Guy’s Cliffe House is a rare treat in history. There are known records that reach all the way back to the Saxons of activity on the site of the current building. The site gets its name from the legendary Guy of Warwick, who is said to have retired to a hermitage that stood on the land. This is very strongly believed in, as in the chapel, there is a sandstone statue carved into the wall of Guy of Warwick, which is very old. The face of the statue has deliberately been removed, which could be a sign of Oliver Cromwell’s civil war; there are records of royalty having visited. A chantry had stood on the land founded from the legend of Guy of Warwick. In 1423, the chantry was established as the chapel of St Mary of Magdelene. The rock-carved stables and storehouses from the chantry remain today. The site fell into private hands with the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. It remained in private hands until WW1 when it was used as a hospital, and then in WW2 as a home for the evacuees. After this, the site was sold into small parts and had many uses, from a nursery to a stables, a riding school, and a pub. These still remain today. Unfortunately, the building sustained heavy damage in 1982 when film crews were filming The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes and a fire scene got out of control and set the building on fire. Since then, the building has remained a shell in most parts. With all this history, what would we discover in our investigation?
Our investigation began with a tour of the buildings. The room that interested me the most was the cave at the back of the property because nothing is known about what it was used for. There is what looks like a chimney or shaft carved deeply into the stone at the back and a few holes in the walls on both sides, which might have been for candles. We can only guess. While in the cave, we switched the torches off to truly experience no natural light. I am used to being in places with no natural light, as I do when caving. So when I started to feel dizzy and like I needed to hang onto someone or something, I was curious. I am not saying it is paranormal, but it was unusual. We got straight into the investigation after this.
We started in the stables with a watch-and-wait experiment. I think I can debunk most of the activity in the stables. We had the TAD flashing blue, indicating the air temperature was rapidly dropping. Standing by the door, I could feel a strong, icy breeze coming through the gaps around the door. As it was a small room with only one entrance, cold air would be forced to circle around it. In my conclusion, this was the cause for the TAD to flash blue to indicate the drop in temperature. The only other activity to note was the temperature sensor on the EDI flashing red, marking a significant increase in heat. That is more interesting as in a draftee room with no heating, you would expect it to flash blue. There was nothing else of interest after this, so we quickly moved on.
The next area we tried was one of the store rooms, and immediately, the energy felt completely different. To see if the spirits preferred a different method of communication, we tried a glass divination experiment. Not long after we started to call out, we heard thunderous bangs and thuds coming from just outside. We checked to see if anyone else was wandering around, perhaps moving something heavy, and we found no one. What was more curious was when I asked for the bangs to become louder, and a few minutes later, there was a noticeable change in the loudness of the bangs. Our attention was brought back to the glass as it started moving. To help us establish yes and no answers, we placed a white light on one side of the table and a red light on the other. White was the yes answer, and red was the no answer. Using this method, we quickly discovered the spirit was not connected to the land. This made us ask the question if the spirit had actually travelled here with any of us. The answer to this was a strong yes. We asked the spirit to move to the glass to the person they were connected to. Straight away, the glass moved to one of the women. However, she was reluctant to talk with the spirit, so I said goodbye to that spirit and focussed my energy on attracting a spirit from the building and land to come through.
In response to my demand, we heard many more bangs, and then there was the sound of footsteps and the rustle of clothes stepping down the few steps into the room. The glass then started to gently slide across the table. I asked the spirit if they were a different spirit, and the glass moved to the white light, meaning yes. We introduced ourselves to the spirit and began our questioning. The spirit was female and connected to the land we soon learnt. At first, finding out what she actually did here was hard. We asked if she was a visitor, farmer, maid, or owner. All of these were met with the glass moving to the red light. That got us thinking, but then we remembered that the military had requisitioned the buildings in WW1 to be a hospital and in WW2 to be a home for the evacuees. We asked if she was connected to either of the world wars, and she said yes. This was the moment of breakthrough, swiftly learning that she had served as a field nurse in WW1 and had been injured in January 1918. I then thought of a way to discover her initials. I read the alphabet and asked her to move the glass to the white light when I said the correct letter. The initials she gave were D.H. At this point, Nic had the name Daisy Hall come to her mind. We asked if Daisy Hall was her name, and the glass moved to yes. We had exhausted the information we could get from glass divination, so we left this area, asking her to speak to us later.
Our following location was the chapel on the upper floor. We set up a laser grid on the back wall and conducted an Ouija board in the centre of the room. We had intense activity immediately, but the responses made me think that the spirit wasn’t who they said they were. At first, they claimed to be four years old, then later, thirty-two years old, after I questioned them again. After that, I said goodbye to the spirit and reset to try and get a different spirit to come through. The planchette moved once more. Straight away, I knew it was a different spirit as the energy of the movement of the planchette was completely different. We asked for their first name, and the name they gave was Heike. We asked them to spell their name again as we didn’t understand. The planchette moved to the same letters. We learnt next that the spirit was female, had never visited the land or building, and had no connection to the land or building. This was extremely odd as to why the spirit was here. She wasn’t connected to anyone, as we checked. So, to make sense of things, we asked whether she had come from a different country and, if so, which country. In response, the planchette moved to yes, then to the letters, “A…U…S…T…R…A…L…I…A.” It still didn’t explain why this particular spirit would be here. What I learnt about this was that when I closed the board and reopened it, despite my intentions to reach out to those from the land, I opened a portal open to all spirits. This has given me ideas for the future when reaching out directly to those from the building I am investigating, but I will not mention them until I have tested them.
Since we had set up the laser grid, I decided to try and get some activity on that. I asked the spirit if she would walk in front of the green dots on the wall so we could see her. I tried several times with no results. She then told us she wanted Nic to sit by the green dots in the chair. We continued to watch the green dots, looking to see even the slightest of movements in the dots. There was nothing. I spoke to the spirit, asking how they would appear to us. They spelt out an amber ball on the board. I then asked if she would do this in her own time. She said yes. I took several photos and, in a later review, although small, I caught something I thought was pretty significant. There are two photos of interest. In the first one, two spherical balls of light appear in one corner right next to each other. In the second photo, you see them travelling in the same direction towards the camera, and one has changed colour to amber. Was this the spirit we had been talking to on the Ouija board? It likely was. I will post the photos on the gallery page for anyone who wants to see them.
We broke off to do our private investigation. Earlier, we had heard the wine cellar was very active, so that was our first point of call. We started with a watch-and-wait experiment. However, despite all the energy and effort I used to get the spirit to interact, this had no activity. The moment I tried an Ouija board, the planchette moved straight away. I asked straight away if the spirit didn’t want to use the equipment I had set up, and the spirit responded no. So, I moved on to finding out who they were. Nothing would prepare us for what happened next. Upon request, they spelt their name. It was Daisey Hall again. The energy of the movement on the planchette was so strong and precise. To confirm it was definitely her, we asked a few questions to see if she confirmed the same information to what she had told us earlier. Daisey told us she was a nurse in WW1. Then we started moving on to the questions we didn’t have an answer to. Through the use of the Ouija board, she told us she was twenty-four years old and had taken her life in 1919 by taking narcotics. With her being so willing to trust us with such delicate information, we pursued the cause that led her to take her own life; sometimes, a spirit just needs someone to listen to them to help them pass over. Once more, she was very forthcoming with the information she told us. We learnt that she had met a soldier in the war. He was one of her patients. Sadly, he died in the war from tetanus in 1918. Daisey was also injured in the war in 1918. When we were asking how she was injured, she spelt, “Shells hites killed NPB.” We asked what NPB meant, and she told us it meant noisy projectile bomber. With some more questions asked, we found out the shells had hit her unit, and she had been badly injured in her pelvis. The result of this injury was she could not walk anymore and could no longer work. It was a cross of her injury and losing her partner that caused her to take her own life. They both had been positioned in Naples.
At a couple of points in the Ouija board session, she spelt the word question without us having asked any question. We learnt that this was how she got our attention whenever she had a question for us. She did this multiple times as we helped to pass her over. As we were passing her over, she was struggling, and the questions were about how to pass over. I didn’t realise it then, but I was about to capture the most unbelievable evidence I have ever captured. I had recorded the whole Ouija board session on my EVP recorder. Listening back to it, I suddenly jumped and nearly fell off my seat. On the recording is a crystal clear and very loud female’s voice saying a sentence. I put the recording through my editing software just so I could slow the recording down a little to try and hear what was actually said. It sounded very much like, “I don’t want to know how’s Karen” at first, but on later review, I heard, “I want a new horse carriage.” As the recording is so clear, I have decided to post it on YouTube linked to a private link that can only be viewed by visitors to my website. Click this link to listen to the EVP: https://youtu.be/PmtiS3FM-14 .This is how I will post any future video or sound recordings to my site. I shall leave it up to you to make up your mind about what you hear. Please comment on the post, letting me know what you think you hear. We finished this Ouija board after finally managing to pass her over.
We headed down into the basement into one of the side rooms. Activity had been noted here earlier, so we went to see if the activity still resided. I set up some cat balls and a K2 metre and started with the table. The table took a little persuasion, but eventually, it tipped onto two legs. As we asked the spirit to move the table to where it wanted us to go, it twisted on the spot briefly and then stopped. I suspected the spirit didn’t have much energy as the table stopped moving after this movement. It took a while to get it moving again, and when it did, it only rocked gently for a long while before falling over against my leg. My leg was the only thing keeping it from hitting the floor. I had wanted to try to use the table to get some yes and no answers by tipping the table in either direction for yes and no, but with the rapidly decreasing spirit energy, I felt it wouldn’t bring any success. I left the table tipping there. While working with the table, one of the cat balls behind us flashed several times. We can confirm that it wasn’t caused by the movement of the table or us, as afterwards, we walked right around the cat ball, and it didn’t flash once.
With the energy struggling, to try and give the energy a boost, we decided as a team to do a séance. We sat around a large table and spread our hands so that our thumbs touched one another and our little fingers touched the persons next to us. We took a nice, calming, deep breath in and out to clear our minds. Then we started to call out. As trigger objects, we placed cat balls and a K2 metre on the table, with a doll fitted with touch sensors. The doll lights up, cackles, and walks about when it is touched. The first thing we noticed was some bangs that seemed to be emanating from the next room. It was a cross between the sound of someone dragging something heavy and someone walking about kicking things. We certainly heard very clear footsteps more than once. The sounds had not been there before we had begun the séance either. Our attention was suddenly pulled to the center of the table as the doll lit up and started to walk around the table. With its cackling and the inky blackness of the room, it was creepy watching it go crazy on the table. To make things creepier, we had placed another doll at the far end of the room, away from us, and that started to light up, cackle, and walk towards us. To say we were a little on the edge of our seats was a bit of an understatement. It definitely seemed that bringing all our bodies into one experiment was feeding the energy profoundly. As I sat watching everything kicking off like a tornado, it seemed the light in the room was growing darker. Then, a couple of us jumped as a shadow figure was seen shooting across the doorway. This was followed by lots of bangs from the room where the shadow figure was seen. All of us were just sitting and watching now, not knowing what to ask. It took a while, but gradually, you could feel the energy start to fall, and with it, the light seemed to be seeping back into the room. With that, we packed up to head to the next location.
The next area was the chapel. We conducted a watch-and-wait experiment here. Not long after we had begun, three very distinct loud knocks came from the corner of the room. It was so loud that we questioned anyone in the room about whether they had moved. The session saw a cat ball flash a few times, and one of the Tads turned red and the other blue. That was interesting to see, especially the one that showed a drop in temperature; there was no breeze, and this room had heating. So it shouldn’t be turning blue. Whilst we sat listening for responses, we heard almost constant knocks and bangs, which sounded quite distant. Some of them sounded a bit like footsteps. Trying to find if there was a source to the knocking was tricky with the echo. It was strange. One thing I noticed throughout the night was that before we started to call out, everything was quiet; the banging only seemed to happen when we were trying to contact the spirits. A thought that occurs to me is, could energy alone cause things to bang and move if it spikes suddenly like static electricity? There was so much banging going on like nothing I had ever experienced. I was then distracted from the knocks by a clear but faint short whistle. The whistle was definitely none of us. So, was this spirit also responsible for all the bangs we were hearing? Unfortunately, I can only theorise on that. With it being the early hours of the morning, we finished the investigation for the night.
What a great location and investigation it had been. Since the investigation, I have considered the cost of hiring the property for private investigations there. From my experience, I can certainly say that there is a lot of energy within the walls; one theory is that different types of stone hold energy better. Guys Cliffe House is built into sandstone cliffs. Sandstone is naturally porous. It is then likely that it would absorb energy well and hold onto it. It’s also likely the walls contain quartz, a crystal form. Crystals have been used in spiritual work for centuries because they are well-known for their energies. These factors, plus the incredible amount of history, could be why the property is so active. I feel as if I have only scratched the surface of the spirits that reside there, so that is my reason for returning there in the near future.
Phantom Echoes Paranormal 
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