Dear readers. This weekend I went ghosthunting! Here's a full, fair and accurate report of the experience for your delight and delictation.

The background

Considering we're investigating a very shaky area of pseudoscience, I think it is only fair to state my beliefs upfront. Last week I told you that real is relative, so what I experienced on the ghosthunt is doubtless deeply linked to my preconceptions. When I was a kid, I read a lot of stuff about ghosts.My first ghost investigation outfit was called GASS, which was an acronym for Guernsey Association of Spooky Stuff. The members were me, and whoever I could drag along at the time. We went on a single outing looking for a trapdoor to a castle, which presumably would then have been haunted, and didn't find it. I finally gave it up after a few years because I was scaring myself, and I still don't sleep with scissors in my bedroom thanks to one story which stayed with me.

So this is a topic I do know a lot about - scared more because I am easily frightened than because I genuinely believed we were, at any point in danger. Ghosts have been much beefed up by cinema, probably when producers realised that the don't do anything except hang around and be scary. The Sixth Sense is possibly the most accurate depiction of our ghost mythology around - terrifying, but at the end of the day harmless. Now, Japan and China do have a rich tradition of vengeful ghosts, which maybe explains why all the best horror movies come from there right now, and I would be much more hesitant about ghost hunting there.

But in the west, there are three sorts of ghosts. The first is your regular spirit-who-cannot-depart. Tied to a particular location, whether by guilt, confusion or having a message to pass on, they're just like they were in life - only more dead. Often they want or need something. Casper the friendly ghost is one of these. I don't know whether I believe in these or not.

The second type is residual hauntings - what has become known as "The Stone Tape theory" after the TV event of the same name. No intelligent being is involved, it's just an echo, a footprint, an event so intense (good or bad) that it has been soaked up by the walls and replayed, like a stuck record or a Hiroshima shadow. Communicating with them is as useful as shouting at the TV screen. Because of the way I percieve the world, it actually seems impossible to me that this sort of haunting doesn't exist. You've been to libraries, right? I've always felt that libraries get into the habit of being silent because of the silence that surrounds them. Or when you feel the buzz of excitement in a stadium, or just as the lights go down in the theatre. No one tells you to feel that way - you're picking up on the emotional experience of everyone else in the room. Repeated over thousands of performances, maybe the room would get it. I have an intense feeling for places, all sorts of places, and being very sentimental, have strong associations for places where good or bad things happened. Even without the presence of Grey Ladies and men in sheets, I believe all rooms are haunted by their pasts.

Type three is the bad type. The poltergeists, ghouls and various malevolent beasties which, depending on your personal mythology, are normally denoted as demons. Again, I've got no good reason to either believe or disbelieve in these.

The haunted location

The German Underground Hospital is a warren of concrete tunnels built during the Occupation of Guernsey. It took three and a half years to build, but was only in use for nine months because the Germans soon figured out no one was going to liberate the island - rendering a bomb-proof complex pretty useless. It may not have ever been needed, had they not shipped over hundreds of German wounded from D-Day. They were kept there for twelve weeks, which is just horrible: if I told you the Germans had kept prisoners in a cold, damp underground complex with no access to the sun, you'd tell me it was inhumane. After coming back, it wasn't the supernatural or dead workers that prevented me from sleeping. It was the thought of those poor patients, trapped down there without any sunlight in those big empty halls. I could vividly imagine lying in one in the dark, with the footsteps of nurses and distant hum of artificial light.

After visiting the Ellis Island Immigration Centre in New York, one of the most uncomfortable buildings I have ever been in, it occured to me that maybe I did have a supernatural ability, and that I should work on refining it. I'm so the type. Then I thought "actually, that would be damn stupid". Movies never really give a thought to how inconvenient having powers like that would be, and assuming developing proper psychic ability is even possible, why the hell would I want to? Despite this, when I went to the Underground Hospital last month I did attempt to see if I could "feel" anything. I didn't really get anything. Nothing beyond the fact it is basically a scary enviroment. In retrospect, I wonder whether this was because I was focused on the fact it was a hospital and therefore fundamentally a nice place.

So I was interested when a friend of the New Number 2 claimed she had found evidence it was haunted, having drawn a blank myself. She had been conducting an interview down there, but on replaying the tapes had found two messages left by a spirit source. The first said "help us", and the second one "closed". I would have liked to hear the messages myself, without being told what to expect, but the first one I did definitely hear a "help" - I am more dubious about the second. I had been researching the backmasked Beatles song for my Paul is Dead article, which is a triumph of hearing voices where there are none, so I couldn't help but be dubious. Especially because I had recently established, on my own criteria, that the place wasn't haunted. Plus, why would forced workers from Russia, France or wherever else be speaking English? ("Yes, why is that Mr Frobisher...?")

Wikipedia on Electric Voice Phenomenon

The team

Strangely enough, then, I was in attendance as the skeptic. Also with us was Professor Summerfield, who had made the recordings; Wolsey, a friend of hers (I'd heard she was going to bring someone along who could hear voices, though whether this was him I didn't know), and my dad a.k.a. the New Number Two. Our equipment was as follows:

> Two digital cameras, with tripods. These were operated by the Professor and Wolsey.

> a digital video camera, operated by the New Number Two

> compass. Despite a whole lifetime of preparation for this event, this was the only bit of technical equipment I could find. No thermometers, no EMF machines. Only a compass, and a dodgy one at that - it came out of a Christmas cracker, and I've been using it for years as proof the polar flip is about to occur because it points anywhere but north.

> tin of mints. Comfort food, and useful at that.

> sonic screwdriver. Don't laugh. My screwdriver incorporates a biro and torch, two items no sane ghosthunt should be without. I also brought a notepad.

The ghosthunt

We meet at 2AM, and spend two hours down there. We started by heading to:

Area 1: the Operating Theatre

On my previous visit, I had felt fairly comfortable in the Hospital and beyond the obvious cold + dark + scariness, I hadn't picked up on the things I would usually use to denote a place unfriendly. There were two exceptions.

As you can see on the diagram below, the Hospital is two long parallel corridors, joined by a series of corridors at regular intervals. One of the corridors was split into a series of rooms. The first two were about 3x3 metres each, sickly yellow and connected to one another. In the corner of room two was a tiny room, slightly wider than a portaloo, with two big metal sinks in it. We referred to it as "the kitchen" the whole time, though it actually turned out to be far more sinister: the operating theatre. At the time I wrote the bad feeling off entirely. A few days earlier, my sister and I had been watching a ludicrously scary episode of Supernatural set in an abandoned asylum, and the look of those three rooms in particular reminded me of it. They were partially furnished, whereas the rest was concrete and bunkerlike. Having said that, from a purely aesthetic standpoint the most terrifying room was the one pictured below - the one with the warped metal beds - and that didn't worry me at all.


The first of the two recordings had been made here: "help us". One of the reasons I had been sceptical about the presence of ghosts was the lack of any good reason for it to be haunted. The Hospital is creepy, yet despite an interesting use as torture chamber in Doctor Who novel Just War, was never more than a hospital - one hardly used, if at all. Professor Summerfield had an explanation that made sense. There is an obvious hole in the pattern of tunnels, indicated by a big red box. A tunnel was being here, but it had collapsed, burying several of the Operation Todt slave workers who had been forced to build it. At this point I wondered in which order everything had happened - discovering the recording, and discovering the history behind this place in particular.

Background: Operation Todt was an army of slave workers cobbled together from POWs from all over the world. They were kept on point of starvation and forced to build bunkers and the like. Nobody in Guernsey really talks about them. According to the leaflet, six Frenchmen were killed in a rockfall at one point, seventeen in an explosion later on, and it suggests many more are still there in the concrete. It sounds like a fine justification for a haunting, particularly if "closed" was related to it. Shut in behind the rocks and a long way from home.

The regularity of the German building made it easy to find where the tunnel should have been, in the corridor out the other end. We spent about ten minutes here, all separately doing our things. I didn't experience any unusual coldness, and touching various areas of wall didn't produce a result. There was one particular point that drew my attention, and kept drawing my attention, but nothing conclusive. The compass didn't register anything unusual and seemed very definite where North was. Though, considering how unreliable that compass was, maybe we should have taken this as a sinister sign. It did wobble every now and then, but never impressively, and never enough to convince me it wasn't my hand shaking instead.

Professor Summerfield then attempted to contact whatever had attempted to communicate, asking it to speak to her and with the dictaphone ready to catch the response. She did this in about three areas - this produced no results. As everyone else took photos and film, I thought I heard a "help us" from the Operating Theatre. I put it down to my ears catching the same sound that we had misinterpreted on the tape, or my overactive imagination latching on to what I expected to hear. If I had been certain, I would have told someone. I also would have stayed in the corridor, instead of doing what I did do: returning to the Operating Theatre, and pacing up and down it with the compass for a result.

No result. When I next looked around, Dad was filming in the "kitchen" with the sinks. Walking through the adjoining rooms was an unavoidable part of getting around the hospital, but I had avoided going into that little room. I figured if we were looking for sinister, and there was a room I wanted to avoid, then that was the best bet. The compass said nothing, but something else strange happened there. The "please charge me" light on the side of dad's camera started winking, and apparently he has never seen it do that before. I certainly haven't, but I don't use it too often. This didn't impede its use at all, but continued to blink erratically for the rest of the trip. I am also positive that as we stood there suprised at the camera, the electric lightbulbs lighting that room also briefly flickered. To my mind, this is the most convincing proof of haunting we found all day - in that room which I had always felt strongly about, on the opposite side of that wall that had attracted my attention, the famous malfunctioning of electrical equipment.

We found no cold spots - no one had found a thermometer, but the cold seemed fairly consistant - and no one had phantom smells.

Here's a plan of the hospital, with the two operating theatres marked by the red arrow. A red square marks the collapsed section, obviously missing. The green arrow points to the mortuary. The munitions area isn't on the map, but we got to it by following the blue arrow. It is about the same size and shape as the hospital.



Area 2: the Mortuary


Ah, charming. This was the second place I had refused to go in last time, though again put it down to mundane reasons. When I was younger and going through my ghost phase, I read a book by a psychic investigator who had seen bloody bodies in the mortuary of the Jersey Underground Hospital. Plus, it was big, dark, scary and had the word MORTUARY slapped onto the concrete in dribbling black paint. Enough reason to put anyone off.

It transpired that the second recording had been made here: "closed". If not for the two recordings, I'd have said Professor Summerfield was picking up on the same instinctive wrongness of the rooms that I had. Still, I feel this is an interesting coincidence worth noting: the two rooms that had last month creeped me out happened to be the two she had had ghosty contact in.

We made another attempt to record a message in here, which also didn't work. I experienced a serious convulsive shiver while standing outside the entrance, although I think the cold best explains that. What is less easy to explain was the sudden feeling of sickness that hit me, as if I was going to hurl. The best mundane excuse I could find was that I was more creeped out than I was letting on, even to myself. At no point did I genuinely feel afraid beyond what you would expect in that enviroment, but maybe my external calmness was misdirecting those feelings to my gut instead. Or maybe it was an outlet for the cold-and-wetness. In any case, this seemed like the best lead we had had, so I started concentrating on that instead of the temperature, compass or hunches. My rationale was throwing up then passing out would be a fairly impressive display of ghostly presence. So I did go into the Mortuary and walked about half way down. The feeling lessened the further in I got, but when I returned to the corridor outside it felt even stronger. I decided to return to the Operating Theatre. I felt fine for the walk back, and entering some of the other rooms, but when I got back to that piece of wall that had attracted my attention it became overpowering. I moved away worrying that I might actually spew on the historical monument. I don't know what this means, if anything. Perhaps it felt so bad next to the collapsed corridor because I expected it to, though the fact it was smaller in the Mortuary maybe counters that. I'm sure there are plenty of rational reasons why that dank atmosphere would make you feel that ill - the fact I still feel pretty ropey now suggests it was mundane. Mind you, it could also have been the drain on my third eye. Professor Summerfield confessed to a constricted feeling in her throat when making the recordings. We had mints at this point, in case it was a passing thing, but those feelings returned when I went back to those areas.


Here's basically the same plan again, from a different angle. I have added two purple spots for the areas which made me feel violently ill. To the right of the lower purple spot is a small box - that's the kitchen-with-sinks I keep mentioning.


Other places

It was here I heard my second "help me", near the unfinished tunnel, but no more convincing than the first. We found some footprints in the concrete, presumably from the builders - one clearly a German hobnailed boot - but nothing especially exciting happened there. We continued to the second half of the compex - the munitions store. This definitely felt markedly less sinister than the hospital, and not just because of what they were: I only found out there was a difference between the two since getting home. It continued to get gradually colder, but I'm fairly sure this was because we had been down there for two hours. In one room near the end my knees siezed up and almost gave way, but again I believe that was due to the cold. I left with a headache and a sore ear - for the third time, it was very cold down there.

The only other area that deserves mention is the car park. Don't laugh. There was a stillness and quietness outside that seemed far more otherworldly and strange than anything I had experienced inside.

Aftermath

We returned to the car to look at the evidence. Nothing as yet - the recordings were all silent, and the video had turned up nothing. I echo Professor Summerfield's comment: not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved.

Overall analysis? Unconclusive. Despite one or two interesting happenings, I did not experience anything which couldn't have had a perfectly mundane explaination. If there was anything, then it was clearly in the Hospital area and not the later halls of Munitions. I'm so darn sensitive I just feel I should know.

I think the most interesting area was that strange bit of wall, especially combined with the light flicker, camera malfunction and my general ill feeling. Any of those would only be evidence in the company of something more solid.

In an ideal world, I would like to reconduct the experience with proper equipment, overnight when there was no one around. On the other hand, you could argue that a ghost-hunting team all alone down there at night would have a greater chance of contacting the spirit world, not because we could all get into a Ritual State and tune in our Psychic Eyes, but because of the psychological kick being in the Underground Hospital overnight and talking about ghosts would tend to give your imagination.

In any case, that's fufilled a lifelong ambition - and boy do I want to do it again!