last night i had the opportunity to do a ghost hunt in the ye olde salutation inn which is one of the oldest pubs in nottinghamshire.
alright so i began my night but taking my sweet ass time getting there. as i arrived everyone was heading into the caves to begin. roz was really nice and greeted me right away, taking me down after everyone. we all were led into the bottom most cave where we did the normal safety and behaviour talk. activity already started up as a few people felt as though they were being touched (even a skeptic said he felt touched which was really weird for him). the touching thing i’m a bit skeptical about just because it was the beginning of the night so nerves and excitement were settling in so the slightest draft could make your hair move and people just take it as a spirit because they expect it.
after we did that we got a super brief history of the sal just so we knew how far back these spirits could be coming from and jumped right into it. first lisa split us up and my group went with roz to see the other caves. i met laura and zoe at this point along with marc and rob. rob was laura’s husband and marc was zoe’s brother. they took me in and made me a part of their little group which was so nice although everyone was commending me for coming on my own. we did a bit of a brief tour of the caves when zoe suddenly said her stomach was aching horribly and as her pain went away another woman suddenly got a sick feeling in her stomach. everyone described them as ‘labour pains’. i didn’t so much have a stomach ache as i did get the onset of a bad migraine for about five minutes when it suddenly disappeared.
after that we went back down to the bottom cave to switch off groups. my group stood in a circle conducted by laura who cast a protection spell for us. after that we got to work with dowsing rods which were so cool! i want to get myself a pair they were so fun to try out although marc was laughing at me because my ‘no’ signal was the two rods crossing themselves so far it was like they were trying to cut my neck off. after we played with the dowsing rods for a bit everyone came back down and we turned off all the lights. the cave got really dark. everyone was sitting down around the edge and we started to call on spirits. one spot in front of laura and i got so cold but only in one place. i even had marc test it out. being in the dark for so long was strange because it’s hard to tell what’s your eyes playing tricks on you or what’s your imagination and most especially: what’s real. people were saying they were seeing faces and frankly so was i but i don’t know if that was just my eyes going all weird in the dark or whether it was true.
at one point though i did see a weird darker shadow go at laura and she said she felt threatened and that someone was standing right over her. lisa explained that when the lights go out that’s as dark as our vision gets so when we see dark shadows it has to be something cos it’s impossible for our vision to darken itself, it actually lightens itself which explains why you eventually ‘adjust’ to the darkness. i also saw the face of a man wearing a beaked mask which i explained to be similar to the types worn by the doctors during the bubonic plague outbreak. it turns out the cave was used to store bodies during the plague so that was a bit spooky. something also threw a stone at one of the girls. she screamed and we turned on the torches and she found a stone laying right beside her where it had landed. no one could’ve gotten up to find a stone because you would’ve heard it and we were all sitting so close together someone would’ve felt the other person’s arm move. we threw the stone back and tried to make them do it again but nothing happened.
i got a really bad wash over of being angry at one point while we were down in the dark. i felt as though someone close to me (and let me just say i’ve always said i’m empathic and very sensitive to the emotions of others. i pick up on them really easily and they affect me quite heavily) was very, very, very pissed off. i had to like sit with my head in my hands cos i just felt so mad. at one point too we all began experiencing ‘loss of vision’ where it felt like our eye sight had gone completely. i could’ve sworn at one point that had they turned the lights on i would’ve still been unable to see anything because my eyes were just so messed up at that point.
eventually lisa asked us all to be quiet so we could see if we could hear anything really spooky but people kept talking and describing what they were feeling. i wasn’t sure if i had been thinking it myself or if someone else had said it but i distinctively heard “you’re not going to hear anything if you don’t shut the fuck up.” i didn’t think anyone else had heard it so i decided to keep it to myself when later during break someone else mentioned how she had heard someone say that and she had assumed it was her brother but he denied having said it. asking around we found no one had said it so that was particularly strange. going back down into the caves we continued to talk and experience a bunch of other things until lisa decided to split us up into small groups again.
i went upstairs to the second floor cave with laura, zoe, rob and marc. marc decided he wanted to go down the forgotten stairwell by himself and see if he could get any readings on the k2 meter while laura, zoe, rob and i were doing a vigil in this little room a stone’s throw from him. and suddenly while we were talking this white light appeared on the wall. so we asked rob if it was a reflection of something coming from downstairs because whatever they had been doing was reflecting up at us occasionally (and they were being very loud!) but he said there was no lights so we were like ‘oh man this is something’ so we got talking more to see if we could get an answer and i said it looked like a smear of blood on the wall when the light suddenly got brighter in response. the three of us all screamed and rob stood up to see what we were seeing and he blocked the source of the light haha it was fake but we nearly pissed ourselves in fright!
after that we decided there was nothing happening in that spot so laura and zoe went over to this little alcove by rosie’s toys while rob and i stood at the top of the stairs talking to marc who hadn’t gotten much. the k2 was sitting at orange but occasionally fluctuating back down to green (nothing). so he said he was going to go and suddenly the reader went off to orange again so he said he’d stay there a bit. we taunted the ghost because i knew there was a dark presence down there (will post pix) so we assumed it was male but when that didn’t elicit a reaction we thought hm maybe it’s a child. so i tossed marc a teddy and he tried ‘playing’ with it but again nothing happened so he came back up. as he was coming up he set the teddy on the lower ledge and left it.
at that point we all went upstairs (we meaning the entire group, all 22 of us) and started doing vigils in the main pub. we had ouiji boards and tables out for table tipping but i was finding i was getting nothing. it was quite disheartening because i usually always get responses on ouiji boards but not this time. so i moved around like a social butterfly and saw everything. down in the cellar though my shoulder started to ache like i’d dislocated it or something and i got a sort’ve sense that i was picking up on something. someone had been tortured and hurt down here and roz mentioned there was a woman who was in labour down in the cellar. but before she mentioned anything else i knew immediately that her heart had broken in some way and at the thought of the baby i was like ‘she miscarried’ but roz said the baby was born stillborn because she’d been tortured by this man.
after that we left the cellar and a lot of people were up on the second floor doing a ouiji session that seemed to be working. we went up to watch them and rob was walking around trying to get a read on his k2 when i mentioned that lisa had told me to go to the ladies toilet and try a vigil there. so i took him over to the women’s washroom and went to open the door but it felt as though some adult was leaning against it. immediately i assumed it was the gentleman i had first gone into the bathroom with earlier who had returned for a second try so i jostled the door a bit to try and show him i wanted to come in and then pushed again but once more all my weight and the bloody thing wouldn’t move. so i was like okay maybe it’s stuck and checked to see but the door was cracked open like a centimeter and i was like okay that’s really weird. i went to shove again, still thinking it was caught on something and the door flew open with ease and i propelled myself into the room right into the next wall. rob saw the whole thing cos i turned and i was like ‘that door wasn’t opening a minute ago right?’ and he was like ‘you were shoving for all you were worth’ - cos i was. we checked all the stalls but no one was there and there was only one exit.
after that marc and i decided to go back down to the caves because we both felt nothing was really happening up in the main bit of the pub. we both went down and sat by the forgotten stairwell we were going to do a vigil but both ended up talking about why we were there and what we wanted out of the experience. it was nice, just chatting we bonded quite a bit in that 30 minutes alone. when the rest of the group reappeared to go down into the bottom cave for the last vigil we stood and saw that the teddy had been replace on the upper most part of the ledge. we asked the group if they’d touched the teddy and everyone claimed that they hadn’t.
we then got the seven men in the group to form a circle, seven’s a powerful supernatural number and accordingly there were 7 evil men who used to gather in the caves to do rituals, and we put a woman in the middle. we then recited the lord’s prayer to get the ghosts going and the room definitely got darker and colder. the girls all didn’t feel good when they stood in the middle because the women were always sacrificed by these men apparently but the guys said they didn’t really feel anything happening to them. after a while we realized nothing was happening and the lights came back on and we all clapped in thanks for a good night. lots of things happened, some i think were debateable but then others i know happened and i don’t kid about this stuff i take it very seriously.
