• last year
Haunted Abergavenny - tales of strange goings on at the Abergavenny Chronicle offices
Transcript
00:00 [Music]
00:06 Hello and welcome to haunted Abergaveni.
00:09 Tonight we take a look at a building in the heart of Abergaveni town centre,
00:13 one that is quite literally full of history.
00:16 Built sometime between 1730 and 1750,
00:20 it has been home to a number of businesses over the centuries,
00:23 including a nursery, a surgeon, a solicitor and a dressmaker.
00:28 But it's best known to the locals as the Abergaveni Chronicle.
00:33 Since the Abergaveni Chronicle took over the building 24 years ago,
00:37 many of its staff and even members of the public have reported strange goings on.
00:42 Paranormal investigations and deep dives into the history of the building
00:47 have taken place to try and determine who these supernatural visitors could be.
00:52 I think it sort of kicked off really first of all in about 1996 when we moved in.
00:56 And it started fairly low key.
00:58 We started smelling fruit, particularly oranges, on the top floor of the building,
01:04 which seemed quite odd.
01:07 You know, we'd come up and try and look for things and couldn't find anything.
01:10 So we started sort of getting that.
01:13 Then we started hearing footsteps.
01:15 It sort of seemed to build as we settled into the building.
01:18 We started hearing footsteps going across the top floor
01:22 when we knew there was nobody here.
01:24 Then people would be down in the lower floor offices
01:27 and they'd hear people coming down the stairs.
01:30 I was hearing a beating one evening and heard footsteps coming along the corridor
01:35 when I knew the door was all locked and the building was secured.
01:38 So it sort of slowly built.
01:41 The first sort of major thing we had was I was in an office quite late at night with a colleague
01:49 and we'd had some computer problems.
01:51 I was standing in the office watching a computer tech trying to repair the problem
01:56 and I felt a hand on my back and I assumed it was perhaps my colleague.
02:00 So I turned to see what she wanted and saw she was completely on the other side of the room.
02:04 We left fairly quickly that night actually.
02:07 We weren't too long.
02:09 I was here one night, and this was not too long ago really,
02:17 probably one of the most recent major things we had.
02:21 I was here quite late on my own and I was just about to lock up.
02:24 I was standing in the corridor and I heard somebody run the full length of the building upon this third floor.
02:30 It was only as I was listening to it that it struck me that
02:35 a) there was nobody in the building and b) you can't actually run the full length
02:39 because there are three or four sets of doors.
02:42 So that sort of frightened me a little bit and I thought right, it's time to go now.
02:46 So I headed off downstairs and it was quite late at night, it was winter, so it was dark.
02:50 And as I put the light off, it went really dark and I wasn't really expecting it.
02:55 And I went 'ooh' and behind me I heard 'ooh' and so I completely shot at the building there.
03:01 Straight into the local policeman actually, who sort of said 'is there anything in there scary?'
03:05 and I went 'yeah, something'.
03:08 The spirits here aren't afraid to make themselves known,
03:11 with staff members often reporting the sound of footsteps coming from the empty rooms on the top floor,
03:16 knocking from behind closed doors, objects disappearing and reappearing,
03:21 and strangest of all, phantom phone calls to France.
03:26 In October of 2015, a retired paramedic living in France
03:31 claimed to be haunted by ghostly midnight phone calls from the Chronicle's office.
03:36 The calls, which spanned a period of more than three months, came by night at exactly 12.05am.
03:43 If answered, the phantom caller could be heard gently sighing on the other end of the line.
03:49 The recipient was convinced the calls were being made by a ghost,
03:53 and even has an inkling of who the spirit may be, a telephonist called Marjorie Jackson.
04:00 I was working in my office which is at the front of the building
04:03 and I walked out to go to the newsroom, which is the next door office.
04:07 And I was standing in the doorway of the newsroom talking to the reporters
04:10 and when I went back into my room, my desk, with a load of computer equipment on it,
04:15 had moved about 18 inches from the wall into the middle of the room.
04:19 And there was no way that anyone could have got in there to do it.
04:23 Absolutely no way that anyone could have got in there without me seeing them or without us hearing it.
04:28 And we tried all sorts to replicate it, we sort of bounced it down on the floor
04:33 and waited until lorries drove past to see if anything happened.
04:36 The desk was absolutely secure.
04:38 A little while ago we tried to raise some money for charity
04:44 and we realised that maybe opening the building up to invite people to come in and spend the night
04:50 and do some investigations would be quite a good thing.
04:52 So over the years we've had a series of groups who've come in and done overnight vigils
04:57 and members of staff have always come along to them.
04:59 And quite often they start up in this room because they quite like it.
05:03 Some of the mediums say that it creates a bit of a portal, I mean all these books here,
05:08 because people are sort of, the spirits are drawn to the history that's in the pages.
05:13 So we started off one evening up in this room and everyone was sitting around in quite a big circle.
05:20 And the person who was leading the group said,
05:24 "Do you recognise anybody who's in the room with you?
05:27 If you do, then do something to sort of show that you know them."
05:31 Which worried me a bit because I was the only one who they would know.
05:35 And I was sitting down there and we used to keep the books like this on top of the shelves
05:41 and one of them just shot out and it came straight out.
05:44 I didn't see it but sort of 15 other people did.
05:47 It shot straight out and then just dropped onto my head.
05:51 So as you can understand I was nearly out through the door.
05:54 It took a little bit of convincing to come back in.
05:57 But when we did come back in, we looked at the book and it was from 1940 or '41.
06:03 And one of the mediums who was here said, "Does that date mean anything to you?"
06:08 So I said, "Well, no, nothing at all."
06:10 And it was only several years later when we found out that possibly one of the girls here
06:15 was a woman called Madame Ardane who was a dressmaker who had a business
06:21 and operated a business and lived here.
06:23 And through a sort of long process we discovered that she, we thought, might be one of the ghosts.
06:30 And somebody sent me her death certificate.
06:34 And the death certificate said January 1941.
06:40 And I came up, opened the book that had fallen on my head and her obituary was on the front page of the paper for that week.
06:46 And I thought if we'd only sort of looked and joined the dots at that point,
06:50 we might have realised that it was actually Madame Ardane who was trying to talk to us all that time.
06:55 Very few weeks would go past where nothing at all happened.
07:02 But you got so used to it that I think people just largely ignored it.
07:08 [Music plays]