Spooky Oxford

The Little Chef restaurant occupies part of the Bury Barns complex, which was the site of the medieval Manor of Burford, where ghostly sounds of clanking horse harnesses are rumoured to date from the visit of Charles II. The most dramatic local report is even earlier and relates to a lord and lady whose spirits used to fly over Burford in a terrifying fiery chariot.

PSI learned that present-day events at the Little Chef include the sighting of a monk, the sound of singing, and mild poltergeist phenomena. One of the mediums in PSI's preliminary visit spoke with a spirit called Susan, apparently a village elder or wise woman from the early 16th century, and later, the medium encountered militaristic monks from the time of the crusades, who claimed to patrol the site's perimeter each night.

Over three investigations, PSI team members logged 173 notable events. Of all the rooms surveyed, the store room generated the most reports, and the children's room the least. A quarter of all reports were figures seen moving around (including several of a monkish character), four of which were seen by more than one person. In one case two members saw the figure of a man in front of a kitchen cupboard door, who moved towards them.

Nearly a third of all events were heard - mostly the normal assortment of creaks, bangs, and other ordinary noises that emanate from the building itself, but five were recognisably human such as chanting and singing, whose origins could not be determined as wholly natural. Other reports included 11 instances where people felt inexplicably touched, and there were even more reports of other sensations or feeling abnormally hot or cold. There were also many light anomalies and extrasensory perceptions.

PSI brought a wide range of electrical equipment to the investigations, but several items unexpectedly malfunctioned (a commonly reported event amongst paranormal researchers). One particularly notable reading (unaffected by malfunction) was from an EMF meter that registered an abnormally strong electromagnetic field in the non-smoking area of the restaurant. The power surge coincided with a very unusual event in PSI's experience: a transfiguration. One team member saw another's face change to that of a child, and then two members saw the first witness' face change to a man with thick curly hair and a beard.

Overall, these investigations appear to buck a trend PSI has noticed elsewhere. Usually, the more strongly a team believes in the paranormal, the more reports of paranormal experiences they generate. But here there seemed to be little correlation.

One of the photos showed an anomaly

The team took more than twenty hours of video footage, which didn't reveal anything paranormal; and nearly 300 photographs, more than 100 of which had some sort of anomaly, mostly orbs, of which 90% were easily identified as having natural causes. Although some of the remainder were extremely unusual, painstaking examination showed that they too could be accounted for by natural explanations.

The strangest photograph shows a stone wall eerily superimposed on a team member's back. Was this just a freak time-exposure during which a red light was played on the wall?

When assessing evidence for paranormal activity, PSI prefers to err on the side of caution. But of course, finding no evidence is not the same as finding evidence of no paranormal activity, and so the search continues.