Sooner than I thought, I returned to Shrewsbury Prison for an investigation that would leave me shocked and speechless!
The night started with a walk around the buildings. As we walked around, I could clearly feel the different energies drawing me to different areas. I felt the strongest areas were the ground floor of cell block C and the courtyard outside. The feelings were very different from the last time I was here. Last time, the courtyard had felt quiet. So, I decided that this was an area that should be investigated later.
After the walk around, we headed to the prison chapel. In a large group, we used REM PODs, K2 metres, REM bear, and the Alice box to try a watch-and-wait experiment. The general feeling in the room was pretty quiet, but that soon changed when I felt an energy come into the room, and the equipment started to be affected. At first, it was the REM bear that started to flash. This was just after we had set it up and shown the spirits how to use it. For it to be triggered, it has to be touched. When you set the bear up, all the sensors and lights come on briefly to show it is working. When it triggered, only half of the bear lit up. So, who was touching it?
That was just the start of the activity, as soon one of the EMF metres turned blue on the far side of the room, followed by a cat ball flashing. Thinking back to the activity, we might have communicated with a child spirit. The activity seemed more playful than wanting to respond to most of our questions. The only time I noticed a truly clear response to our questions was when I asked if you could flash the light close to the person you want to talk to. There was very little time between my question and the response. The light closest to my team turned from green to blue. We tried to get more of an idea of who the spirit wanted to talk to, but we got no more answers.
It is amazing how quickly time can go when investigating the paranormal. We left the chapel and headed for the hangman’s room. We conducted an Ouija board here. The energy felt slightly heavy but not as heavy as in other places. I started to call out to the spirits to interact with us through the board. There was no response. I tried and tried multiple times speaking loudly. I was ready to call it and move the Ouija board to another room when the planchette crept slowly forward. You can never get sick of the feeling when a planchette starts to move. Not wanting to waste any time or the spirits’ energy, we quickly introduced ourselves, showed the spirit how to use the board, and began our questions. Asking one letter at a time, we asked the spirit to spell their first name. The planchette slid gently over the letter “T.” The spirit followed our instructions as we asked for the next letters until we had the name Thomas. Earlier on the walk around, the name Thomas had appeared on the Alice box app on the phone. To me, that says that the spirit of Thomas knew this conversation would happen before it actually did, or another spirit was telling us who we would be speaking with tonight! We continued to ask what his surname was, and gradually, the planchette moved over the letters “S…M…I…T…H”. So we were talking to a Thomas Smith. I turned the questions to try and find out when he was at the prison. With a name and date, there is a good chance I would be able to find information on exactly who Thomas Smith was. The date he gave us was 1867. With still some time left, we tried to find out why he was there. All we learnt was that he was an inmate. Any other questions we asked to do with his crime, the planchette moved very hesitantly, swirling around the board. The energy also changed and felt uncomfortable, which told me he wasn’t happy talking about his crime. I didn’t ask any more questions about it. Perhaps he regrets what he did now that he has passed on to the next life? We shut the Ouija board down and headed for a break. Later on that night, we managed to find details of Thomas Smith, who was hung at the prison in 1807; a 6 does look a little like a 0 in a dimly lit room. Was this proof of who we spoke to?
After a break, we headed to cell block C. We tried our hands at table tipping on the ground floor. Half of us went into one of the cells, and the other half remained outside the cells. I remained outside the cells and spoke to the spirits to coax them out of their cells and all the other places they might be residing. Slowly, the table started to creak and tilt from the floor. I asked the table to tip onto two legs, and it did so. I asked the table to tilt onto one leg, and it did so! Before we knew it, the table was spinning on one leg. I asked the spirit to walk the table where it wanted us to go. Surely enough, the table began to creep down the cell block. It stopped in the middle of the floor, however. I wasn’t sure this was really where it wanted us to go or if the spirit was just playing. It certainly felt a very playful energy. As soon as I said to the spirit do you just want to play, the table shot across the floor and started spinning at a ridiculous speed. The fact we could hardly keep a finger on it shows that we weren’t faking it! The other group didn’t have much in the cells and came out of the cells to where we were getting lots of activity. Even with their table close to ours, it wasn’t tipping. It was then that I asked if the spirit could take the table to the other group and play with their table. The table started to slide in their direction, and it stopped when it got close to them. I tried to get it to tip again, but all the activity had stopped. The next thing I saw was their table tipping. I believe the spirit had jumped from our table to theirs exactly as I asked. However, there wasn’t much time left in this area.
With a chance to do our own investigations, we headed to cell block A. On the top floor, we took photos looking along the full length of the cell block after having tried a watch-and-wait experiment in a cell. None of our photos showed anything unnatural until almost the last photo. I still can’t explain what I captured. I have tried to recreate it with no such luck. With no more unexplainable photos appearing, we headed back down to the ground floor to conduct a watch-and-wait and Ouija board. However, it didn’t take long for us to get distracted as someone captured footage of a large orb floating towards the back of my head as we conducted the Ouija board. We shut the Ouija board down soon after it began, as the activity was quiet. We only managed to get a name, and that was Henry. The others wanted to try another table tipping session, so I tried that with them. Although we were only a few metres away from where we had just tried the Ouija board, the table tipped eagerly with the same energy as when it did in cell block C. It is weird how close the separate experiments can be together yet yield different responses. With hardly any effort required, the table span on one leg before it crashed to the ground. With so much energy, we now turned our efforts to try and get the table to levitate. To make our pressure on the table as light as possible, we placed only our pinkies on it. We tried and tried, and all that happened was the table tipped onto one leg and remained on the edge of falling to the floor.
With the last of our investigation time, we headed to the courtyard where I had felt a lot of heavy energy earlier. I decided an EVP session would be good. We stood in a circle asking the spirits if they could tell us their name if they were inmates and more. We listened to the recording straight away, and although we hadn’t caught any voices, the audio on my EVP recorder was popping in and out after every question like something was trying to communicate with us but didn’t quite have enough energy to do so. I definitely think that it was paranormal as my EVP recorder has never done that before, and it is very new, so there is no fault with the recorder. I have also used my EVP recorder since then, and there was no interference of any kind.
We regrouped for the final sessions. We headed back to cell block A. We conducted a glass divination experiment at the far end, at the bottom of the stairs to the four floors above us, surrounding ourselves with trigger objects. The movement of the glass on the table was immediate. They told us they were an inmate who was here in the 1900s. Though, as we tried to break it down to find the exact date, the glass didn’t move. It only moved again when we asked do you not want us to know when you were here with the answer yes. Suddenly, an ice-cold blast of air hit my right-hand side. With how localised the cold spot was, I definitely thought a spirit had come and stood next to me. I asked the spirit to move the glass to where they were standing around the table to confirm what I was feeling. Sure enough, the glass moved into the gap next to me. All we needed now was a name for this spirit. However, a sudden bang in the corner of the room, where nobody stood, caught my attention. Who was in the corner if the spirit we were talking to on the table was standing next to me? We asked the spirit on the table if the bang was another spirit. The answer was yes. We now turned our attention to the laser pen I had set up to try and see the spirits that were around us and communicating with us. I had positioned it mapping the back wall and the stairs. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next as I asked the spirits to walk down the stairs! With my own ears, I heard a very loud hiss come from the second floor, and I could account for where everyone was, and nobody was up there. It wasn’t a nice thing to hear; to me, it seemed like a threat. At first, with none of the others hearing it, I doubted my EVP recorder would have captured it, but when I listened back to the recorder, there it was as plain as day. Although chilling, this has to be among the best paranormal evidence I have captured to date.
After calming down a little after that experience, we returned to the laser pen. I asked again for the spirit to walk down the stairs, and as we all looked, we saw some of the green dots start to go out in a sequence like it was mapping footsteps going up the stairs. It continued for a while. I told everyone to take photos of this, and sure enough, in one photo, I captured a picture of the stairs where all the green dots had disappeared. So, who was on the stairs? We continued to watch as the lights started going out up and down the stairs. The best way I can explain it is someone pacing up and down a set of stairs. The spirit talking to us on the board confirmed it was someone walking up and down the stairs when we asked. Then the REM POD triggered on the other side of us about fifty metres along the cell block. That took our attention away from the stairs, and now our questions focused on discovering who that spirit was. However, we didn’t find out who this was as we had run out of time on this session. There was still another area left to investigate tonight, but I don’t see how anything could be as good as what we had just experienced. How wrong was I!
For the last part of the investigation, we headed to the processing room. This was the first room any inmate would see when brought into the prison. In this room, they were searched for any contraband and then accessed and taken to the cell block they would remain in based on how high risk they were. To the investigation, we set up a watch-and-wait experiment. On the counter, we placed several torches and the Alice box, and on the floor, we had K2 metres and REM PODs positioned from the doorway to the far end of the room. The moment we had set up, the corridor into this room was reported to be growing darker, and it continued to do so until you could hardly see down it. I was on the far side of the room, so I couldn’t see down the corridor, but to my eyes, the darkness was starting to creep into the room, the far back wall I struggled to see. The more questions we asked, the REM POD in the doorway started to trigger nonstop. Slowly, the activity moved around the room. After a short while, the torches on the counter were turning on and off on command, the K2s on the floor were now flickering, and the feeling in the air was growing heavier. The activity was so strong that it was hard to focus on all the equipment that had started to be affected. I wanted to try and capture some audio evidence of who was communicating with us, so I asked the spirit to copy me. I knocked three times on a wall, and not a second later, as clear as day, three precise knocks were answering. I knocked three times again, and several knocks responded straight away. It doesn’t matter how many years of investigating you have under your belt; you can never be prepared for amazing responses like that. We started to ask the Alice box questions as it started spitting out words. However, I didn’t think the responses corresponded with any of our questions. I think whoever or whatever was with us didn’t want us here and certainly didn’t want us asking questions. In what seemed a threat, the Alice box said a complete sentence, which is extremely rare. It said, “I can touch things!” After this, I felt the atmosphere become even heavier. It felt very angry in the room. Suddenly, one of the torches on the counter flew from the counter with aggression, slamming on the floor. We all jumped at the sudden, shocking evidence. What made this more incredible was the Alice Box saying that it could touch things just before the torch was thrown aggressively. This confirmed my thoughts that whoever it was was angered by our presence and constant questions and was trying to scare us out. In some ways, it had worked, as most of the group was now too scared to continue. So we called it a night.
To conclude this investigation, it has seen activity like I have never seen before. This location is ramping up to be one of the most haunted buildings in the United Kingdom. It has shown and taught me even more about the power of spirits. Where this power comes from, I don’t know, but that is my next step of discovery on my journey to uncover the afterlife. Since the investigation, I have shared the unexplainable photo I captured in cell block A with professionals in photographic evidence and cameras. They have not been able to explain what I captured, and now my photo is traveling around the paranormal world in search of an answer. The mystery deepens. I have a few vague thoughts about the photo, but I have no way of proving it. I will post the photo in the gallery. I would love to read your reactions and thoughts on it, so please give it a like and leave a comment. Now, I am preparing for the next investigation at Ripon Workhouse in a week.
Phantom Echoes Paranormal 
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