Happy New Year

Daytime ghosts at the Sheffield Central Library (by Andrew Wooding)

Every self-respecting ghost-hunter has a certain item on their DVD shelf. Can you guess what it is?

Ghostbusters, of course, the blockbusting movie from 1984 which is uncannily accurate in every way and serves as a visual representation of the serious art of seeking out spooks. (Or at least how we want it to be rather than the sad reality.)

If you’ve seen it as many times as I have (I’ve also watched the commentary, deleted scenes, trailers and bonus documentaries), you’ll know that the film’s first glimpse of the supernatural happens in the basement of the New York Public Library.

The librarian on duty down there is attacked from all sides by hundreds of flying index cards. And our intrepid heroes are confronted with a tall uneven stack of books which has no earthly explanation (other than the merest possibility that a bored member of staff might have just stacked them there for a laugh).

Naturally, then, you can understand my delight when I heard from Mike that we’d been granted a guided tour of Sheffield Central Library’s basement (known as ‘the stacks’). He’d heard that some of the staff had seen strange things down there, so he’d got in touch and they’d kindly invited us along to have a gander.

I got there early on the day in question, so I drooled over the wares on offer in the DVD/CD lending room, then hovered round the graphic novels section, browsing my favourite titles.

A lady on staff came up to me and asked: ‘Can I help you, sir?’

‘No, ta,’ I thanked her and smiled. ‘Just looking.’

Come the time of our appointment, I trundled back to the foyer and found the very same lady standing there with her colleague. They were looking down at their watches, looking up at the library’s entrance, looking down at their watches again, and so on, as if they were expecting to see someone.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Are you waiting for the ghost blog people?’

The lady smiled and shook my hand.

‘I knew it was you!’ she announced.

I’m still not sure what it was about me that gave the game away. My jacket? My hairstyle? My general demeanour? I’m now paranoid that whenever I’m out and about, children and grown-ups alike are laughing and pointing at me, whispering: ‘Hey, look. That man over there. He’s a ghost-hunter. It’s obvious!’

The lady in question was Eunice Heathcote, who’d worked at Sheffield Central Library for ten years, and in her time (in common with many of the staff there) she’d spotted a number of ghostly figures roaming around the premises.

Eunice was delightful as she chatted away, and so was her colleague, Linda Greenwood. Linda had been at the library for a year and hadn’t had the same experiences as Eunice, so she was just as fascinated by Eunice’s tales as I was.

A few minutes into our chat, Mike burst through the library doors.

‘Sorry I’m late!’ he yelled.

He was hot, flustered and sweaty. Parking had been nigh on impossible in town that morning. Spaces were like gold dust, but as soon as he’d found one he’d parked his car there and raced on over to us as fast as he could.

Shaking hands with Eunice and Linda, wheezing, panting and wiping his brow, we were escorted to our first port of call: the staff women’s toilets. (The places that self-respecting ghost-hunters have to check out in order to do their research…)

Turns out that Eunice had been in there one day when she spotted a lady standing in one of the cubicles, as solid as you or I. She definitely wasn’t a member of staff, and she was garbed in vivid, bright-coloured period dress (was it Victorian?). Eunice had turned to the sink for an instant, then turned back quickly and the lady had gone! There was no way she could have left the cubicle and sneaked out the door in the half second or less that Eunice had turned away.

Brilliant story, but I don’t know what unsettled me more. Eunice’s unusual tale, or the fact that Mike and I were standing right in the middle of the women’s loos, scared that we’d be caught at any moment!

The second port of call was the basement itself: ‘the stacks’.

As we entered, Eunice reassured us: ‘Don’t worry. You won’t get attacked by flying cards or books!’ (So she’d seen Ghostbusters as well. Excellent!)

For a book lover like me, ‘the stacks’ was pure heaven. Rows upon rows of shelves piled high with books and other publications as far as the eye could see. I could quite happily have spent days in there.

There were lots of dark corners and narrow shadowy corridors for ghosts to hide in. Except they didn’t hide. Staff would often see people down here, again in period dress. And it seemed that these people (ghosts?) could also see the staff, speaking to them and gesturing.

Eunice had once seen an amorphous dark mass down here. She hadn’t been scared by the period figures, some of whom walked up and down the staircase, but this eerie black shape had given her a deep sense of uneasiness.

I shared this sense of uneasiness each time I heard a bang or a clatter or a door slam down here. The sound effects in question would invariably be followed by a member of staff walking past, pushing a trolley or going about their everyday business.

But my overactive imagination would always assume it was something more sinister and spooky. The others just laughed at my jumpiness. Thanks, guys (and gals…)!

Finally, we chatted to a lady at the main desk upstairs. She told us that once, in the main library area, she’d heard her name called out. She looked round, but no one was there. Then she could smell flowers really strongly, but again there were no flowers around to be giving off the scent. (Mike has a theory about this. More about that in his follow-up blog entry coming soon.)

Eunice’s parting thought to us as we headed for the door was: ‘These people haven’t just been spotted in the basement. Staff see them in the library as well, in the daytime, as clear as you can see me and Linda right now.’

It occurred to me that all of Mike’s and my ghost-hunting excursions have taken place at night. But Eunice believes that ghosts can appear at any time. We only notice them at night because we’re not expecting to see anyone, but if they occur in the daytime we might walk straight past them, thinking they’re just ordinary folks like you or I.

As Mike and I emerged onto the midday street, encouraged and challenged by our visit to the library and grateful for the warm hospitality of our hosts, I couldn’t help looking at the crowds of people hustling and bustling down Surrey Street. I wondered how many of them might be daytime ghosts, and how would I be able to tell?

‘Great stuff,’ said Mike of our morning tour. ‘We’ll have to pay a return visit soon.’ I hope so. I’m looking forward to it!

And return we shall. But in the meantime, Mike has been doing some research. Lots of it. With some very interesting findings. But that (as clichéd endings go) is another story…

Ghostly greetings from 2MG

The Stocksbridge bypass revisited (by Andrew Wooding)

A few blog posts ago, Mike told the story of his gardener, Chuck C’s ghostly encounter on the Stocksbridge bypass. The woman in the car in front of him was shaken (understandably so) because a phantom monk (in robes and everything) had allegedly appeared in the passenger seat next to her for part of the journey. Maybe he couldn’t afford a bus ticket.

Mike had also read recently that a motorcyclist, who used the bypass to get to work each day, had problems each time he approached it. Turns out his engine would cut out and only return to full working order once he’d walked his faultering vehicle the full length of the bypass.

If this happened to him every time, it kind of makes you wonder why he didn’t choose another route. (Or maybe he was persistently late for work, and this was the only excuse he could think of. In the words of Michael Jackson: ‘Don’t blame it on the sunshine. Don’t blame it on the moonlight. Don’t blame it on the good times. Blame it on the paranormal goings-on at Stocksbridge bypass that affect the inner workings of my motorbike.’ Or something.)

When you consider both of the above stories – along with the sad fact that the only remotely spooky thing that’s happened to us since we started this blog is Mike’s mileometer packing in as we headed for the bypass in question – can you blame us for deciding that a return trip to Stocksbridge was in order?

If something had happened every single day to this motorcyclist, then the odds were in our favour for a genuine happening on our journey. And, amazingly, we could finally have something worth writing about!

So, with our hopes high, our tank full, and bags of liquorice allsorts in our pockets for sustenance on the way, we set off up the M1 for Stocksbridge. We were gonna catch ourselves a mad monk from the otherworld!

I wish I could say our optimism was rewarded on that fateless night.

I wish I could report back with spine-tingling tales of a mysterious transparent figure roaming the roads and interfering with our innards (the innards of our car, that is).

I wish that the most dramatic thing that happened that evening was slightly more interesting than me losing a pink liquorice allsort (one of my favourites) down the back of Mike’s car seat.

We tried our best, really we did. We must have driven up and down that bypass at least half a dozen times, our eyes darting left, right, and all directions in between for the slightest sign of strange goings-on in bushes, over fences, behind trees ... or anywhere!

But strange goings-on there were none.

Sadly, the only sighting that was vaguely unusual was a lorry parked in a layby, with the word Symphony cryptically painted on its side in large red letters. Was there a full orchestra in there, being carted about from symphony hall to opera house like a stable of horses being ferried about in the back of a van?

Eventually, our curiosity got the better of us, and because there was clearly nowt else to be seen on the road, we pulled up slowly behind the lorry. As we read the writing on the back doors, it all became clear. Turns out Symphony is a company that manufactures mattresses, and the lorry was most likely full of them.

So, unless our ghost-monk was having a secret kip on one of them before his next scheduled stint at terrorising Sheffield motorists, that was probably ‘it’ as far as our ghost-hunting attempts went that evening.

Mike turned his engine off so that we could have a breather from driving backwards and forwards. It was hard work not seeing any ghosts on the highways and byways of Sheffield … and the fact that mattresses were in our immediate vicinity must have sent a subliminal message to our brains that we were tired.

So, with nothing else to do, we chatted in the dark for a while, and Mike regaled me with a repeat telling of his gardener, Chuck C’s story of the phantom visitor in that poor woman’s car. I was thrilled and intrigued by this, until I turned my head and saw a sinister silhouette in the dark behind Mike.

‘M-M-M-M-Mike,’ I stuttered. ‘I hate to tell you this, but … behind you. It’s…’

I stopped in mid-sentence when my intelligence kicked in, correctly telling me that all I was seeing was the head rest sticking up on the back of Mike’s seat. Amazing what a teensy bit of darkness, plus a truly spooky story, can do to one’s powers of suggestibility and imagination. In such conditions, a head rest from Halford’s can so easily be perceived as a deranged dead monk with the ability to sabotage complex 21st century automotive systems. I consoled myself with the fact that this was a simple mistake that anyone could have made ... wasn’t it?

Mike and I decided there and then that we needed to change our strategy. We were clearly getting nowhere. So, instead of looking for ghosts ourselves, maybe we should shift our efforts to seeking out and interviewing people who’ve regularly seen the very things that elude our grasp.

Which is precisely what we did! Please don’t miss our next exciting blog post in which we tell you in great gory detail what happened to us in the basement (not to mention the women’s toilets) of Sheffield Central Library.

Plus my intriguing encounter in the library’s graphic novels section.

Oo-er…

Humbug, part two...

Crumbs. Look how long Mike's had to wait to see a ghost!

Rather than finding one, it seems he's turned into one himself.

Gonna have to change the name of this blog to 'One Man and Two Ghosts'...

Humbug to Christmas...

Yes, it's a close-up of our very own Mike Kazybrid (one-third of Two Men and a Ghost). Could it be that he doesn't like Christmas?

Or is it that he's trying to provoke the spirits of Christmas past, present and future, so that we might actually see a ghost or two before the year's end? We are supposed to be ghost-hunters after all, and we still haven't seen one of the bloomin' things...

Exposed in Sheffield ... and more 2MG on the radio!

In our last blog post, Mike's gardener Chuck C revealed his own spooky take on the alleged mad monk sightings on Sheffield's Stocksbridge bypass.

Inspired by this (and since the Stocksbridge bypass was our very first foray into this ghost-hunting lark back in May), we decided to take a trip down memory lane and revisit this infamous location to see if we had any further luck in finding our elusive spectral monk.

Watch out for the account of what we discovered (or maybe didn't discover!) in a few days' time.

While you're waiting, you could check us out in Sheffield's excellent exposed magazine, which shifts 35,000 copies each month. It's available free at all good pubs, clubs and shops in the Sheffield and Doncaster area, and you'll find us on page 12 in the festive December issue.

Or you could listen to the latest Paul and Spike show, a bumper two-hour edition! This is our third appearance on the programme, and (amongst other things) there's a teaser for our upcoming Stocksbridge bypass story, as well as all the gory details of Mike's recent encounter with his boiler man.

What's the significance of the bright blue bucket in the picture above? Not telling! You'll just have to download this brilliant show from the link below in order to find out. (Believe me, it's stonking!)

The Paul And Spike Show, episode #136: Friday December 11th, 2009.


Click here to download the show mp3.
Click here to subscribe to the Paul And Spike Show, using iTunes or any feedreader.
Furthermore, bookmark PaulAndSpike.com, mmkay?