The first investigation!

Saturday saw us put our equipment to the test for the first time “in anger”. We had previously planned to do it the previous Saturday but Cheshire’s weather had other ideas (if you’re wondering how high an Audi A4 can send water into the air, the answer is about 20 feet, judging by the puddle (small river) which snuck up on us on the drive back).

Ahead of the (failed) investigation on the first weekend, we headed to the church and graveyard to take some still images and do some voice recordings too. Firstly to see if we captured anything and secondly to see if there was anything we needed to keep an eye out for when we hoped to return later that evening. Having done some of what we wanted to, I let my son loose with the camera and told him to just grab some random shots.

Upon reviewing the shots we and he had taken, I noticed something interesting to the left of one of the shots, so I zoomed in – having confirmed my suspicions, I got a couple of other people to look at it, without zooming in. They all reported the same thing, they thought there was a person to the left of the shot, behind a wall (the graveyard was empty, the only other people we saw that afternoon were two cyclists who left as we arrived), upon zooming in it was confirmed to be nothing more than pareidolia, an old, weathered headstone posing as the spectre of a vicar long past.

There was also an interesting bit of footage from the dictaphone. When calling out at the grave of my great-grandparents, there was a clicking sound which we hadn’t heard with our ears. This sound was also present at another call out we did. Having tested various things to see if I could replicate the noise, I remembered it had just started to drizzle as we’d started the audio work, so I headed outside in to the rain with my dictaphone in hand, doing a short recording and then returning to my computer. I listened back to what I had just recorded and there it was, that same clicking sound, very similar to a pen being clicked in and out. The clicking we had heard was rain drops hitting the microphone screens on top of the dictaphone…

Undeterred by the false positives of the week before, I packed our bag of tricks: camera, camcorder, battery packs, light rigs, tripod, microphone, Infrared light, dictaphone and the newly acquired trail cam. I then set off to pick up my long-standing friend, cohort and in this case; cameraman, Craig (the sceptic) the short drive was punctuated by the standard weekly catch up and gentle ribbing of each other.

We arrived at the church, sat there discussing the plan of attack and having a couple of sips of our thermos cup clad brews, meanwhile a woman in a white Hyundai did a U-turn in front of us, all the while staring into the car. As she left, we got out and started to assemble the gear, heading straight in to the investigation. For the next couple of hours we were walking across uneven ground in the dark, as bright as the full moon seemed, it didn’t really help with gauging the sodden ground beneath our feet or the avoidance of long forgotten graves hiding beneath the longer grass.

We called out a few times, disturbed a ridiculous amount of pigeons and hunted down a weirdly shiny headstone. We didn’t capture anything, it was freezing cold…but I thoroughly bloody enjoyed it and can’t wait to do it again!

You can watch it yourself here: YouTube

Don’t forget to like, comment and subscribe if you enjoy it.

For now though, plans are afoot for our next investigations.