Paranormal Investigation at Kelvedon Hatch Nuclear Bunker
Strange one this. Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker was built as an RAF Rotor Station, then it became a civil defence centre and finally a Regional Government HQ. It was designed to allow up to 600 people survive the aftermath of a nuclear war, thankfully it was never put to use and is now open to the public. We were not the first paranormal investigators to visit and reports were that Kelvedon Hatch is haunted......
Our first and probably hardest challenge of the night was finding the place! Obviously being a secret bunker it wasn't to be found easily along the main road and when we did manage to find the turning we had a job to find the base and an entrance to it once we were on the grounds. Great start eh!
The night started with a tour of the bunker to familiarise ourselves with the three levels of the building. It's a strange place, it looks as though everyone just upped and left leaving behind all the equipment and furniture. It's very basic, no plush accommodation for the potential stay of the PM, just an array of cold offices and rooms.
Our night was fairly uneventful although we did have a few experiences. We didn't get much from any of the circles we performed, we tried candle communication after the success we had at Arundel Town Hall Cells with little success, which accentuates just how special the night at Arundel was.
Interesting points of the night were:
One of the spookiest, atmospheric areas of the building was the entrance tunnel. The psychics in our group decided that it was a good place to set up a fixed camera on motion detect and a trigger object. We set up the camera and continued to explore the rest of the building. About 30 minutes later we returned to see if anything had been captured. The camera equipment used was pretty high tech, well in my opinion anyway, and was rigged up to a laptop so we could analyse any film capture straight away.
Upon our return there was a buzz going through the group because the camera had indeed been activated and captured some movement! We watched the video back a few times and could make out a figure of sorts at the far end of the tunnel. Alan took the laptop up stairs and played with the lighting on the video to try to enhance what we could see. When we watched it it appeared quite clear however Alan told us that when he tried to upload it to his pc it didn't come in quite so well, so he took a snapshot from the video and enhanced it to make the image clear.
This was the final result
On the left is the area that the image was captured. On the right is the "figure". I appreciate that it is hard to see from the pictures.
On the left is the area that the image was captured. On the right is the "figure". I appreciate that it is hard to see from the pictures.
As you can see it isn't conclusive but there certainly does appear to be something there, although it's hard to appreciate from just the pictures above. Anyway we tried various experiments with the camera to try to replicate the result but to no avail. So I can 't dismiss or explain the phenomena and accept that it was something unexplainable.
The trigger object that we left there had also moved albeit ever so slightly. I was quite excited about it but unfortunately the object had not been isolated and throughout the night some of us had been in the vicinity of the trigger object and may have inadvertently knocked it. I think that this was unlikely however it cannot be dismissed....We took a picture of the moved object anyway:
This was in the same area as the camera had picked up movement earlier in the night so perhaps it was paranormal, but then perhaps not....
During one our seances Alan got a message to go to the washroom. Strange. We went to the ladies toilets presuming that this must be the washroom as there wasn't any alternative that we could think of at the time. We decided that we would ask questions and use a dictaphone to try to pick up any answers from Spirit, this is referred to as EVP. I think that the first question asked by the group was "did you work here", the others from the group asked various questions and once they were finished the recording was played back. After the first question we picked up the response "no". It can be heard here: EVP - "No" - Make sure you have your sound turned up!
At the end of the night it was decided that we should try something a little unorthodox, for us anyway, we were to sit and meditate to see what images we got. As we did this one of the group members filmed us to pick up any anomalies and promptly turned it off once the exercise was complete. About a minute or so after the camcorder had been turned off we heard a cough! As far as we were aware there was no one else in the building although we had been aware of the owner walking around the place throughout the night, but the cough that we heard sounded female, so it was unlikely to be him. Myself and one of the other group members quickly scouted the floor to see if we could find anyone and I also ran up the stairs calling out "Hello" but I saw no one and no one replied. I can't rule out completely that this wasn't just the owner because the place is full of nooks and crannies so he could have slipped into anywhere. However if it was him and he reads this then I'd just like to say that you cough like a girl :)
There was one other incident I'd like to mention, it was the very best paranormal experience I have ever had, so real, so convincing that it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end....
Rosie wanted to go out to smoke a cigarette so we made our way out of the carpeted tunnel leading from the canteen area, as we got to the end to outside we heard footsteps from the other end of the tunnel. I said to Rose "ah looks as though some one has come out to join us", we stood and waited but no one came! My God, but the footsteps were so clear, then we heard the footsteps again.
I ran to the other end of the tunnel to see if I could see where the sound was coming from, there was no one there and no obvious source of the noise. This is it I thought, this is the most convincing paranormal thing that has ever happened to me. I called back to Rosie "There's nobody here!". Rose moved back closer to the mouth of the tunnel and thats when I noticed it....Rosies footsteps had been echoing down the tunnel but due to it being carpeted it sounded as though it was coming from the other end rather than the usual resonating sound that you get from an uncarpeted tunnel, hence our confusion. What an anti climax, it was fun while it lasted though....So that was it. I'm really not sure what to make of what happened at Kelvedon Hatch, some things certainly appeared to be paranormal but why would the place be haunted? It's a fairly new building, hasn't got much history, was hardly really used, and as far as I know no one died there although there is rumuor that one of the workman whilst building it slipped into the 10ft thick concrete walls during construction. It was an interesting night, it didn't feel very spooky there and the psychics didn't "feel" much either but we got those few pieces of evidence to take away with us.....Perhaps the resident cat Catastrophe, pictured above, is responsible for some of the "paranormal activity".