All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 9, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:41
Edition 369 - Andy Gilbert

This time ex cop Andy Gilbert - with chilling real life on-duty paranormal tales from policeofficers...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Thank you very much for being part of this worldwide adventure that we've been on for years and years and years.
If you're a comparatively new listener, then thank you for joining.
And I hope that you're enjoying going through the back catalogue, which I know a lot of people are.
If you're somebody who's comparatively new, hasn't been here from the very beginning, but has been here in the last few years, like Ashley in California, who emailed recently, thank you, Ashley, for your nice comments, then you're welcome to please recommend your friends to this show because that is the only way that we will grow.
I don't have vast advertising or social media budgets, so the only way to do this is to get you to tell people about this show yourselves until we're able to invest more in it.
But it seems to have worked pretty well so far.
So thank you very much.
If you want to get in touch with me, make a guest suggestion, tell me about the show in any way if you want to.
You know, put a criticism out there or maybe make a suggestion about how things can be done better, that's okay.
Go to the website theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, and you can get a message to me that way.
And if you would like to make a donation for the work that we do here to continue, then you can do that as well at the website theunexplained.tv.
And it's always nice to hear from you.
Whenever I get up in the mornings, I always check my e-box, e-box, my inbox first.
Actually, that's a very good phrase.
I always check my e-box first just to see if anybody's been in touch and what the general feeling is about the latest show.
So, you know, it means a lot to me.
When you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
And if your email demands an urgent response, it will get one.
Which is more than can be said, as I always say here.
I'm probably getting boring about this, but more than can be said for a lot of the mainstream media who simply don't bother about you.
Okay, the guest on this edition of the show is somebody who is a trained observer, who's been getting the story of other trained observers.
We've seen over the years on The Unexplained that some of the best accounts in the field of ufology, for example, but also in the field of ghost research and other fields, come from people who are trained to observe.
People who are pilots or police officers or other people of that kind in a uniform.
Now, sometimes we don't get those accounts because perhaps the people are worried that they will be ridiculed.
Perhaps it will affect their promotion prospects, which was very much a factor in the past, I think.
But also, of course, some of the people who wear uniforms swear an oath of secrecy and would be prosecuted if they divulged what they knew.
Nevertheless, good stories do get out.
And somebody we will speak to on this edition, I think you're going to like a lot.
His name is Andrew Gilbert.
And he is of a police background who's gathered some really wonderful stories from serving and past police officers across the United Kingdom of ghostly and other happenings.
I have to say that the book is quite short, but very, very well reviewed and very, very well written.
Some fabulous stories in there.
So we're going to talk to Andrew Gilbert about himself and the book on this edition of The Unexplained.
I hope you enjoy that.
A reminder, if you want to contact me, go to the website theunexplained.tv and you can leave me a message from there and it would be nice to hear from you as ever.
Okay, let's get to a part of the United Kingdom, which I think is probably about 100 miles or so north of me here in London.
And let's talk to Andrew Gilbert about the book Credible Witness.
Andrew, can I call you Andy?
Yes, that's fine.
Thank you very much for coming on my show.
Tell me about, first of all, where you are.
I'm currently in Tamworth in Staffordshire, where I live.
I retired from West Midlands police six years ago, and I worked throughout the West Midlands area.
Okay, and a lot of these stories are from the English Midlands, but we have to say not all of them.
That's right, yes.
As I gradually went along doing a bit more research, talking to more people, people very kindly put me in touch with other people.
And so the stories are quite well spread throughout the country now.
And I've got to say, before we do any of this, I do recommend people take a look at this book because it's a really well-written book.
It's not a long book, but I think I explained to my listener that my father was a policeman in Merseyside.
And he is the person who taught me to write.
Because, of course, a lot of police work still is sitting down and writing reports.
So my father taught me how to use a notebook effectively and taught me how to type because that was what he had to do.
So police officers are very good at putting together stories.
Yeah, what I tried to do was to try and give a true witness account from the people.
You know, it's their story.
And whether I met them in person, whether I spoke to them on the phone, or some people wanted to say, well, look, because they are police officers, I'd rather draft my own statement, so to speak, and send it to you.
But I was quite surprised with the kind of thing that I slowly got back because I'm not an academic and I'm certainly not somebody who's from a paranormal background.
So I went in with sort of an open mind, but I just found it fascinating.
Well, it is fascinating and the stories come across as being very realistic.
They're very, very true to life, I suppose, is the way that you would put it.
You know, they read like somebody would be speaking to you and telling them.
And that's a great compliment to make to somebody who's got a book out.
You know, a lot of people try to do that and they don't succeed.
So that's one of the many reasons why I enjoyed your book.
Oh, well, thank you.
I think that's credit to the people who had the, I think, courage to come forward and tell their story because there's still a lot of stigma around this subject matter.
And in fact, just 20 minutes before I started speaking to you, because I'm doing a volume too because it's been well received, I was contacted by somebody who told me two stories that happened to them in their police career.
But they said these happened some time ago, but I've never felt comfortable about speaking to people about them.
And I think there is a stigma with issues such as this.
I think we have to be honest about it.
There is, and you know, like I've said to my listener many, many times, my father was a police officer.
He was a police officer for his entire working life in Merseyside.
First of all, it was Bootle Police, then it was Liverpool Police, and it became Merseyside in the end.
And it was a great camaraderie, a very great closeness between officers, but also it was quite tough in many ways because they would, as we say in the UK, they would rib you, they would josh you, they would tease you about things.
My father had a car accident, and his name was Walter, and they teased him about his car accident.
It became Wally's folly in, you know, in the station.
So that's the kind of climate we're talking about, isn't it?
And that's one of the reasons why people sometimes are not willing to come forward.
Yes, I mean, there is the nature of, because of the nature of police work, they do have, as you will well know, they do have a sense of humor that helps them get through things.
And there is a reluctance to talk about things like this.
And funny enough, some people did actually went back to the station and people have said to them, you know, you look like you've just seen a ghost.
And then they say to them, well, this has just happened to me.
And it would be a case of, well, don't be sadaft, you know, put the kettle on.
You know, it just sort of dismissed in a very offhand way.
But what I find was interesting with some of the stories, several of them, there were actually two officers together.
So it's corroborated.
So it's not a case of one officer had seen something and been mistaken.
They'd both seen exactly the same thing.
And that's the case when you're talking about mobile patrols, I think.
There was one case, and we'll get into it when we talk about what's in the book, where four officers saw what was presented.
Yet it was seen by four people.
Which one was it?
Is that the King Standing one?
It was the one to do with a bunch of nuns, I think.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
That's a good one.
Let's not spoil it now.
We'll get into it.
That was one of my favourite stories.
So like we say, these stories are centered on the Midlands, places like Wolverhampton, Solihull, Birmingham, those sorts of areas.
But not entirely.
There are stories from London and places like that and Wiltshire as well.
So we'll get into this.
At the beginning of the book, you say, this is a collection of compelling accounts from members of the police family who've witnessed or have intimate knowledge of unusual and unexplained incidents.
That's a big statement.
And when I read that statement at the beginning of the book, I thought, oh, yes.
Well, you know, let's see if he can deliver that.
And I have to say that in the pages that followed, you did.
So just before we get to the specific stories, which I know people, listeners love to hear the specific stories.
So we'll tell plenty of those.
Talk to me about the process of you doing this book, why you wanted to do it, and how you were able to get people to come forward and tell you their stories.
It started off when I obviously I served for 30 years in the police and I'm quite honest about it.
You know, if you spend a great deal of time with me, the conversation will soon run out and then we start discussing, you know, who's the best James Bond and, you know, start talking about football.
And I would often ask people, I said, have you ever seen the ghost?
And I was quite surprised how many people actually turned around and then gave an account of something that had happened.
And I was quite intrigued by it all.
And then as my service went on, I knew of a few incidents that had happened that people had told me about.
And you just said, you sort of store them at your back of your mind.
But I actually went to an incident when I was a shift inspector at Warsaw where a security guard had called the police because he thought there were persons on premises.
It was in the Streetley area near the Buccaneer Pub.
And it was a brand new complex, retirement complex, and it was near completion.
And I attended there with another vehicle because we initially thought it was burglars.
And we were met with a young security guard who was absolutely terrified would be the best word to say.
And he said that he'd seen an elderly couple ballroom dancing in the newly built recreation room.
Okay, and presumably that elderly couple were not three-dimensional and physical and real.
That's right.
There was nobody there.
It was not inhabited.
He was the only person on the premises.
And he'd said that he'd been sitting there and the lights had started going off and on, off and on, off and on.
And that first alerted him.
He thought, well, there's something strange going on here.
And that's when he sort of had a look around the building and he saw an elderly couple, ballroom dancing.
And he was obviously clearly very, very unnerved.
And although it's difficult, the colleagues I was with, we couldn't sort of, it would have been rude to talk about the security guard in front of him.
So we did what we always did.
And then we had a good search of the premises, saw that there was absolutely nobody there.
There was no sign of a forced entry.
But I did not doubt anything that he'd said about I've seen the lighting me going off and on and I'd seen a couple ballroom dancing.
And we sat outside and I was with another experienced colleague who's a sergeant and I said, well, I think he's seen a ghost.
And it makes you wonder, doesn't it, whether there was a story there about a couple ballroom dancing, maybe there was a ballroom there that ties into it.
Yeah, it does, because I couldn't get any history of, you know, as I say, I think it was a house that had been pulled down and then they built this complex.
But next time we were on nights, I think it was a few nights later, I was going out with the same site and I said, let's just pop in and see that young lad, the security guard, just to make sure he's okay.
And you'll make sure he hasn't quit his job in the meantime.
Well, to provide some reassurance, but when we got there, he had in fact quit his job and was another security guard there.
We didn't say anything to him because we didn't want to scare him, but quite clearly that guard had been alarmed by it.
And it was at that point, and as time progressed, I just thought, well, it'd be a good idea to start writing some of these stories down.
And I started contacting the people I knew had stories and then started asking my circle of friends and just using very, you know, social media.
And this book became the result of that.
And it's interesting that you've also got security guards, like you say, in the book.
There are some stories about them.
You know, when my dad left the police, there are a number of jobs That police officers do, and my dad became a regional security boss for a company called Comet, which doesn't exist anymore, but they were an electrical discount warehouse chain all over the country.
And his bosses, oddly enough, were in Seleoke in Birmingham.
So we used to go to Birmingham a lot.
But there was one place in Liverpool.
My father used to have to go out as a favor to the security officer on Saturday nights to this place at Concert Street in Liverpool, which had been a music hall before it was a branch of Comet.
And later it became a bookstore called Waterstones.
Now, the security guard was a hard-bitten old guy, quite short.
I think he'd been in the Navy, but he was a tough guy, and he had a great, big, ferocious Alsatian dog that loved him and hated everybody else.
That dog was so terrified of whatever was up the stairs in that building, at the top of the stairs, and close to the balcony as it had been of that concert hall, theater, whatever it had been, the dog wouldn't go up there.
And the stories from people who worked in that place were that huge great colour television boxes were flung about the place and all sorts of stuff.
So this is, and I won't tell this story again because I have told it on this show, but this kind of stuff is incredibly common.
Yes, it is.
In fact, there's a story in the book from the Birmingham Boring.
We'll get to that one.
Yeah, that's a great story.
Okay, yeah.
Very similar circumstances, Howard.
Very similar.
Now, you go through, and I think it's really useful before we tell the stories in the book, a list of the kinds of ghosts and apparitions that there are, and you talk about the various categories.
There are ghosts, residual hauntings, historical hauntings, intelligent hauntings.
Those are the ones that communicate with you and know that you're there.
They're not just running a movie for you.
There are shadow people.
There are mists that form.
There are poltergeists that throw things around.
And then there's a feeling of being watched or a feeling of being touched, feeling actual physical contact.
So I think it's good that at the beginning of the book, before you start telling the stories, you lay out the various forms of phenomena.
Well, I did that because, as I said, I'm not an expert in this and I'm not from a paranormal background.
But I thought I had to look at that from my own point of view, think, what's going on here?
Because every story seemed to be different.
I needed to get some sort of idea in my own head of the different kinds of things that happened.
Not to label them, but I just needed to get a greater understanding.
I thought, well, a lot of the people who might read this will be similar to me in as much as they might not be somebody who's interested in this sort of thing.
So it sort of set the scene to say, well, this is the sort of thing that can happen.
Okay.
I'm not going to read big chunks from the book because that's not fair to you.
We need to get people to read it themselves.
However, if you don't mind, I'm going to start with the story from George Street Walsall, as southerners call it.
Walsall, as people more or less call it in the West Midlands, don't they?
Yeah.
And you say, what I'm about to tell you, or the person behind this, took place when I was a probationary constable posted to Walsall Police Station in the early 1980s.
Walsall is a large town in the Black Country with a market area in the centre.
The town is famous for its saddle making and leather industry.
Yes, I remember that well.
I just returned from two weeks' leave and would be starting a set of seven nights with the first one being on a Monday night.
I was posted to Foot Patrol, Town Centre, and although not as warm as Mallorca from where I just returned, it was a pleasant summer night on this particular night.
Once the pubs had closed, it was a fairly routine patrol, checking the security of the shops and stopping to speak to anybody who happened to be walking around.
Short time after midnight, I was walking along George Street when I suddenly saw a boy aged about 13, wearing school uniform, only a few yards ahead of me.
My first thought was, what is he doing here at the time of night that it was, and I've edited out a swear word there, but we can imagine what it might have been.
Before I could think anything else, he ran straight towards me, so it was my intention to grab hold of him and speak to him.
The boy was running at quite a pace, so I put my arms out to grab him by the shoulders as he was coming straight towards me.
I braced myself for the impact, but I felt nothing.
The boy ran straight through me, not around me or to the side of me, but straight through my body.
The boy matched the description.
It says later in this piece of a boy who'd committed suicide virtually that day.
Yeah.
What a story that is.
How did you get hold of that?
I started, funnily enough, I still see the sergeant who I went to the incident in Streetley with, I told him I still see him for a coffee occasion.
I said, I'm about to start on this project.
And he said, you need to speak to this officer.
And he got me his details.
And I can still remember when I actually spoke, interviewed this officer, because it was over the telephone.
And I was actually in Beacon Park in Lichfield.
And I knew the guy, very, very much a straight-up guy, good, down to earth, on his copper.
I'd known him.
I'd worked at Warsaw with him.
I never knew about this story.
And I told him what I was doing.
He said, well, I'll tell you what's happened to me.
And he said, I still think about it, you know, often about this boy.
And then he told me this story and I was genuinely astonished.
And I had to cliche, but I did get goosebumps.
And I just said, well, thank you very much for sharing that with me.
I mean, I had to take out some detail to protect, obviously, you've got to be sensitive to obviously other family that might be involved.
I mean, this is a terrible tragedy, isn't it?
But, you know, the poor boy had, for whatever reason, committed suicide, had killed himself and had made himself apparent to this police officer on this particular night.
That is an astonishing story.
I don't know how, if you've been through that, and you'll know better than I will because you've spoken to the person, how you come to terms with it?
Well, the funny thing was that, you know, this officer's now retired sometime, but the thing that stuck with me was, I still think about that boy.
You know, and when something, in terms of coming to terms, you never forget it.
And I don't know how you can do because he said, you know, after he'd had the conversation with the inspector and found out the background, he said, I still think about the poor lad.
And so in terms of coming to terms, perhaps you never actually do.
And Perhaps what was happening, we'll never know, but it's something that is written about in a lot of books.
Perhaps he was at that point, if you believe in these things, he was somehow caught between this plane and the next plane and hadn't himself discovered that he was not here anymore.
I think that would be a very reasonable conclusion to come to.
And from the direction you ran, Pat, trying to make his way home.
It's such a sad story, but what an impact that that will have had on the person who experienced that.
Okay, there's a story from a place that I know very well, Aston.
I used to work in Aston at a radio station called BRMB, which does not exist in that form anymore.
But I know Aston very well.
This story is from the gates of St. Peter and Paul's Church, Aston, Birmingham.
We're talking about a figure that apparently walked through some gates, but the officer who saw this figure go through the gates didn't realise until later that the gates had been locked all the time.
Yes, it's again, I know this officer, and when I contacted him and spoke to him about this, he worked from Queens Road Police Station, which, as you know, is just under the bridge.
And the actual site of this church is right by the Aston Villa ground and just within a stone's throw of Aston Hall, which has got a lot of history to it, but not connected with this.
Yeah, he just said, well, as it was in those days, officers were out on foot patrol, which doesn't happen now on nights because of the resources and the changes in policing.
But he saw a person walk through some locked gates and he thought, well, I need to go and check that person out.
And as he went, when the gates were locked, he'd seen the person just walk straight through them.
You know, one of the reasons that police officers experience these things, I think, is that they are around and doing things when most people are asleep.
You know, they are around in the dead of night.
They are the people who have to go and attend the traffic accidents, the sad deaths of pensioners in their homes, all of the things that other people don't want to think about.
Police officers have to be there.
And my dad had to go through all of that stuff.
And I always used to think as I was growing up, I wonder how he managed it.
But there were times in his service where weird things happen.
And, you know, he would always tell us, and it would usually be very late at night on a Saturday night, and we'd all be around the fire.
And the midnight movie would have finished on BBC Two.
And he'd tell us the story of what, and we heard this story a million times and never tired of it.
This was Bootle Cemetery in Liverpool.
My dad was on his bike in the days when officers had bicycles.
And he was quite a young PC.
He was going home.
And he cycled past Bootle Cemetery.
No one around.
And he looks into the cemetery and sees a guy in a flat cap standing by one of the gravestones.
Now, this is like two o'clock in the morning, maybe three o'clock, whatever.
He'd done a late shift.
So he gets off the bike and goes into the cemetery, walks up to this stone, and is just about to say to this man, what are you doing here?
And he disappears.
And my father said, and the way my dad used to tell it, I have to clean it up a bit.
He said, you couldn't see my backside for steam, the way that he cycled away from there.
But that's a typical story, isn't it?
Well, it is a typical story.
And it's funny because my partner, Helen, her father was a police officer, as my partner was.
And he told me a story of an area that you all know, which is Whitton Cemetery.
When he was on foot patrol, he just saw, he was just walking along.
He saw a man walking in front of him a short distance away.
He didn't think anything particularly of it.
He was just walking in the same direction at the same speed.
And then the guy just turned right opposite the safe harbour pub or the gravediggers, as it was known.
He turned right and walked straight through the wall into the cemetery.
And he just thought, well, again, you have to take the language.
In the book, I have included the language that the witnesses have used.
And I think it's quite understandable that you might use some choice language if you've just seen a person walk through a brick wall.
But he became quite emotional when he told me this story because obviously he, you know, he thought about it for a long time.
And it's not the kind of thing that you can share and discuss with people.
But again, it was a graveyard.
And you say, well, in the same way that your father had seen something in a graveyard, absolutely.
How do you explain that?
And also, if you're on duty, and my dad was coming off duty then, so he didn't report it.
He just told us about it and probably told his colleagues about it.
But if you're on duty, presumably you have to report something, don't you?
You have to account for your time.
You do, but I don't think anybody under circumstances such as these would actually turn around and tell somebody what had happened unless, I mean, an example of that would be the, there's a story in the book from the Three Tons Public House in Sutton Coalfield.
Now, I've got it right in front of me now, funnily enough.
Now, I'd just gone out, I'd started on this project and I'd gone out with a group of friends and I met up with this guy who I knew, usual conversation, what you up to.
I told him about this and he just gave me a sort of a strange look.
And then he pulled me to one side as the evening went on and said, are you serious about what you're doing?
I said, yeah, I'm not.
I said, it's not, you know, this is a genuine sort of project I'm working on.
And he said, I'll speak to you tomorrow.
And he told me the story which you have in front of you about the cavalier-like ghost coming out the back of the three tons.
And he ran away and he ran down the bottom of the hill.
And he said, my finger was hovering over the radio button.
But I was a young officer.
If I shaded up over the airwaves and said, I've just been chased by a ghost, the chances are your career might be over, but you'd be subject to such ridicule for the rest of that career.
And, you know, it's a very difficult situation to be in, but he'd been chased by a ghost.
And did he...
I think this was 1977, wasn't it?
Yes, it was.
Yeah, that's right.
So that's 41 years ago now.
And he'd been chased by this smoky apparition, this sort of cavalier you describe it as.
Did he want to do any research about that?
Find out if anybody else had experienced it, maybe go back into the history of the place, or did he leave well alone after that?
He did sort of have a look as I did, and there is a lot of history towards in that pub regarding the little drummer boy that apparently was killed in the cellar.
And so locally in the Midlands area, there are sort of ghost stories attached to that.
But he couldn't, he said, I couldn't tell anybody.
He said, you know, what could I say?
He just calmed himself down and decided to just go for a cup of tea with a security guard in the shopping center and just think, well, what on earth happened to me?
And, you know, I suppose you're never going to know until your time comes, I guess.
Okay, well, let's try another one here.
Chadwick End, Warwickshire.
I think this was mid-90s, you'll tell me.
This is the one that was witnessed by four people.
A group of, I mean, this is one of the spookiest ones in the book.
And I recommend that if you're listening to this now, get the book and see it for yourself.
But this is a group of nuns who appear to be walking by a roadside, and they are seen by four people, but they are not what they appear to be.
That's right.
It was two double crewed cars, traffic officers, saw a group of nuns walking down the road.
And at that time of night, straight away they're thinking, what on earth is that?
And that's a group of nuns walking down a dark road.
We really need to tell this group of nuns not to sort of walk down here.
They could get run over.
Stops the car, goes back, nothing there.
And as I recall, that colleagues had seen exactly the same thing a short distance away.
So whatever that group of nuns was within that sort of small area, it had been witnessed by four police officers, but just incredible, really.
And as far as you know, had anybody else witnessed this particular apparition?
Because something like that is likely to repeat and be seen by other people.
I'm just trying to refresh my memory.
I know it was seen by police officers, but I don't recall that there are any calls to the police about it.
I might be wrong there.
And was there anything about them to indicate the era that they might have been from?
You know, the uniform, the habit of nuns has changed over the decades.
And, you know, the kind of garb that they would wear 100 years ago, very different from today.
Yeah, I think he refers to the white penguin fronts, doesn't he?
If that's the way that it looks, then if it's the more elaborate costume, the more elaborate robes, then that's a previous era.
That's not this one.
No, no, that's right.
Boy.
And four people witnessing this.
And was that a story that was kept between those four people over the years?
I don't know about that.
I'm trying to see.
When I spoke to the guy, I think I contacted him via Warwickshire NAPO.
Which is the National Association of Retired Police Officers.
Yeah, then he got in touch with this story, which I thought was fascinating.
I mean, it's great that people have been willing to give you their stories like this, and they certainly have.
There's a place called Catherine de Barnes Lane, in a place I always think is posh.
You know, it's quite up across, you know, posh people call it Solihull, Solihull in the 1980s.
This was a figure that looked like some kind of highwayman from the era when we got around the country by coach and horses, and frequently those coaches and horses were robbed in places like this.
Yes, that's right.
I'm sorry, just going back, that previous one, Chadwick End, it is logged on the British Paranormal website.
So somebody else may well have got in touch.
But when the four officers saw that, they wouldn't have known anything about that, would they?
That would have been neither there.
Okay, so Solihull.
Solihull.
Yes, yes, Catherine the Barnes, yeah.
So this looked like a highwayman with all the garb and the, you know, we always think of Adam Ant, don't we?
Well, if you think of, yeah, bearing in mind, these two officers were engaged on a, what we call a blue light run.
They were going to an emergency incident.
And then a sort of a, this sort of, as you say, quite an adamant figure, highwayman, and a horse goes straight across in front of them.
Now, this is where that sort of cynical or sceptical police type comes in, is because the guy said to me, he said, I didn't want to say anything because I, you know, I'm thinking, so he said, you know, he says, you know, he doesn't say what he'd seen.
He'd saying, you know, what was it?
He knew it was a man on a horse.
And then when his colleague replied in his black country accent, mon on us, he was like, yeah, we've both seen exactly the same thing here.
But again, two police officers have seen the ghostly figure of what appears like a horse, a man on a horse go right across, right in front of them and disappear between the hedgerows.
I can't explain that.
So the imprint perhaps of something that happened a long time ago.
I mean, I guess if this had happened during the daytime, you might say, well, it's some kind of historical recreation.
But that's not likely.
I just don't know.
I know that the people who have knowledge of these things think it might be something on a loop that irrespective of whether those officers were there or not, this horse and this man would have gone on that route.
It just happened that they were there.
Yeah, but they witnessed this ghostly horse and this ghostly person in Catherine de Barnes Lane.
They both saw it.
They both saw exactly the same thing.
Okay, now the one thing that comes clear from the book is that, you know, as you get momentum with this, there are more and more stories from more and more places.
And it kind of tells me a story that the more you got into doing this research, the more people were sharing stories with you.
There is one from Wiltshire.
There aren't many stories from that area in the bush.
But this is two patrol officers, rural area of Wiltshire, and they see some kind of weird, dense vapor.
You describe it.
Yes, I contacted when I put something out on Twitter, on social media, and then this officer got in touch with me and told me about this story about this just driving along and this ghost vapor just rearing up out of nowhere on this road where they'd been.
He didn't know at the time, but as soon as the incident happened, he drove back, drove back and forwards, as most of the officers do in these cases.
They're trying to find an explanation for what they've just witnessed and what they've just seen.
And again, I think he was with a colleague as well.
And they looked and they searched and there was no reason for what they had seen, just rear up in front of them.
But when they did arrive at the police station they were heading for, they did mention it to colleagues who in a matter-of-fact way told them, well, there's been quite a lot of fatal accidents on that road connected with that, maybe.
But again, very interesting story.
Lots of stories in the book about things that happen at police stations.
Now, we have to talk for just a second.
For those who haven't been in a police station or spent any great time there, I have to say that, you know, from a child, I did, because my dad was a policeman and I would often go and meet him off duty at work.
So I would get to see the inner workings of a police station.
Some of these buildings quite old, some of them with a lot of history.
There was a place called the Main Bridewell in Liverpool, which I think is a term that goes back to Scotland.
I think they've got bridewells in Scotland, but it was the Main Bridewell, not very far from the docks.
And it was a glum old building that I used to go meet him in.
But all human life was there.
You know, literally life, death, murder, tragedy, everything was played out every day in places like that.
So it's not surprising that weird stuff can sometimes be associated, not necessarily with stuff that happens out on patrol, but actually in the police stations themselves.
Yes.
Yeah.
If you look at the, you know, in a building itself where there's been obviously quite a lot of trauma, I mean, nobody would enjoy being locked in a police cell.
There's an awful lot of history attached to police stations.
Unfortunately, and without getting political, a lot of these buildings now have been closed down and sold off.
So I was quite pleased to capture some of the history of them with some of these stories, what people have actually witnessed in some of these buildings.
Well, there's a great one from Aldridge Police Station.
I don't know where that is.
I know it's in the West Midlands, but you can tell me.
This is a really spooky one.
I mean, you could make a whole TV play about this.
The temperature dropped, and the officer involved was kind of going into the corridor, but it was warmer, then going back to the place where he was sitting, and it was freezing, freezing cold and felt a presence.
And then there was a coat stand that began to shake and revolve and do all sorts of stuff by itself in this place.
Yes, that's right.
There are, in fact, there's two stories from separate officers from Aldridge Police Station.
And the one officer there was when it kept getting really, really cold, freezing cold on a summer night.
And then the coats and everything just threw themselves onto the floor.
There was another officer who saw a, looked like the figure of somebody standing in a window.
And he was, I don't know, On another occasion, they were about to try and play a prank on a young officer in a cell, but it sort of backfired in as much as he had a very difficult experience in the cell when he went completely freezing cold and just felt a presence all around him.
Yeah, so, but I've really tried to get to the bottom of the Aldridge situation, and I can't find anything that history-wise, that would sort of give a clue as to what was happening there.
Well, the officer giving the account of the spinning coat stand says, and I quote, I moved the coat stand into a corner and put a chair up against it whenever I was in the office on my own at night.
I don't even, you know, some people wouldn't even be able to work there.
So I think that was a good way of dealing with it.
Well, the interesting thing is about Aldridge, since the book came out, an officer got in touch with me who said, I read the stories about Aldridge and he said, I'd like to tell you my account of what happened there.
And he said, the station's not open fully now.
He said, it's a place that you can get into overnight if you wanted to go and have your sandwiches.
He said, we tended to go there instead of Warsaw because it was quieter, no supervision.
We could just put our feet up and have a cup of tea without being bothered.
He said, but I will tell you, he said, I always work with the same guy.
He said, we're both six foot plus.
We are taser officers.
He says, we're not drinking violets.
He said, but sometimes we would go in there and we would look at each other and go, no, we can't stay tonight.
It's here.
He said, the presence is here.
He said, it was an overwhelming feeling of negativity and not being wanted in that building.
And they said, we'd just look at each other and say, no, we'll go and eat our sandwiches.
We'll park up and do it.
And he's had a couple of incidents there with thunder crashing in the, it sounds like above him that, you know, and they both ran out of the police station.
He's quite open to admit it.
He said, you know, we're two police officers, but we ran out that building terrified because there's something there.
It's quite like my dad cycling away from the graveyard at top speed.
You don't hang around, do you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he said, there's something there.
He said, between certain times, he said, because I've worked there in the day and he said, there's a different atmosphere.
He said, but I can go into that building.
He said, and he's also seen the figure standing at the window as the other officer had done.
And again, these are totally separate officers.
There's no collusion or anything like that.
And he said, I'll witness what he has witnessed.
And he said, but I can walk in that building.
He said, and I just know it's, you know, you've got to get out.
It's just not right.
And if it gets known about with groups of officers serving at a place like Aldridge, do senior officers take an interest?
You know, do they take an interest in that and try and do something about it?
Have the exorcists ever been called in?
Not to the best of my knowledge.
And as well, you know, Howard, from your police background, it would just be dismissed as it would just be laughed off and saying, yes, okay, you know, no.
And we've got to say, in the Panoplian Chronicle of Things That You Have to Deal With, this is not by any means the worst.
You know, the human tragedies are the worst.
Those are the things that, certainly in my father's case, always have a, you know, they're in the back of your mind.
Yeah, I think it's important to point out that however alarming these may be, none of these ghosts hurt anybody.
And you have to remember that, as my grandmother used to say, you know, it's the living, not the dead, who are going to hurt you.
Exactly.
It's always right.
Tipton police station, strange footsteps.
Yes.
Yeah, again, that is quite a close friend of mine who reported that.
And there were other people who I could have spoken to, but I tried to get hold of, but I respected their decision.
They didn't want to talk about it.
But this officer was prepared to talk about it.
Footsteps going up and down the stairs.
He was the only person in the building.
And he just couldn't explain.
He searched the building.
Footsteps again.
He ended up going out, waiting in the backyard for somebody else to turn up because he was that frightened.
You would.
You would.
Lloyd House.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but Lloyd House was for many years the headquarters of West Midlands Police, wasn't it?
Yes, I think it still is, yes.
It still is.
Okay, because I used to, when I worked in Birmingham, one of my first duties every morning was to call Lloyd House and ask whoever was on duty for any overnight stories.
You know, anything happened last night.
So I could put them in the news on BRNB.
So Lloyd House, large building, headquarters of West Midlands Police.
This has quite a nice ghost story to it, if I read this right.
It's a retired police officer who used to grab a crafty smoke before going off shift.
Not a threatening apparition, actually a friendly ghost here.
Yes, yes, it was.
The officer was a retired officer working in the antecedents department.
And this was, you know, like most buildings, there's no smoking.
He thought it was very odd when he smelt strong tobacco.
And he thought, well, this is strange.
I can't work this out.
No one smokes here.
And as it was, he had to go to the small room at the end of the building where the photostat machine was.
And there he saw a former colleague who'd passed away having a cigarette.
I think he only saw him from the, he was only visible from the top part of his body upwards, and then he disappeared.
But he didn't find that to be in any way frightening.
It was just, well, I've just seen an apparition of an old colleague.
And there's no reason why you should know this, but did the apparition appear to be aware of its surroundings?
I don't know.
I couldn't.
That's astonishing, isn't it?
Because a lot of police officers have quite an emotional bond to the places where they worked.
You know, I know after my dad retired, we would still drive past the places where he'd worked and he'd say, you know, I was stationed there and I was there and I used to go on patrol there and I chased a bunch of villains across a rooftop there.
You know, people have a bond to this job that perhaps people don't have with other jobs.
Yeah, I mean, that's interesting without giving too much away.
The story that came in just before I started this interview with you was from an officer from Staffordshire who parked his panda in the backyard at a small station, saw somebody at the kitchen sink.
He thought, well, that must have been a colleague, perhaps someone from the CRD upstairs.
When he went inside, he thought it was somebody in a black cape.
Now, it was at the time, a police officer wearing a cape.
It was at the time where capes were still issued, or some people had decided to hang onto their capes because they were a lot warmer than the coats they were issuing.
And he said hello to the guy, didn't know him, thought a little bit strange.
The guy just walked straight past him, turned right, and he thought, well, who is he?
Followed him down the corridor within a matter of seconds.
He disappeared in a dead end.
So he said to me, in his opinion, and I think he's right, he said, that's probably somebody who used to work at the station.
So there are some officers who never go off shift.
Well, that's the way it seemed in that case.
And again, he said, I searched the building.
I went outside and he said, I had my sandwiches sitting in the car, you know.
Like you would.
They're not all stories from the Midlands, though.
There is one at Erith, which is sort of southeast London.
Strange footsteps in the parade room.
Now, we have to say, for those who don't know, and I don't know if they still do it today, I suspect they might, but in a different way.
You know, every shift starts with the officers on parade.
It's almost like a military thing, doesn't it?
And they have a room to do that.
That's right, yes.
Does that still happen, by the way?
They still have parade.
I think they still have parades.
I think there's just less of them on parade.
Well, this is a weird and eerie story of, again, at a time when not a lot of people, if anybody else, is around, but there are at the same time, every night have I read this story, right, footsteps coming from that room, as if a parade was being held.
Yes, there was somebody up there in the room, and, you know, this officer kept going up there because, and, you know, going upstairs to investigate it, and there was no one there.
And of course, there's a lot of atmosphere in police stations at night, but there is that inquisitive mind where police officers, they're not going to ignore it.
And so he kept trying to find out the source of these footsteps, but he never actually did.
Now, we have to explain to people, perhaps not listening to this in the UK, there are many of those outside the UK hearing this, that London has two police forces.
One is the Metropolitan Police, which everybody's heard of, which is the one that covers most of London.
And the other one is the City of London Police that covers the square mile, the financial district, the city.
You've got a story in there about Bishopsgate Police Station in the city, which was the site of a former hospital.
And it seems to officers who've worked at Bishopsgate that there is a nurse from that former hospital apparently still in the building.
Yeah, and do you know that was perhaps one of my favourite stories because I found that to be quite moving.
I got the story via officers who were on the British Transport Police.
And then I did some research with again using social media with a colleague who works in the city of London.
And then I did my own research online.
And it looks for all intents and purposes that there's a nurse there called Nurse Rolf, Evelyn Rolf, who died fatally injured by enemy action in a bombing in 1940.
Yeah, we have to say that that area, all of London, but that area was heavily targeted by the Blitz Krieg, the Nazi bombings.
Yeah.
And a lot of people died.
What isn't in the book?
Because all the raw, I write this for a local charity.
It's just a hobby.
So I don't make any money.
None of the people who contribute to this book have been paid.
It's purely for a charitable cause.
But that's why I don't put photographs in the book, because it keeps the publishing costs down.
But the description of the lady that tucked the person in bed when she was staying at Bishopsgate Police Station in the single quarters accommodation, when she describes this person as wearing, you know, like the John Lennon spectacles and what have you.
I did actually, when I contacted my colleague from London, he sent me a picture of Evelyn Rolfe.
And there she was wearing those glasses and fitted the description perfectly.
And that really did, well, it didn't frighten me, but I just found it, I don't know.
As you say, it's moving, isn't it?
It's quite moving that it seems to be that Nurse Rolfe is still there carrying on, tucking people in in what used to be the police hospital back in the day.
And the sense of duty still there and the fact that there were very big and impactful events happening and all of those things perhaps making an imprint on the location.
What a great story.
Yeah, it is.
It's a really interesting story to have such good witness accounts from the people and what they witnessed because just for people who are listening, it's Bishopsgate Police Station, but on top of it, it was converted into single officers' quarters.
But before then, many years before, it was a police hospital before the evolution of the National Health Service.
And that's where the nurse story comes in.
So we're saying that this nurse, you said this nurse actually tucked into bed as she would do on her rounds as a nurse, one of the people in the single police quarters?
Yes, she was staying there with her.
She'd gone down to see a friend in London, but the friend got called out to an incident.
And as she was lying in bed, not for the first time, she was tucked in by what appeared to be Nurse Evelyn Rolfe.
Well, you know, if that wasn't somebody having a joke with her, that is an astonishing story.
It is an astonishing story, but I think a lot of people who know Bishopsgate Police Station will know about the ghost of Evelyn.
But I didn't know any of this when this story was passed through to me from this British transport police officer.
And it's one of those many stories of a public building where people know that there's something reported and people have talked about it over the years.
And this is where the living coexist with whatever else there might be.
Quite happily, but there was a knowledge on both sides almost.
Yes, it certainly appears that way here.
Okay, ghostly bangings in the custody cells at Bilston Police Station back in the West Midlands.
Yes, again, I was just.
The officer there, I've actually attended a funeral of a colleague and again, I just have this conversation with people, what are you doing at the moment?
And I tell them and they say, right, okay, I'll be in touch tomorrow with a story for you.
And he told me about the ghostly noises at Bilston Police Station that really did cause him some concern.
Okay, so literally noises from the, we have to say that, you know, there are cells in many main police stations where people are kept overnight or whatever, or ahead of being taken to the magistrate's court, whatever it might be, for a first court appearance.
So this was actual noise coming from the cells where people were kept.
Yeah, he heard the noises of chains.
He heard the noises of screams.
Yeah, again, a building with an awful lot of history.
But it certainly alarmed him to the extent that, again, he was very concerned.
I would just like to mention, if I could, there's two stories in there about Canterbury Road police station.
And as a result of the first book, I've now actually, for the second book, I've actually interviewed an officer a couple of weeks back who's actually seen the Canterbury Road ghost.
Whereas the two stories in the book relate to cell doors slamming and nobody being there.
I actually spoke to an officer who was on duty there who actually saw the Canterbury Road ghost.
Sorry, Canterbury Road, is that Bilston police station?
No, Canterbury Road in Perrybar.
Oh, in Perry Bar, Birmingham, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So talk to me about that case.
Well, in the book, there's two stories and they are many, many years apart.
Whereby there's an officer in the state.
It's a very small office, and then there's a small cell block.
No one can walk into that cell block without getting past you.
And they heard the sound, a very distinctive sound of a cell door slamming shut, that metal on metal, followed by a long ring.
So those two stories feature in the first book.
And as I was researching the second one, I actually spoke to an officer who saw, who's actually seen the ghost at Cansbury Road, who was just, again, he was in the front office covering the night duty.
He said, I looked across down to the bottom of the stairs and he said there was a man in dark clothing staring straight at me.
He said he had his hand on the bottom of the rail as if he was just about to go up the stairs.
He said he looked at me and then he ran up the stairs.
He said, but again, this is an old police station, wooden staircase.
He said he ran up those stairs and did not make a sound.
He said, I got out of my chair.
I walked to the bottom of the stairs.
I went up where there was just a few small rooms and he said there was nobody there.
Boy.
Something else you have to live with because, you know, nobody's going to do anything for you.
You've just got to get on with it, haven't you?
Yeah, Yeah.
But I was pleased about that because I'd had two ghostly incidents, but now I'd had somebody who'd actually sort of seen the apparition or the actual ghost, so to speak.
So the second book, it's not out yet.
No, no, it'll be out sometime next year.
I think I'm just taking my time doing the research and collecting the stories, which it's always interesting to talk to people who can tell me these things.
People are going to love these books.
You know, they do.
And they will, because they're really well written and they're great stories.
So, you know, I think you need to take this forward definitely.
You need to do more interviews.
You've got some miscellaneous stories in here.
There's one from North Wales, Flandross Church in North Wales, a strange person wanting to get into a car, apparently for a lift, I think, who then completely vanished.
Almost like a kind of phantom hitchhiker thing.
Yes, that's right.
An officer, I think he was on his way home and pouring rain and he saw a figure huddled and he did the good surmounting the thing and stopped and the person disappeared.
There is a story that I loved from a place that I know so well from my childhood right up to today.
It's Keel Services or near Keele Services, which is off the M6 motorway, isn't it?
And if you're traveling sort of from London up to the northwest of England or up to Scotland, chances are you might well stop at Keel.
It was always one of my favourite service areas.
But if I've got this one right, this is the story of somebody who reported seeing a guy apparently broken down with his motorbike, an old Norton British motorbike, good old-fashioned motorbike.
And he gave this guy a lift, presumably, you know, to take him onto wherever he needed to go next.
And the guy sat in the car and they went back on their way and he looked at the guy to talk to him and the guy just disappeared.
That's absolutely right.
And the officer who told me this story was the person who took the call from the gentleman who'd picked up the hitchhiker.
I think the intention was to actually go into Kiel Services to make that phone call.
And of course, the man had disappeared completely and he was quite distraught and he telephoned the police, spoke to this officer who told me this story.
And then some other officers went there, spoke to this gentleman, a very genuine guy, obviously very upset.
But he picked up somebody who had disappeared.
And I suppose one of the things that makes you think about this story is that the motorbike was an old motorbike.
And the guy who got in the car wasn't exactly dressed in a contemporary way.
No, he was dressed as of a period gone by, old motorcycle, old motorcycle gear.
But you have to, you know, you would not, you know, nobody.
Why would you make something like this up?
Why would you go through the ridicule of actually phoning the police and saying, look, this has just happened?
Well, you wouldn't.
But the thing about these particular stories, there are stories from all over the world, places like Cape Town and all over the United States of so-called phantom hitchhikers and loads of them in the UK.
I've done them on my radio show.
And they are astonishing because those are cases that tend to repeat themselves.
Other people report them.
Yes.
Yeah.
You start to...
I think there's a theme, you know, there's lots of cases of people walking through a wall or there's the old...
Many people say, well, ghosts walk through walls.
Ghosts do walk through walls, you know, or walk through locked gates.
So, you know, these stories do come from somewhere.
And when you actually speak to a witness firsthand, yeah, you start to see a pattern of behavior by the ghost, so to speak.
Well, you do.
And I wonder if this one appeared to anybody else.
If you're listening to this now and you know about the ghostly figure of somebody by a Norton motorbike who regularly gets into cars and seeks a lift and then disappears, I'd be interested to hear about this.
We're running out of time, Andy.
I've really enjoyed this and thank you for making time for me.
There's one story that I love here.
It is about a railway signal box near Crewe.
But actually, it's not a railway signal box near Crewe.
Now, we have to say for people outside the UK again, Crewe is a major rail interchange in this country.
So you go up to Crewe on the train and there are, well, there were, signal boxes all over the place.
This is one particular signal box.
And if I've got this story right, it is a phantom phone call from the signal box that is received and then it's discovered that signal box doesn't exist anymore.
That's right.
And there was a lot of, this came from a British Transport Police officer.
And there's, you know, I think there'll be officers in BTP who are aware of this story.
And I found that really quite interesting.
And that's when I actually did the history, did the research.
I didn't have the, I didn't know about the crash or the fatal crash that had happened in that reading.
It took me quite a long time to find it.
So there had been a rail crash near that signal box?
Yeah.
Yeah, there was.
And I had to do a little bit of digging because I thought the story as itself stands alone is a good story.
But when I tried to get, you know, when I found out about this accident that had actually happened.
And what was the accident, Andy?
I'm just looking through the book that I've got in front of me, just trying to get to the right.
Have you got the page number there?
I haven't.
I've actually made notes on the book, so both of us haven't got the book.
But it's all right.
I'll keep talking away.
But it's about four-fifths of the way through the book, I think, from memory.
But it is a great story of a phantom phone call from a signal box that was connected to a big disaster that no longer exists.
I mean, you can't get any spookier than that.
Yes, I've got the story now, yeah.
I had the story through, and that's when you see in the author's notes, when I say that I look at this story as a matter of interest, official railway records show that an accident happened at Betley Road on the 17th of November 1954 when a Class D freight train was traveling down the line in fog, ran through a signal, and it ended up overturning.
The driver was fatally injured.
And I got that from the railway archives.
It took some research after actually getting the story, but the story in itself, I thought, was so interesting as a standalone one when they traced this call via BTP.
And when was the call?
This was 2011, the actual call, the incident happened.
So more than half a century after this disaster.
Yeah, and when they were getting this call through and the call dropping out and somebody asking for help, in view of the confusion, they traced it through and they went to the scene to investigate, but there was no scene because the signal box at Betty had been demolished some years earlier.
So the call had actually emanated from a location that was a signal box, but was disused and dismantled years ago.
That's correct, yeah.
God.
I mean, that's a great point to park this, I think, because I don't think you can top that story.
There are lots of great stories in this book, and I'm looking forward to round two of it.
I think you need to do more of this, Andy, because the stories are great.
The book that I saw today, volume one, is fantastically well written.
It's not a long book, and people are going to be begging for more stories because, you know, when you tell people stories like this, your audience is insatiable for more.
So I think this is something that you need to do an awful lot more of.
And thank you very much for making time for me.
No, absolute pleasure.
The stories I've had for the next book are just as interesting, and it all goes for a good cause.
Okay, so do you want to come on one of my shows then when, you know, closer to the time when the new book is out?
And we'll talk again.
Yes, I'll be in touch.
Probably sometime in the middle of next year, judging by the flow of stories that are coming in, but I'll certainly be in touch, Howard.
And thank you very much for having me on.
And thank you.
If people want to read about you, do you have a website, anything like that?
I'm on Facebook, Andy Gilbert Books.
Right.
Andy Gilbert Books.
Yeah, but there's nothing interesting about me, but the book is quite interesting.
No, I think you do a great job of putting this together and a great job of putting the stories over.
And I thank you very much for being part of this.
My pleasure.
Andy Gilbert, and I'll put a link to him and his work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
And like I said at the beginning of this, a very, very well-written book.
You know, as we said in the course of the conversation, my father was a police officer.
And my father was the one really who taught me to write professionally because his job, part of it anyway, was a lot of form filling, a lot of report writing.
So he was very good with a notepad and very good with a typewriter.
And I learned so much from my dear dad, who served in Brutal Police, which became Liverpool Police, that eventually became Merseyside Police, and then he retired.
But he had so many stories and he was the original good cop.
So great to hear some police stories on this edition of The Unexplained.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London and please stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection