Shrewsbury Prison has been reported as one of the world’s most haunted places. Given its history of public executions until 1886 from its opening in the late 1700s, and then continuing to execute inmates away from the public into the 1960s, and having housed some of society’s worse criminals such as Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper), I can understand why people may think it’s one of the most haunted places; the place is soaked in heavy, oppressive energy. I went into this investigation to document these claims and learn from the spirits what kept them there.
In the first session, we were in a large room beneath the workshop. I felt unbalanced standing in this room, and the floor seemed leveled. In the centre of the room, we had set an EMF metre, k2s, and cat balls. We stood around the perimeter. For ages, we asked questions, exploring ways to get a response from any spirits; it seemed very quiet. Eventually, we heard a large bang come from the workshop above. That was it until all the lights on the EMF metre suddenly flashed blindingly. There was a small bang coming from the stairs. So, I volunteered to sit on the steps. Sat on the steps, I heard a few bangs from upstairs, and I could feel a cold blast of air floating down the stairs. I didn’t immediately conclude it was paranormal as it could have been a breeze, causing a door to bang slightly. We were here for about half an hour before taking a history tour of the prison.
I didn’t know it then, but I was about to capture the most exciting photo of the night in cell block A. In cell block A, we stopped to talk about the history in this block. When we had stopped, I took three photos, standing absolutely still. In the second photo, I captured a massive ball of white light on the overhead gantry. It seemed like a prison officer was standing on the balcony watching us stand around as a big group chatting away. If it was a prison officer, I believe he would see the prison as it was in active operation. From that point of view, it would be unnatural in a prison and draw a lot of attention. It’s precisely what I think was happening.
After the walk around, having felt many different residual energies fighting one another in the separate rooms, we headed to the indoor gallows and the room where you spent your final hours. With the team divided in two between the rooms, we contacted the spirits through table tipping. I conducted the table tipping in the room where you spent your final hours before you were taken to be hung. This is where you would be served your last meal and, within reason, could have whatever you wanted. To the table, and the table took minimal effort to start to rock, and as I gave clear instructions to the spirits on how to move it, it began to lift clear onto two legs, then one leg. To really build the energy, I asked the spirit to spin the table on one leg. It immediately span really fast. Then I asked the spirit to walk the table to the red light we had placed in the corner of the room. It took a little while for the spirit to work out how to do it, but eventually, we had the table walking around the room. Then I asked the spirit to walk the table to where we needed to go. Oddly, it walked into a small walk-in cupboard. Later that night, I discovered another group’s table had done the same. I have a couple of theories. One, it was trying to take us to the gallows. Two, when they had died, they had had some personal effects left in that cupboard, and the energy of the personal item connected them to the cupboard.
The energy was very high, and the response time to questions was immediate, so I asked the spirits to rock the table towards me for yes and away from me for no. We wondered if we were talking to a prisoner, and the table moved to yes. However, when I asked if the spirit was here in the 1900s, the table seemed to rock back and forth between yes and no. I then asked another similar question, and it had the same response. I questioned if we actually had two spirits around the table, so I asked, and we got a yes. The answers became apparent as soon as I asked them to answer one at a time. One of the spirits was female, and the other male. They had been hung here for two separate crimes, one for theft, the other for murder. One had been here in the 1800s, and the other in the 1900s. This was all found out through the spirits rocking the table. Reading this, you may think I am crazy, but I would tell anyone to try ghost hunting and table tipping simultaneously. You will be genuinely amazed by how you can communicate with spirits.
In the next session, we headed to cell block C. This was the cell block where the high-risk inmates were housed. We conducted the first Ouija board of the night on the ground floor. The planchette was immediate in its response. At first, we had two spirits talking to us. One we learnt was a male prison officer and the other a male prisoner. The prison officer said he had been murdered; however, the whereabouts of the murder and who did it were unclear. The only thought I had was the prisoner we were speaking to responsible? The prison officer left after this, so we focused on who this prisoner was. I asked which his cell was, and he told us it was 107. We were confused because cell 107 doesn’t exist. So I wondered if the cell numbers had changed since the spirit’s time. He responded, telling us the cell numbers remained the same. Rapidly thinking, the question was asked: had you been in more than one cell. He said yes. So then I asked him to move the planchette to the numbers on the board to tell us the cells he had been in. First, he moved to the number seven, then to one, then zero. So, in the first place, he was telling us that he was in cell 10 and cell 7, which is what 107 meant. Finding this out made things more interesting for what we had learnt on the walk around. In cell 10, we had learnt that probably the most famous spirit in the building was imprisoned. Famous for the wrong reasons! To this day, people who often walk into his cell feel like they have been punched or have a feeling on their temples, like hands clamping around their head, squeezing like a vice. He is remembered by the nickname he was given. His nickname was The Butcher. He was arrested and executed at the prison for the murder of a woman. Though many argued, believing he hadn’t committed the murder. With all that in mind, I asked if he had another name that the inmates called him. The planchette moved to B…U…T…C…H…E…R. At this point, everyone gasped slightly.
We didn’t have much time left for this Ouija board session, so we closed it down and moved on to our own investigation time. With the freedom to go wherever we wanted, I decided we should head back to cell block A, where previously I caught that giant ball of light. We did another Ouija board session in cell 23. Boy, were we in for a shock! The activity on the board commenced immediately. Straight away, I asked if he could spell his name. He told us his name was Auther, which is a name I had not heard before. Then we asked if he could spell his surname, and he spelt Sutcliffe. When that name came up, we all were shocked. Next, we asked if he was related to Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper). He said yes. It was Nic who then questioned if it was actually Peter speaking to us. We got a yes. Now, this could be just one of the inmates trying to scare us, thinking it was funny, but unfortunately, we have no way as of yet of proving this. It was at this point I heard a faint whistle. I only heard it, but luckily, my EVP recorder, which had been recording all the time had picked it up very clearly. He also told us he was here in 1969 and aged forty. I did my research, and unfortunately, it didn’t add up. He was arrested in 1981, aged fifty-five years old. So my thoughts are, was it a spirit pretending to be someone else just to try and scare us, or were we talking to multiple spirits simultaneously, and they were all trying to answer? It’s too hard to say. I asked if he had any messages for us, and his reply resulted in me immediately closing the Ouija board session! He spelt, “Get with u.” From my many years of experience, that is very bad and should never be agreed to. My experience tells me it is a spirit trying to attach itself to you. This is why I took charge, closed the board down, and moved us to a completely different prison area.
We went to cell block C, hoping to investigate cell 10. However, it was occupied. We headed to a quiet cell on the far side of the block. In this cell, we conducted another Ouija board, making contact with a male called Mimei. When he spelt his name on the board, we thought hard of a name he could be trying to spell. In the end, we came to no conclusion. So, instead of trying to think of a name it could be, we simplified our result by asking where he is from. He responded, telling us he was Dutch. Things got interesting when we asked how long he had been here. He told us he had been here six hundred and nine years, which was well before the prison stood on the land. But when we asked what year he was here, he said it was 8106! If this information was accurate, we were talking to a time traveller, which I think is highly unlikely. Nic followed up on this date, asking with curiosity if he was using the Mayan calendar. He did reply, saying yes, but now, a few days later, I think he was just agreeing to anything we said, and nothing he told us was true. That’s my opinion based on my experience. After this, none of the responses we got seemed coherent.
Moving into the final session, we headed to cell block A. In the middle of the cell block, we sat as a large group surrounded by K2s, cat balls, and EDIs. Except for one of the cat balls flashing after a lot of calling out to the spirits, the other equipment remained quiet; you could feel, with it being the early hours of the morning, the energy was dropping. However, we hadn’t given up, so we tried the Estis method. For those unfamiliar with this experiment, it is where you listen to a radio designed to sweep through the radio frequencies at a rapid pace for spirit voices. To make the experiment more credible, you listen to the radio through headphones so you can’t hear what questions those around you ask. On this occasion, many of the occurring words had no correlation to any question asked. The first word we did get that correlated was the name Francis, which directly responded to the question, “Can you tell us your name?” We had a few others such as flowers come up, which also had some correlation to the questions we were asking. Then we heard a few bangs and whistles, but it was hard to say where it had come from in this massive cell block. Before we finished the investigation, we had one more outstanding response using the Estis method. We had asked what the spirit had been locked up for, and it responded on the radio, saying many crimes. We tried to follow this up, and we got no more results. This brought the investigation to an end.
To conclude this investigation, I would say there is a lot of energy within the walls of Shrewsbury Prison; however, that is not surprising given the prison’s dark history of public executions, overcrowding, and housing some of the country’s worse criminals, such as Peter Sutcliffe. The night certainly saw a lot of activity. But having said that, I believe we only saw a small percentage of the action that happens there. As much as I would love to go back to prove my point and study the full extent of the activity, I would probably advise anyone not to investigate there too much; having been a former prison and having some exceptionally dark history, that creates a lot of dark energy which dark spirits feed off. It is highly likely there are some very dark, malevolent spirits there. That is why I advise you to use extreme protection or not investigate the place. It’s onto the following investigation and hopefully making a breakthrough with answers to the afterlife.
Phantom Echoes Paranormal 
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