Newsham Park Hospital began life as an Orphanage for the orphans of British seamen in 1870. It was started by James Beazley, a ship owner, who on 17th of December 1868 wrote to nine of his colleagues offering to donate £500 to start a building fund if they would donate the same amount. They responded with the funds, and soon they had a temporary small orphanage until the Liverpool Town Council, on the 7th of April, 1870, granted them 7000 square yards to build an orphanage. It opened in 1874 and was seen as such a good deed that in 1886, Queen Victoria visited the institution to add her name to the list of patrons. However, the unforeseen events of the First World War brought a sudden influx of orphans to the institution, and by 1918, one thousand orphans were overcrowding the orphanage, resulting in harsh disciplinary action to try and control the huge numbers. An article written by Louise McWatt interviewed one of the surviving orphans, Phyliss Gallimore, highlighting the tough conditions in the orphanage. The article is called ‘Life in the Orphanage’ and can be read on the BBC website. See link: BBC – Liverpool – Local History – Life in the orphanage. There was very little improvement until the end of the Second World War in 1949 when the social services program changed, and a new law prohibiting the education of boys under eleven with those of an older age came into fruition. This ended the building’s years as an orphanage. The buildings were not empty for long as they were bought by the Ministry of Health for £125,00 in 1951, and in 1954 Newsham Park Hospital opened. It developed its own psychiatric department and received an influx of patients with severe mental problems. The hospital used common practices used in the 1950s, such as Electroconvulsive Therapy, Lobotomies, Hydrotherapy, and more. In 1959, a new mental health law changed medical practices to use drugs. However, it was likely that in the early years, drug testing on patients was implicated. Due to the expensive running costs and the decay of the buildings, the hospital stopped taking new patients in 1988, and by 1992, all remaining patients and staff had been relocated. In that same year, Rainhill Lunatic Asylum closed, and the inmates were moved to Newsham Park. 1.6 million was spent to house the new inmates. Although it operated with the standard medical practices for its time, many reported the woeful treatment of the inmates. Could it be that these complaints led to the asylum’s closure in 1997? Now, the buildings remain derelict, littered with the tools of their past. Is this dark past the reason for its claims as one of the most haunted asylums in the United Kingdom, and why it’s world-famous among investigators? With such high claims and many stories of paranormal activity within its walls, I decided that the Phantom Echoes team should try documenting these claims.
After a tour of the areas we had to investigate, we got straight on with the investigation. We couldn’t investigate the whole of the hospital as, sadly, some parts have become victims of old age and have collapsed. We began on the ground floor in the laundrette, where the old ironing and dress steaming equipment can still be seen. We set up the Ouija board and a number of trigger objects all around the room. There was an unmistakable feeling of stillness in the room, and as we tried to get activity with the Ouija board and equipment, everything remained still. We persisted, exhausting every technique to try and get a response, but nothing prevailed. We had the brown room adjacent to the laundrette, so we set it up again in there. Although there was no activity on the Ouija board, there was some interesting activity on the K2 metre by the door flashing a couple of bars before fading away. The batteries that were new were dead. Perhaps this unexplainable activity with the equipment showed us how the spirits would respond? Running with this idea, we used the spirit box to do a live EVP session. We asked many questions regarding the age of the spirits and when they were within the building in life, but only a couple were met with an answer. In response to asking for their name, we heard a female voice say ‘Lyn’ come through the spirit box. Shortly after this, we asked how many spirits were with us, and the response came almost instantly, saying ‘seven.’ In the remaining time we were in this area of the hospital, we only heard one more word of interest, which came through the spirit box in a deep voice clearly saying ‘talk.’
Our next area was at the very top of the building in what is known as the naughty boy’s corridor to conduct a watch-and-wait experiment with trigger objects. Along the corridor are a number of cupboards big enough for someone to stand up straight in. There are stories associated with these cupboards that children were shoved in them as a discipline for bad behaviour and left for hours with no food or water in freezing conditions in the winter months or cooked in what felt like an oven in the summer months. This is reported as one of the hospital’s most active areas. As we made our way onto the corridor, we heard a bell ring at the far end, so we quickly got set up and began our investigation. Unlike many have stated previously, I did not feel uncomfortable in this corridor. Not long after asking the bell to ring again, we heard it ring. There was a short while of silence before we then noticed faint movement passing by the laser pen blocking out a few of the green dots mapped out on the wall. We observed this a few times, predominately in the top right-hand corner at the far end of the corridor; one shadow I saw looked solid black. Our attention was suddenly shaken when the rattle of a door was heard. We checked every door in the corridor to see if any had opened. We found one at the far end where we had been seeing the shadows had opened. Immediately, we tested the door to see if it could have come open of its own accord but found the door to be stiff and catch on the floor. It would not have opened even with a strong breeze behind it. The response in activity seemed to slow after seeing the shadow; it’s understandable that manifesting as a solid shadow would be quite depleting of energy. We kept encouraging activity to happen, and with the time we had left, the cat ball flashed, which was the only time it flashed in the corridor.
After a short break, we made our way to the nurses’ quarters to conduct several table-tipping experiments. We set up a table in one of the smaller rooms and placed a REM tripwire across the doorway. A REM tripwire works very similar to a REM POD: if anything passes over the wire in the doorway it will light up. It could be tripped in stormy conditions or if using equipment like a phone that gives off lots of EMF, but on that night, it was a still night, and our phones were on flight mode so as not to interfere with any of the equipment. The energy felt quite calm in most areas we had passed through. We began to call out with our fingertips, touching the table with the softest of touches. It was met with no response initially, but as our energy grew, it felt like the table was softly vibrating. At the same time, the REM trip wire lit up. We observed to see if it would do so again, and a short while later, it did. As it had only just started to alarm, did it mean a spirit had been drawn to our presence and watched from the doorway? With there seeming to be a growing spike in activity, we focused our attention on the table, making sure to keep our pressure as light as possible and our hands and feet as still as possible. Slowly, at first, the table began to lift onto two legs but was soon moving quite fast. Our fingers touched the top of the table very lightly the entire time. As I asked the table to lift onto one leg it did so and began to spin clockwise on one leg, rapidly building speed to the point we struggled to keep up with it, and our bodies crashed into one another with our arms tangled. When you table tip, it feels like the table is spinning beneath your hands much faster than you are turning with it. We then witnessed the table starting to walk across the room towards the doorway, stopping just before it reached the door and sinking back to the floor.
We ended that table tipping session as we had a unique experiment to try. An old hospital gurney in the nurses’ quarters has been known to move along the corridors. Knowing how heavy old gurneys are, I was very keen to investigate the stories. I placed my hands on it with the rest of the team and gave it a shove to feel how easily it would move if, say, someone accidentally leaned against it. For it to move, you had to really purposefully push it. Like we would with table tipping, we only touched the top very lightly with the tips of our fingers and kept our hands still to make the results as credible as possible if anything happened. The gurney did start to roll and picked up quite a bit of speed, travelling the full length of the corridor. However, this is not enough for me to say it was paranormal, as there were a lot of others in the group around the gurney who were not known by my team and were excited to get the movement going. With the large number of bodies, could they have been subconsciously pushing it? It is something I need to investigate more. Having said this, there was the occasional shift in the movement with how a request for movement was asked; I felt this when asking, ‘Could you push the gurney, please?’ It’s important to remember that spirits are the spirits of someone who once lived, so it is important to speak to them how you would like to be spoken to. Just using please and thank you can sometimes be the difference between witnessing something paranormal and not.
On the way to the psychiatric ward, we passed through a corridor, and this was the only place in the entire building where I felt an unsettling energy. Did this mean the area was particularly active at that moment? In the psychiatric ward, we had a relatively new method of research to conduct paranormal research. The experiment had only been conducted a few times at Newsham Park Hospital. Before I conclude my findings, I will tell you a bit about the method of research and how it has evolved. For years, paranormal investigators have carried Dictaphones and spirit boxes that rapidly scan through AM and FM frequencies in the hope of picking up spirit voices. Over the years, this has had some profound results. More so, with the spirit box having proved spirits can talk through radio waves, why couldn’t they speak through a phone that also emits radio waves? This was the idea behind the research. Like others before, we rang a person’s phone and placed that phone in a room by itself, establishing a link between our base room and the room the other phone was in. Asking questions through the phone, we listened to see if any voices came through in response. We didn’t hear any voices on this occasion, but there were a few knocks. However, without having been in the room the knocks came from, it is impossible to conclude those sounds.
We hadn’t finished in this area. We had another experiment set up. We had set up a live camera stream in several rooms, and a few of us split into separate rooms to do our investigation work. I sat in one of the doctors’ chairs by a desk with my EVP recorder and K2 metre calling out for activity and listening very intently between questions. I did not witness or record any sounds to spike my curiosity; however, as I was calling out, the room was growing darker, and I was suddenly drawn towards the doorway on the right of the camera. It was almost as if I could see the silhouette of something blacker than the black of the room standing directly in the doorway, looking at me. My attention was only diverted by suddenly seeing an orb float across the room, which I discovered later on had also been witnessed on camera. I can’t say for certain what it was, but I then noticed a red ball of light manifest at the far end of the next room and move along the back wall. As quickly as it had appeared, it had gone. There was one other thing that was of interest that was seen on the camera. When I felt a presence in the doorway to the right of the camera, they had witnessed what seemed to be a shape rapidly flash into the field and disappear, which seemed to be coming from the direction of where that door was. Although the time was up for investigating this area, the thoughts of what we had all witnessed were just starting.
With the chance to go off by ourselves, I took the Phantom Echoes team to the nurses’ quarters to the rarely investigated tower. We set up an Ouija board and trigger objects in a small room at the top of the tower. In the doorway, we placed the music box and REM POD. We got started right away with the Ouija board, and the planchette started moving with strength right away. When asked who they were, they told us their initials were BW and that they were fifty-four years of age. When we asked for them to expand on their initials, the spirit spelt ‘Bilkv.’ Could the spirit have possibly been trying to spell Billy? We learned that he must have been a patient at the hospital as he told us that he was here in 1953 and had a wound. After this, his responsiveness on the board, the planchette snaking in circles lazily, told us his energy was almost depleted. Bringing this Ouija board session to a close, we started with another Ouija board to see if any other spirits wanted to come forward. Luckily, we got another response come through straight away, but you could feel it was a different spirit with how the planchette moved with sharp, vigorous movements. It was a female, Diana Movekc, who was here in 1939. If that was indeed her surname, then was she an evacuee from the European continent? When we asked how old she was, she gave us the numbers fifty-eight and eighty-four. I could write many thoughts and theories about that, but as they can’t be proved, I will leave that there. At that point we learnt she was here for service, we were drawn away from the Ouija board as the REM POD was suddenly touched and the green light went off. We directed our questioning toward the REM POD to see if we could get an on-command response. Not long after we asked, there was a response, the green light flashing again. The battery was fresh, so there was no activity around it resulting from a low battery. Whilst the REM POD was still active, the planchette continued to move on the board. Out of curiosity, we asked how many spirits were on the board with us. The answer was two. We set to work to find out who it was in the doorway playing with our equipment. We discovered it was a five-year-old child called Oscar. He had died from Lyme Disease. Diana had been the one who attended to him. Did Oscar see her as a motherly figure and now travels with her in the spirit world? The activity on the REM POD continued. It was getting close to the end of this session, but just before we did, I asked for the spirits to appear in my photos in the doorway. I took several standing as still as possible. I then asked if they appeared on camera, and they said yes. I then asked how did they appear. They spelt ‘orb’. I scanned through my photos from that room, and only in one photo was there an orb in the doorway. That is truly remarkable evidence to take from that incredible Ouija board session. What an incredible piece of evidence to end the investigation.
Newsham Park Hospital had caught my curiosity for a while with its frequent reports of activity. I wanted to see how many of these reports were true or fantasized. From the stories I heard, it would seem the hospital is crowded with spirits. I kept my mind open as we investigated this giant building. I still stand by having only felt uncomfortable energy in the Psychiatric ward, which would suggest the stories of the hospital being hell on earth as fantasized. In my investigation of the property, I discovered that the spirits that haunted there were those of orphans, patients, and the staff who cared for them. Perhaps it was the trauma of having spent a good portion of their lives in this hospital and losing their life within the walls that prevented them from moving over. With how vast the building is, I intend to return to Newsham Park Hospital in the future to try and cover more of the labyrinth of rooms and corridors and to further document and research the gurney that moves by itself with just my team.
Phantom Echoes Paranormal 
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