This was the second time that the Phantom Echoes team had ventured into Fallstaffs, also known as Tudor World, in Stratford-Upon-Avon. It was almost a year to the day since our last exploration with Haunted Happenings. This time, however, we had the entire property to ourselves from dusk till dawn. Our goal was to conduct a thorough, professional investigation and provide a comprehensive account of the activity that regularly haunts those walls. Before I delve into our findings, let’s revisit the history of this intriguing property. Understanding its past may shed light on why it remains the most active location in Stratford-Upon-Avon and one of the most active in the UK.
Records show that there has been a property on the site of the current house since at least 1146. As for what that property was, little is known. Our earliest record of the current house dates to 1536, when it was called Shrieve’s House in honor of William Shrieve, who owned it at the time. William Shrieve was an archer for King Henry VIII. However, William suspiciously disappeared three years later. Rumour states that William may have been an assassin for the king, which could explain his disappearance. In a relatively short period, the house endured a very turbulent time, being hit by the Black Death in 1563 and a large fire that gutted the township in 1596. There is evidence of priest holes that have been found. They were likely used in the 1600s to hide from Oliver Cromwell’s parliamentarian forces if they came knocking looking for royalists. Quite often, the parliamentarian forces would put a watch on a property for days, so if someone should try to hide, they would die of starvation or dehydration, even if they weren’t found. In 1641, under the command of Colonel Behr, parliamentarian soldiers were billeted at the house during the civil war, which was when the famous Battle of Edgehill was fought. The aftermath of the battle saw Shrieve’s House become a field hospital where many of those inflicted in the battle died of infection. Also in the 1600s, the house was used as a tavern and a brothel. It is said that a local serial killer did his foul deeds within the building at this time. There are also strong links to witchcraft within the walls, and to this day, a witches occult practice their witchcraft just outside the barn. To many, this history has been forgotten, as the fame of William Shakespeare being born in the town and walking the same cobbles that are still walked today at Fallstaffs outweighs the dark truth.
Our investigation began with two walks of the property. The first one, we were given a history tour, and whilst on the tour, I was feeling for different energies as I went from room to room. The reason we decided to do another walk around afterwards was to see if the rooms felt the same as they did with the lights off. There were a couple of rooms with a clear contrast in energy presence that hit like a sharp headache stretching from the frontal lobe to the back of my head like a halo. If these areas had felt the same as the rest of the house, it wouldn’t have peaked my interest, but the fact that I could walk into one room and feel nothing, then another and suddenly be burdened with a headache, which was gone again when I left that room, or even spot, is not a natural phenomenon. The feeling upstairs at the start of the night was dense and oppressive, and was not somewhere either of us wanted to be. However, after having felt the most substantial presence in just one spot on this floor, this is where we chose to begin with a watch-and-wait vigil.
We collected our equipment from our baseroom for the night and headed upstairs. We brought a wide array of equipment this time to capture anything that might happen. In this one area of one room, we set up flashing cat balls, K2s, a laser pen, MEL REM, and EVP recorders. I began calling to see if I got a response. It was quiet at first, but eventually the cat ball we had placed on top of a wooden post to keep it from rolling down the sloped floor flashed. At first, we thought it might have been us as we moved about setting up, but it wasn’t the only time it flashed. The next time it flashed, we were standing dead still. I then tried to debunk it by walking by the post and stamping my feet on the floor around it. Nothing I tried caused enough vibration to trigger the cat ball to flash. This made our experience much more credible as paranormal evidence. I had placed the MEL REM just inside the next room, far enough out of the way of accidental contamination. I allowed it to acclimate to the building’s ambient temperature so the readings would be accurate. Almost halfway through our first vigil, it began to alarm. To see which sensor had been triggered, I went into the other room. It was the temperature sensor that had alarmed, which only alarms for a rapid increase/decrease of five degrees around the sensor. It was indicating a five-degree rise in temperature. As far as I know, from my many years of experience in the field, this was not explained by any natural phenomena. The activity in this area ceased, so we moved to the far end of the upper floor to conduct the same experiment there. The hope was that the activity was moving around the building, which would indicate a spirit presence, rather than a static residual energy that just responds until it is bled of energy.
We were now right below the attic in one of the most feared areas of the property. The owner himself will not even go into this area after nightfall. Before the investigation began, I spoke to the staff who had been on duty that day, and they swallowed hard and held their breath when they realized we were a private investigation team of two people. If that doesn’t tell the truth of what goes on in the building, then I don’t know what does. This room made me feel the most uncomfortable during the lit walk around, with a dense atmosphere; I could see why, at night, if someone were alone walking through this area, they would not want to hang around. I set up my equipment around the entire perimeter of the room, with my MEL REM at the top of the stairs and a laser pen shining into the rooms we had come from, mapping a grid of green dots on the far wall to capture any movement should anything cross the laser beam. Both the MEL REM and the laser pen were affected. After introducing ourselves to the spirits in the hope they would introduce themselves to us, I asked if a spirit could affect any of our equipment, at which point my MEL REM’s touch sensor briefly lit up blue, indicating that something had come into very close proximity of the aerial. This was the only time of the night that the touch sensor was triggered. It was then that Sheree noticed the laser pen had dimmed. I had fully charged the battery before we came, and it had only been used for at most half an hour on the investigation; it was far too short for the battery to be waning. So, had something drained it? If so, what? There was no more response in this room, so we took the watch-and-wait vigil downstairs to the room with the throne, as this had felt the most active area downstairs earlier and was said to be an area of the building where the spirit of Lucy liked to show herself. We heard the story of Lucy on the lit walk around, and it is gruesome! Lucy was only a young child who was announced dead after being found in the fire that ravaged Fallstaffs. Though when the autopsy was carried out, Lucy regained consciousness. Her spirit has been seen, sadly, cut open, and sometimes she shows herself as a playful child. As I scoped the room, it came to me immediately that the tense atmosphere had relaxed somewhat; a lot of people, after having felt the atmosphere earlier, would have wanted to turn around then. I conducted the vigil, but nothing was witnessed in this area. One of the significant challenges of being a paranormal investigator is to find where the activity is moving to and what equipment or method it will respond to.
We took a break to plan the next session based on the activity levels so far. In this session, we will cover the rooms downstairs that we haven’t covered so far. With the decision made, we made our way to the tavern, which is now a gift shop. We had witnessed the spirits manipulating our equipment, so now it was time to get the names of those who were roaming inside the walls. I set up an Ouija board on a table, and our EVP recorders and K2 metres around the room. Once I had opened the board, I introduced us to the spirits and asked them to introduce themselves. A few minutes passed with no movement on the planchette, but eventually it began to slide slowly. I was mind-blown by what we discovered! When asked if the spirit was a gentleman, the planchette moved to the yes, so I asked for their first name. Meticulously, the planchette moved to spell George. We went on to discover that he once lived here, was fifty-eight years old, and worked as a Reeve. The fact that the planchette had spelled reeve had me really impressed. For those of you who don’t know the definition, it means a local official, in particular the chief magistrate of a town or district in Anglo-Saxon England. I had a good idea of which era we were talking about now, but to prove it, I asked whether the spirit of George worked for someone. He answered yes, then spelled Oliver Cromwell. That told me that George was from the 1600s. To further prove that the spirit was who they said they were, I asked them to spell the battle that was fought near Stratford-Upon-Avon. Once again, I was hugely impressed as the planchette moved to spell Edgehill. Another story that has passed into history and rumour at Shrieve’s House is the story of a young boy believed to be a spy who was caught and hanged. It is believed his body is buried under the staircase at the far end of the building. With already talking to a spirit claiming to be a reeve, I wondered if there may be a connection. The question was asked if George knew the spy, and the answer was yes. We also learnt through many questions that he also passed sentence on the spy, which means he could well have been the one who gave the order for the spy to be hanged. To try to put a conclusion to this long mystery, I tried to get the spy’s name and find out whether the body was within the walls and where. We did not get a name, but George told us the remains were here, but not where they were. Having felt we had learnt all we could from George, we reached out in one final effort before we closed the session to see if any other spirits were in our presence. George told us there was a female watching us from the corner of the room. We asked the planchette to move in the direction she was in and it slid to the top left corner of the table. For further proof, we asked her to make a sound wherever she was within the room. There was no response, so we closed the Ouija board and moved on to the next vigil.
In the next few hours, we tried table tipping, watch-and-wait, and photography sessions, and no activity was witnessed. As the activity was proving hard to witness, we left a camera and an EVP recorder by itself upstairs. We didn’t know it at the time, but this may have been our best idea of the night. When we reviewed the audio and video evidence, we were impressed by a couple of orbs that seemed to move with purpose, appearing and disappearing within the frame. Unfortunately, the camera battery died a short while before we came to check on it, but the EVP recorder continued to record, and what it captured left me speechless. On the recording, you can hear the distant sounds of outside noise pollution from cars and the neighbouring pubs, and then you can hear us faintly on the floor below in the tavern area, but then very clearly and loudly there are some loud unexplainable bangs right next to the recorder, which sound almost like furniture being moved, followed by clear footsteps walking away from the recorder growing fainter. The bangs were that loud, you could hear it rattle the EVP recorder, which was sitting flat on top of a book on top of a large wine barrel. For something to have rattled the recorder, it would have had to happen right next to it. As I continued to listen to the rest of the recording, I heard us a few minutes later, after the sounds had stopped, clearly coming up the stairs to check on our equipment, utterly unaware of what the recorder had just recorded. It is pretty surprising we didn’t hear anything downstairs. It was only the two of us in the building. All access points to the building were locked, and nobody would have gotten past us without being heard, as there was only one way into the building, which was very close to where we were when the sound was recorded. So just what had we captured? Click the link to listen to the audio https://youtu.be/GzS5QiT2MHc. I would love to hear in the comments what you think, and if you hear anything else that we missed.
Before we began with our big planned experiment of the night, we took a break. Sheree had popped to the toilet, and whilst I waited for her to return, I was looking straight down the cobbled alleyway. In that brief time, I saw a shadow dart across the alleyway from right to left, completely blocking out the light emanating from the street beyond the gates. There was nothing that could explain that. With the activity showing us it hadn’t finished, we grabbed our kit for the experiment and headed upstairs. For quite a while now, I have been playing around with music that connects to the properties I have been investigating to see if it would boost the energy and trigger a response. So far, every investigation I have tried this method has been followed by a noticeable increase in activity. So for this investigation, I sought to recreate the energy of the 1600s tavern that was once within Shrieve’s House by playing tavern music and sounds, whilst playing a few simple games that were likely to have been played in the taverns, such as the three cups and ball game and games using dice. In case of anything happening, we positioned the camera pointing to one doorway, the MEL REM and light emitter across the other entrance, creating a trip beam, with the music box, K2 metres, cat balls, and EVP recorders surrounding us in the hope of a fool proof setup. Whilst the music filled the room, we played a few rounds. Despite the effort we went to, everything felt very still and quiet, and there wasn’t even a flicker on any of our equipment. Later, when we reviewed the audio from the experiment, it sounded like a hushed female voice was overlaid on the recording. It was impossible to say if it was words or a sigh. However, we can’t verify its credibility as paranormal evidence because of the sound of people outside talking. On the plus side, all the outside sounds have sounded slightly distant, slightly muffled, and what we captured sounded sharp. It is at least an interesting piece of evidence, even if it can’t be proved either way.
For the last vigil of the night, we climbed up the ladder into the attic to see if any more of the building’s spirits would tell us who they are on the Ouija board. Once more, we set our detection equipment around us to try and document anything we came into contact with. As we began the Ouija session, the planchette started moving immediately, with surprising speed. We did not waste any time and got straight into discovering the spirit’s name. Their name was William, which immediately poked my curiosity, for the first owner was William Shrieve. I did ask if it was William Shrieve, and the planchette slid to the no answer. He claimed to have lived in the property in the year 0868, which was a long time before the current building existed, but the foundations of Shrieve’s House have been dated to a far earlier period. To test the consistency of the response, I followed up by asking if he owned the current house. The planchette moved to the no, which was a relief. With the chance to discover what the original building was and why nothing but the foundations remain, I changed my approach thus. Over the next twenty minutes, we discovered that the house had changed due to a debt of 787 pounds. That would have been a massive amount of money at that time. William gave us the initials of the person the debt was to as H.D.W. We weren’t able to expand on those initials. The conversation shifted after this to messages for us, and, due to their very personal nature, I will not discuss those messages out of respect for all team members involved. However, I will mention one part that was given to me as a message, leaving me stunned and speechless. The planchette on the board had started to move to individual letters in a sequence of E,B,D,E,C,A,C. With both of us having a musical background, it seemed like these were chords. I asked a few questions to see if they were music chords and if they were connected to a favourite band of mine. When I got home early that morning, I just searched on the internet my favourite band’s name, AC/DC, followed by E,B,D,E,C,A,C, and the first song to come up was AC/DC Thunderstruck! There are very few times I can say I have been speechless; this was one of those moments.
The investigation was not the one I thought it might be after the level of activity we experienced during our first investigation with Haunted Happenings. It just goes to show that you can’t predict where or when the activity will happen. All we can do as professional investigators is try to scientifically capture any evidence that emerges. From talking to the staff who work there on a daily basis and the reports that have travelled across the internet, I have built a picture that this relatively small building is unspeakably haunted, but is it any wonder, given its known history. It was only as I was writing the report and thinking of the spirit of George under the command of Oliver Cromwell, that I had a thought which would add considerable clarity to the history of the building. Historians have believed that the word Shrieve translates in the modern tongue as Sheriff, and that William Shrieve was a very important person in society and was appointed a sheriff by King Henry VIII. So, with George having told us that he was employed as a Reeve, meaning a local official, in particular the chief magistrate of a town or district in Anglo-Saxon England, it supports the historians’ belief that this was once a sheriff’s house. And with the loud movement sounds and footsteps captured on my EVP recorder, it made for a very hair-raising investigation.
Phantom Echoes Paranormal 
Leave a comment