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Email: Tim.watson@forgottenparanormal.co.uk
Mobile: 07818552830
Location: The Block
Address: Wood Street,
Burton on Trent,
Staffordshire,
DE14 3AB
Aprox. year Built: 1500
The History - What is the Block? The Block is a massive building in the heart of Burton on Trent.
As you approach this building and contemplate the 4 floors with which this investigation will consist of fear will start to set in and that’s even before you enter the front door.
Floor 1 has a purpose built base room, toilets and kit area. The rest of the building is made up of offices, warehouse spare and attics.
Built in the early 1800#s to service the brewing industry in Burton the Block has seen quite a lot of history in its time. Housing both British and American troops during the 1940’s as part of the ongoing war effort.
It is rumoured that there were just over 3000 troops held here before a big operation ... who will you encounter? ......
There have been may reported incidents of paranormal activity within the building. Including people being pushed, children being both heard and seen. Lights smashing without any reason and footsteps being heard around the building.
It was a cold night with outside air temperature of 1 - 3 degrees Celsius. It was a cloudy night and the temperature inside the Block was about the same as the outside temperature. After our safety briefing from security who were there as the site is used as an Air soft range and the was pyrotechnics and explosives stored onsite. As the site was used for Air soft it was also littered with small BB pellets some of which glowed in the dark. This has to be one of the largest locations that we have investigated with three floors in two building joined with a walk way. The first building had the base room on the ground floor which also had the toilets, the next two floors in that part of the building were known as the offices and they had multiple rooms linked together. On the first floor there was a walk way approximately 20 meters long that linked to the second building. The second building also had three floors of which we were only using the second and loft areas of for the investigation.
The second floor was two large open warehouse space that had chipboard building erected for the air soft gamers. There was also barrel and other items scattered around the areas. Above these areas was the loft area, again this was split into two separate areas. At one end there was a room called the red store.
Vigil One -The investigation started with a 20 minute vigil in the top floor of the office area. This area had small offices and one large room. We started in the large room with three K2’s located on the floor and a Mel meter which was on the floor at my feet. While walking up the stairs the base reading on the mel meter was 0.2 which is high but was stable showing this as our base reading. There were a few spikes up to 0.8 buy this could have been electrical pulses as there were lots of power cables running up the stairs in the ceiling.
We formed a circle and conducted a watch and wait. It this time we had No responses to any of our questions, No activity on the K2 and no spikes on the Mel Meter. We heard no Tapping or anything else that we could not explain as the wind or influences from outside.
Vigil Two -This was a small ground of 7 of us. This vigil was in the Red Store located in the loft on the top floor. It is the room room on the right at the top on the plans above. The room was spit into two parts with Hessian net used as the divider. The room had shelving around the outsides. We again had a few K2’s, A REM pod located just outside the door, two Mag light torches (one blue and one white) and a Infa Red video camera on a tripod in the corner. We started with a watch and wait with Hazel (spooky Nights) taking the lead to start.
After a few minutes with no responses I called out to the spirits to give us a sign that they were with us. As soon as I started to talk the white mag light turn itself on. We ask for the spirits to turn off the light and also made sure that no one was near to the torch. The spirits turned the light off as soon as we requested it. We then asked for them to turn on the blue torch which they did and they turned this off at our request. We then asked for them to turn on the blue light if they were male and the white light if they were female. The blue light was turned on. We then asked the spirit to move towards the REM pod located just outside the door. This had no response apart from the the Mag lights being turned on.
We tried a few experiments in this room including rolling marbles across the floor and asking the spirits to roll back, talking to us but this had no responses. We did however have lots of taps when nobody was moving. We can see on the video evidence that there is nobody moving when some of the taps take place. We did however find that when you stepped on on of the BB pellets and crushed them that you get the same tapping noise.
Vigil Three -This vigil was conducted in the loft area located at the top of the stairs in the larger building. This room had metal grating around it and was very small with a blocked off area at the rear. This room seemed to be darker than the rest of the site. For this vigil we used the IR camera, K2 and audio enhancer with recorder for EVPs. We created a power circle and conducted a watch and wait. Straight from the start we had some activity with the door opening which seemed to be on request however we debunked this as the wind in the end as it was taking a lot of asking and when it did happen you could hear the wind or just before there was wind. We put this down to the air pressure difference on the sides of the door being different and that being the reason the door opened. We also had the some of the group smelling curry or curry powder which put us down a line that any spirit that was there was a cook. We also had the smell of manure from the same guest and then the smell of burning/smoke which was smelt by three of us. We then went down the line f fire or death in a fire. I had the feeling that they died from the smoke and where locked in the room. We were not able to confirm this.
Vigil Four -This vigil was conducted in the office area in building 1 above where the base room was located. We started with the Ouija board in the end office. We asked out but received no responses on the board or with any knocks. We then moved to the centre office and tried table tipping but again we could get nothing to interact with us. There was no feeling of any presence with us. Lastly we tried a watch and wait but this area proved to be very quite. This is in the same area of the building that we did the first vigil. It was then time for a break.
Vigil Five -This was alone time where we had a free run of site. We conducted two vigils here one in the loft area and one in the red room. In both vigils we had no activity. With people walking around a lot it was hard t get the energy up in one place. We only took K2 and spirit box with us on this vigil and had no responses or spikes on the K2.
Vigil Six -Loft Area with Ouija board, energy circle and spirit box. This vigil stated with some of the group using the Ouija Board. As with other parts of the location it seemed that the spirits did not want to come forward and communicate on it. After a short time we moved onto the energy circle. We stood in a circle holding hands and ask for a sign that we had spirits with us. Again this seemed to be quite so the group decided to put the spirit box on to see what we could get through there. We had a female and a male voice come through but were not able to make out what they was saying. The only word we could recognise was “Hello” in a female voice. This however did start the playful spirits turning on and off a torch that was in the corner. This again was done at request with no one near to the torch.
Vigil Seven -Main warehouse area in building two. This was the first time in the evening that we had done a vigil in this area and right from the start it seemed to be active. After setting the IR camera up in the corner (see video below) I had moved back to the area the rest of the group were. There was then a big bang that came from that corner. At the time we could not find any reason for this as nothing seemed to be out of place in the area. There was a trolley that had a wheel missing and when stood on it made the same noise. On looking at the video on of the guests does come from this area after the bang. For this reason I could not say that the sound was paranormal. We then conducted a watch and wait and almost straight away we had tapping from the other end of the warehouse area. We debunked this as not paranormal as it was happening on a regular basis and not on request. We did have a torch again going on and off on request that was under the window, This we had to put down as paranormal as the torch had been turned off completely before the start and would not come on if you stamped next to it.
Hazel and another guest also thought they had seen a shadow figure walk directly in front of the video camera as the light was blocked out. I have studied the video at the point when Hazel mentions this and was not able to find any evidence on the video but we did have some light anomalies on the video. See video below.
We also had taps on a wall that Hazel was sat with her back to. This was done when I asked them to tap on that wall. We had this happen a few times on request. The biggest bang of the night came on an old oil drum, this scared three members of the group that were stood near it. There reaction can be seen on the video below. After studying the video I cant see how any of them could have banged the drum to make the bang as loud without being seen on the video. We have no explanation as to how or why this happened that we could put down as natural or man made.
This ended another fantastic night with spooky nights. While the night had active periods and very quite periods, was freezing cold it was a great investigation.
