1st ever Two Men and a Ghost podcast!

At last. Here it is. In all its primitive audio goodness! The first ever podcast from the men (and ghost) behind Two Men and a Ghost.

We ventured forth to Bunting Nook at night in search of that which cannot be found. Then afterwards we retired to Mike's car to pick our noses, crunch a few Polo mints and record our thoughts ... and get stopped by the police twice, live on mp3.

Stream it here, or download the full 37 minutes at the bottom of this page.

Then listen in the dark under the covers at night ... if you have insomnia.

Ghost hunters at Bunting Nook at night

Competition extended!

From Mike Kazybrid’s recent interview with Rony Robinson on BBC Radio Sheffield:

Rony: Have you seen any good ghosts lately?

Mike: No.

Rony: Have you ever seen a ghost?

Mike: Erm … no.

Rony: Isn’t it a bit odd to be a hunter of ghosts if you’ve never seen one?

Mike: (mumbles a half-hearted embarrassed defence)

As you can see, Rony rumbled us immediately, live on air, and Mike’s insightful, eloquent and well-thought-out responses did little to convince him. So, if we haven’t found any ghosts yet, we need you to tell us about your ghost encounters. Doesn’t have to be long – just a sentence or two. Either comment at the bottom of this blog, or bung us an email at twomenandaghost@hotmail.com.

Out of all the stories received, we’ll turn our favourite into a comic strip, like the one above which relates to our adventure in Bunting Nook (you can read about it here and here). For more examples of Mike’s excellent artwork, see his latest graphic novel about the legendary Humph the Cat, completely free to download here.

Just imagine, your story can be illustrated by a top UK artist (Mike is currently drawing the Wallace & Gromit strip for The Sun), and you will also receive his original artwork through the post, signed personally to you.

Our original deadline for this competition was the end of June, but we so love reading your stories (they turn us green with envy) that we’ve extended the deadline to the end of the summer hols (last day of August). Many thanks for Martin Dawes of The Star for promoting our competition here.

Please get scribbling and scare us with your true-life tales!

Ghostly goings-on at Graves Park (by Andrew Wooding)

‘Not again,’ I thought when Mike suggested we meet up at Bunting Nook, especially as our previous visits had proved spectacularly fruitless. But it turns out he only meant we should rendezvous there in our cars before strolling to our latest investigation, which he promised was ‘Just down the road…’

Which road, and the precise length of Mike’s ‘just’ were appropriately vague, as I was soon to find out.

We nattered for a while in Mike’s car about this and that and t’other, and before we knew it, night was falling all around us.

Fall, it went.

‘Better get a move on,’ I suggested. ‘Where are we supposed to be heading anyway?’

‘Follow me,’ beckoned Mike, ‘and I’ll tell you a story.’

As we sauntered in the twilight, Mike regaled me with the thrilling tale of a photographer and a young woman. No, not a salacious piece of gossip, but a startling story of impossible photographs and invisible wedding crashers.

Back in 1989, the photographer in question had shot a panoramic snap across the boating lake in Graves Park. When he developed it, he noticed a young woman standing between some trees in the background, wearing a long short-sleeved dress and holding a bouquet of flowers. The photographer insisted she hadn’t been there at the time, so how had she ended up in the picture? (Cue some suitably atmospheric spooky music, maybe downloadable from iTunes. Just type in ‘suitably atmospheric spooky music’ and see what comes up.)

Around the same time, just before a wedding at Norton Parish Church, a guest took some photos of the building. Again, there was a ginormous surprise when the snaps were developed: the pictures showed quite clearly a bridesmaid in a Victorian dress. The people who’d developed the piccies (the local branch of Boots?) informed the lady who took the snaps that they’d seen that bridesmaid before – she’d appeared in photographs of other weddings at the very same church. Creepy, eh? (Now play the theme to The Twilight Zone. If you don’t have it to hand, just hum it.)

Turns out that a long, long time ago - possibly in the nineteenth century - a bride-to-be received some very bad news before her wedding. The news remains a mystery, but whatever it was - (maybe she’d been told she had to live in Bunting Nook?) - she fled from the church and was later found dead in the boating lake of Graves Park.

To add to this jolly tale, another woman committed suicide in the very same lake, again for marital reasons: her dad wouldn’t give her permission to marry her boyfriend. Could one – or both – of these women have turned up in the various purported ghost photos, both, for reasons of their own, obsessed with weddings and cameras?

As Mike told me all this, I had a moment of inspiration. Maybe we could fake a marriage ceremony at the church in Norton, entice one of these ghost brides to turn up, snap a load of piccies, then nip down to the nearest Boots for our definite photographic proof that weddings and ghoulies are often ideal bedfellows.

For some reason, Mike wasn’t happy with the idea. Maybe it was because I’d volunteered him as the pretend bride in our staged wedding. Or maybe it was because we’d just walked a mile and couldn’t see Graves Park anywhere.

‘I think I may have taken a wrong turning,’ he admitted. So we took a different turning and carried on sauntering.

‘I think I may have taken a wrong turning,’ he admitted again as – another mile later – we were still no closer to the site of our investigation. At least we were getting some exercise. Ever hopeful, we tried another turning.

Guess what happened after a further mile of walking?

‘I think I've … er … taken a wrong turning again.’ (I bet other ghost hunters don’t have this problem. Maybe the ghost brides were messing with our sense of direction.)

The only thing for it was to head back to our cars at Bunting Nook and drive to Graves Park. We still might get lost, but at least we wouldn’t get blisters on our tootsies.

Amazingly, we made it, and we marched through the open park gates in almost pitch blackness. So, where was the boating lake? We couldn’t see it anywhere. But we still walked slowly in case we accidentally stumbled across it and joined those poor women at the bottom.

Eventually, we bumped into a sign.

Bump!

‘Ow.’

Maybe this would give us a clue where to go. But we couldn’t read the words in the darkness, and we didn’t have any torches. Mike lit up his mobile phone – not enough illumination, unfortunately. I lit up my iPod – even less illumination, but at least we had the option of listening to the Greatest Hits of ABBA to cheer ourselves up.

With nothing else to do, we returned downhearted to our vehicles. What an evening. First, we’d got spectacularly lost. Second, we couldn’t find our haunted boating lake, despite being in the very park it was meant to be in. And third, Mike selfishly refused to kit himself out with a wedding dress to aid our investigations.

We felt like the worst ghost-hunters ever. Or were we?

Read on, McDuff, for the imminent account of our second foray into ghostly Graves Park, this time armed with torches…

Bunting Nook - the sequel (by Andrew Wooding)

As a postscript to the last blog, Mike and I drove like the clappers from the ‘loose dogs’ of Hell-Clough and headed back to Bunting Nook just minutes away. We parked by the side of the road and nattered for a while about this and that and anything we could think of … anything, that is, except for the supposed haunted nature of the street we were in.

You see, Bunting Nook had completely lost my interest. The last time we were here, it promised so much, and delivered … nothing. I couldn’t imagine anything of a haunted nature happening here … ever. So much for birds never singing in this place. They were chirruping away even louder than before.

Funny thing was, as we happily chatted – about telly, pile cream, the education system and Bernard Manning (amongst other things) - night-time descended over good old Bunting Nook. The street lights flickered on and cast a dull yellow glow over everything, the air became still, leaves and litter stopped blowing about, and the silence around us was deafening.

Those birds had decided to call it a day. Either that, or the loose dogs of Hell-Clough had secretly followed us and had their merry way with them all.

Our conversation stopped dead. Both of us became aware simultaneously that a change for the worst had happened in our surroundings. We felt a deep foreboding. Dead spooky it was. For the first time ever, I began to believe that anything might happen in this place. Maybe the stories about Bunting Nook were true after all.

‘Waaah!’

(The gasp came from me.)

‘What’s up?’

(The enquiry came from Mike.)

My heart beat fast, my veins were icy cold, goosebumps raced up and down my spine, plus all sorts of other anatomical symptoms of a sudden and utter shock.

‘C-car,’ I stuttered. I’d glimpsed it in the mirror on the passenger side of Mike’s car. ‘Th-there’s a car right behind us. How long’s it been there? What does it want with us?’

Mike glanced over his shoulder.

‘It’s your car, Andrew. It’s been there all the time. That’s why I drove you here, to bring you back to your car!’

‘Oh. I see. Well, that’s all right, then.’

Feeling a right ninny, I reckoned it was time to leave. I bade Mike farewell and stumbled the three yards to my Vauxhall Astra. The street was still spooky, still silent and still surprisingly free of birds. I couldn’t see or hear a bird anywhere.

Then I noticed it. Right on the bonnet of my car. A massive great blob of bird crap, the biggest I’d ever seen.

‘I bet you think that’s funny!’ I said, shaking my fist at what I imagined to be a gaggle of mischievous birds sniggering silently in the trees above.

Either that, or the birds really had gone, and the mess on my car was a ghostly phenomenon from the nether regions. Did it have magical properties?

I might just keep it, or even sell it on the internet. Next time you’re on eBay, type ‘ecto-poop’ into the search box. It’s the genuine article, sure to be worth a fortune.

Or not.

Silence of the birds (our icy adventure in Bunting Nook) (by Andrew Wooding)

Since starting this blog, Mike and I have noticed a truly strange phenomenon: everyone we’ve spoken to about our quest has a ghostly story or two to tell, usually followed by a recommendation of a haunted location for us to visit. No one’s laughed at us (which makes a change) – everyone’s been most eager to help with a tip-off or a story of their own. Maybe you could do the same by leaving a comment at the end of this blog?

For what it’s worth, here’s my own personal ghost story: the mysterious hovering lampshade of Bordesley Green. This really happened, and I’ll never forget it! Back in the nineties – I believe it was winter - I was staying at my aunt and uncle’s in Birmingham. There I was, reading a comic in bed in the spare room, when I glanced up at the ceiling … then froze in my bed!

This wasn’t just because it was a cold house (they didn’t have central heating); it was because I was witnessing a truly ghostly phenomenon. The lampshade hanging from the ceiling was moving quite dramatically of its own accord … from left to right, from right to left, from north to south, and all directions in between … as if some invisible figure was pushing it about for devious reasons of its own.

I couldn’t move for ages. Would this nightmare ever end? To add to the mystery, the air directly below the hanging lampshade seemed to be shimmering. Evidence of a ghost perhaps … or was it some sort of heat haze?

‘Heat haze?!’ It was then that I realised what was happening. One of those portable three bar heaters – switched on in the spare room - was giving off heat directly below the lampshade. The heat (as it does) was rising, and it was this that was causing the lampshade to swing randomly about. No ghost, then … unless Morphy Richards heaters give off paranormal entities, but there’s nothing about this in their warranty.

The reason I mention this is that on our travels, Mike and I fully expect to see lots of strange things. But how do we know when something is ghostly, and when it’s something that’s perfectly explainable by science or psychology?

On our first trip to Stocksbridge, our mileometer packed in for the entirety of the trip, only working again when we headed for home. How do you explain that? On our second trip, nothing happened, other than indigestion from guzzling a fun pack of Gold Bars too quickly. Ghostly noises emanated from our stomachs, but it was nothing to do with the spirit world and everything to do with trapped wind.

This being our third excursion, we wanted to ‘up’ the probability that we’d stumble across something worth writing about. So Mike chose Bunting Nook, a leafy road near Graves Park in Sheffield, noted by a number of paranormalists for the following phenomena:

1. There’s a ghostly dog, known as a boggart;
2. An eloping couple who died after falling off a horse (what were they doing on the horse?) supposedly haunt the lane;
3. A man with the surname Glover was brutally murdered in the nineteenth century, and visits his grave in Bunting Nook once a year;
4. Birds can never (I repeat, never) be heard in the lane;
5. There’s a ghostly figure that walks through walls.

There you go: five possible paranormal encounters. How could we go wrong?

We spent the best part of two hours wandering up and down the lane, and unless the boggart’s changed its form into that of a squirrel with halitosis, we didn’t come across it. There was no eloping couple, no grave in the graveyard with the surname of Glover, and those birds that don’t sing … they were screaming their lungs out at us, and we were treading in evidence of them all over the pavement.

This left the ghost that walks through walls. On our third walk up the lane, I examined one of the walls more closely, cleverly made of sharp flat rocks piled on top of each other. Protruding between two of the rocks was an ice lolly stick. Hoping I’d find a joke on it, I plucked it out, but there was no such joke … not even a Lyons Maid logo burnt into the wood.

A hundred yards or so down the lane there was another lolly stick on the floor, lying between all the bird poo. Then another lolly stick near the bottom of the lane … or, to be more accurate, only half a lolly stick.

Mike and I tried to imagine the events that led to this thought-provoking display of litter. Did the lolly sticks originate from just one person, greedily sucking his or her way through three of the lollies in succession while traversing the length of the lane? Or maybe the lollies were consumed by three people walking together, who happened to suck at different speeds and finished at different points on their journey. And why was one lolly stick half the size of the other? Maybe the three friends in question were two giants and Ronnie Corbett?

These are mysteries we are still pondering days after our experience of the legendary Bunting Nook. And can you blame us? There was nothing else for us to ponder … other than how we were going to get all that bird crap off our shoes.

Ah well. Better luck next time?

PS. Maybe the significance of the ice lolly stick is that our ghost likes to walk through Walls?

PPS. No, I didn’t think it was funny either…