The Winter Green is a relatively new pub on the recently developed Waverley estate and despite only opening in the last decade, it has already had paranormal investigators in twice who have both described the very same family of four - who are believed to have perished in a great fire in years past.
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00:00 "You won't believe what's just happened."
00:01 And I'm like, "What's the matter now?"
00:03 And he's like, "Well, you know I said the bar's weird."
00:05 I was like, "Yeah."
00:06 He says, "I kid you not."
00:07 He says, "I'm literally closing the pub up,
00:10 "shutting the windows and everything."
00:12 He said, "I've had this almighty crash."
00:14 - South Yorkshire certainly has its fair share
00:17 of ghost tales, and this community pub
00:19 found on the Rotherham side of the border with Sheffield
00:22 is no exception.
00:24 The Wintergreen is a relatively new pub
00:26 on the recently developed Waverley Estate,
00:29 and despite just opening in the last decade,
00:32 it has already had paranormal investigators in twice,
00:35 both of whom have reported the same ghostly family of four
00:39 who are said to have perished in a great fire
00:42 in years past.
00:43 - We had a stool incident.
00:45 So we've got where the bar seating area is.
00:50 Again, woo-woo, alarms off middle at night,
00:52 you're thinking, "What's going on?"
00:53 You come down and investigate,
00:54 and you think it's the double doors to the garden
00:56 that haven't been shut properly.
00:57 Do all your checks, everything's fine.
00:59 You're thinking, "What's made this happen?"
01:01 So looked on CCTV footage, the stool clearly moves,
01:05 and then something on the bar flips down
01:07 as though somebody's, and you see a whoosh.
01:10 You see like a white shadow go from the stool
01:12 over the bar, and everything, it just flips everything
01:15 in its way, and then it just smashes,
01:17 it literally just turns this thing over on the bar.
01:19 (audience laughing)
01:20 Okay.
01:21 So yeah, we've got that kind of footage as well.
01:25 It's always around the bar area.
01:26 It's as though they like to play around the bar area.
01:28 It never happens anywhere in the corners.
01:30 It's always around the bar.
01:32 So regarding the pool table incident,
01:34 obviously, middle at night, alarm goes off.
01:37 On the control panel, it said zone three,
01:39 so we're thinking, "Okay."
01:41 So I come downstairs to investigate,
01:42 to find out if it's a break-in or anything like that.
01:46 I think there's no windows, so it can't be
01:49 the wind rattling the doors or anything like that.
01:51 It's got to be something else.
01:52 So I come downstairs, and I'm looking around,
01:54 and I can't see anything.
01:55 The only thing I can see is the pool balls
01:58 on the actual table.
02:00 So I thought, "Okay, nothing's untoward
02:03 "or anything like that."
02:05 Goes back to bed, sets the alarm,
02:07 gets up in the morning a bit curious,
02:08 thinking, "What actually went off?"
02:11 So go from the office, does my own procedures,
02:13 checks the CCTV footage, and I'm like,
02:15 "Oh, that's what happened."
02:17 So you can clearly see that there's no one there.
02:20 You can clearly see that the balls are on the table,
02:22 and it's as though somebody's got the finger
02:23 and bringing it along, and then it speeds up
02:25 as though they've done like a swoosh,
02:27 and you can see the ball, and then the ball
02:29 just stops dead before the pocket.
02:31 But if it was gonna go in the pocket,
02:32 it'd go in the pocket to get away.
02:33 It just literally rolls and stops,
02:35 builds momentum, stops.
02:37 You're like, "Okay, what was that?"
02:41 Sometimes we have incidents where the lights
02:43 swing on the bar, and you're just thinking,
02:45 "Okay."
02:46 We've had the situation where the car sign
02:48 has illuminated really light, gone down to almost a dimmer,
02:51 then come back on, and you get a cold shudder
02:53 through your spine, like, "What was that?"
02:56 We've had incidents where chairs have just moved,
02:59 and when you look on the CCTV footage,
03:00 it looks like there's a child underneath the chair
03:02 playing with a toy.
03:04 But when you zoom in, you can clearly see no one's there.
03:06 It's just a shadow.
03:07 - The male ghost has affectionately been named Derek
03:11 by staff at the Wintergreen.
03:13 Derek is clearly fond of a late-night play
03:17 with inanimate pub objects like the pool ball and glass,
03:21 but numerous members of staff working late
03:23 have reported being physically touched
03:26 by a seemingly invisible hand,
03:27 including one being gripped around the back of the neck.
03:31 - So Derek is just the name we give the ghost.
03:34 Don't know why we call him Derek.
03:37 But we've had paranormal investigators here
03:40 that said there's a lot of activity.
03:42 They was talking to me about a family,
03:45 and they said something about a lady, a man, and two kids
03:48 that was living in a house nearby,
03:50 and they was the servants.
03:51 There was a great fire, and they all perished in the fire.
03:54 And we then got told that she gave us the names,
03:59 this paranormal activity gave us the name
04:01 of the woman and the kids.
04:03 And then when the paranormal activity,
04:06 they named the kids completely.
04:07 We looked through history.
04:08 We couldn't find anything to do with this family
04:11 or this fire.
04:12 But then a local historian got in contact with me
04:15 and went, "Actually, she's got the words
04:17 "the wrong way around.
04:18 "It's actually called this house."
04:19 So say it was called the White House.
04:21 It was the House of White,
04:22 but she got it the wrong way around.
04:24 And he said, "Yes, there was a great fire.
04:25 "There was a woman, there was two kids."
04:28 He literally described exactly
04:30 what the paranormal activity lady said.
04:32 And there was this great fire,
04:33 and the family perished and all this.
04:34 And when we had the footage from the stool moving
04:38 and the child underneath the chair,
04:41 he like, apparently, she was talking about this little boy
04:44 who was about five or six,
04:45 what was playing with a little wooden toy train.
04:48 And you can actually see on the footage
04:50 that there is a little boy playing
04:51 with a wooden, like, a toy.
04:52 So we didn't know if she'd watched the footage
04:55 and then told us, but it all matched a little bit
04:58 to weird, if that makes sense.
05:00 She also said that there was a man
05:02 what was carrying a miner's lamp.
05:06 And she says it's an old man wearing a flat cap
05:08 with a denim waistcoat.
05:09 So we were like, well, that could be any man
05:11 what works down a mine.
05:12 But yeah, she says he's swinging the lamp
05:15 'cause he's checking.
05:16 He's some kind of foreman what checks for something.
05:19 And he likes swinging lamps.
05:20 And obviously, when we've got the lights swinging
05:22 on the bar, we're like, is Derek playing with the lights
05:24 'cause he's checking the lights?
05:25 It's just, maybe you put two and two together
05:27 and you come up with 10,
05:28 but the stories just match everything.
05:31 And like the darts as well.
05:32 When we leave the darts out,
05:33 they always get swiped off the side
05:36 'cause at the other side of the pool table,
05:38 the dart board, sometimes we leave the darts in a cup.
05:41 Now, we can't explain why a pint pot,
05:43 for no reason, would fall over
05:45 and the darts fall out and then the darts move.
05:47 So we always said Derek likes to play darts.
05:50 He's a typical old bloke that likes a pint and darts.
05:53 So things like that happen where we're like,
05:55 we're trying to make it fun and not make it scary.
05:58 And so Derek's just an old coal miner
05:59 who likes a pint and a game of darts
06:01 or a game of pool or something like that.
06:04 But yeah, when she said he likes to swing his lights,
06:06 I'm like, oh, the lights move all the time.
06:09 It's just, it's two coincidences, if you get what I mean.
06:11 Then we've had another set of paranormal people in
06:15 and she had to leave 'cause she says
06:16 there were that many voices talking to her.
06:19 But again, you don't know if it's true or not.
06:22 She said there were that many voices trying to talk to her.
06:25 In particular, one old man that used to work down the mines.
06:27 And you're just thinking, well,
06:29 everybody knows this were built on a mine.
06:30 So if they are pulling that kind of information,
06:33 you've got to be skeptical as well as believe it,
06:35 aren't you, really?
06:36 So, but yeah, but two different people
06:39 that have never met each other
06:40 described the exact same bloke.
06:42 And we never put the footage,
06:44 we never put the story out there,
06:45 what the paranormal activity said.
06:47 So the first people said it was this guy
06:49 in a denim waistcoat.
06:51 Six months later, a woman that drove up from Dorset
06:54 comes to do a paranormal activity,
06:57 describes the exact same man.
06:58 They've never met, they've never spoke,
07:00 as far as we're aware.
07:01 It just seems a bit weird that they're coming up
07:03 with the same stories, but who knows?
07:05 Who knows if Derek's a miner?
07:07 - It's certainly a bizarre story for a relatively new pub
07:12 here in Rotherham, but certainly not something
07:15 that is unheard of in the great county of Yorkshire.