Tales from Scotland’s ghost hunters
Quizzing Bonnie Prince Charlie’s spirit, a haunted swimming pool... and a spine-chilling brush with a spectre called The Crawler
STEFF Murdoch-Richards is unloading an impressive arsenal of top-grade technology designed to nail the most elusive of targets. Electromagnetic field meters, laser thermometers and infra-red cameras are laid out on a large dining table, next to super-sensitive microphones and recording devices capable of picking up even distant voices.
It is an array of hi-tech detection equipment that would have a spy salivating, and yet Steff and Janice Murdoch-Richards have no interest in anything as mundane as exposing state secrets.
This husband-and-wife team run Lanarkshire Paranormal, one of Scotland’s most active groups searching for proof of paranormal activity. In layman’s terms, they are ghosthunters.
‘We’re not Ghostbusters though!’ roars Janice in her broad Glaswegian brogue. While Hollywood’s fictional Ghostbusters employed proton packs and slime blowers to track down and rid New York of a cast of unpleasant – and entirely fanciful – visitors from the spirit world, Steff and Janice’s sole concern is attempting to document what they would term genuine contact from ‘the other side’.
‘When you tell someone you are a paranormal investigator, you get one of two reactions,’ she adds. ‘They either say, “Oh my god, that’s so cool”, or “You are nuts”.’
People, it seems, are rarely indifferent to their work. For more than a decade, their shared passion for the unexplained has taken them to some of the country’s creepiest buildings – castles, stately homes and even the odd disused swimming pool – in the hope of capturing conclusive evidence of hauntings.
They will cheerfully spend an entire night sitting in the pitch black of a castle dungeon or exploring a historic mansion’s hidden passages, usually in the company of like-minded souls willing to pay £30 a head to have the living daylights scared out of them.
During those long hours of darkness, they say, things have often gone bump. Reminders of Scotland’s long and turbulent history lurk round every dank corner. They claim to have seen apparitions looming in darkened hallways, felt spirits grasping people’s wrists or touching them on the shoulder, and captured unexplained shadowy figures in photographs.
ANOTABLE recent incident came in March, when they believe they contacted the spirit of bonnie Prince Charlie in the abandoned a-listed mansion, bannockburn House, near Stirling, where he met his mistress in 1745 during his march south to gain support for the Jacobite cause.
at the time, Janice told a local newspaper: ‘We did a vigil in bonnie Prince Charlie’s bedroom and called out to anyone there who could hear us. His name came through and when we asked, “are you the bonnie Prince?”, the meter went right off the scale.’
as the couple prepare for a fresh series of probes, including a Hallowe’en special at spooky Plane Castle, near Stirling, at the end of this month, Janice added: ‘We find that everywhere we go there’s always a Grey Lady or a White Lady and people are desperate to see her. and Mary, Queen of Scots, is everywhere!’
Do they worry about the curse of the celebrity ghoul?
‘I do, because it takes years to build up your reputation and this kind of thing can knock your credibility,’ says Janice, at their first floor flat on Glasgow’s South Side, which serves as the ghosthunters’ HQ. but she stressed: ‘We would never fake anything or jump out on people and go, “boo!” That’s just not us.’
Their investigations work is virtually full-time, although Janice is studying for an HND in event management, and they rely on a small team of volunteers, including a nurse, an insurance salesman and a barber, to help with their not-for-profit activities, which generate up to £10,000 a year for various charities.
It’s also bought them some clever toys. Laser thermometers can pinpoint so-called ‘cold spots’ that might indicate the presence of a spirit which, according to conventional wisdom, can lower the temperature of a room. EMF meters can detect distortions in electromagnetic wave patterns. Steff says: ‘Spirits allegedly give off their own electromagnetic fields. I say allegedly with everything I say and I also never say anything’s a ghost – it is simply unexplained.’
Recent excursions to Leith Hall, aberdeenshire, Glasgow’s Provan Hall and Cultybraggan PoW camp near Comrie, Perthshire, have yielded much that is unexplained, they say. There are lurid tales of bloodcurdling shrieks, tortured groans, Jacobean ladies singing and spectral faces peering in at windows.
as well as their box of hi-tech tricks, the pair employ traditional methods to summon up the dead. ‘We use scrying, where someone stands in front of a mirror and we ask the spirit to change their face to what they look like,’ says Janice. ‘We have had women’s faces turning into men’s faces, with full-on beards and everything. We do table-tipping, asking the spirit to move a table which everyone has their fingertips on.’
In the dungeons at Castle Menzies, near aberfeldy, Perthshire, Steff reported calling out to any of the 16th-century fortress’s three resident witches. Janice says: ‘We all heard this horrible cackle. It made my blood run cold.’
Some of the most bountiful surroundings are the most prosaic, including Govanhill baths, in Glasgow. ‘We’ve been there several times now,’ says Janice. ‘It was used in the Second World War as a morgue for victims of the Clydebank blitz. The pools were drained and bodies were kept in the them. and, over the years, bathers have drowned.’
The pair have intriguing footage of the ‘Govanhill shadowman’ lurking in a corner of the baths’ old steamie, while a photograph appears to show the outline of a man at the foot of a set of stairs.
‘We could all clearly see the figure coming down the stairs. There was a lot of screaming,’ they report.
Some pictures posted on their official Facebook page – which has around 4,000 followers – seem less convincing, like a blurry photo purporting to show the shadowy outline of a hooded monk in a corridor at the abbot House, in Dunfermline. Yet, their customers lap it up and it is not
uncommon for some to become so overwhelmed that they have to be helped to a safe place and plied with strong coffee.
Those of a fragile disposition will doubtless be thankful they were not with Steff when he fell upon his most famous sighting in the grounds of Cockenzie House, in East Lothian.
‘I had gone to get something from the van when I saw this girl crawling on the floor. She was all buckled and twisted,’ he says.
He thought she might be a local drunk and offered to help her up.
‘It was like lifting fresh air. I asked if she was okay and she said, “Yes”. Her eyes were dead black and her voice was a monotone and she was dressed in really oldfashioned gear.
‘I took a couple of steps before I turn round again and she’s gone. There’s a 10ft wall on one side and a big green on the other. There’s no way she got past me that quick. She just vanished.’
News of the encounter went global when reported on paranormal forums. ‘Some fans have called her The Crawler,’ says Steff.
Even so, sceptics will question the lack of corroboration. ‘It is frustrating,’ he admitted. ‘We do get a lot of scepticism. Everyone has a right to their opinion and we do welcome constructive scepticism because there can always be something you can overlook.
‘Many years ago, I had a picture of what appeared to be a spirit standing in a doorway. But it turned out it was down to the security guard that works there. He said there was a window which shows his reflection and he had often jumped at the sight, thinking it was a ghost, as well.
‘It’s possible to spook yourself with windows and mirrors. We don’t go in anywhere thinking everything’s a ghost. If anything, we try to disprove it before we can prove it. If there’s a 99.9 per cent chance it is paranormal, then our view is there’s still a 0.1 per cent chance that it isn’t.’
At first blush, they make an unlikely couple. Janice is a motherly 53, with a grown-up son and daughter and a raucous laugh. Steff, meanwhile, is 37, his slightly cadaverous features softened a touch by a wispy goatee.
They met through a mutual friend on Facebook and for their first date, Steff drove Janice all the way to Bolling Hall, a stately home near Bradford, for a night’s ghost-hunting.
‘I won’t lie, the first wee while I was absolutely bricking it,’ says Janice, pointing out quickly that it was the creepy surroundings and not her companion that had unsettled her. Soon she was hooked, both by the paranormal and her paramour.
Yet, they have more in common than the impressive collection of horror DVDs and their matching diplomas in parapsychology, attained through an online homestudy course from Cornwall-based Stonebridge College.
Steff was adopted and brought up in Southampton. From an early age, he would freak out his parents by talking to a shadowy ‘friend’ while playing by himself.
‘I could see it out of the corner of my eye – a sort of black thing. Only I could see it. I wasn’t unsettled by it but my parents were.’
On trips to his grandfather’s home in Kent, he was hooked by tales of bedsheets being ripped off as his parents slept and pictures lifting up off the wall.
By his teens he was investigating hauntings. When he tracked down his birth mother he found they had a shared interest in the paranormal. ‘We ended up starting a group together in Manchester, where she and her husband live,’ he says.
JANICE’S family background also prompted her fascination. ‘My mother and her mother both had “the gift”,’ she declares. ‘I believe in the gift – you know, being able to speak to the afterlife. I don’t have it, which is very frustrating.
‘My mum, Jean, would read tea leaves and could tell someone they were going to meet such-and-such a person or they would be ill but they’ll be fine and it was all true and I couldn’t understand how she knew that.
‘I would drop everything to go with her to someone’s house for a reading and just sit there goggle-eyed. She died when I was 16. I do miss her.’
Such talk raises the hackles of cynics keen to dismiss their research as mere hocus pocus. ‘Paranormal can cover a multitude of things, from ghosts to UFOs and cryptozoology, things like Nessie and Bigfoot,’ interjects Steff.
‘We focus on spirits. A spirit or haunting is easier to find.
‘There are people who study UFOs – in my opinion, how do you ever really know? Unless you have a device that is proven to communicate with aliens,’ he laughs.
But how do they really know they have communicated with a long-dead soul? ‘What we have is witness reports in a confined location or area. It may be a house with multiple people having witnessed things happening.’
But who is to say these are not fabricated? ‘We don’t fake it,’ insists Janice. Steff recalls an incident at a pub a few years ago where he found nothing. ‘The landlord said, “Could you say there’s something there anyway?”.’
He added: ‘Where is the interest for us in faking it? We do this largely for ourselves, to satisfy our own curiosity.
‘We just want to uncover the truth of what’s really there, if there’s life after death.’
Next up is Fyvie Castle, Aberdeenshire, where the spirit of Dame Lillian Drummond – starved by her husband – is said to stalk the corridors and a phantom trumpeter patrols the battlements.
When it comes to searching for spirits, it seems, Lanarkshire Paranormal are far from ready to give up the ghost.