19
Jason claimed to possess mediumistic abilities, and he wasted no time in trying to engage the spirits of the Cage in active communication. As he asked questions, Claire could feel an invisible something tickling her skin. It was more of an irritant than anything else, like a flea or some other insect constantly brushing against the back of her neck. She tried to swat it away irritably, relaxing back into the fireside chair as best she could.
But then the itching became a burning. It wasn’t long before the back of Claire’s neck felt as if it was on fire. And suddenly the tidal wave of negative emotion was back, only this time it was both stronger and much more intense than it had been before. Claire burst into tears, choking off a sob as her entire body began to tremble and shake.
When she had been overcome with emotion before, Claire hadn’t the slightest idea why she suddenly felt the way that she did; this time, however, the reason was abundantly clear to her. She was crying for her children. They had been taken away from her when she was imprisoned, and she missed them with all of her broken heart. She felt helpless and powerless, unable to do even a single thing to help either herself or her children.
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, Claire remains convinced that she was empathically picking up on the torment suffered by one of the female prisoners who were kept within the Cage during their trial for witchcraft. When one considers what happened to Lesley in that very same chair (and the two women have never met one another, nor even spoken with each other), it seems very likely that the epicenter of this paranormal emotional cyclone is focused upon either that piece of furniture itself (unlikely, as it is relatively modern in design) or more likely upon the section of the front room located between the fireplace and the main window.
“I just knew that I was never going to see them again,” Claire related during an interview with one of the authors. She still finds it traumatic to relive the experience to this very day, dredging up the memories of heart-rending feelings that were suffered by a forlorn mother who was held captive within the Cage. “I have never experienced anything like it in my entire life, either before or since.”
While Claire fought to calm herself down once more, Angie asked the assembled team whether they could hear a chuckling. It sounded as if it was coming from somewhere within the Cage proper, though it was hard for her to pin down the exact source. It was difficult for most of the investigators to hear it, thanks to the constant stream of traffic passing by just inches away from the front window.
Angie suddenly experienced a vision, a flash of psychic insight. Sitting in the chair next to the fire was an old woman. She had tough, leathery skin, black gimlet eyes and a long, thin face that ended in a pointed chin with a wart on the end—in other words, very similar to the stereotypical witch as seen on Halloween decorations and throughout popular culture, although she lacked the pointed hat.
Unbeknownst to Angie, she had been describing somebody who was all too real. Up until now she had paid little attention to the old monochrome photographs that hung on the wall facing the downstairs toilet. The next time she went to the bathroom, she paused to examine the frame full of aged pictures, and found to her astonishment that one of the people who appeared in those photographs looked very familiar: It was the old woman that she had seen sitting in the chair just a few moments before.
The team decided that it was time to split up: Half went upstairs while the rest remained downstairs. Carol took up position in the kitchen, where she could keep a watchful eye on events via the video monitor feeds, whereas Eileen, Jason, and Scott decided to try their luck in the children’s bedroom. This team of three simply sat in the semi-darkness for a while, lettings their senses adjust to this new environment.
Eileen and Jason didn’t notice it at first, but as the three of them sat there quietly on the floor, Scott was beginning to grow increasingly agitated. When they finally realized that he wasn’t quite acting like himself, they asked him what was wrong. “I feel strange,” Scott explained awkwardly. “It feels as if I’m a woman, and I have been wrongly accused of something … ”
Suddenly, he began to empty his pockets, divesting himself of everything that was in there except for a cigarette lighter. Then he walked over to the fireplace, which was completely cold and dark. It had been quite some time since a fire had burned in that particular grate. Scott simply stood there, just looking at it.
Finally he said, “I just want to be in there. I just want to burn. I need to burn. I’ve done nothing wrong, but they burned me anyway … ”
It is interesting to note that one of the modern tropes concerning witches is that of the accused witch being burned at the stake; yet the truth is that British witches tended not to suffer this brutal method of execution at all, for they were much more likely to be either hanged or drowned.
Jason decided to enter into a trance and see what information could be gained. He began to describe the figure of a man standing there in the room with them. The man was wearing a long dark coat or cloak and was busily writing things down on paper, some of which he then screwed up and discarded. When pressed for more information, Jason told them that he was getting the impression that this man had been a judge, and that he had the power to decide who was to live and who was going to die. Could this have been Judge Darcy, who had presided over the trial of the St Osyth witches at nearby Chelmsford? He would certainly fit the description.
Temporarily mollified, Scott sat back down to listen to Jason’s description of the powerful man. Suddenly both men were on their feet, and squaring off against one another. Jason began rolling up his sleeves, as though preparing to start a fight. Scott walked right up to Jason, invading his personal space, and growled, “I’ve done one thing wrong … and you’ve gone and killed me for it!”
For her part, Eileen could only look on in astonishment as the two men faced each other down. A fight seemed to be brewing, and things had the potential to turn violent in an instant.
What was the “one thing” that Scott (or whoever it was that was making their emotions felt through Scott) had done wrong? “It was some kind of a spell or incantation,” Scott explained during our interview. “I’m not saying that the people who were accused of witchcraft genuinely had supernatural powers, but people around here certainly thought that they did. I became convinced that I had tried to use those powers in public, that it had gotten me locked up in the Cage.”
Suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, Jason collapsed. He hit the floor with a resounding thud, making Eileen wince. She had no idea why he had just fallen, because Scott hadn’t laid a finger on him. She quickly called for help. The rest of the team came pounding upstairs, removing Scott from the room first because of his bizarre behavior and shunting him into the relative safety of the master bedroom. Phil and Kenneth then set to work tending to Jason, who was by now totally unconscious.
The two men grunted as they lifted Jason and maneuvered the dead weight out through the doorway, intending to get him downstairs as best they could. Once they reached the well-lit upstairs landing, Jason’s faculties began to return. Moaning groggily, his eyelids fluttered open. He had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there.
While all of this drama was taking place in the children’s bedroom, Claire and Steven had been sitting quietly in the master bedroom. Claire had taken up residence in the chair nearest the window (the same window in which the emaciated female apparition has been reported by many local motorists) while Steven made himself comfortable on the floor.
Taps and knocks began to be heard on the walls behind and to the side of Claire. Their source of origin would have had to have been either outside (when the investigators looked through the window, they saw nothing unusual out there) or in the neighboring bedroom, which was being staked out by Jason, Scott, and Eileen.
“I’m starting to feel cold,” Claire reported.
Curiously, Steven broke out a thermometer and analyzed the air temperature next to her. Sure enough, the air was several degrees colder to one side of her than the other … the same side on which the taps appeared to originate.
The sudden loud thud from next door was, of course, Jason’s body hitting the ground. Steven rushed into the master bedroom to help when Eileen called out for it. Interestingly enough, Claire seems to have undergone some kind of missing memory episode at this point, because the next thing she remembers is the other investigators looking at her with great concern. Of the intervening time period, she can remember nothing to this day.
“What?” she asked warily, confused as to why her colleagues were all looking at her like that.
“Don’t you remember?” one asked.
“No, what?” Claire insisted.
Claire was astonished to hear that she seemed to have entered something similar to a trance state herself, and when she was questioned by the other team members, she had demanded to know why they were accusing Kenneth. The other members of East Drive Paranormal were every bit as confused as Claire was; after all, nobody was accusing Kenneth of anything. He had been standing quietly in a corner, minding his own business. Yet Claire was getting increasingly distressed, bursting into tears and sobbing due to an overwhelming sense of sadness that had overcome her.
The team collectively decided to take a well-earned tea break, a good opportunity to regroup and gather their wits once more. Jason, Claire, and Scott were all soon back to their normal selves, although the mood was a little less cheerful than it had been to begin with. It was decided that for the remainder of the investigation, under no circumstances would Scott be permitted to go back upstairs after what had overcome him in the children’s bedroom. The risk of him doing harm to either himself or to another member of the team was judged to be too great.
During their next foray into the master bedroom, three of the investigators (Eileen, Jason, and Phil) felt as if the floor was burning up, almost as if it was actually on fire, while the fourth—Sarah, sitting in the same chair that Claire had occupied earlier—experienced the polar opposite, insisting that the air around her was ice cold. Sweat was pouring from the investigators who were sitting on the floor, whereas Claire was actually shivering.
No temperature variations were recorded to support either claim, rendering the experience a totally subjective one—but no less intriguing for that.
After a short break, Jason, Phil, and Eileen elected to spend some time in the cramped bathroom. This is the same bathroom in which the intimidating male apparition had made his presence known to Vanessa in the most unpleasant way. Simply fitting everybody inside the small room was no mean logistical feat: Jason stood in the bath, whereas Eileen took up residence on top of the toilet, and Phil claimed a clear spot on the bathroom floor.
It wasn’t long before the K2 EMF detection meter that had been placed on the floor began to light up, indicating the presence of a strong electromagnetic field. There were no electrical devices in the bathroom capable of making this happen, nor does the Cage have any wireless routers or other computer equipment that might explain it away. When my team and I investigated the Cage, we had sniffed for any wireless networks in the area and had found none.
Another potential culprit would have been cell phones and tablet devices, but like all good teams, the crew from East Drive Paranormal all set their phones to airplane mode at the start of the investigation—no stray communications signals would be broadcast, which often spoof K2 meters when phone calls, texts, and Internet browsers are communicating with the cellular network.
Whatever this energy field was, it wasn’t coming from any of the investigators.
Intrigued, Eileen prompted Jason to move the K2 around a little to see how widespread the field might be. He swept it around the bathroom, raising it high to the ceiling and lowering it down to the floor. The meter stayed pegged at the high end, indicating a very strong field that simply hadn’t been there before. To make things even more interesting, the field was intermittent; it was there one minute and gone the next. No explanation for what might have just generated this electromagnetic field was ever found.
“There’s somebody in here with us,” Jason insisted suddenly. Eileen and Phil looked at his outline in the darkness. “We need to get out. Now.”
The three investigators got up and left the bathroom immediately. “Don’t ask me why,” Eileen told us months later during an interview, “but we all got up and charged out of that bathroom. I’m still not sure of the exact reason.”
Jason felt compelled to leave, and the team had learned to trust his instincts when it came to such things.
After another tea break, the investigators decided to give the bathroom a second try. They didn’t much like the idea of leaving unfinished business with whoever had put up Jason’s hackles. Angie, Eileen, Carol, Jason, and Phil all crammed themselves into the bathroom in what looked like a crazy game of Twister. Getting three people in there initially had been a challenge; nearly doubling that number was a real squash, but somehow the team managed it through a combination of standing, squatting, and leaning around the bathtub, toilet, and sink. Carol was the last person in. She carefully closed the door, which latched with a gentle click, shutting the team inside. Then she turned out the light.
For their part, Scott and Claire had both chosen to remain downstairs, keeping watchful eye over the entire house by way of the video monitors. There was also unspoken agreement that after his bizarre experience earlier by the fireplace in the children’s bedroom, it was probably not a good idea to let Scott go upstairs again.
For a short time, all was quiet inside the confines of the bathroom. Nothing stirred, other than the occasional rustle of an investigator shifting position in order to get more comfortable, and the steady, rhythmic breathing of six people waiting patiently in the dark.
Then the door latch raised itself.
From her vantage point right next to the door, Carol was looking right at it when it happened. At first she thought that her eyes must be playing tricks on her. The latch lifted itself up and dropped straight back down, as though somebody was trying to get into the room. One side of Carol’s body was in direct physical contact with the stout wooden door, and she actually felt it move.
Through the crack between the door and the frame, Carol saw what she thought was a person walking past, their shadowy figure blocking out the light on the landing for a split second as they passed between it and the bathroom door.
She threw the door open, half expecting to find either Scott or Claire standing on the other side of it, and yet she knew that it was impossible for a flesh and blood human being to climb those stairs without causing so much as a single creak or groan from the old wood.
Nobody was standing there. The upstairs landing was completely empty. Carol quickly checked that the door at the foot of the stairs was still shut, satisfying herself that nobody was lurking in either of the two bedrooms. Just as she had expected, the entire upper floor of the Cage was deserted.
Impressed, Carol closed the door again, making sure to latch it once more.
“Do you feel that?” one of the investigators asked. There were mumbled voices of assent from the rest of the team. The floor was vibrating. It was almost as if a mini-
earthquake was going on, causing the wooden planks to tremble beneath their feet. Downstairs in the Cage itself, Scott and Claire felt nothing at all. Nobody had been observed walking on the landing since the investigators had taken up residence in the bathroom either; Claire and Scott had both been watching carefully.
Eileen felt something touch her leg, giving her quite the scare. Despite the bathroom being almost completely blacked out, she was well aware of the positions of her fellow investigators, and remains convinced that it was not one of them who touched her. When asked, they all firmly denied having done so.
The rest of their session inside the bathroom proved uneventful, and so Carol and Angie decided to relocate to the children’s bedroom. A number of taps and bangs were heard while they were sitting in the darkness there, many of which seemed to originate inside the cupboard by the fireplace. When the investigators checked it thoroughly, the cupboard turned out to be completely empty.
After they had been in there for a few minutes, the ladies reported seeing a tall shadow figure flitting past the drawn curtains. It seemed as if it was inside the room with them, but there were no other physical signs of its passage, such as a draft, breeze, or drop in the temperature. Did they both truly catch sight of one of the denizens of the Cage, or were their eyes simply playing tricks on them?
Not all of the team’s experiences that night were as subjective as catching a glimpse of this shadow figure. Shortly before the end of their investigation, Claire was sitting at the wooden table in the Cage itself when she suddenly heard the chains rattling gently on the wall. This is a phenomenon that many visitors to the Cage have reported experiencing, and when one considers the relative weight of the iron chains, it is extremely difficult to debunk by attributing it to breezes, drafts, or the vibration caused by traffic passing along Colchester Road outside.
Reaching for her camera, she began to snap a sequence of photographs. She covered the kitchen and the Cage itself before moving on into the front room, where Kenneth (their driver for the return trip) was fast asleep on the couch. She also took photographs of the rear atrium and stairwell. Conditions were very low-light, and most of the building was in heavy shadow.
Though she had seen nothing unusual with the naked eye, Claire was to get quite a surprise when she checked her photographs afterward. The shadowy figure of what appears to be a tall adult male could clearly be seen on one of the images standing in the doorway at the base of the staircase and tentatively poking his head around the corner.
The question must be asked: Who was this shadowy man at the foot of the staircase? Several obvious possibilities suggest themselves. Firstly, could it be the jailer, the same dark entity that had terrorized Vanessa and visitors to the Cage when she lived there? One would think that, based upon his blatantly aggressive actions in the past, he would be more than willing to appear in a photograph if the opportunity were to present itself.
Alternatively, what about Judge Bryan Darcy, the man who had tried the St Osyth witches and condemned two of them to their deaths? Scott and Jason’s disturbing experience upstairs would lend credence to that theory, but it must be pointed out that to the very best of our historical knowledge, Judge Darcy never visited the Cage in person. He would have had no reason to, for the accused prisoners would have been brought to him before his court at nearby Chelmsford.
A third, equally disturbing possibility also suggests itself. The staircase is where a former owner of the Cage sadly took his own life by hanging himself from a beam at the very top. Was it possible that his spirit still remained earthbound there, having never left the home in which he was so unhappy during his lifetime?
The truth is that we will probably never know for sure.
“I have to point out that we hadn’t locked the back door,” Claire admitted, “so it’s possible that somebody randomly wandered in from outside. Maybe on the way back from the pub.”
While technically true, such an explanation seems highly unlikely. Even leaving aside the fact that nobody heard the back door open, how reasonable is it to contend that a drunken intruder would enter the house, lurk in the stairwell long enough to be photographed, and then leave again, all without anybody catching sight or sound of them and without leaving any trace of their presence whatsoever? It is also worth mentioning that a member of East Drive Paranormal was assigned to watch out for potential activity on the video monitors during the course of the investigation, adding an extra layer of protection against unwanted visitors of the physical variety.
When comparing notes at the end of the investigation, most of the investigators agreed that they had not liked the feel of the staircase in the slightest. It had felt fundamentally wrong somehow, in some indefinable way.
Carol related to the team that she had picked up on the identity of some of the spirits of the Cage. One whose presence she felt very strongly was that of Ursula Kempe. This may have been validated by Phil, who was using a computer application named Ethereal, which the application designers claim will allow users to interact with spirits by means of radio signals. Such applications and devices have generated a great deal of controversy among the members of the paranormal research community since their inception, with some maintaining that they do exactly what their designers say they can do, whereas their critics insist that all that is really being heard is white noise and random, meaningless sounds that the listener fools themselves into believing are meaningful messages.
Whichever side of the debate that you happen to come down on, it is safe to say that the jury is still out on spirit boxes and their purported ability to communicate with the dead. When Phil fired up his device inside the Cage, one of the words that came through happened to be a name that is rather uncommon in modern-day England … Ursula.
Carol also believes that she sensed the energy of a child, one that she claims is trapped inside the children’s bedroom, unable to move on. The spirit child gives the impression of being a little girl who is still searching for her mother, hundreds of years after both of their deaths. Looking back at some of the activity that took place inside the Cage during Vanessa’s tenure, we can see that the running footsteps of a child were heard coming from the upstairs bedrooms on more than one occasion. This phenomenon was reported by multiple witnesses. Was the young girl the daughter of one of the accused St Osyth witches, either imprisoned in the Cage alongside her mother, or perhaps allowed to visit on occasion while her mother was tried by Judge Darcy?
Perhaps most intriguing of all was Carol’s report of the spirit of an elderly male, one who was deeply attached to the Cage and did not wish to leave under any circumstances. She sensed that he had owned the building at some point during its long history, and that he wanted everybody else to leave so that he could enjoy its peace and quiet all by himself.
Last, but by no means least, is the spirit of the man who used to be the jailer. Both Carol and Jason picked up on the presence of this particular entity, the dark force who seems to lie behind most of the negative, frightening, and violent activity within the Cage. He does not like to show himself plainly, as some of the other spirits are willing to, but rather he prefers to lurk in the shadows, playing mind games with visitors and attempting to generate as much fear as possible.
The men and women of East Drive Paranormal packed up their gear and left shortly after two o’clock the following morning, having spent the better part of eight hours inside the Cage. It was a one-night prison sentence that none of them would ever forget.
Nor does their story quite end there. In the days and weeks that followed, Angie experienced a considerable run of bad luck. She wasn’t feeling quite her usual self, instead becoming unusually moody and low of spirit. For several weeks, she felt increasingly emotional and severely depressed.
Angela and Jason both told her (independently of one another) that she had picked up an attachment during her night spent investigating the Cage, and she had brought it back home with her.
An attachment tends to be a spirit, often (but not exclusively) a negative one, that somehow grafts itself to a living person when they visit a haunted location and then piggybacks along with them when they leave. They are often described as a combination of spiritual hitchhikers and parasites, particularly the negative entities, which some people believe will draw on the life energy of their living host and use it for sustenance.
Angie worked with a friend who was also a medium in order to rid herself of her unwanted guest. At the time of writing she is feeling much better. The men and women of East Drive Paranormal feel a compulsion to return to the Cage when the opportunity presents itself, because many of them hold the very strong belief that their team has unfinished business to take care of, with whoever—or whatever—still haunts the old witches’ prison.