Spooky night at haunted tower: Features editor goes ghost-hunting

By Cathryn Ings, features editor
South Wales Evening Post

Sitting around telling ghost stories in the bar of the Tower Hotel probably wasn’t the best way to prepare ourselves for a night of paranormal investigations.

Although, looking back on the night at the tower, I don’t think anything could have prepared us for what happened.

Myself, my colleague Pat Jones and Post photographer Carolyn Evans were waiting for psychic medium Gavin Cromwell to arrive.

We were going to spend the night with Gavin, in a paranormal investigation at the Jersey Marine tower.

Pat and I are big fans of TV’s Most Haunted show with Yvette Fielding and were really quite excited about taking part in a paranormal investigation.

And we were getting ready for a bit of screaming for the camera, as Gavin films all his paranormal investigations.

On the night, we were promised all sorts of psychic investigations — from dowsing to calling out to spirits and even a seance and ouija board.

Me, Pat and Gavin were joined by Gavin’s agent Martin Clowes and Port Talbot mother and son Alison and Luke Moyle. Alison, from Sandfields, knew Gavin after having had a reading from him and was keen to be part of the investigation.

Finally, there was Tony Edwards the cameraman, with his night-vision camera. Tony was also in charge of other technical stuff like a monitor to check temperature drops and shifts in energy.

Gavin arrived shortly after 9.30pm. He looked amazing. He looks a lot younger than his 26 years in real life and was wearing a striking Adam Ant-style jacket and drainpipe black jeans — not your usual psychic medium garb.

The paranormal investigation was due to begin at 10.30pm, when we went in to the tower. As we walked in cameraman Tony said he had a strange feeling that something was going to happen that night. Little did he know . . .

All the lights in the tower were switched off. We were plunged into pretty much total darkness.

We started off in the ground floor bedroom. Almost immediately Gavin sensed a spirit in the room — that of a nurse called Megan. He said he felt that the nurse had been tending somebody who was suffering from a lung disorder.

“She died from the same illness as her patient, at the age of 24,” said Gavin, and described Megan as a neat-looking woman with jet black hair parted in the middle. She had very delicate hands.

“She is very much drawn to the windows and will spend a lot of time looking out of them,” said Gavin.

He said he could see the nurse in the corner of the room. And when I went over to where Gavin said she was, I could, indeed, feel a coldness which I didn’t feel in the rest of the room.

Next came the first of our experiments — dowsing. Gavin explained to us that dowsing rods — basically thin metal rods which are bent to form a handle — could detect changes in energy.

You just hold them loosely and let them do their work. If they cross, this indicates a change in energy and that a ghost is present. If the rods cross back towards you, it means the spirit is empathising with you.

As I walked towards where Gavin said the ghost of the nurse was standing, the rods crossed and then crossed back towards me — it was the strangest feeling.

Most activity came in the top room at the tower — in fact things got pretty scary up there at one point.

As we walked into the room Gavin immediately picked up on a soldier and his dog.

Behind him he could sense two ladies. He described them as canteen ladies. From their dress he guessed that they were from the 1930s or 1940s and had been killed in a bomb blast. There was also the ghost of a little girl in the room.

Next we rearranged the room for Gavin to conduct a seance, to see if we could learn any more about the spirits in the top room at the tower.

It was then that things started to get very odd.

The room was on a split level — with a bedroom on the top and a sitting room at the bottom.

Gavin sent Tony the cameraman to film down onto us. But when Tony got to the top floor, he found his battery was dead. The same happened to Martin’s camera.

Then Tony seemed to be having some sort of panic attack. He called out that there was something up on the bedroom level that he didn’t like. He started to get tearful and breathless.

Gavin looked up from the seance and said he could see a dark spirit had attached itself to Tony, who seemed to be getting more distressed and keeled over onto the bed.

Gavin raced up the stairs to see to Tony who was sweating profusely, despite the room being quite cool. He seemed to recover for a while, but was complaining of a pain in his side.

“He thinks you are his son,” said Gavin to Tony. “He has attached himself strongly to you. His son died before him and he thinks you are his son.”

Gavin described the spirit to the rest of us. “It is terrible. He is covered in blood and seems to have an eye missing. I’m getting from him that he died in a bomb blast.”

It was all quite scary. Was Tony putting it on for our benefit? He didn’t seem the type and he did seem genuinely shaken.

We followed that up with glass swirling and a ouija board. According to Gavin, the little girl spirit seemed interested but she didn’t respond to anything we asked her.

“Does anybody speak Welsh?”, said Gavin. I can speak Welsh, so I asked the little girl some questions in Welsh.

“She seems to be responding to that,” said Gavin. “She’s getting quite excited.”

There was no movement on the ouija board but I started feeling very hot.

Gavin decided to end the ouija exercise as he was worried that the spirit of the little girl would attach herself to me, and with this, at around 2.30am, the investigation came to an end.

Was I convinced that there were spirits there? I was a bit disappointed that the seance hadn’t been a bit more dramatic. But I’m sure there was something supernatural going on there, especially with poor Tony.