The building that we know today as the National Emergency Services Museum began life in 1900. It was built to pioneer the way for the emergency services, combining the fire, police, and ambulance services within one building. In the early years, the fire service lived on the upper floor, where they had direct access to the lookout tower. At the time, there was a law that stated all houses in the city could not be higher than the roof line of the emergency services building. This was so the fire officer up the tower had an unimpeded view across Sheffield. As the men and women would spend so much of their lives in the building, they had a dance floor and bar, a living area, and separate rooms. Occasionally, the firemen would have relationships with female staff living in the building. This was encouraged as a way to free up bedrooms by putting couples in rooms together.
The police and ambulance service shared the lower floors until the rapid expansion of the ambulance service saw it relocated in 1913. Eleven years later, the fire service also relocated due to the limitations of keeping up with modern standards. The police remained in the building until 1965. In addition to keeping the old police cells, the police were able to make use of the now vast empty building and introduced a vehicle workshop, a road traffic department, and a 999 telephone emergency control room.
On December 12, 1940, the Germans bombed Sheffield, causing the attack to become known as the Sheffield Blitz. On that day, the emergency services building took over the duty of emergency response. The former engine house was transformed into a temporary fire station, and the basement was used as an air raid shelter.
The vision for the museum came in 1931, when Superintendent Tom Breaks of the Sheffield Fire Brigade embarked on creating a museum for the fire service.
As part of my research before the investigation began, we decided to visit the museum in the daytime to pay attention to the historical details of all the artifacts on display. As we walked around the museum in the daylight, I discovered a few points of interest in a couple of areas. Walking along the corridor and past the police cells, I felt an energy presence in one spot in the corridor that stopped me in my tracks to feel what it was. It was a sensation of being watched, a feeling of unease that I couldn’t shake off. I stood for a minute, focusing on this energy presence to see if it would move or if any thoughts/words came to my mind. They didn’t, but I knew from past experience that this wasn’t caused by anything electrical, from it being central to the corridor with space on either side; you could walk around it if you wanted. We walked to the end of the corridor and went into the last cell, Caine’s cell. It was when we were looking at the artifacts in the cell when Sheree suddenly felt a cold shiver pass through her. It was a warm day, and the building’s ambient temperature was warm. Paranormal or not, it was worthy of mention. I checked the air vents in the room, and a gentle breeze could be felt brushing my fingertips. The breeze wasn’t enough to cause a sudden shift in temperature that would cause someone to shudder.
We continued our walk of the museum, passing by the amazing display of vintage ambulances, police cars, and fire engines and climbing the stairs to the first floor. This was where I found a spot I knew I had to return to and investigate later on. Passing through the war exhibit, I felt as if I had walked into a glass wall—I could walk through, but the resistance I could feel was like trying to walk with thick clumps of mud stuck to the bottom of your shoes. This same oppressive feeling resided over the entire corner where the WW1 Somme artifacts and wheeled litter from the 1800s resided. Again, this wasn’t anything explainable by the building’s electrics giving off high EMF as the feeling would have been the same throughout the room and not feel like you have stepped into another building just twelve feet away. Sheree could also feel the change walking into this area and said it was the only place in the building that made her feel uncomfortable. My interest in investigating this later was to see if it felt exactly the same in this area. If it did, I could conclude why I believe it feels that way. I won’t give my conclusion of that just yet. We quickly finished our walk of the museum before we were chucked out at closing time.
Long after the museum had closed to the public and the city streets were ghostly quiet, me and Sheree returned to the museum to conduct the investigation with our two friends Helen and Emily from Haunted Happenings. I highly recommend Haunted Happenings as a very reputable and passionate paranormal team. They played a huge part in getting my team, Phantom Echoes to where it is now. Anyone looking to do a paranormal investigation, check Haunted Happenings out!
Our investigation started as one group in the 20th-century policing exhibition. It certainly was unusual to conduct a paranormal investigation surrounded by vintage police cars. Around the room were placed K2 metres, cat balls, REM PODs, TADS, and EDIs to do a watch-and-wait experiment. Not long after we had begun to call out, the TAD turned red, indicating a rise in temperature around the sensor. We debunked this to be the sensor acclimatizing to our body heat that had suddenly come into the room and surrounded the TAD. However, it continued to trigger for a good five minutes by which time it should have acclimatized. For research purposes, it was reset to see if it would be triggered again. A short while later, it turned red again. This was a significant finding as it suggested a persistent change in temperature that could not be explained by the sensor acclimatizing to our body heat. While this had been happening, the K2 placed closest to it detected low EMF fields. This was also a significant finding as it suggested the presence of electromagnetic energy in the area, which could be a potential indicator of paranormal activity. As the TAD is a receiver, it does not emit EMF, so the TAD was not the cause of activity on the K2. Also, it is worth noting that if the TAD had been causing the K2 to detect a rise in EMF, then it would have been a constant reading on the K2.
Our attention was dragged from the activity in the centre of the room to the door to the police cells in the back corner of the room. A guest believed they had seen someone standing in front of the door and dashed over there to see. Looking in the direction of the door, taking photos, I didn’t see anything that jumped out at me, but often, when a spirit has been seen, it’s gone in the blink of an eye. What was worrying was that when he was by the door, he felt frightened and seemed to have a reaction, saying that he felt like he was being choked. Once brought back to the group, he seemed to improve. As to what he experienced, I cannot say without experiencing it myself.
The air temperature in the room felt like it was falling despite the TAD still indicating an increase in temperature. I could feel to my right an icy breeze drifting towards the centre of the room. I believe this can be explained by the fact that the front of the building still has the old wooden doors for the emergency vehicles. Being old and wood, the glass in them is most likely not double-glazed, and there are very likely to be gaps around the door. It’s a very likely source of the current, which was feeding to the back of the building and bouncing off the walls, forcing it to vortex.
The TAD was still being triggered whilst the K2 continued to detect a source of EMF around it. This brought our attention back to it and made us try to see if we could prove that it was spirit activity around the TAD. For me, what happened next was the most important evidence of that session. Helen had the brilliant idea to ask if the spirit/s could turn the red light on the TAD to blue. Instantaneously, the TAD turned blue. This was the only time it changed colour. Having been flashing red for nearly half an hour, to suddenly turn to blue on command is the cherry on the cake in paranormal evidence.
We finished up in this area as we still had a lot to cover and moved into the police cells. I took my team to Caine’s cell where Sheree had been affected by a sudden cold shudder on the daytime walk around, and I had felt the presence just outside. It was worthy of further investigation to see if it happened again or could be debunked. We joined up with Sam, a Haunted Happenings training member, and his friend Alex. Before I begin with the investigation in this area, I just want to give them a shout-out and say they were a joy to work with, and I wish them both the best with their paranormal journey. I hope that we get to work with them again in the future. Back to the investigation, and in Caine’s cell, we combined an Ouija board session with a watch-and-wait experiment. In the doorway, I placed my music box, and around the cell, cat balls, EVP recorders, and K2 metres. It didn’t take long after I had set the music box for it to trigger, indicating that something had passed in front of the sensor. All four of us focused our attention on the music box for intelligent responses, asking if the spirit would step away and trigger it on command. When we asked for the spirit to join us in the room, the music box went off instantly, which seemed to be an intelligent response to our question. What happened then was the music box activated and did not stop playing. We asked for the spirit to step away many times, and yet it kept playing. Who or what was standing in front of the music box? To test that the music box was working properly, I went and reset it to see if it would trigger again. After this, it didn’t trigger. Did my presence moving to the door scare off whatever was there, or by resetting the music box, did I break the flow of energy?
We started the Ouija board, hoping that the strong activity around the music box would lead to great results through the board. However, after the planchette began to move across the board, I wasn’t so sure that we would learn anything at all. We asked the spirit to spell their first name twice in that session, and both times, it gave the same answer, but one spelt slightly differently. The first answer was “Caz58,” and the second was “Kaz58.” We ran with this result for a while, wondering if the fifty-eight referred to his age or police car number plate, but when we asked, the planchette consistently moved between the goodbye and no. By the end of the Ouija board, we had learnt nothing. Close to the end of the investigation in this cell, the cat ball flashed on the floor. This was the only time it activated. Even though we had been standing still, I made sure we tried to debunk it. Alex stamped on the floor right next to the cat ball. It wouldn’t trigger. That is proof to me that the ball had been touched.
After a quick break, we made our way to the engine house and blitz exhibition. My team, with Alex and Sam, headed into the Anderson shelter for another Ouija board session. We set up a few trigger objects as well. It’s always a good idea to see if there is any correlation between the trigger objects being affected and activity on the Ouija board. We could hear a few knocks happening that seemed to be resonating from above. As the roof was made from corrugated iron, it does have a tendency to creak as it expands and contracts with changing temperatures. What I found weird was the static electricity I could feel floating in the back of the Anderson shelter, and at the same time, I felt some of the hairs on the back of my head were pulled. This could be explained by my hair magnetising with static electricity. However, it did not explain the sudden discomfort that Alex felt behind his right ear. He started to feel an uncomfortable, burning pressure behind his ear. He kept on rubbing it, which would explain the inflamed, red skin behind his ear when we checked, but we saw within the redness a raised welt like a scratch. It was impossible to say if the welt had already been there as directly behind the ear is very hard to see. Around this time, the Alice box Alex had been using had said “stabbed” and “affected.” Could this be connected to what had affected Alex and made him have to leave the team? After Sam had checked on Alex to make sure he was okay, we commenced with the Ouija board. Unfortunately, it was very much the same as the first, and any intelligent response was too fragmented to comprehend. We took from it a possible age of forty-five but nothing else.
With no more activity being acknowledged in this area, my team headed upstairs to the first-floor war exhibit. This was still, in my mind, the most interesting area of the building. I walked into the area, and it felt just as heavy and oppressive as it had in the daytime. I set my ambition to try and discover what was causing such a dense energy in this area. The fact it was static in this area led me to think it was connected to an object or the objects in that area. There were two artifacts of real interest in the area: a wheeled litter from the 1800s and part of a uniform found in the Somme. If anything were to hold an energy print from another time, they would certainly be my first choice. Once we had set up all our trigger objects covering all angles of the area, we started with automatic writing. Getting no results on that, we switched to the Ouija board. As we were calling out for the planchette to move, the K2 by the wheeled litter flashed green, and then the REM PODs temperature sensor alarmed, registering a rise in temperature. Our attention was drawn away from the Ouija board further when the K2 flashed green again. Then, the REM POD alarmed even louder, which, from experience, told me that the energy around it was increasing significantly. The logical next step was to test the activity on those two pieces of equipment to see if we had an intelligent spirit with us and not just residual energy. From the K2, we got some successful results with it flashing on command, but only a couple of times. It continued to flash sporadically but never to any of our other questions. We didn’t hear it with our own ears, but on later review of our audio recordings, it was at this time we picked up several whispery voices on the recording. They are very fragmented in what they say, and to this current moment, I still work on the audio, trying to decipher what I can hear. Click here to view the audio https://youtu.be/tiZ0_Zx2oCQ. Please leave a comment and let me know what you thought you heard.
Turning our attention back to the Ouija board as the activity on the K2 and REM POD was increasing, I wanted to see if we could make contact with what was causing it. After opening up the Ouija board, I asked for the spirit to spell their first name. The planchette glided across the board to the letters A and O. I asked if these were initials, and the answer we got was yes. After this, we sadly got no further response from the board. We kept working on this area as the equipment was still detecting high levels of energy. We did hear a knock, but we put it down to others moving around the building. It was then that something happened that made me and Sheree think we definitely had a spirit with us. So far, the REM POD had only indicated a strong increase in energy and heat around it, but then it fully lit up, which can only happen when the metal aerial on top is being touched. Alex and Sam came to join us and walked in at just the right time to see the REM POD light up again. Shortly after this, we heard a metallic ting right next to us. Using our torches to look for the source, I caught a glimpse of a lantern that looked as if it was swinging slightly. Sam tapped the lantern to see if it was what we heard. It certainly seemed to sound like it. The activity quietened off after this.
With some time left before the next vigil, my team, Sam and Alex, made our way to the engine house and Sheffield Blitz exhibition to conduct research inside the back of the open fire engine. We set up a few pieces of equipment and our EVP recorders and sat and listened. We began to hear knocks that seemed to resonate from under the wooden floorboards. Our first thing to check was moving our bodies about to see if that was causing it. Then, as much as I could, I went underneath to try and replicate the knocking sound. They could hear me knocking, but it sounded completely different from what we heard before. Before, the knocks had echoed, and the floor was vibrating right under our feet. They couldn’t feel any of this when I knocked, and I had made sure to knock quite firmly. The knocking was happening all around the fire engine and sometimes very loud. Emily came to see what was going on, and she was lucky enough to hear what we were witnessing. The best way I can describe the knocking was that it resonateda from within the wood itself. Feeling the floor move under our feet with the knocks left us all a bit speechless. We couldn’t debunk them and have to say that it was paranormal activity. I was then made to feel uncomfortable when my legs started to feel very heavy, cold, and shaky to the point I had to leave the rest of the session. The moment I was out of the fire engine, I felt fine. I returned to help them pack up before heading to the next area.
We found out from Helen and Emily that the next area we were to investigate was back in the engine house and blitz exhibit. It was immediately decided my team, with Alex and Sam, would return to the fire engine to investigate further what was going on. We took a table and glass with us this time to see if we could make any contact with what was causing all the knocking. As we got set up, the knocking started just as clear as the last time. I had never experienced knocking as frequent as this. If it was a natural phenomenon, we hadn’t got an inkling as to what was causing it. Whilst the knocks continued to amaze us, we got started with the glass divination. After a short while of asking for movement on the glass, it eventually began to slide across the table. However, there were no conclusive answers to who or what might be causing the knocking. In the future, my team will investigate this museum privately and try to get to the bottom of the knocking.
The knocking seemed to move into the front of the fire engine, and Alex thought he had heard a shuffling sound. I asked for the spirit to move about in the front, and almost immediately, we heard the familiar squeaking sound of someone moving in a leather seat. I decided to take photographs of the front seats, but after an immediate review of the photos, I found nothing out of the ordinary. Over the next few days, as I reviewed all my sound recordings and photos, I spotted something in a photo that caught my curiosity. What I saw in the photo was what looked like a solid apparition of a child outside of the fire engine. What makes it more compelling is I took a string of photos and it only appears in one. Since then, I have shared the photo with Emily, Helen, and other professional investigators, and without me telling them what I saw, they described what they saw as very similar to what I had seen. The photo has struck so much curiosity that in the near future, that area will be investigated again to see if the same photo can be recreated. I will include the photo in the report and on the gallery page. Please leave a comment below on what you think you see. It might help us to prove it or disprove it as paranormal evidence.
For the last experiment of the night, we headed to the hay loft just above the 20th-century policing for a watch-and-wait vigil. This was an area rarely investigated, and after speaking to Helen, I realized that it had proven to be very active earlier, with some really heavy knocking. We wasted no time in getting the investigation started. The first thing to note was the blue torch turning off by itself. To test it, Helen put new batteries in the torch, and immediately, the batteries drained again. That was very compelling evidence. Did the spirit drain it in the process of building up enough energy to do something big? With that thought in mind, we pressed on, focusing our attention on the other equipment to see if that could be affected to further prove paranormal activity. The torches seemed to be a good way to lead the investigation. We had a red and yellow torch as well as a blue. To prove it was spirit, we asked the spirits to turn the other torches off. The red torch started to flicker and dim, but it didn’t turn off. The yellow torch remained static. Shortly after the red torch began to flicker, the TAD that was next to it flashed red, indicating an increase in temperature. It continued to do so for the rest of the vigil. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn blue on command like it had earlier. After getting no further responses after this short window of activity, we closed the investigation.
This was an eye-opener of an investigation, with such strong contrasting energies in different areas. What I have taken from this investigation is proof of what I had believed about objects holding energy and being a conduit of paranormal activity. To help you understand why objects hold energy, think of it like this: every action we do each day, from the moment we wake up to the point we go to bed, is a manifestation of energy. The reason we get tired is because we have drained our energy source. Even inanimate objects give off energy every single day, as humans use them for everyday needs. As an example, the wheeled litter or the artefacts from the Somme, the last time they were used were in a time of war and horror when everyone was fighting for their survival and not always achieving that. The wheeled litter would have carried the wounded and dead and have absorbed all that trauma. The artifacts found in the Somme would have been attached to someone, most likely at the moment they lost their life, and if they were someone’s personal effects, the energy tied to them would be much stronger. Now that these objects are placed in a museum and not used, the energy they absorbed bleeds from them. This, I believe, is why the oppressive energy residing in the WW1 exhibit remained the same as it had been in the daytime. It would be good to walk through the WW1 exhibit and see if the energy still felt the same. It would be even more compelling if it didn’t feel the same. My focus for a return investigation will be to try to capture names and dates to put a face to the activity.
Phantom Echoes Paranormal 
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