that would be sorely tested during the course of that night.
The investigators arrived just after six o’clock in the evening, which gave them plenty of daylight. They took advantage of that by conducting a walk-around of the building’s perimeter, photographing it from all angles and getting to know the lay of the land. Apart from the constant buzz of traffic along the busy Colchester Road and the muted sounds of early-evening drinkers at The Kings’ Arms next door, all was fairly quiet. Every so often a local resident would pass by along Coffin Alley at the back of the house, walking a dog or heading to the pub for a pint or two.
The weather was warm and muggy, and the still air managed to feel close and oppressive. As always, it was colder inside the Cage than it was outside when the team first made their way inside.
This was the calm before the storm.
Vanessa had arrived and unlocked the back door for them. She had made sure to get there long before dark.
The first order of business was for the team to conduct a walk-through, going from room to room in order to get a feel for the house. Did some of the rooms feel different to the others? After spending years in the field investigating tens or even hundreds of haunted places, many paranormal investigators will begin to develop a certain instinct when they enter an active location. Call it a sixth sense, if you will, but whatever it is, it can often be a reliable gauge as to how paranormally active the property is going to be during the course of that night’s investigation.
Personally, I use what I like to call “the sleep test,” which simply means that if I feel that a location is sufficiently calm and quiet enough for me to curl up and go to sleep, then nothing noteworthy is going to happen during the course of the investigation. Although there is no scientifically rational explanation for this particular instinct, it proves to be right more often than not.
Following the initial walk-through, Claire took a seat in the front room, parking herself in the chair next to the fireplace. After just a few minutes, she was suddenly overcome by a feeling of terrible sadness, which seemed to strike her like lightning out of a clear blue sky. There was no apparent reason for her to feel this way; one moment she was fine, and the next she was suddenly distraught.
This is the very same chair where Lesley was overcome by a feeling of great coldness during her first day spent inside the Cage, and feelings of great sadness and melancholy would also afflict her after having sat in that chair. Could this be a coincidence, or something more?
“I had only been there for a couple of minutes, and then all of a sudden I was just absolutely heartbroken,” she explains, still unsure of exactly what had come over her. “I started crying for no reason at all.”
Claire got up out of the chair and went into the kitchen, wiping away her tears. “Take her outside,” Carol suggested gently. Scott took her by the arm and led her outside, intending to get her a breath of fresh air and to put a bit of distance between Claire and the Cage for a while.
She took a seat outside on the bench, enjoying the fact that she was out of the oppressive atmosphere inside the old prison building. After a moment, Claire stood up and stepped out into Coffin Alley. As she lit a cigarette to try and calm her nerves a little, she watched a cat slink into view. It stopped and watched her for a few heartbeats, before wandering past her and disappearing over a nearby wall.
As though caught in a daydream, Claire began to walk slowly along Coffin Alley. She had no particular destination in mind, and in fact felt quite detached from the world around her. No sooner had she reached the halfway point that she heard the pounding of footsteps running along the alley behind her. Claire turned to Scott, who seemed a little concerned that she might wander off and get lost.
“Do you want some company, Claire?” Scott asked politely.
“What are we doing here? Why are we walking?” she asked, obviously confused as to how she had ended up halfway along Coffin Alley. Claire remembered leaving the house and standing outside, but the intervening moments were hazy and disjointed, seen almost through a daze.
“Come on,” Scott said, “let’s go back, shall we?” The two investigators turned and began to walk back toward the Cage. No sooner had she taken that first step, Claire began to feel what she could only describe as a heaviness settling over her chest and her head. It intensified with every step they took, becoming more and more uncomfortable the nearer they got to the old witches’ prison. It wasn’t exactly painful, per se, but felt more like a pressure, as though some heavy constricting bands were tightening around Claire’s chest and skull.
The strange feeling went away after she rejoined her teammates, but the feeling of intense pressure would come back to plague Claire later on that evening … when she returned to sit in the very same chair next to the fireplace.