Ghost Hunt

It was 11pm on a cold, windy night as I and Ripley and Heanor News photographer Lindsay Colbourne entered the Cock Hotel in Ripley. We were not there for a lock in, but to meet the Alfreton Paranormal Group for a ghost hunt.

Over the years there have been many reports of ghostly goings-on at the pub which dates back to the tenth century, including the sensing of the spirit of DJ Darren Hunt.

Darren, 22, was killed in a car crash two years ago and according to staff and friends at the pub his spirit regularly haunts the place. Pub manager Marc Watson has heard many accounts of spooky sightings and sounds in the pub, adjoining club and upstairs bar. He said the spirit
of a young boy with cigarette burns had been seen by a number of staff sitting on top of a stack of water bottles. Marc has even seen the boy, who was last spotted a year ago, himself. He said: “It’s like an image, you blink and it’s gone.”

Marc thinks the presence of the paranormal group, which formed a year ago and has carried out a number of vigils at the pub may have led to the recent inactivity of the ghost.
As the lights were turned down at the start of our search for paranormal activity, one of the members Roy Brown-Lowe showed me a video filmed on his mobile phone at a 2,000 year-old graveyard. He described what he captured as a surge of energy.

It was like something out of a horror film, the images showed what looked like child spirits surrounded in a green glow chasing each other. Were we going to see anything as spectacular as this I wondered? I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Of course, even if we didn’t see anything there was still the possibility of hearing, or feeling something. The most active time for
spirits, according to Roy is between the hours of 1am and 3am, so to be honest we were a little early.

Accompanying Roy that night were group members Stephen Walker, Stephen Elliott and medium David Williams. Stephen Walker operated a EVP (electronic voice phenomonen) device which was constantly recording and was run through a computer and analysed
afterwards to see if any noises below the level of those that can be heard by the human ear were picked up.

Although we couldn’t hear them at the time Roy told me the next day that the EVP device had picked up some whispering voices. Stephen Elliott operated a video camera to film the whole night. He was hoping to pick up any unusual spots of light, otherwise knows as orbs.
The medium David’s role was to see if he could sense any spirits. On previous occasions he had seen bodies in the cellar and believes that they could be linked to bare-knuckle fighting which took place at the building many years ago.

He has been what he calls ‘helping people’ for the past five years and first discovered he had ‘the gift’ at the age of five when he saw a group of people in his bedroom. His mum reassured him it was just a nightmare but when he went to the bathroom the people were still there.
He said: “I have used it all my life in terms of knowing things that are going to happen but it was only five years ago that I decided to do use it for charity through medium nights.”
All money raised from events set up by the paranormal group also go to charity. More