Location: National Emergency Service Museum (Sheffield), 7th December
Team Members: Brett, Sarah, Pete, Pam and Kit
Time: 9.00pm until 2.00am
Event write up by Kit Brewer.
On Saturday December 7th, 2019, Visage Paranormal Group investigated the National Emergency Services Museum in Sheffield and I was invited to go along.
During the initial set-up on the second floor, Team Member Sarah felt sick in a certain area of the room and, while setting up chairs, I saw what I thought was a member of museum staff ‘walk’ past the window in the adjacent room on the other side of the fireman’s pole – which would have been the firemen’s mess hall back when the building was in use. On checking with the museum staff, I was assured nobody had been in that room at all.
Could this be the sign of a things to come for the rest of the evening?
During our Health & Safety walk round with the museum staff in the Hall of Fire Engines I had a sudden stabbing pain in the right-hand side of my head and almost doubled up with feeling of nausea. It was as if I had walked into someone else’s feelings just for a moment. This sensation passed when I moved away from that area.
When we returned to the meeting area on the 2nd floor Brett had the guests make a circle to do some protection, one of the guests began to cough and complain like it felt as if she had inhaled smoke. A couple of other guests agreed that they felt something similar. Could they have been reliving the feelings of firemen returning from a shout? Who knows?
We then separated into two groups and I headed with one up to the top floor where the firemen’s bedrooms used to be. Guests did some glasswork on the table and kept getting the number 4. Answers given via the table seemed to point to a woman, who died at aged 48, who came from Sheffield. 2 of her children grew to be adults and 1 became a fireman. When asked to spell out her name, the letters D E L T Y came through, at which point several guests said they felt a cold draught around their knees.
At 11pm Team Member Brett said he felt a pain in his back when entering the fireman’s bedroom exhibit and that this had happened on a previous visit. The pain disappeared when he moved away from that room and went down the corridor.
At this point the guests shut down the glasswork on the table so we could move on and investigate the 2nd floor room which would have once held the end of shift Sunday night dances for the firemen and their families. Team Member Sarah and I were both immediately drawn to the back stairs area which led down to where the supplies for the dances would have been brought up to the bar.
The guest were invited to participate in a Human Pendulum experiment and appeared to get a male fireman spirit come through who rode on the fire engines but did not drive them. He had retired and had some connection to one of the artefacts in the exhibit now displayed in that room.
During the break I spoke to the other group who had been in the old police cells. They had experienced strange sensations of heat and cold, seen shadows on the thermal image goggles and heard tapping in response to calling-out. I couldn’t wait to get down there myself and see what, if anything, would happen to our group.
I wasn’t disappointed.
In one of the cells, which turned out to be cell 4 (perhaps referring to the number repeatedly appearing during the glasswork upstairs?) We had the odd feeling that the wooden bed we were sat on was being pushed from beneath. Nobody’s feet were touching the floor, and nothing was under the bed – believe me, I checked! When calling out to any spirit who might still remain in the cell to make themselves known in some way, the lights on the K2 meter on the floor began jumping from the usual steady green light through to orange. This happened repeatedly as we called out over several minutes. Then it seemed to calm down and the atmosphere went very flat. Guests in the adjacent room however, then began getting similar responses on their K2 meter, saying it had flashed right up to the red. Had our resident spirit got bored of us and gone to communicate with the people in the next cell?
The night was turning out to be a most intriguing one.
During the free time, I wandered from group to group. The ladies in the upstairs bedroom again used the Ouija board and get the names; ‘Fred’ ‘Eian’ and the years ‘1889’ and the fact that these two names were brothers who once shared a room and didn’t always get along. The ‘cat ball’ trigger objects did light up at times during this exchange but were on the table, so we cannot dismiss the idea that they could have been accidentally activated.
Another group returned to Cell 4 and had some interesting results with the K2 and the Ouija board. And our first timer ghost hunters seemed to have enjoyed themselves and had some interesting experiences throughout the evening.
What a great building to be allowed to wander around, with knowledgeable and accommodating museum staff. I would very much like to make return visit sometime.
Thank you to Brett and Nicola at Visage Paranormal for allowing me to tag along to see it from the other side (as it were) rather than as a guest. I am very much looking forward to more adventures with his group in 2020.