his
story is completely true, so don’t try to read it as dramatic fiction or you
may be disappointed. I’ve avoided mentioning names in order to protect those
involved.
Way back in the 1980s I was working as a software engineer at Ferranti
in Cwmbrân in South Wales. When I arrived in 1979 we worked in a tiny Portakabin
in the middle of a plot of waste ground, and the huge, purpose-built software
house had been built around us as we worked, so it wasn’t an old building by
any means. Ferranti sunk in 1994, and the last time I was in the area the purpose-built
software house had been converted to a carpet warehouse, but at the time the
Cwmbrân site specialised in producing training software for air traffic control
simulations and suchlike. These days you can make a training simulator at home
with just a PC, an HDTV and a dentist’s chair, but back then a simulator was
very hardware-intensive and a development area was the size of a large ballroom
and littered will all sorts of stuff: banks of monitors, “minicomputers” the
size of a wardrobe, arrays of cooling fans, miles of assorted cables, and specialised
equipment such as ranging lasers, multi-kilowatt projection lamps, and audio systems that went many knobmarks beyond Spinal Tap’s legendary eleven.
The project I worked on was the biggest in terms of hardware, although
only four software engineers were required. We had our offices along a corridor
next to the huge simulator room in the basement, but the management in their
wisdom decided to move us all to the top floor on the opposite side of the
building. After that it was quite a walk from my desk to the simulator equipment.
A few years before this, one of the managers had died at his desk. I remember
seeing him being carried off from his office in the basement, near where the
simulator now was. One day I was walking the long walk down to the simulator
room and got chatting to an engineer who told me that this manager’s ghost
had been seen by one of the security men on his nightly rounds. This got me
interested, and he explained that it was the third door at the entrance to
my simulator room. That’s to say, one door went into a staff shower room, the
other opened on the simulator room, but there was a third door, and I had never
thought about where it led to.
When the chap explained further that the security man now refused to go
down there again, I decided I’d have to go there myself and see what there
was.
It was quite strange. I opened the door, went down a flight of steps and
turned a corner, and there I was in a tiny room, completely empty with tiled
walls and floor, and no windows or doors. Presumably the architect had a little
space left over that he didn’t know what to do with, and decided it might be
useful as a small store room. It didn’t seem to be being used, so the security
men, who were supposed to look into every room in the building on their nightly
rounds, would be the only ones that visited.
I decided to get the facts from the horse’s mouth. The security man in
question had been in the local papers as a Sean Connery look alike, so I knew
who he was. I had to press him a bit about the ghost, since he didn’t seem
to want to talk. In the end he said it was just a grey shape, and he outlined
a vaguely human shape with his hands.
Some time after this I had to do some night shifts so I could work with
the simulator without the hardware engineers getting in the way. Every night,
me and one or two other software engineers would be in. As I walked the long
walk through darkened corridors from my office to the simulator room, I occasionally
thought about the ghost. You need to understand at this point that I’m used
to being about in the night, and sometimes go down and sit in the village graveyard
at night to watch the bats flitting about in the moonlight. I’m not easily
spooked. On top of this I’m a scientist and not about to start believing in
ghosts if they’re going to keep on being so unobservable as they are. So the
walk in the silent, darkened corridors several times a night was something
to look forward to, and I especially liked walking on moonlit nights through
the side of the building that was all glass roof and walls.
But one night as I approached the simulator room, things took an unexpected
turn. All of a sudden I felt very cold and came out in goosebumps that I could
feel on my arm. For no apparent reason I suddenly felt quite scared and had
an overwhelming sense of there being someone else walking the corridors, unseen,
but very near me. It was scary, but I wasn’t terrified out of my wits, so there
was nothing for it but go on to the simulator room and get on with the work.
Over the coming weeks I didn’t look forward to having to go down there
on the nightshift any more. Sometimes this sensation came over me again, but
not usually. It did cross my mind that I might see a grey, vaguely human shape
walking the corridors, but this never happened.
The next summer I was on nightshifts on a different project which was
housed in rented offices in a different building across the road. I was on
continual nightshift almost the entire summer and didn’t once get this feeling.
I even tried to make myself scared and imagine there was someone in the corridors,
but to no effect. Like I said, it’s not normal for me to get spooked (not even
as I sit here late at night alone typing this ghostly tale!), but it was as
if there must have really been something there in the basement of the main
building.
Quite recently I was reading Richard Wiseman’s book “Quirkology” and came
across an account of something similar experienced by Vic Tandy, a scientist
who worked in a laboratory that had a reputation for being haunted. Wiseman
describes Vic’s experience in this way:
”Working alone late at night, he started to feel increasingly uncomfortable,
and cold. Next, he had the distinct impression of being watched, and looked
up to see an indistinct grey figure slowly emerge in the left side of his peripheral
vision. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and, as he recalled, ‘It
would not be unreasonable to suggest that I was terrified.’ Vic eventually
built up the courage to turn and look at the figure. As he did, it faded away
and disappeared.”
The next day Vic had his fencing foil in work as he was entering a fencing
competition later on. Having noticed that the foil was vibrating, he was able
to use it as an instrument for investigating the pattern of energy in the room
and traced the problems to an air conditioning fan that was generating sound
waves below the human hearing threshold. The book goes on to explain the many
strange effects that infrasound can produce, including the panic that animals
seem to experience prior to an earthquake or on the approach of a tsunami.
It all now looks like it’s only natural. The little tiled storage room
where the Ferranti security man encountered the strange grey figure, and the
corridors where I felt the sudden onset of cold, fear and paranoia were right
next to the vast simulator room. Amongst the computers, acoustic walls, powerful
light and sound generators, cooling fans and miles of electrical cables, there
could easily have been something generating enough infrasound to get the building
listed in “Britain’s Most Haunted”.