Ghost Hunt Of Healey Hall

Healey Hall is a beautiful old house in Rochdale. I was invited to a real Ghost Hunt, which was brilliant, I have to say. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do especially seeing as I write for a living about a paranormal investigative team in my Beyond Series of books. I thought it would be fun to go on a hunt and do a little research for my books characters at the same time - plus I wanted to have a nosy inside a big private manor house!

First we had a tour of the house and immediately I was creeped out by the maze of cellars and the attic rooms, especially when the owners had one of those creepy life size child dolls that face the wall as if playing hide and seek, but when you turn the things around they have no face, yahhhh! How can anyone find those things cute?

There was also a little chapel on the first that was currently being used as a dressing room for a guest bedroom and this also sent shivers down my spine. I’m telling you now, if I was a guest sleeping in that house, I would be sleeping in the lounge.

I heard a few moans and groans through the white noise, but the séances were a joke. There was a lady there who claimed to be psychic, and who blatantly directed the séances using a glass. There wasn’t even an attempt to use the power of suggestion through advanced language patterns. As an NLP Master Practitioner not much passes my attention, so I sat out of them both, especially when I felt other people in the seance circle actually pushing the glass around to spell out a word! Geeze!

Anyway, I enjoyed sitting in the darkened living room alone, until other people came wandering in and talking, which irritated me a little as it ruined the ambience for me. I left at 3 am because the “psychic lady” was banging on about a Victorian nanny that walked into the current nursery. Now I knew that that room hadn’t always been a nursery and it’s pretty safe to assume that a house that size would most certainly have had servants and a nanny!!! Oh yeah and I was tired. I didn’t experience anything conclusive that ghosts exist or blew my socks off scary like that librarian in the beginning of Ghostbusters movie!

We did have this machine that gave out white noise and if you went into this room you had to keep very quiet, unless something was heard through the equipment. So I spent quite a bit of time in here. I did hear something - I'm not sure what, a cry or a moan or a sigh! The organisers came running in the room very excited and asked me if I'd just heard 'that'? I said I'd heard something from the white noise box. Apparantly the two men had been in the attic and they claimed to have heard screaming and moaning! Creepy!! But sadly that was the only exciting thing that happened that night.   

In conclusion, I think it's fair to say that these ghost hunt TV programmes do exaggerate and sensationalise each and every hunt they go on just to make themselves more credible. I would really like to go on a ghost hunt with just two or three people and who are trustworthy enough not to fake stuff. Any Offers?

Alison's Beyond Books Are Available Now - Click Here