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Dec. 8, 2009 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:31
Edition 28 - Nick Pope

This Edition, the last of 2009, features UFO researcher and ex British Defence Ministry manNick Pope...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, my webcast and podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes.
And this is The Unexplained.
Well, thank you for returning to the show.
This is the last one of 2009.
It's been a very big year for us.
Launched a new website.
We've done more shows.
We've taken the show out on the road and there are more plans for 2010.
Please watch this space.
Again, thank you for the great email traffic that I've had over the last month since edition 27 went out.
Emails from all parts of the world and all parts of the UK and many, many more emails saying again that we wondered where you've gone from talk sport and now we've found you again and we're glad you're doing the show.
So certainly there is no doubt that that show had an audience and we are reconnecting with that audience which is a nice feeling.
This time round we're going to bring you Darren W. Ritzen, the ghost hunter based in the northeast.
He's got not one but two new books out.
We'll be talking about those and some of his very very scary experiences with presences from the other side if you believe that kind of thing.
Also we're going to bring you a conversation with Nick Pope about something that only appeared in the news a few days ago here in the UK.
An astonishing statement.
Well I thought it was astonishing and many other people did too from the Ministry of Defence here saying that they are effectively closing down their UFO investigation facility.
Now as you might know Nick Pope is now an independent investigator but he was the man who did those investigations for the Ministry of Defense up until the 1990s so that's why we're going to be talking to him in just a second.
But I'll read you the statement on the Ministry of Defense blog that's just appeared and it'll only take about a minute or so to read and it's worth hearing.
Here it is.
There have been various media reports on the closure of the MOD department which has investigated UFO sightings for the last 50 years.
The MOD has no opinion on the existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial life.
However, in over 50 years, no UFO report has revealed any evidence of a potential threat to the UK.
The MOD has no specific capability for identifying the nature of such sightings.
There is no defense benefit in such investigation, and it would be an inappropriate use of defense resources.
Furthermore, responding to reported UFO sightings diverts MOD resources from tasks that are relevant to defence.
Oh boy, that's the statement.
Came out of a clear blue sky for me, appeared on the media five days or so ago.
There's been a lot of talk about it on the net.
Conspiracy theories emerging all the time.
Let's get the view of the man who used to do that job for the Ministry of Defense first up.
Nick Pope is online to us now.
And Nick, when you saw that, what did you think and were you expecting it?
I strongly suspected it was going to happen and I had clear indications that this was on the cards.
I must confess, however, I thought that the formal termination of the UFO project would actually take place rather later and my view was that they would wait till the final batch of declassified files had been sent to the archives and when the National Archives had put the final batch online, then I thought MOD would kick in with this announcement.
So they somewhat preempted me, but I knew this was on the cards.
The first thought that I had when I heard about this and read about this was about you, funnily enough, because I thought, in a funny way, it devalues all the work that you did with the MOD.
What do you think about that?
It does and it doesn't.
I mean, yes, of course, it was a sad day because it's the sweeping away of 50 years of research and investigation into one of the great mysteries of our time, just at the stroke of a pen.
And in a sense, yes, it's a bit of a slap in the face for the work that I did.
And of course, not just myself.
Many, many people at the Ministry of Defense, both civil servants and military officers, have been involved in this over the years.
So it's a little disparaging to their work, too.
However, as with many things in the murky world of UFOs and government, not everything is quite as it seems.
I thought not.
Yeah, if you look carefully at the MOD statement, they do go on to qualify, or rather this may not have been in the statement, but an astute journalist, I think, got this admission out of the press office, and it was certainly in some of the many media articles that there have been about this.
There was a throwaway line along the lines of we shall continue to monitor UK airspace and any intrusions will be detected on radar and the appropriate action will be taken.
So in other words, really what's happened, reading between the lines, is Joe Public and their Chinese lanterns have been cut out.
But you can absolutely take it to the bank that if an RAF pilot sees a structured craft of unknown origin in British airspace, if a radar operator detects something on the screen that's assessed as a solid craft, that will be looked at.
Not because the MOD does or doesn't corporately believe in extraterrestrials, but self-evidently, anything in our airspace that behaves unusually is of interest from a defense point of view, isn't it?
Which is great if you happen to be within the MOD establishment.
If you happen to be part of the RAF or one of the uniform services, that's fine.
But what happens if I go for a walk in my local park late one night, look up in the sky, and I see a structured craft of unknown origin?
Nobody's going to listen to me now.
I'm afraid they're not.
You won't even get a standard reply back.
I bemoaned the fact that after I left, I mean, my time on the UFO project was 91 to 94, and I did my level best to investigate all sightings that came to me from wherever the source, be it police, pilots, military, or the public.
After I left, that seemed to go on the back burner, and the message seemed to be that the only meaningful investigations would, for example, be police, pilots, unusual radar sightings, those sorts of cases.
Now, the implication is that nothing will be looked at.
The reality is, I think, that it is the military.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
like I say, Joe Public has been cut out.
So if you see and report a structured craft, unfortunately it uh it really won't be listened to, looked at.
Oh, tough as they say.
Um the interesting thing is then the policy was always much like this since you left the MOD.
This almost looks like somebody's playing politics then.
Money needs to be saved.
This is a very small amount of money we have to say, by the way.
£44,000 a year, I understand, which in the defense budget I guess is a drop in the bucket.
But money has to be saved.
They have to be seen to be saving money.
So what a great way to do it.
We'll put out an announcement saying this is something we're disbanding.
Well, this is a very clever little move, and it was quite sneaky for a number of reasons.
Firstly, there was no announcement in Parliament about this.
There was certainly no public consultation.
And you would think, again, whatever you think about UFOs, the MOD has been in this game for over 50 years.
It's quite a big thing.
So the lack of consultation or public announcement was very interesting.
The way in which the announcement was snuck out onto the website, it's absolutely fascinating.
What they did, rather than create a new document, they took an existing document called How to Report a UFO sighting.
Oh, really?
And they edited it and put in this little line at the end to say, therefore, with effect, from 1st of December 2009, we shall no longer be responding to or investigating UFO sightings.
So you had to look for that piece of news?
You had to look.
It's only because, as an insider, I know how policy announcements are sometimes snuck out.
You know, we're back to a good day to bury bad news.
That I spotted this.
I passed it to a contact at the Sun newspaper.
They broke the story, and from there it went all around the world, as you know, on a number of high-profile television and radio shows, and about every newspaper on the face of the planet.
So that was interesting.
And in a sense, you could say that MOD got caught out by this, and almost it became their worst nightmare.
It became such a big story because they'd been dishonest about it and the way they'd handled it.
The other thing that's a little bit dishonest is this subtle implication that somehow this is going to go to the front line, that we're going to wind up the UFO project and suddenly troops in Afghanistan are going to have more kit.
A crate load of body armor is going to turn up in Helmand.
No, it won't.
That's not the way government finance works.
MOD will have been given savings targets for the financial year.
Each division, and I say this as somebody whose 21-year career in MOD included a financial policy post, so I do know about this.
Each division will have had savings targets, and they will find those by identifying posts which will then be cut.
But it's a false economy.
These were cuts MOD had to make anyway.
And this is a top-down dictum Treasury-driven anyway.
Even if MOD was to make an unexpected saving, all that would happen is in the next spending round, the Treasury would offset that and basically say, well, we're giving you less because you've taken a saving.
But at least they've made an announcement and it looks like some official somewhere is trying to keep his boss happy or the powers that be happy by doing this.
Or if you were a conspiracy theorist, you might have another spin on this.
You might actually say, if we all as a society and a community were getting too close to the truth, whatever the truth may be, here's a great way to take the steam out of it.
Well, very interesting you should say that.
When I found out about this story, I was discussing it with a friend before I'd even passed it.
Well, no, I'd passed the tip to the son, but they hadn't yet run the story.
And the very first thing she turned around and said to me was, you know, maybe they were getting too close.
Maybe they don't want people looking at this issue because they found something.
So if you go out onto the net, if you look at the blogs, the forums, the discussion lists, the email groups, et cetera, et cetera, that sort of talk, conspiracy theories around this story are rife.
So if MOD had any thought that this was somehow going to take the wind out of the sails of people who were interested in this and make people say, oh, well, there was nothing to it after all, that government's not interested.
Quite the opposite has happened.
But of course, you have to think like a bureaucrat, and a bureaucrat perhaps wouldn't think in that dimension.
A bureaucrat would think, we need to do this thing, hence we'll make this announcement, hence the equation goes there will be less interest in the subject.
Yes, that may well come into play, and the bureaucratic thinking will be, even if we do take a short-term hit in terms of negative PR, we've got the climate change conference, we've got the state of the economy, we've got X Factor, and we've got people eating rats in the jungle.
So, yes, the bureaucratic mindset is always you can ride these things out if you're prepared to be a little bit patient.
Seems to be a terrible shame, especially as you say, with some kind of, if you believe what you read on the internet, some kind of critical mass perhaps about to be reached and people like the people who were speaking with you at the conference in Liverpool a couple of months ago saying that disclosure is very, very close and all the rest of it.
This does seem to be a terrible shame.
Is there anything else that can be done?
Is it possible, do you think, to buy on MPs, by getting more publicity for this like you're doing, to get this idea looked at again, to get it resurrected?
In the short term, I don't think so.
And in the run-up to an election, I think it would take a very brave MP to make an issue out of this.
The giggle factor still comes into play.
But you're quite right.
UFO Sightings are at a 10-year high here in Britain.
Interest certainly is at an all-time high, I think, as evidenced by the amount of media coverage and the amount of serious media coverage that we're seeing.
People are talking about petitions, lobbying parliament, etc., etc.
Ultimately, you know, this is events-led.
We've been here before.
Classic example is right at the beginning of the MOD's involvement with this subject.
Right back in 1951, when the Flying Saucer Working Party set up to look at this issue, recommended no further action be taken to investigate UFO sightings or to research the phenomenon.
What happened?
The very next year, there was a high-profile wave of sightings involving the RAF, and the MOD was dragged back in.
So, if we get the high-profile events, MOD will be back in the game.
But make no mistake, as I say, while it's a sad day for the public, and arguably a sad day for science, that the vast majority of people, their sightings won't really be looked at, the RAF hasn't given up monitoring our airspace 24-7.
The air traffic controllers are still looking at the screens.
The commercial airline pilots, if there's a near miss, will be reporting to the civil aviation authority.
The RAF pilots, if they see something, will be kicking it up the chain of command.
So, albeit away from the public gaze and behind closed doors, but make no mistake, the MAD is not really out of the game, not yet.
So we can sleep safe in our beds, maybe.
The one thing that struck me more forcibly than anything else, though, is as a journalist, whenever you write or you see one of these stories, it always gives it an added touch of credibility and it makes it more worth reading, perhaps.
If you see the line at the bottom to the extent that an official source said that we are investigating this matter, just the very fact that somebody is investigating it seems to give it more credibility and gives the story more power.
Now, unfortunately, I think what we're going to get is a lot of trivial UFO stories that really do have the giggle factor, as you call it, Nick, I think.
That may be the case, but I mean, over the last few years, the MOD Press Office has been very, very careful to avoid saying, well, we'll investigate this.
They have simply fallen back on the party line of we look at UFO sightings only insofar as this is part of our remit of making sure there's no threat to the defence of the UK.
Now that will be replaced by a line which I imagine says something like, we no longer investigate UFO sightings.
So yes, it's a step back.
But, you know, I don't know.
Journalists won't, I mean, the smart journalists won't fall for that one.
And if they've got a serious UFO story involving pilots, police, or the public, and they think it's a good case, I think they'll write it up.
But yeah, we'll never entirely lose the giggle factor.
And, you know, very often you have this saying, you can't run a UFO story without mentioning your keywords like little green men, mulder and scully, etc.
That will continue.
I've had to write those stories in my time, Nick.
Yes, I have.
Yeah, I mean, the termination of Mod's UFO project won't stop people doing that.
I mean, I think that's just the nature of the beast.
So we'll, but it's, you know, it's early days.
We'll have to see how this pans out.
Well, there you heard it.
The views of ex-MOD man and now independent investigator Nick Pope about the MOD deciding to stop investigating UFO reports.
At least that is what they are telling us.
I would be very keen to get your thoughts about that by email.
Go to the website, triple w.theunexplained.tv, and you can send me an email from there.
If you want to reach me direct, it's unexplainedh at yahoo.co.uk.
But for many reasons, very important for me that you register a hit on the website.
One quick thing to say, and I did mention this briefly last month, I do have a plan, and it's probably going to be weeks away now, to start a PayPal link on the website so that you can make donations if you want to.
Now, I'm not suggesting that you should, but I've had a lot of emails from people saying we think this show is worth something.
There is no doubt that the amount of funding that I have available to make this happen is limited and getting smaller, so it would help.
If you think the show is worth something, then when you see that PayPal link, you might want to make a contribution to it to allow it to continue and to allow the plans that I have to come about.
That's that.
Let's get now to our special guest this time round, Darren W. Ritson, the man who's given a good portion of his life to investigating ghostly phenomena up in the northeast of England, based in Newcastle.
And he's got not one, but two books out at the moment.
He's online now to the unexplained.
Darren W. Ritson, hello.
Hello there.
And how's life treating you?
Because it's a few months since we last...
It's a few months since we last spoke.
Certainly.
Yeah, I'm not too bad.
I'm not doing too bad.
Yeah, I'm still full of busy with my work commitments.
And we don't have no three and a half years, so she's a bit of a handful.
Oh, wow.
The first time we spoke, she was a baby, I think, the first time.
Yeah, which would have been pretty tiny the last time.
And I'm not sure if you can recall as well.
I was having a few health problems.
Yes, you were.
How are you now?
Yeah, I'm fine.
As it turned out, everything worked out well.
I had all my tests.
And what I thought it was, it turned out it wasn't.
So I was greatly relieved.
Oh, well, that's always good, isn't it?
I've been in that situation too.
Yes, I've been there.
No better feeling.
I don't have to tell you that.
Now, that actually brings me very neatly to the first thing I was going to ask you, which is, you know, you have a full-time job, you have a family, and yet you're turning into a prolific author about ghosts and supernatural happenings.
How do you fit it all in?
I make time.
Actually, I get asked this question quite a lot with family members and work colleagues.
And basically, it's a case of whenever I get a moment of free time, once I've finished the usual coming in from work routine, spending time with the other half and playing sniffing ladders with a little in and generally doing the dad thing.
When the little thing goes to bed, it's a case of what time have I got?
I get upstairs and I'll just work through a couple of hours through the night till about maybe it's like 12, 1 o'clock in the morning.
Then I'll go to bed, get some sleep, up for work again, the day starts all over.
I'm quite fortunate as well to have a job where I'm on flexi time, so I can go in whatever time I like and I can have as long as I like for my lunch.
And when it's working on PCs, I can do extra work whilst I'm at work as well.
So it's tailor-made for your life, really, isn't it?
It's basically, yes.
It's a case of whenever I can get on the PC to do some work, I basically grab the chance and do it.
There's a lot of time I've got Sundays to myself.
Me other hoff goes out to a mother's, takes the wee one with her, and then I've got Sundays tonight crack on as well.
But look, I mean, there are all these aspects of your life like an ordinary person.
You've got a job, you've got a child, got a wife, you know, you write, but to be able to write anything, you've also got to do the ghost investigations that you do.
So you have to fit those in along the way too.
How often do you do those?
Well, it used to be quite often back in the day.
But now they're not so few and far.
They're quite few and far between now.
But I still keep me handy and I still get on the investigations.
There's a lot of people I know here up in the northeast who are more than happy to invite me along to the investigations and I really do like to go with them.
But there's a team I actually work with called the Ghosts and Houghton's Overnight Surveillance Team who are there at the beginning with them and they do quite a lot of things up in the northeast of England and I get invited along to a lot of their stuff, you know.
But I go like I say at weekends, that's another great thing about doing the ghost hunting, right?
You see, when Jane in Abbey, even when my daughter goes to bed, that's ideal time for me to come out and play, really, isn't it?
They're in bed all night whilst I'm out and about doing my stuff.
I'm not cutting into their time because they're asleep.
Well, that sounds like you've got it all organised and you know ghosts tend to be we tend to think that they're nocturnal and I suppose they are.
Yeah, but sometimes through the week occasionally I'll take a day off work or a half a day and I'll like sleep through in the morning then go to work in the afternoon.
But I think at the end of the day it's if you want to do it and you're desperate enough and you've got a passion enough to do it, you will find the time.
Now you've been doing it for years though, Darren.
How many years?
Tell me exactly again.
I know you told me before.
I've actively been out and about researching, doing overnight investigations for about, since about 2003, I think it was, the first.
Right, so the interest, the active interest, you were telling me once, I think, goes back to the 90s, doesn't it?
But really getting involved...
It goes back to the early 90s, yeah.
It goes back even beyond that to the early experiences I had as a child growing up.
I always had a fascination with it through some of the odd occurrences that I'd experienced as a kid.
And we talked about that in a previous edition as well.
You had some spying, well, things that would have scared the proverbial out of me when you were a kid, and they focused your mind towards all of this, didn't they?
Well, yes, they did, they did.
I mean, at the end of the day, I could have chose to ignore them and be framed by them, you know, but as it happened, it had an effect on us, which basically has lasted all these years.
It made us want to know what could be going on here.
Why are these things occurring?
Is there more to life than what we knew at the minute?
And I think, indeed, there is.
Well, the last time we talked, we covered off the South Shields poltergeist case, which was, well, very, very frightening and had a specific focus, as poltergeist cases tend to have.
So that could be heard on a previous edition of the Unexplained a few editions back.
We're going to talk about some specific ghost investigations now that are in two of your books.
we're going to deal with the first one is, is it Supernatural North, the first one?
Yeah, it's called, yep, Supernatural North.
Okay.
And that's just been released by Ambelly Publishing.
well you know that whenever i do these things and we'll get to the details and have a get hold of the books at the end of this but whenever i do these things either on live radio or we do them like this on webcasts the response i always get is that people want to hear the stories it's the stories that they want you know last year in liverpool i threw open the phone lines on city talk 105.9 and i said okay here's your opportunity to tell those stories that you tell around the fire on boxing day when the telly's off and everybody's sitting there they're all chilled out and
The stories come out.
Let's hear those stories now because they may never get an airing like this again.
And I said, I'll tell you mine.
And I told a couple of mine and my dad's because my dad was in the police and in the forces before that.
He had some weird experiences.
So I told a couple of mine.
Then the phones went mad.
People love the stories.
So let's work through some of these.
This is from the first book.
And the other book is called Paranormal Northeast.
That's the newest of the two.
But we'll talk about Supernatural North first.
And you give me a list of a few stories here.
The first one is the Furcroft Miners Institute in Rotherham, which is South Yorkshire.
Yes, yes.
What happened there?
That was a very interesting.
Well, we've had a number of investigations down there.
Basically, the Gerson Houghton's overnight surveillance team I mentioned earlier on.
One of the chaps penned an article for a magazine.
And it was for a paranormal magazine.
And through that article, somebody down there read about our team and what we did.
And subsequently got in touch.
And they had a lot of things going on.
It was a huge, gigantic, like, sort of community center hall.
You know, it's been around.
We have to explain to people who don't live in the UK that miners'institutes in places like the North Midlands and right across the North of England, their places were.
They're like social clubs for the people who mined the coal.
Yes, that's right.
That's right.
So they've been around for a long time.
And basically, the place is now used as a community center.
it's gonna it's being used nowadays as what it was then a place for gathering for for people to get together and hold parties and events there and things like that and it's a huge old burden anyway the the staff and members who go there were experiencing some more activity and things were being seen footsteps were being heard um eerie presences were felt, you know, like chills were being felt.
And they basically turned around and said, Look, we're not worried about this at all.
It is quite unnerving at times, but you're more than welcome to come down, spend a few nights here.
So they weren't calling you in to get rid of these things, they were just calling you in to come and see them.
Yeah, basically, it was just a case of, look, come down.
Maybe she can shed a few answers.
Maybe she can tell who these people might be.
Perhaps maybe it can try and catch something on Philip.
Maybe it's accrue some evidence.
But you're welcome to come nonetheless and have a look.
So we did.
And what a few investigations were had there.
Where do I start?
Basically, once we were down there during these investigations, there was a load of weird and wonderful things caught on tape.
On experiences were, well, experience basically.
Chairs were being moved around when there was nobody around to move them.
We actually heard footsteps.
There was a guy, Drew, actually saw an apparition.
Someone actually stuck their head around the corner, you know, as if someone was just looking for somebody.
You know, if you pop your head into a door and you just say, Is anybody in there?
No, they just popped their head around and then disappeared.
Drew actually thought it might have been me because he actually describes it as a balding, chubby fellow.
And he thought it was me.
But he was rather surprised to see me coming out of another room which was behind this door.
Okay, so and there was nobody else there.
Well, not who looked like me.
And he was quite surprised about that.
But there was an area backstage, like behind behind the stage, you know, there was like a little area that was like, it used to be the original embrance to the burden.
And what happened in there to this fella Drew was absolutely mind-blowing to say the least.
He went in there with a small group of people and had a few video cameras and the usual.
And they were calling out to the atmosphere, give us a saying, is there anybody there?
And basically they heard these few knocks and bumps coming from down the corridor into the darkness, you know.
And they thought, oh, you know, what was that?
What was that?
Could you do that again?
Was that a knock?
And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, you heard this, it was like you had this feeling of static electricity and it was like a hissing noise, like a police taser gun, really, yeah?
Yeah, basically like a type noise, you know.
And as that occurred, this scream, this howl can be heard as it envelopes his head.
And it's like...
Right?
And exactly at the same time, he was hit on the head.
Something actually clobbered on the top of the head.
And it was actually recorded on tape and you can hear this slap.
Imagine, like, you know, when you, you know, when Benny Hill used to slap that little bald man, it's not funny.
If it had been me, I'd have been out the door of that place so fast, you wouldn't have seen my backside for steam.
Yeah, but basically, it was just one slap.
It was as if someone or something raised the hand and just gave him one old maybe slap on the top of the head.
His legs actually buckled with the slap.
Because it was unexpected.
Because it was unexpected and it had so much force.
It nearly knocked him out.
and he sees the legs buttoned, you could see all the three of them scream, and when they come back through into the main area, we listen to the footage and we thought it was, I mean, there was something genuinely frightening that occurred.
Drew's not a man of...
He doesn't...
Well, no, he's not.
Well, within five minutes, he was back down there anyway.
He went back down to Facebook, to whatever it was.
He went back down.
No, you said whatever it was.
One of the last guests that we had on the previous show was Sandria Mosses.
She's a medium who works in the Midlands.
And she specializes in going to places where there are what she calls entities.
And she describes some of these things that are not necessarily ghosts, but they're spiritual presences, she thinks.
And they do some very, very scary things.
She's been in situations that I could, you know, physically I wouldn't be able to face.
You know, most of us wouldn't be able to.
Do you think that you were dealing with something like that?
Or was this a presence, the ghost of a person?
Well, we took a medium with one second trip.
And this was the second trip when this assault took place.
You know, the guy who was one medium on the night, he's like a well-renowned medium.
He actually, he's an exorcist.
He's called Ralph Keaton.
And he's a really good medium exorcist.
He knows what he's doing.
Now, this guy picked up on a number of things when we were down there.
And he basically said his conclusion was that to put a faint point on it, it was because we were dabbling.
End of story.
You know, you get a lot of people say you didn't want to dabble.
You don't know what you're doing.
Things like that.
So he was telling you that you were connecting with something there.
And by the sound of it, you were.
That really you don't need to mess with.
These things are like low-grade presences that a lot of people who are in the field that you're in say exist.
And as long as you don't acknowledge them or dabble with them or mess with them, they're not going to do you much in the way of harm.
Yes.
Basically, that's what Ralph said.
And he more or less turned around and said, look, at the end of the day, it could have been Drew.
It could have been me.
It could have been anyone on the team.
It just so happens it went for him.
Simply because we were there and it didn't want we're there.
You know, it's a classic case of you know sticking your nose in.
I mean, we actually tell people as well.
I would like to think, I would like to consider ourselves as like we sort of know what we're doing, we're experienced.
We've went through a lot of this stuff, we've studied it for years and years.
There are a lot of people out there who think it's fun, they think it's a thrill mate, right?
And you've got to respect these things.
We are probably one of the very few people who do go in and respect these things.
But even I can hold my hands Up and say, look, you know, I mean, like the South Shields case, there was a time where I actually thought to myself, just what the hell am I dealing with?
You know what I mean?
Because it's unknown.
Okay, so there you are at the Fircroft Miners Institute in Rotherham for the second time, and you have this famous medium with you who is a bit of an exorcist.
Does this person, do you try and get rid of whatever is there?
No, we don't personally.
I mean, Ralph has.
Ralph does, but he tries not to if he can help it.
you've left whatever is there still there to this day?
Yes, but that was with the request of the people who run the...
Because they'd said it wasn't a problem to them, Nothing else.
What do we think?
Now, if we go back to the north of England, I'm from the north of England, so I know more than your average person from the south of England about this stuff, but mining communities were very, very close and tight, and they suffered.
Of course they suffered.
They suffered in so many ways.
People would go down the pit, just as they do in places like Africa today, and they don't come up.
There are accidents.
There are tragedies.
Do we think that any of that is anything to do with what was going on there?
I don't think so.
I think at the end of the day, no, I can't quite remember this offhand, but it is noted in the book.
This guy, Ralph, picks up on a name and he comes to the conclusion that this chap was actually a soldier.
He was a veteran of the Great War, of the First World War.
And he came up with a name, which is mentioned in the book.
But later on in the investigation, we didn't realize it at the time, we went into one of the records rooms and we found some information.
And this guy's name was in there, which was pretty incredible.
Wow.
Well, you know, that's what investigators look for.
It's the Holy Grail, isn't it?
It's proof.
Real proof.
Well, we know it is.
We know.
I mean, it convinced us of Ralph straight away, you know.
But again, those listening to this interview tonight can just say, yeah, well, of course, whatever.
We weren't there.
Well, look, there are going to be people who will email me about this and say, are you sure that somebody somewhere was not having a joke with you and it wasn't a setup?
Yeah, we have that all the time.
And at the end of the day, I think we're seasoned investigators and I think we've been in the game long enough now to know or to be able to work out when someone is sort of pulling the wall over what eyes you see.
I mean, these investigations, these thorough professional investigations, there's a lot of time goes into planning them.
And we make sure that if there's any mediums on site, they don't know where we're going, they don't know anything about the place.
So the scope for fixing it, for making it a put-up job, as we say here in the UK, is limited.
Very much so.
All right, I want to get on to another one of these cases.
You sent me this list from the book.
Now, as a kid, I used to spend a lot of my time with my mum and dad in Blackpool.
Now, if you're born in Liverpool like I was, we used to go a lot to Blackpool.
It was my first holiday was in Blackpool.
And they always used to take me to the fair.
And Blackpool Fair has a very, very famous ghost train.
But according to you, the ghost train is haunted.
Really?
For real?
Yes, yes.
It sounds crazy, doesn't it, really?
A ghost train.
A haunted ghost train.
I live in it.
But I mean, there's lots of unorthodox haunted places in and around the country.
You've got haunted hilltops, you've got mountains.
Some people think trees are haunted and things.
In a ghost train, it's just a raid.
It's technically just like a movable property.
You've got to have a caravan that travels around the country.
There's no reason why you can't have a haunted caravan.
At the end of the day, the Blackpool ghost train stays there.
When you get inside it, it's like a warren of corridors, really.
It's one long corridor all the way around and inside.
And there's no reason at all why a ghost, a real ghost, shouldn't inhabit there.
And there is.
There's a guy called Cloggy.
Cloggy?
Cloggy.
Well, that was his nickname.
He used to wear a big pair of clog boots.
Did he work on the ghost train?
He worked on the ghost train, and I think he was one of the chaps that actually had built it.
It was his baby type of thing, you know, when it was built back in the day.
And when he died, it's said that he loved his ghost train so much he never left it.
And occasionally, you can hear his boots as he clogs around the tracks, you know, like the Echoic sort of tubes that are.
And again, you don't think this is a myth that the people who run the ghost train and the fair at Blackpool, the fairground there, wouldn't like to have put around because it's good for business.
Well, I suppose it could be, but at the end of the day, it's like the Polygaste phenomenon for me.
When I heard of the Enfield Polygast, I was always on the fence.
I read about different Polygaste cases.
I was on the fence.
I was like, maybe, maybe not.
I can't say it didn't happen because I wasn't there.
But I can't say it did because I wasn't there.
So until I see it for myself, I'll keep an open mind.
So you went to Blackpool, went to the ghost train, and experienced it for yourself?
Yes, I did.
Yes, I did.
And what was it like?
They vacated the ghost train and let us finish off the investigation with the seance.
They wanted nothing to do with that, which is fair enough.
They had had all that film.
They'd done what they needed to do with us.
So we escorted them out of the train.
Then we came back inside, made sure the place was empty, and then proceeded with the seance.
It was during the seance there was a door that was standing behind one of the chops that was banging and rattling.
You know, the lock was going as if someone was trying to get in.
When we ran out, had a look around, there was nobody there.
We felt cold drafts, of course, but what do I mean?
It's on the Blackpool safe front, you know, there will be drafts getting in there.
But we also heard footsteps clumping along the track towards us.
We called out, are you there?
Is that really you?
Obviously, we didn't get any answer in the form of voices or anything, but we heard the footsteps come along and then they stopped.
And at that point, we broke the circle, all split up, had a little look around, found that nobody was in there.
All the crew and the cast and everyone else, they were all outside.
So we've come to the conclusion that we did hear the footsteps.
Whether it was Clovey or not himself, we don't know, but we do know we heard footsteps.
Now, the interesting thing is, as well, I've got a friend in Blackpool called Juliette Gregson.
Now she's a bit of an authority on the ghosts in Blackpool.
And her great-great-grandfather, if I'm correct, I've read it somewhere, I don't think she's even told us, was actually Cloggy, the man himself.
So we know this guy exists.
We know he did exist.
But you're just not sure about what it was that connected with you.
And isn't it funny that the TV crew who didn't want to be part of the seance didn't want to experience that?
They missed the best part of it.
Well, that's the ironic thing as well.
I've specified this in one of the books as well.
It basically says, had they have been in and been filming it, we would have caught it on tape.
These days, I think that they would want to do it because these days, I think the regulations are a lot laxer about these things.
And you've even got attempts to contact Elvis Presley now and Michael Jackson.
Yeah, yeah.
The less about that, the better, I think.
All right, and from this book, let's do one more.
The Golden Lion Pub.
Where's that?
The Golden Line pub is in...
A lot of people say it's in Sunderland.
A lot of people say it's in County Durham.
But it's right on the border.
But it's in a place called Seaham.
Oh, yes, Seaham.
So that's a seaside town, yeah?
It is, yeah.
And it's a coal town as well, mining town, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
It certainly is, yeah.
I thought we said a colder town.
Well, it is a cold town as well, especially at the moment with the gales going on there.
But that was a mining town, and they used to get, what do they call it, sea coal.
So the miners would actually go out under the sea and cut the coal from under the sea, wouldn't they?
Yes, yes, that's quite incredible.
This is a pub in Siem.
Yes, it is.
It's an old derelict pub.
And we've been in there about three or four occasions now.
The first time was a good night.
The pub was still open for business then, so while we'd found the clues, and during that investigation, a number of experiments were carried out, a number of vigils were carried out.
And during the course of that evening, we actually heard, I actually heard, as well as others, the sound of a woman crying, which was pretty sad, I must admit.
You could hear the woman sobbing, and it was coming from somewhere within the room or within the corridor.
And it was quite horrible, actually, it was quite sad.
But earlier on in the evening, another psychic friend of mine, Suzanne Atchinson from Walkworth, she picked up earlier on in the evening that there was a spirit of a woman had been seen in the building and had been heard crying.
She said she sensed someone's pain and anguish.
And harrowingly, she actually said this girl may have actually been sort of raped and tortured.
In the pub?
Whether it would be in the pub or elsewhere.
She was somehow connected to the pub.
But interestingly, later on, like we say, when we were sitting in the vigil and sailing conditions, we all heard this sound and it sent chills through your bones, it really did.
And that was on one of the first investigations.
One of the second investigations that was more interesting because it was now a derelict old building and all the windows had been boarded up, the doors had been unlocked.
No one had been in the pub for a year or two.
There'd been a fire, there'd been outbreak of fire in the main bar, and so the whole bar was damaged.
But when we got there in, again, the window, there was no electricity in the place for that night, you know.
So we had to go in with all our torches.
We locked ourselves in.
We made sure all the windows were intact.
All the windows that had been boarded up, we made sure they were secure.
And in hindsight, that was one of the best things we did, to be honest, because what had happened later on, what transpired later on, really again sent chills down the four because there was four in there that night.
We split them into two groups of two.
And as I was walking up the stairs again with this guy called Drew Bartley, I had my video, my dictation machine running.
It's like my EVP machine.
And what I do is I use it to take notes.
20 past 10, we've gone into our first video.
I'm now sitting down.
I'm going to call out and take photos.
So when I come back to write up my report, I know exactly what's been happening, you see.
So as we were taking these steps up the stairs, you heard me say, Right, well, I'm just about to go up the stairs, and then all of a sudden, we heard this gigantic pop and then this crash as if glass was breaking.
And then I actually turned around to Drew after a split second of silence, looking at each other with dread.
I actually said, What the is that?
I'm not actually saying what we can guess.
But it was rather coarse to say the least.
So we ran down into the main bar and we couldn't find a thing.
And what it sounded like was one of the paint glasses that was stabbed up on the table had been violently thrown to the floor and smashed.
That's what I thought it was.
So basically what we did is we had a look around to see if we could find any broken windows.
Had someone pop the window from outside?
So as one person ran outside, having a look around for like hooligans and thugs, we also checked the windows.
Now not one window had been put out and all the windows that were boarded up were still boarded up.
So whatever happened happened within that building.
It wasn't something that came from outside.
Well, yes, I'm absolutely convinced of that.
In fact, I'm convinced so much to the point.
Well, Drew, Drew was more skeptical about it.
I don't know why.
He's had lots of experiences before.
I mean, it's good to be skeptical, yes.
But after we'd eliminated all the possibilities, he still wouldn't accept the fact that it could have been a glass breaking.
Now, what was the vibe about that place?
Because you told me it was closed, and in recent years, a lot of pubs have closed all over the country because they're having a hard time.
But you know, you'll sometimes get a pub, and I know of one or two around the country where not nice things have happened there, and they just seem to be unlucky places.
I wonder, do you think that's one of them, from what you know?
Well, it seems to be.
It seems to be.
I think when the pub was open, when the guy was in running his business, he was having experiences in there.
That's why we went in in the first place, you see.
He was experiencing stuff.
He was here at children laughing and carrying on and you could hear noises and footsteps coming from upstairs when he's working in the bar.
And did you ever research what was on that site before there was a pub there?
Yes, we did.
I mean, there wasn't much we could find out about the place, but we did manage to ascertain some information.
There was like the building was actually used for a Sunday school type of place where there would be like uh an off enough like an authority figure and there'd be youngsters running around and it was either like a Sunday school or a place of learning.
Um, that's what we're gonna sort of gather so far.
And there was and there was an accident in there where somebody fell down the stairs and died.
Um, also, it's believed that Albert Pierpoint, the executioner, he actually resided in that building as well.
Really?
Now, wasn't Pierpoint the last public executioner that we had in the UK, the last hangman?
Yes, he was.
Yes, he was.
And I mean, there's nothing sinister about him and him staying there.
It's just his job is sinister.
He's a gruesome executioner.
So maybe if we follow the line that that person I was talking to in the last show, Sandre Mosses, was saying, sometimes entities and spirits attach themselves to people, and if you're not very careful, they stay with you.
Maybe there was stuff hanging around him because of the job that he did.
Well, who knows?
I mean, I suppose that's a big possibility.
Speculation.
All right, let's get on to the new book.
This is the latest one, which is Paranormal Northeast.
That hasn't been published yet, am I right?
Yes, no, no, no.
They're both out.
They're both out available at the buy at the minute.
All right, well, let's deal with a couple here.
One of them you sent me was a prisoner of war camp at a place called Harperley.
Now, prisoners of war, people may not know, but during the wartime, there were people who were interred here.
If they were seen as a threat to the state when we were at war with Italy and Germany, if there was anybody like that here, they were interred.
And also, of course, anybody who'd been captured, perhaps from a ship, German U-boat cruise, that kind of thing, we put them away in prisoner of war camps, yeah?
Indeed, we did, yes.
And actually, the Horbury Prisoner of War camp was actually built by Italians, which eventually came to house the Germans.
But unfortunately, I don't know what's happened to the place now, but it seems to have closed down.
It's in rag and ruin at the minute.
And I think it's up for grabs at the minute for the prisoner of work.
I think the owners, who I was corresponding with at the time, they've actually moved on, they've sold it.
I think they couldn't afford to keep it going, all you know, lack of business and things.
All right, but they approached you to go and check the place out.
Well, I was invited as a guest of another team that corresponded with the owners a lot more than what I did.
You see, there was a team called Anomalous Phenomena Investigations, ran by Cindy and Colin Nunn.
They used to work in the north.
He subsequently moved back to California now, because Cindy was American.
Anyway, they used to do the work up there.
They organized the investigation, and I was fortunate enough to be invited along, yes.
But, you know, it was reputed to sort of be haunted.
You know, there were a few things that might have occurred.
You know what I mean?
It was like there weren't sure.
So basically, Cindy went in and invited some people.
And it was basically like, let's see if we can get anything.
We don't know if it's haunted, but let's see if it is.
But I think it turns out it is.
Well and truly.
Haunted.
And tell me how you found that out the hard way by the sounds of it.
Yeah, yeah, because I actually saw a ghost.
All right, what was that like?
You saw.
Now, you know, I'd love to see a ghost.
I've never seen a ghost.
I don't think so.
What did you see?
Well, can I just say it first as well?
Out of all the takeaway of the South Shields Polargeist, right?
Out of all the investigations and overnight as I've done, like in castles, pubs, clubs, hotels, stately homes, aeroplane cockpits, you know, any type of haunted place, garages, lock-ups, sheds, the lot, I've investigated them all.
And I've done hundreds of overnight investigations over the years.
And I can only say with you know 200% sincerity that the only ghost that I've seen, the only one ghost that I've seen, crystal clear, that I can put my hand on my heart and say, I am sure about this, was it Hobley Prison at a war camp?
I mean, I've had tons of other experiences where it's been like you thought you see something, but then you come to later and question it.
This is the one experience where I've actually visually seen an apparition and I've never questioned it since.
Well, I think I can say that you're probably very lucky.
There'll be a lot of investigators out there who spent their whole lives doing EVPs and taking cameras, you know, film cameras, digital cameras out to places, and they've never seen anything.
They may have experienced temperature drops and all the rest of it and seen electromagnetic phenomena, but never actually seen a ghost.
So maybe you're lucky.
I don't know.
Tell me the story.
Well, I mean, I'm tenacious, one of the two.
I think it's a combination of them both.
And in regards to, like I say, I've been in the game a long time now and I've seen a lot of people come and go for that main reason.
They come on investigations and after like three or four or five investigations where nothing occurs, they quit the game, they quit the field.
Which is sad, but at the end of the day, I mean, you've got to have patience, haven't you?
You've got to persevere.
So anyway, you put in the time doing the investigations and this ghost was your reward in a way, wasn't it?
I think it was, yes.
That Miss Household case.
Because everybody dreams of the big one, you know.
And the South Shields really was the big one.
Well, tell me about this ghost, though.
Yes, it was on a break.
We'd basically been investigating the huts and the areas within the prisoner of war camp.
And we'd done an investigation and, you know, very little had occurred.
So we went to the base room, wall met up, had a break, had a cigarette, was standing outside, having a chat.
And I was talking to a couple of chaps, and out of the corner of my eye, I caught this movement.
And there was something just there floating about.
And I thought nothing of it, because I thought it might have been another investigator he'd been, you know, having a look around and peering into some of the windows and the opposite huts and things.
So the first thing you do always, and you've said this before, is you look for the logical explanation first, well, that's what I thought it was.
I didn't even look over at the time, I just caught the movement out of my eye and I thought nothing of it.
I just thought someone's out and about.
But I kept on talking, we kept on chatting with these, you know, with my colleagues, and it was there and it kept on bugging us.
You know, it was like, you know, it was as if it wanted us to look over.
You know, it kept on catching the corner of my eye.
So I basically turned and looked.
You know, like the snagging feeling got the better of us.
So I turned around and looked.
And you know, when you're outside in the dark at night and you see someone on the other side of the road, you can see that there.
You can see there's somebody there, but you can't make out whether it's a man or a woman or whether you can't make out what they've got on.
It's what they call a shadowy figure.
Yeah, it's just a shadowy figure, but it was crystal.
It was there.
I mean, there was a light up above it.
You could see there was somebody there.
And as I turned, as I turned, it began to move.
And as it moved, it walked into and through the back of a parked tractor, which was sitting there.
And when it got halfway through this tractor, it just disappeared in the thin air.
You know, crazy as it sounds, it did.
And I sat there, sorry, I stood there looking in utter bewilderment, thinking that all the investigations I've been on, all the hours spent in vigil locations.
And it happened when you least expected it.
When I least expected it.
And I should have known that.
But again, it always catch you off guard.
Okay, what do you remember?
Apart from it being a shadowy figure, what do you remember most about it?
Well, two things.
The fact that I think it was a man, and the fact that it disappeared in the thin air in front of my eyes after I walked through a track.
They're the two things that stick.
I think I've actually seen something walk through an inanimate object and then disappear.
You know, track down in this case.
Absolutely main blood.
I was gobsmacked.
Literally, I was gobsmacked.
And what about the research you did after that?
Did you find anything that would have tied to that figure that you saw?
Anything that would have tied up with it?
Unfortunately, not.
We did try and do a little bit of research.
But as I said earlier, although the people at the camp thought it might have been haunted, or presumed it would have been haunted, with it being a prisoner at a war camp that having history, they got the teams in just as a diagnostic thing, just to say what we could find.
So when I went and said, has there been anything seen in this area before?
The answer was always going to be no, because nobody had.
Do you know what I mean?
Because they didn't know if the place was haunted.
If someone had suggested that someone had seen a ghost, then they might have said, well, there was a ghost which has been seen over there.
Now, if that was the case, if they had known about that, then somebody could have turned around to me and said, well, you obviously knew about that and it's played a trick on your mind.
So now, because nobody had ever seen a ghost there, no one ever knew, I'm basically say I'm probably the first person ever to have seen it and realized what it was.
And there was no reason, as you've just said, for you to be anticipating that there would be something there because although people had a vague feeling it might be haunted, nobody'd ever seen anything and it took you off guard.
It took you completely off guard.
Basically, yeah, in the fact that I was on a break and I wasn't expecting anything, yeah, it left us quite dumbfounded to say the least.
But you weren't able to record it.
Unfortunately, that was the only one that couldn't have been left in the basement.
That's what happened to me.
Well, maybe whatever it was meant for it to be that way, wanted you personally to know, but didn't want anybody else to.
However.
You know, I sometimes think like I think that because it seemed to be hanging around quite a lot.
Nobody else seen anything over there.
Yeah, it was hanging around, you see.
As I said earlier, I thought it was like another investigator mooching about.
And for those who don't know what much it means, it just means like hanging about.
Oh, no, I think that's probably a term that would be appreciated both sides of the Atlantic, Darren.
I think they know mooching in the US.
They'll tell me if they don't.
So it must have been there for a good while because I was talking for like 25, 30 seconds.
And I thought, it's still there, whatever it is, it's catching my eye.
And then I turned, I looked, then it proceeded to walk slowly into the back of this track out where it disappeared.
It was as if it was waiting for me or someone else to notice it before it disappeared.
And do you have a fear that some of these things, which is another theory that I've read and heard about, could be draining energy from you if you're not very careful?
You know, people who do this say you have to protect yourself.
I don't know how, but you have to protect yourself.
Well, I don't really know how to protect myself.
I know there's theories and ideas about psychic white lights and covering yourself with auras, but it's not really scientific, is it?
when you think about it.
Well, I suppose that the approach that I would take Well, yes, a lot of this could be psychological, but you know, the approach that I would take, and sounds like you take it too, is that you just simply do not allow anything in.
If you don't allow a thing in, it can't get in.
Well, I suppose that's true enough.
Yeah, that's true enough.
I just go in and I take it, you know, step by step as it happens, as it happens.
I've been touched with it at the end of the day.
I've never had any serious injury.
I've never been...
Like...
I've been touched.
I've been a solid, I've been Really?
Yeah.
What did that?
some invisible entity in the Scona Hotel they've actually done it twice in the space of We're on the internet.
We can say this.
Some hidden hand or hidden force grabbed your testicles.
Indeed.
And all I can say is it must have had a big hand.
Did it make your eyes water?
It certainly did.
Yeah.
Sorry for laughing.
It's not funny.
Well, it is now.
I'd done a bad thing.
I was aggravating the spirit.
I was ghost-baiting, which is not really recommended.
It was in one of my earlier days, you know, and I was naive.
It's not the sort of thing I do now.
But a lot of people do that.
They aggravate the spirits and effing blind at them.
They call them.
They try to provoke them into an outward manifestation.
Well, you won't be doing that again, will you?
No, I certainly won't.
Not in room 28 of the Squid Hotel.
My God.
But yeah, that crushed them.
And look, I mean, this is, you know, this is quite, well, it can be a very painful thing.
Were there any physical signs without going into graphic detail here, Darren, but any physical signs of what happened to you?
Bruising?
No, not really, not really.
You were well, you were a lucky man, but whatever it was, certainly knew how to teach you a lesson.
Yeah, well, not really, because I was back in about 10 minutes later and I was in doing the same thing.
So it happened twice on that occasion.
So after the second time, I mean, that was a bad night, to be honest, because later on in the investigation, I was chased along a corridor by an invisible force, by these footsteps, and I ran into a wall where I thought there was a door.
And I bumped my head, I nearly broke my leg, I smashed my toe, and I broke my clipboard.
Good luck.
And I was bleeding, and I needed first aid.
And I mean, for two weeks after that, actually, that was the beginning of a bad two weeks, really.
And you were younger tempted when those things happened to want to pack this in, to stop doing it?
Well, yes, I did.
I really considered that.
I was terrified, but there was a guy I knew again, like Drew Arthur Faircroft.
Within 20 minutes, I was back down there calling out, seeing what was there with someone.
I basically went back down the way it happened.
And I think if I'd never went there and I'd never went back that night to face my fian or whatever it was, then I might have left.
So I'm glad I went back down there.
That's true, it's like falling off a horse you've got to get back on.
Yeah, basically, I had my first air, got banished up, went straight back down.
Fixed the investigation.
Darren, we'll talk again.
Listen, we're out of time.
You leave the best story till last.
Oh, I know.
Because here on the internet, we can say words like testicles.
I'm not sure if they still can on American radio, but I think we can probably get away with that.
Tell us about the books then.
Your publisher is, what's the name of the publisher?
Amberly?
Well, the publisher for both of these books is Amberly Publishing.
That's A-M-B-E-R-L-E-Y, yeah?
Yes, Amberly Publishing.
I think it's like my fourth and my fifth book with Amberly, I've done.
Because I'm getting a bit ahead of myself now.
I'm on the book 10 or 11 now, I think.
But yes, Paranormal Northeast.
That's the new book, and the other one is Supernatural.
Supernatural North, yep, and they're all available in good shops and online, Amazon.co.uk.
Once again, nicely sold, Darren Ritzon.
I would say, get on and get them.
There's some Kraggin stuff in there.
Darren W. Ritzon back on the show, The Prince of the Ghost Investigators in the Northeast of England.
And as he told you, two new books out this man has, and I'm sure there's another one coming during 2010.
I just have that feeling.
This has been edition 28 of The Unexplained, the last one of 2009.
Thank you very much for your support.
Please keep that support coming.
Keep your emails rolling in.
Thank you to Martin for the theme tune, which he reworked very effectively this year.
Martin, it's great, and I'm going to keep using it.
Many thanks.
Adam Cornwell, I don't know how much I can thank you, Adam, because you've done great work on the website.
We have plans for next year as well.
So watch this space.
W.theunexplained.tv is the web address of this site.
If you need to contact me directly, it's unexplainedh at yahoo.co.uk.
But Adam and I would prefer it if you email through the website, www.theunexplained.tv.
Watch this space.
I wish you warmth, happiness, love, success, and everything you would wish yourself in 2010.
Who knows what the new year will bring?
I never, ever make any predictions about a new year.
But I hope it's a good one for you.
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