THE Chronicle’s resident paranormal expert Claire Barrand joins a brave group of ghosthunters at the paper’s Nevill Street offices to uncover the mystery behind its resident ghosts all in the name of charity...

JUST?a few weeks ago the ghost hunters returned for an evening of investigations, all in the name of charity at the Abergavenny Chronicle offices.

Keen to discover more about the spooky goings on and haunted happenings that I have read about and reported here, I joined the event, along with my sister Linzi Smith, paranormal events team Beyond the Grave, guests and Chronicle editor Liz Davies for another night of things that go bump!

The evening began late at 10pm, as darkness folded around us; Beyond the Grave had some impressive equipment (including the controversial and elusive “GhostArk”, a multitasking device that currently has the Paranormal community divided as to its reliability and supplier problems with orders), night vision cameras and digital recorders, K2’s, trigger objects, spirit boxes and torches set up around the building, to capture any activity we may experience on camera or digital voice recorder.

We often find that when a group of enthusiastic investigators get together, that the energy is powerful and that helps with building paranormal activity.

It is thought that spirits might use this energy to manifest and communicate with us in the physical world, and things certainly did seem to happen for us as the evening continued!

During the very first vigil in the downstairs offices, we all heard furniture scraping sounds across the ceiling above us, yet nobody was upstairs.

Light anomalies were witnessed by many guests; these can look like small fast moving balls or dots of white, blue or red lights in the darkness.

I was touched on my foot – it felt like a finger sharply prodding me, yet nobody was close!

A sinister black shadow was seen lurking at the top of the stairs in the corridor by many guests, as we sat around the table in the board room.

Liz, who is a sceptic, was spooked nonetheless, had to move from the doorway as she was closest to it!

Linzi brought with her a Victorian boy doll. He was creepy in himself and freaked many of the guests out by simply being there.

Dolls are well documented in our field as popular (with spirit) trigger objects. Ghosts of young children are attracted to toys that they possibly had themselves and this one was no different!

Watching him sat on an office chair ( yes it was in Liz’s office again!) from a comfortable distance via a CCTV camera, we witnessed the EMF (electromagnetic field detector) flashing red indicating a strong electrical static in the air close to him, and the image of orbs darting and floating around him were visible!

Orbs are other phenomena that the jury is out on, many believers say they are the light energies created by spirits and others debunk them as simply dust or insects captured by the camera.

My personal belief is that you can recognise if an orb is floating dust or an insect by the way it moves, and I have seen some rare ones that move in such an erratic way that they cannot be explained as easily.

The ones we saw that night I would say were mostly dust. But one or two darted and changed shape, and those I believe were created by spirit energy.

We got some first-class EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) again; a clear “yes” was recorded and also heard in “real time” by Linzi in response to a question directed at the rumoured female presence in the main office of a Marjorie Jackson – a familiar spirit that has previously given her name in previous investigations.

We do believe this to be a female spirit and that this is the lady that haunts this area of the building, moving things around.

The evening was eventful for all the guests; many had personal experiences themselves with taps heard, whispering and more shadows seen!

In the attic rooms we all felt a strong presence of a male figure who watched us from the shadows and creaked floor boards as he edged closer and the smell of stale sweat became apparent.

Setting off an alarmed trigger object placed in the other room where we could sense him, made each and every one of us jump out of our skin!

In a final vigil, a door handle to the attic room loudly clicked, and a curious, eerie, long wailing sound is heard by everyone in the room.

This was caught on record for you to hear - we would like you to decide for yourself what this sound could be?

It did sound like a communication of some sort, it was strange and not like anything we could describe.

Making doubly sure we took home the creepy doll with us Liz bid us goodnight and locked up the building, making it home for sleep at some time around 4am.

After the event, which raised a lovely sum of money which will go towards the Abergavenny Eisteddfod Fund, Liz and I did some investigations of the Google kind and looked a little deeper into the history of Tindle House, number 13 Nevill Street.

It appears that by coincidence, in the 1901 census, Edith Mabel Jackson did in fact reside in Nevill Street.

Born in 1883, Edith was a worker and assistant to a French woman named Miss Cecile Marie Ardin who was a retired dress maker.

She lived firstly at 10, Nevill Street and then possibly at, number 13 then called Nidra House - the reversed name of its owner - alongside Madam Ardin and three other women.

Could Edith Mable actually be our ghost “Marjorie” that helps Liz, tidies up and enjoys a cigarette in the corridor? Maybe she should be on the payroll after all her years of loyalty to the Chronicle Offices.