In 2004 Derwent Paranormal participated in what was at the time no more than a bit of fun as far as the team members were concerned but, with a little more experience behind us, we now realise the importance behind it. What we did was purely off the cuff, was not carried out in a scientific manner whatsoever and was in fact the funniest thing we had ever done. Even if we had tried to carry out this as an experiment under controlled conditions I doubt very much if we would have succeeded as we spent most of our time rolling about laughing.
We were holding one of our field trips in a supposedly haunted location and off a poorly lit corridor, we found a room with the windows bricked up. When looking into this room from the corridor there was nothing but total blackness and after entering the room it took at least three or four minutes for your eyes to adjust before you were able to make out any shapes or forms whatsoever.
During the morning we had passed down the corridor on several occasions and the brave or foolhardy visitors of which there were many, thought nothing of venturing into this black hole. We ourselves had visited the room several times and on each visit had found a plastic ball which on each occasion, we had moved to another part of the property. However, each time we went into the room it was back in there. Now as anyone would guess, this could in no way be considered a paranormal act as there were thousands of visitors in and around the location and where else would they deposit a plastic ball but in an extremely dark room?
Devilment however got the better of us and with the rest of our work finished for the day we decided to place the ball outside the room and stand in complete silence in the complete darkness to see who would throw the ball back in again. We stood, in complete darkness, barely daring to breathe, in case we alerted the public to our presence. To our amazement, we found that nobody would now dare to enter the room although many people stopped and peered in. This was a complete reversal of what had happened during the morning when people were quite happy to wander in and feel their way about.
Were the visitors now using some form of sixth sense which was alerting them to a possible danger in the room? After all we stood in there for over an hour during which time nobody dared to come in and to make matter worse the ball failed to make reappearance as well.
We did at one point have a couple of lads who peered into the blackness for a couple of moments and one of the lads eyes must have adjusted to the darkness extremely quickly as he spotted us standing against the back wall. His friend however categorically denied that there was anybody in there which somewhat unnerved the poor guy who could clearly see us. About five minutes later the poor unfortunate chaps were once again forced to walk back down the corridor and on reaching the blackened room pressed themselves against the corridor wall in an effort to get as far away from the room as possible.
Although we have made our point about the possibility of everyone having a sixth sense we haven’t yet explained the reason why we were all helpless with mirth. Since the ball had yet to be returned to the room after an hour of waiting we decided to make it a little more blatant by placing the ball in the doorway and waiting for someone to idly kick it in on the way past. Of course, we weren’t disappointed as the ball started rolling into the room on a regular basis. But, whilst initially retrieving our ball, we found a second one and decided that, when the visitors kicked the ball in the doorway into the room, we would roll the second ball back out again. Now I’m certain we can all imagine the visitors reactions to this and needless to say, still no one would enter the room to find an explanation for this unusual phenomenon, but can we really blame them?
