During this series, I’ve brought you stories of poltergeists, residual hauntings including sightings and auditory phenomena, all of which I’m at a loss to explain. (Don't worry if you've just stumbled here, there are links to previous posts at the end of this one!)

The other thing I mentioned was an intense sensation of being watched. Scrutinised by invisible eyes that left me with little doubt that my presence was not welcome.
 
One day at the Royal Oak (and not at the Hotel where I experienced that feeling), my parents were alone and got a very similar feeling. Enjoying the experience about as much as I did when I felt the same thing many years later, they decided to go out. As they were about to climb into the car, my uncle, the DJ in the nightclub, returned from an errand.
 
“Don’t mention anything,” dad quickly whispered to mum. “We’re just going to the shops to buy a newspaper, would you like anything?” he asked my uncle.
 
The reply came in the negative and off they went. When they returned some thirty minutes later, my uncle was sitting outside, alone.
 
“What are you doing out here?” dad asked, innocently.
 
“I’m not going in there,” my uncle replied. “There’s somebody in there.”
 
Another bizarre event at the pub took place when dad was upstairs and mum nipped downstairs into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. She suddenly heard a very familiar and distinct sound: my grandmother shouting my dad’s name. The only issue was my parents were alone: my grandmother was on holiday in Scotland.
 
My mum was shaken (naturally), when my dad came downstairs you’d imagine that it would calm her a little. And I’m sure it would have, had my dad’s first words not been “You won’t believe what I’ve just heard…”
 
Of course, he reported the exact same thing.
 
As haunted as the Royal Oak was, in all the time I was there, I only ever personally experienced one event. At the bottom of the stairs, where the brass-topped table sat, I heard the distinct sound of footsteps coming from upstairs. The highwayman. At the time, the only other person at the pub was my mum, and she was in the kitchen next to me. Naturally, I fulfilled the classic horror movie trope and headed upstairs to investigate. Of course, there was nobody there.
 
In my experience when it comes to stories like this, people tend to fall into three distinct categories:

1. Those who are convinced that whenever something weird happens, it must be paranormal: they already believe, and the story you’ve told further confirms their belief.
2. Those who are convinced it is not paranormal: the people telling the story are either confused, exaggerating or dishonest. Or they take the story at face value and try to explain the events away, sometimes using more implausible reasoning than the events of the story itself.
3. Those who have a genuine interest in realistically coming to a satisfactory explanation of the story: they find the story fascinating and would like to do nothing more than satisfy their own curiosity.

 
Category 1 are believers. Category 1 people annoy those from Category 2 who see themselves as rational. Sceptics. Not taken to flights of fancy and living in the land of the fairies. People from category 2 annoy those from group 1. Group 2 will be sad to hear that they annoy those from group 3 as well. The reason being those from category 3 are the true sceptics.
 
If you’re category 2, you’re a debunker. I’m sorry to tell you that you can come across as deluded, almost as much as those folks you love to mock in group 1. If you’re from category 2 you try to shoe-horn the story you’ve just heard into a box where it doesn’t fit. Making the story fit the science and not vice versa. Every slamming door is a gentle breeze and every UFO report, swamp gas and weather balloons. Weather balloons that cross the night sky in a zig-zag pattern in a matter of seconds. Poltergeists are earthquakes. Earthquakes that only affect one item in one room.
 
Coming to these conclusions is unscientific, and rather than solve the problem, you skip over it, missing an opportunity to genuinely come to an understanding that wasn’t previously considered.
 
There have been studies that show low-level sound frequencies can bring about the fleeting sense of movement in peripheral vision, and even feelings of revulsion and dread. Tested. Repeated. That is science. If these feelings had been written off as delusion, that would be something undiscovered.
 
Low level sound doesn’t explain stories of disembodied footsteps, or situations where loved ones have heard the voices of a family member holidaying in another country.
 
As it stands, we have no explanation for that. And that suits me just fine.

Just in case you've read these posts out of order like some massive weirdo, here's the links for the rest of the series! The Royal Oak...
Part One: The Room
Part Two: The Highwayman
Part Three: The Bar
Part Four: The Cellar

The Hotel...
Part One: The Flat (1)
Part Two: The Flat (2)
Part Three: The Kitchen
Part Four: Reception

Last time at the Royal Oak, we talked about the bar. The busy bar was almost the full length of the far wall of the large open space. Behind the bar were two doors. The first led to the kitchen. The other was an old wooden door which led to the cellar. Inside the door were two stone steps leading straight into a square room with only one other entrance: double doors to the left where beer deliveries were received. The remote location and need for security meant these doors were always locked unless there was a delivery (the cellar was also where expensive bottles of spirits were kept, so it would be a quick way to lose a lot of money quickly if left unlocked).
 
One thing of the first things you’d notice on entering the cellar, besides the large barrels and chilled air, were electrical sockets. One by each barrel of beer. To help thirsty customers get their hands on ice cool beverages ASAP, the bar was fitted with electric beer pumps. Place a glass under the tap, flick a switch and a half a pint is poured. Flick it again and Hey, Presto! a pint. Ideal when the round was a mixture of beers and spirits. Leave the glass under the tap and mix a double Jack and Coke or whatever. Because it was so busy it common to see several of the taps going at the same time.
 
In the middle of the chaos of a Friday night shift, the place is packed, disco music is pumping, dancefloor jumping, and of course, beer is flowing.
 
That’s when our night in question takes a turn for the weird.
 
The music is still playing. The dancefloor is still jumping. The problem is the beer. The flow has stopped. All of the pumps have stopped at exactly the same time. The music is still playing, so it’s not a power cut. So what is it?
 
Several bar staff desperately start flicking the switches up and down. Nothing. So the problem must be in the cellar.
 
Upon entering the cellar, everything seemed normal. Nobody there. Kegs all aligned in their usual ‘L’ shape along the walls, no bottles missing, and those all-important double doors still locked. Then they see it.
 
Every plug to those electric beer pumps, spaced over a distance of a few yards, has not just been switched off, but completely removed from the wall. At the same time. Unplugged.
 
Every. Single. One.
 
After a few moments nonplussed, the plugs were reinstated to their working positions and normal service resumed. A problem easily solved. But to anyone working that night, it was a problem not so easily forgotten.

Have you experienced anything spooky yourself? Seen a ghost? UFOs? Let us know in the comments! As always, I’d like this to be a serious discussion, so no jokes, memes, etc. And please be respectful of others!

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The reception at the hotel was home to a mischievous spirit, with multiple reports of both auditory and poltergeist activity.
 
The front door of the hotel opened into the reception area. Turn left, and you’ll find a passageway leading to the public bar. Head right, and you’ll end up the restaurant (and those swinging double doors leading to the kitchen) and go past the office you’ll find toilets just before you hit the beer garden.
 
The ladies toilets were constantly cold even at the hight of summer, and many customers told stories of strange feelings, and sometimes even sightings in there. Just before the right turn to the restaurant were the stairs that led to the flat. I did not like the stairs. Not one bit. In fact, I hated them. Whenever I was going up the stairs, it felt like there was someone behind me. Every. Single. Time. Whoever this someone was, I got the same feeling of malevolence from them as I did the presence in the flat. Maybe it was them.
 
The main focus of reception was the office. There were two kinds of phenomena around the office. The first kind was nasty. At the entrance to the office, both of my parents experienced the same thing on two separate occasions, something I’m overjoyed to say never happened to me. They were standing just outside the door when a disembodied voice screamed in their ears. A vicious barked AH! up close and personal, targeting them when they were alone.
 
The other kind was mischievous. One afternoon, I had to count the takings from the restaurant till. My maths is pretty good, but I usually used a calculator, just because it was quicker than recounting if I did make a mistake. I departed the office, collected the money, and carried the tray from the till back into the office and placed it on the desk. No calculator.
 
Just as with the auditory phenomena experienced by my parents, I was alone and there was no-one around to play a trick. After a quick search, I decided it would just be faster to count using pen and paper. Not the most exciting job, scraping the coins from their compartments and out onto the desk, left to right, starting with pound coins, and working through to the pennies. Count them, mark the amount and move on to the next section.
 
On this day it was a quick job. All present and correct, I took the tray back to the till. When I returned to the office, I froze.
 
Sitting smack in the middle of the desk, where the tray had been, was the calculator.
 
My first conclusion was that I’d made a mistake, done something stupid, put the tray on the calculator and not noticed. But something about that didn’t feel right.
 
Neither the calculator nor tray from the till were flat. The calculator had a raised section for the display; its profile looked like an ice-hockey stick. The bottom of the tray was the opposite of the top. Plastic where there were gaps and vice versa.
 
I went back to the till and collected the tray and tried to fit it over the top of calculator so that it wouldn’t wobble. I tried every possible position and there was no way that thing would fit. Whenever I got something close to the tray being flat, I scraped the coins out from the tray, it noticeably wobbled. I hadn’t made a mistake.
 
Putting those events aside, the strangest thing to happen in reception was connected with the lock on the office door. It was a Yale lock. For those not in the know, a Yale lock is an auto locking system. Nothing fancy. The key needed from the outside, and on the inside, two buttons – one that twisted to open the lock, and a smaller switch that fixed the lock in place: either stopping the lock from closing if the door was being used a lot, or fixing the lock closed for extra security (so much so that when it is locked like this, it won’t be opened even with a key).
 
One night I had to go to the bar, so I left the office, making sure I had my keys (because locking yourself out of somewhere with these locks is far too easy) before dropping the switch to lock the door. After about an hour, I went back to the office, stuck my key in the lock and twisted. You guessed it. Nothing.
 
I jumped to the obvious conclusion: the lock was broken, thinking the switch must have fallen from the up position to the down and fixed the lock shut. The hatch where guests would sign in and receive their keys was closed and locked with a bolt. After a few minutes of rattling I managed to get the lock open (yay, security!), and I climbed through into the office. To fix the lock in place, either locked or unlocked, the switch had to be put up. It couldn’t have dropped and locked me out. And when I checked the switch… Up. I didn’t move easily and even if it had happened on its own, it was defying gravity.
 
Again, after a few minutes of fiddling I came to the conclusion that there was no way it could have happened accidentally. If we were dealing with a defective lock, I would expect this to happen often, with increasing regularity. In ten years, this happened twice.

As mentioned in The Highwayman, the Royal Oak was a huge place and at weekends was a busy nightclub (yes, I grew up experiencing this. Yes, my childhood was that awesome). The bar itself was brass-topped (just like The Highwayman’s table) and wide, to stop drunken patrons trying to reach over and help themselves to beer(!), and the area behind the bar was equally wide. The extra room was invaluable during those packed out weekends so the bar staff could easily pass one another. All in all, the distance from the back of the bar, to the front of the bar was easily somewhere around 5 feet (approx. 1.5m). Behind the bar were shelves full of glasses for easy access.
 
Late one afternoon David and Mandy were working at the Royal Oak and a couple of customers who were impressed with the age of the old place asked about hauntings.
 
So the question came about hauntings, and David mentioned the odd sightings, and poltergeist activity. The moment the words were out of his mouth, a glass flew from the shelf behind the bar. It flew through the air completely clearing the bar, before smashing on the customer side. A huge distance.
 
Such a journey defied the laws of physics and cannot simply be attributed to gravity alone. Again, this is another story which asks for some serious logic bending when trying to come up with an explanation.
 
The second story happened one night after the pub had closed. David had stayed up for one of those late night afterhours sessions and had fallen asleep afterwards. He awoke alone, disturbed by a distinctive hollow metallic sound. The sound of barrels being moved around in the cellar.
 
He opened his blurry eyes and the noise stopped, but he saw somebody helping themselves to a shot from the optics mounted behind the bar. His eyes came into focus but when they did, there was nobody there. Thinking he’d imagined the whole thing, he went upstairs to bed.
 
The next morning he went downstairs and spoke to the landlady.
 
“What were you doing last night?” she asked.
 
David explained that he wasn’t doing anything, he’d just fallen asleep. “Why?” he asked.
 
“It took me ages to fall asleep because of the racket coming from downstairs.”
 
David was confused. “What racket?”
 
“Somebody messing around in the cellar, moving empty barrels around.”
 
The word ‘Poltergeist’ comes from the German meaning ‘noisy ghost’. Poltergeist activity includes objects being moved (or in some cases thrown), loud noises, e.g. knocking, banging, etc. This kind of spirit is also purportedly capable of biting and scratching those unfortunates unlucky enough to experience it. Poltergeist activity often occurs in the presence of an adolescent: in a home where there is at least one teenager; one theory being that poltergeists feed off their energy, though this gives rise to claims of bored kids with nothing better to do playing pranks on adults.
 
Other theories claim poltergeists can be written off simply as the result of a vivid imagination or memory lapses.
 
In the case of the glass above, it would be an elaborate prank indeed, to get a glass to perform the kind of gymnastics mentioned. Not only that, but the prank would have to be set up during a shift, and not triggered beforehand. Who would do this? David and Mandy were as much victims of the ’prank’ as anyone. So could this just be a case of imagination? Well, if there is a broken glass as a result, seen by multiple witnesses then I should say not. Which leaves us with a question: are poltergeists real?

 
Have you experienced poltergeist activity yourself? Let us know in the comments! As always, I’d like this to be a serious discussion, so no jokes, memes, etc. And please be respectful of others!

And a quick word about a new short story series Infinity. Part one 'Last Party' saw our hero wake up chained in a warehouse, surrounded by 3 strangers bearing strange marks on their wrists, but what do they want? Part two drops this Friday (17th Feb) at 8am (GMT)

It was a regular day at the hotel, back in the time I was working in the kitchen. The kitchen at the hotel was up a short flight of stairs separated from the restaurant by a pair of large swinging doors, and a particularly active (paranormally speaking) part of the hotel.
 
There were sightings of shadowy figures (not by me, a cleaner was talking to mum and stepped aside to let ‘somebody’ past her) and one occasion I recall, I went up there to collect a CD a friend wanted to borrow. It was a short distance to the CD player and the ultraviolet light of the insect zappers meant I didn’t need the lights on. As I walked to pick up the CD I heard a pair of hard soled shoes following behind me. I was wearing trainers and the footsteps were at a different pace to mine. That took me a minute to build up the courage to turn around, I can tell you. After a minute or so trying to recreate the noise I gave up.
 
Back to the story…
 
I’m in the kitchen working with a colleague (Lynne) and on this particular day, I was washing the dishes and Lynne was preparing main courses. She had just served up a meal and to let the waitress know the food was ready she shouted the standard “Meals away!” The food was set onto the pass through that divided the kitchen into the large cooking area and smaller waitress area and she went about her business of preparing the next meals.
 
After a minute or so, the meal was still sitting there, going cold. It wasn’t a particularly busy day, so I gave a slightly lounder shout, hoping my voice would carry further, before getting stuck back into the dishes. Another minute passed and the food was still sitting there. I turned to Lynne, and we shook our heads in disbelief that nobody has come to collect the food, when we hear the distinctive sound from the bottom of the stairs of swinging double doors opening.
 
“Finally!” Lynne says.
 
The scrape of traipsing footsteps echoes upstairs and we both go back to whatever we’re doing, Lynne the next meal, and me, more dishes. I glanced around just in time to see a stockinged leg in a plain flat black shoe disappear around the corner as I picked up the next plate out of the sink. After washing it the waitress still hasn’t reappeared carrying the meals (which by now have been sitting for a good few minutes).
 
I turned round to see Lynne give an exasperated shrug, so I walked around the corner to “politely request that the waitperson exercise a little haste”. I poked my head back around the corner, mouth agape.
 
Lynne mirrored my gormless expression.
 
“Is there nobody there?” she asked.
 
“Did you hear somebody come upstairs?” I replied.
 
After a minute of asking each other questions back and forth like an Abbot and Costello routine, we both confirmed that: yes, we heard the doors open; yes, we heard footsteps; no, there’s nobody there.
 
Eventually the double doors swung open and the waitress finally appeared and rather than wanting to know what had taken her so long, we were both desperate to find out if she’d opened the doors come, upstairs, then gone back down for something.
 
She said that she hadn’t been upstairs, and she hadn’t heard us shouting. She had to check a guest in at reception. The reception where she had been for the past few minutes.
 
Wide awake, corroborated by another witness. There. Told you.

 
That’s All, Folks! Next week, it’s back to the Royal Oak, for POLTERGEISTS!! Have you liked/shared/retweeted? You have? Thank you! You may now go. But come back next week!!

Have you ever had an experience you can't explain? Let me know in the comments! As before, I’d like this to be a serious discussion, so no jokes, memes, etc. And (I really shouldn’t have to tell you this) please be respectful of others!