The Priory Barn

7th June 2014,

On Saturday 7th June, our investigations took us to The Priory Barn. Our team for the night was Maria, Loretta, Ben, Matt, Dave, myself, Nat, Lesley, Andrew, Hannah and Emma.

History

The Priory Barn was a tithe barn formerly in the grounds of the Priory it is late medieval and altered towards the street where it is divided into 2 storeys. Now owned and renovated by the Bradford on Avon Preservation Trust the Barn is used for Trust events, but can also be hired for private functions. It is a Grade: II*listed building.

The Barn isn’t a huge building. The floor space consists of a kitchen and large foyer on the ground floor and a larger function room on the second floor. After we held an energy building exercise to get us all focused in the main function room we decided to get the investigation underway. We set up a Ouija Board experiment down stairs and a table tipping exercise on the floor above. Our team split into 2 with Maria taking Loretta, Ben, Matt, Andrew and Lesley downstairs and I, Dave, Nat, Hannah and Emma stayed upstairs.

We positioned ourselves around the table and began to call out. It wasn’t long before we got the familiar creeks and knocks that you hear when the energy starts building in the room. We started to hear distinct knocks from the table which appeared to happen after a question was asked (as if it was a direct response). I am still very open minded when it comes to table tipping. I have done a lot of research on the phenomena to try and find an explanation to what exactly is going on. I kind of accept that table tipping can be influenced by micro mannerisms to a certain extent; however, I still find it hard to accept this as an explanation when you get the full on loud bangs and knocks coming from the table and then the table suddenly decides to shoot off to one side. If this was caused by all of us around the table influencing it with our micro mannerisms then surely that is demonstrating a form of ESP for us all to intuitively work together to get these sort of results? Anyway, I digress. We found that the table seemed to be dragged to a certain part of the room and then stop. Once it had reached this spot we wouldn't get any more real responses from our questions (unless we took the table back to where it originally was). When we did this it would then slide back to this position again. One of the team started to feel very emotional in a sad way. They couldn’t explain why but as soon as they had shared this emotion with us, the sad feeling disappeared. The team member who had been affected exclaimed that “that was Weird”.

I decided to change my approach in trying to communicate with the energy we had made contact with and instead of asking questions, I said out loud what I felt that the energy was and what had happened to them. I don’t claim to be a medium; I just was speaking what was coming to my mind. With that the table suddenly lifted up at one corner and slammed back down on the floor with a very loud bang. “Ooops, I seem to of hit a nerve” I said. I did not want to make any energy or spirit person angry and apologised if they felt I was being disrespectful. With this we decided to take a break and then change rooms. A few days later, we found out something regarding the function room that is not well known and would explain the odd and suddenly aggressive feel to the energy. The facts surrounding what we know are sensitive so I am unable to report them in a public domain.

The ground floor.

We decided to try one of our newer pieces of equipment alongside the Ouija board experiment. We have a device called a ghost talker ii. It is an early version of the PX Olivus device they use on Ghost Adventures. Again, I stress that this is an experimental device. I do not mind using devices in experiments, however, I do take any results we may get using them with a very large pinch of salt.

With the Ouija Board, I am also very sceptical. I think there is more opportunity with this type of experiment for people to cheat or more openly try to influence the glass. Having said that, you can usually tell if anybody is trying to cheat as their own mannerisms and body language can give it away. As our team have been working together for a number of years, we trust each other. Also, I usually find that it takes longer to get the energy going for a Ouija board or glass divination experiment. Surprisingly though, we found that we got a response from the glass after just a few minutes of concentrating and asking out. Interestingly enough, The Ghost Talker ii which had been quiet suddenly started to try and make words when the glass started to move. I must confess that this did make me (and a few others) jump. From our experiment, we did get a few names which we can verify. What I can tell you is the surname is a very old Bradford – on – Avon Family, who lived somewhere in the 1700’s, however, I am unable to give the name for respect of the living ancestors still in the town. We learned that they had, had a very successful military career and gave the different (old) spelling of the surname (which if any of us had been cheating, would have not given). While researching our findings the next day, I was so surprised to find that a lot of what we had written down from our experiment did tally with actual facts. Some of it I couldn’t verify but even so, I was amazed. A lot of the time when we do a Ouija board experiment, a lot of the ‘facts’ we get turn out to be un-traceable and so therefore, we are unable to verify our findings. However, every now and then we do get a thread that actually turns out to be true.

I had to make my excuses and leave the investigation at this point as I needed to get my son from the sitter. From what I understand, the team then joined back up and carried on upstairs for a while. They got reasonable success from their séance experiment though I have been informed that the energy was quite weak.