I arrived at Penshurst Place around 6pm on a misty and moist evening in November 2002. At about 7.30 Graham, the Phantom or Fraud leader, got us all together after having taken the three team-leaders off to see all the rooms we will be working in. He had permission to use three rooms as opposed to investigating just the Barons Hall. It was decided that at 8 o’clock we would separate into our different groups, and then each group would spend an hour in each of the rooms.

All the rooms were in the same complex, we did not go much further into Penshurst Place due to the security alarms and the fact that the D’Lisle’s lived on site and were asleep in one of the other wings. The rooms we had access to were the Barons Hall, a little room off the hall and a larger room upstairs, and, of course, the kitchen. All these rooms were very localised, and contained the oldest parts of the house as well as a relatively new piece built in 1836.

Penshurst Place, photograph by Patrick Hutton © 1999

My group started in the great Hall, and I explained to Jan how to work me as a medium, to ask questions and when I go quiet, to ask another question. They ask me where I wanted to start, I walked around and we all eased ourselves into the energy of the place. The vast amount of stuff we got was at the spiral staircase. That was where I started describing the medieval lady. I had picked her up earlier but now I described how she walked up and down the stairs, wearing green velvet dress and a headdress with round bits and a floating veil. That she was quite sad because she died in child birth. She goes up and down the stairway to the Solar. I asked her why she was still there. She said it was because the children are buried in the Church. I told her that she was dead too. She is one of those echo memories that hadn’t grasped the idea she was dead. I thought I had got her to understand and had gone, but later on Adele picked her up. Lady Margaret was very gracious, very much the Lady of the Manse.

Once we had finished with Lady Margaret I noticed that there was someone else on the stairs, up by the door. He was a horrible man. I got the impression that he was a servant of the family, he smelt of wood smoke. He did not want to talk to us, just wanted us to be gone and said that we would not pass [through the door] he was guarding it for his Lord. I gave him a piece of my mind, saying ‘look, you have got to stop feeling guilty for what you did; you have got to forgive yourself and move on’. But he was not having anything to do with moving on, he was so very angry and did not want to talk to us. I said okay, someone else will talk to you soon. Meanwhile Jan, Mike and Clive were photographing orbs zipping about the place. This is always interesting because I rarely see orbs, but was aware of this dark cloud coalescing and moving around at the top of the stairs by the door. It was either crouching by the corner or moving around. He had dark hair, which was interesting as later on events would make him become a man in armour. But I had sensed him as a servant of the family. I did not get his name, nor his period of time.

After talking to him I felt quiet drained and went back into the hall and quietly sat down. At this point Jan felt energised and walked around the dais, became aware of someone who poked her in the side close to the door opposite the spiral stairs. She said it was a child. She then stood in the middle of the dais and held up her arms feeling full of energy. She started talking about the importance of the windows, saying that they were something to do with worshipping the sun. Clive said that the alignment of the room was wrong for sun worship. At that point she said, well then it was the stars, we should find out which stars they looked out onto. We also got a still digital photograph of a lot of light around her neck. On inspection we all came to the conclusion that it was the flash light bouncing off the coats zipper tag.

We regrouped at our next venue; I sat down away from the two doors and eased myself into an Alpha state. I found the place ‘clean’ of disembodied beings. I felt like I was in a boardroom. So I tried to call someone into the room. I managed to get a large Victorian man with red hair and whiskers, and twinkling eyes, into the room. He came through the other door that led to the hallway. As I stated trying to get a close link with the nice man, he probably was the ‘Stephen’ that had been picked up previously by Heidi and Adele when they had first arrived. Jan started working a pendulum near the door that I had mentioned he had come in by. She was asking him to communicate with her as the pendulum swung wildly back and forward as she tried to establish contact with him. No-one fed me questions to ask him as he stood by my left shoulder as I had requested at the start of the evenings activities. I looked up at the ginger whiskered and haired gentleman and shrugged my shoulders, he smiled at me and slowly drifted back out again as no-one was paying any attention, all eyes were on Jan and her pendulum. At that point I sat back and went with the flow as without questions I was unable to get into communication with ‘Stephen’.

As a group we concentrated on experiments in the room, photographing through auras to see if it brought out more orbs, automatic writing, drawing in Alpha-state etc. Some good orb photographs were taken by Mike, especially around Clive. We also tried orb calling one by one. Jan made a really good, concerted effort to call orbs. Clive had a go, orbs were recorded on photographs, but he was pretty quiet about them. Mike too called orbs, and it resulted in a great laugh as Jan thought she had caught ectoplasm only to realise that it was the flash bouncing of white dust on his shoulder. She also made an interesting drawing of a dark-haired woman, funnily enough it looked like the woman I had seen sitting at the boardroom table doodling during a meeting which I mentally placed in the 1950’s or 1960’s due to her hair style. For me it was restful and warm room but with little paranormal interest as I only enjoy communicating with spirits, it was a chance to regain a little energy for the next room.

The next break was very strange. It seemed to go on for ever. I kept trying to round up our group. Mike was out smoking with his partner Heidi and did not want to come in. Clive seemed to get fed up with our weird group and went off to join Adele in Graham’s group, continuing where he had left off with her the previous weekend in Dunstable. They started a new experiment in the ‘boardroom’ sitting close together. Adele was calling orbs with her pendulum sitting knee to knee with Clive.

I went back out of that room and went upstairs to the third room. As I walked up the stairs I felt a feeling of dread, of not wanting to go into the final room. I opened the door and peeked in. I said out load, ‘can I come in?’ There was a palpable feeling of being pushed away. As if there was a real barrier to entering. I said out load ‘okay, I’ll come back with the others’, and closed the door.

I located Mike and said come on. As we passed by the ‘boardroom’ again I called in to tell Jan we were going upstairs. Mike gathered his camera as we went through the kitchen. We finally went into the upstairs room. I could feel in the newer side that there was a tall gentleman. I walked through to the older side of the double room. It felt so full of death. I found it hard to breath, like I had pneumonia. I said that there was death in the room and described a man in a winged chair by the fire and he was dying. He was very old, he had outlived all his family and friends, and although he was scared to die he didn’t want to be in his failing body anymore. I had put one of the chairs by the fire where the winged chair was, and leaned on it telling Jan and Mike about the man. When asked for a name I supplied George but I give little credence to it. Also, Mike had a black mist go by as he was aiming the camera at me. I mentioned that the dying man had a little dog, a Jack Russell terrier, when asked for a name I laughed and said it was Jack just like the breed, very unoriginal. That was all from the spirit, it was him talking about his dog. I also said that I had an echo from the Charles I period, of women all sitting in here saying their rosaries, their beads, feeling dread.

After I had walked away – to get back my equilibrium – Jan started picking up on a more mystical side to the room. She said that the Templars were there, or people doing pagan stuff, that there was evidence of the round table, pointing to a Victorian or Edwardian oval table in the room. Mike and I said ‘hang on, the table is recent you cannot make assumptions based on modern furniture’. Jan said that if we look in the pictures we will see evidence of cult activities. I said ‘perhaps they did some Masonic stuff there but there were no Templars or Pagan stuff, they would have been burnt if there had been’. After a few minutes in which we all tried to find the light switch to make it brighter to look at the pictures to prove her point we gave up and went out. Jan was not happy in the room and wanted to get out, I was not happy there alone.

All three of us were now in the minstrel gallery. We tried again to find the light switch, and failed. Then we took some pictures on the gallery. I pointed out the window that Jan had thought was tied into sun worship and she said that she still felt the same way about it. Mike chose to go back into the room to meditate and get some more information. Jan soon followed him in. I was in the middle of taking a picture and so could not follow them. Once I was alone I felt that there was someone else on the gallery with me. I put the camera away and rejoined the others. I was not in the right state of mind to talk to who it was without a control by my side.

When were all back in the room Mike said he was getting the Black death, that people were put in here to die and food was left at the door. We tried to do more work in the room but I was having trouble. It was like there were two people in the room. He was the guy in the newer side watching the older man dying, as if it were the same person but split in two. He had split himself and was watching himself die.

We finished there and breathed a sigh of relief and went back to the kitchen. It seemed impossible to gather everyone up for a circle, and choosing where the circle was to be. There was a three-way split between the three rooms. I wanted to do upstairs because I believed it was the room that needed our help. Medium Mike wanted the Barons Hall by the spiral staircase and Adele wanted the ‘boardroom’. Luckily Graham too wanted the upstairs room so after a while we all congregated there. I drifted into the back end of the room and started to put chairs out in a circle. I chose to sit on one that looks towards the fire so that I do not have the dying man behind me, but in front.

Gradually we all sit down and Medium Mike talks us down into Alpha state. I start to say that I am getting a nurse dressed in a uniform between Florence Nightingale and a First World War VAD trying to nurse the old man when Graham says we need a Dictaphone in the middle now. The circle gets broken by someone scrambling out of it to get one from the large table. I cling hard on to the alpha state and it seems like Medium Mike is doing so as well. Once we are all settled down again we try to pick up stuff. But before we could get going Jan starts to dominate the proceedings loudly insisting that the ‘circle is terminated now. That the ghost does not want our help, that we are not wanted and she wants it closed down now!’ Several of the female members of the circle to my right start trembling with fear. After vaguely trying to keep it together Graham gives in and closes the circle down and says we will try another circle in the second choice spot, by the spiral staircase in the Barons Hall.

I have to say I was very annoyed. We did not get a chance to help the ghost stuck in the room. Ghosts can fight by using fear to manipulate those in rooms with them, the trick is to keep control and to not let them use your fear to control you, in this we failed. A fear cone was generated between the ghost and Jan and it shattered any attempt we could have made to help him come to terms with death and dying. We let an inexperienced person control the situation.

We all reconvened the circle down in the Barons Hall. This time Adele chose to sit it out. We stood in a circle, not quiet holding hands, and Medium Mike talked us down into alpha state. I sensibly did not stand with my back to the spiral staircase, but to the side, two down from Medium Mike. Helen, his wife and control, is between us. It is an interesting experience, this time I follow him down and as we are in a group I become aware of the child that Jan mentioned earlier. I do not often get children but as we are in the group I do. He is blond and is aged around puberty. He is mischievous, and likes to play tricks. We all start picking up different images. Later in the debrief I describe it as if someone had chucked a lot of photographs up into the air and as we catch them we describe what we see. It was impressions from the walls, floors, space, recordings of times past. I get the judiciary taking place there. Others get other things. Names get called, but the grumpy man leaves us alone. At one point Mike turns to me and says ‘you been here before’ I reply ‘yes, but I didn’t live here, I was a De Warren’ he says ‘it was not very nice then’ and that ends a weird exchange between the pair of us. Helen says that she gets the man in armour, but I see him as the grumpy man, I end up describing him for her, I can see his face but not what he is wearing. Finally, after about 15 minutes we closed down the circle.

As we wander back to the kitchen I sidled up to Adele and ask her what she was getting. She said she spent the whole time pushing the grumpy man back up the stairs; he kept trying to get down.

Finally we were called in for our debriefing session. Graham sensibly chose the warm ‘Boardroom’. I had a chance to toast my feet on the radiators. This is where I discover someone in our group should have been taking notes and our group hadn’t. It was interesting hearing what everyone else got. But the best bit was when Graham told us what spirits had been seen the rooms. A knight and a child had been seen in the Barons Hall, the knight is on the stairs and the child in the hall. The upstairs room has even workmen frightened of going into it. But nothing is found in the Boardroom, I was right!

Judy Farncombe, Farncombe Publishing © 2002
Copyright held by Judy Farncombe of Farncombe Publishing. Not to be reproduced without permission.