Myths and Legends

He had joined the US Army Air Force as a captain in 1942 and was based at Milton Ernest Hall just a couple of miles away.

In December 1944, a small plane bound for Paris took off from Twinwood with Miller on board, but somewhere over the English Channel the aircraft vanished.

The Control Tower at Twinwood is now the home of the Glenn Miller Museum which opened in 2002, but since then there have been even more renovations and the site now houses an Aviation Museum and many other restored war time buildings.

Robert Allen is a volunteer and the curator of the Aviation Museum. For the past six years, he and his team have spent many hours working on the restoration of the old RAF buildings and during this time, they have witnessed some very strange things, which prompted him to want to research the existence of paranormal activity.

I went to meet Robert, who revealed some of the things he has seen over the years.

“Odd things started straight away. There was always an atmosphere, you always felt like you were being watched and we’d be working away and you’d see somebody appear at the door like a black shadow and you’d turn around and it would vanish."

They’d also hear voices, and Robert remembers one particular incident before the Glenn Miller Festival one year when three of them were in the building. Two of them were holding a large piece of timber while a man called John was cutting it with a rotary saw.

“We were concentrating on holding the wood still when we heard a woman’s voice” he said.

“It was very loud but we couldn’t work out what was being said.”

Robert’s colleague holding the wood also heard it, and John told them that a woman was at the door. They all looked up but there was nobody there, so they went outside to look and there was no one around. It got weirder during the Festival as Robert explained.

“A young lady came into the building and said, ‘I don’t want you to think I’m strange but I’m a medium and I’ve picked up the presence of a lady in WAAF uniform. She’s very interested in what you are doing and she’s watching you’.

“We said, ‘that’s weird because on Thursday night we heard her!’”

The corridor in daylight

The team then started to see more and more things. 

“In the old flight office buildings, two of our members were walking down the corridor on a winter’s evening to collect something and they didn’t bother to turn the lights on” said Robert.

“As they were walking, a ball of blue light, about the size of a football, came shooting down the corridor and went into an open doorway. They said we wouldn’t believe what they’d just seen, but then we started hearing footsteps down the corridor even though the doors were locked, you’d wait to see someone and nobody would appear.

“The owner has seen many odd things” added Robert.

“He’s turned all the lights off in the Tower and gone back to his home down the track, come back an hour later and all the lights would be on.

Orbs in the corridor

“On another occasion he had a number of visitors in the Tower and all the lights went off. He thought the trip had been switched on the fuse box, so he went and unlocked the generator room downstairs, opened the steel door, and the trip hadn’t been switched, the actual main power lever had been turned off, yet the door was locked.

“All the team of volunteers that work here have witnessed things. Sometimes they can be quite funny and sometimes they can catch you unawares.  There is a multitude of things going on here but I will emphasise that it’s nothing nasty.”

Finally, after many unexplained experiences, Robert asked ghost detective Adrian Perkins to visit Twinwood, and he has now been investigating there for two years.

Adrian has been a paranormal investigator for about 20 years but says that from the very start he knew that things were different there, as on the very first day he did a dozen or more interviews with people who had experienced paranormal activity, as opposed to the one or two that you usually get.

“I was like a kid in a sweetshop” he said!

Ghost Detective Adrian Perkins

“It was absolutely brilliant, every paranormal thing you could imagine was here. We just had to do the overnight vigils, and from the word go, from the first minute that we started the cameras rolling, things started to happen. Everything was here and you just had to sit and wait for it to happen – and it happened."

Adrian said that they saw silhouettes walking past the windows and heard both conversations between males and females and one sided conversations, such as one female talking as if she was on the phone. The team also left a voice activated recorder in the old armoury, locked the door and left it all night. This produced some very interesting results.

“When we got back to it there was two minutes of tape used, and we couldn’t wait to find out what was on it” said Adrian.

“What was on it was pure noise of either gunfire or someone striking metal and it was loud, it was very loud.  There was nobody else on the site and we would have heard that sort of noise but we heard absolutely nothing.”

Orb crazy! Pictured in the Aviation Museum

Adrian has a recording of this noise, which you can hear in feature two below, and a number of photos were also taken on the vigils, some of which you can see on this page. There are shapes that look like ectoplasm, with heads and lots of mist, and also pictures of orbs, perfectly round, some bright and some dark.

The picture of the big blue orb was taken on one of the vigils when Robert arranged for one of those who had seen the original blue orb to be there. After asking that person to stand exactly where he had been when he had seen it and took a photograph, Adrian took a picture and on it was this ball of light that looks like a human cell and a smaller one behind it which looks like there’s a man’s face in it when you zoom in.

Adrian is not the only one who has captured the orbs on film, some policemen from ghost team Northants Haunted set up cameras and on the camera monitor in another room Robert saw what looked like a firework display with balls of blue light coming through the walls and flying around. 

“I’d loved to know if there’s a logical explanation because I can’t think of one” said Robert.

But what explanation HAS he been given?

“They seem to believe that it is the start of a spirit trying to materialise” revealed Robert.

“I think what you’ve got to remember is that during World War II most of the airmen were young boys of about 18 or 19 and they might have had the best days of their lives while they were stationed here, living day to day and not knowing if they were going to be here tomorrow.

“I know this was a training base and not a bomber base where they really did live life to the full, but I think the same thing happened here because a lot of them were killed on training flights. I think they have a link here, they were happy here and are probably coming back to see what’s happening."

So, the orbs in these pictures are thought to be the manifestations of new spirits, but couldn’t they just be the marks that you sometimes get when using digital cameras? I put this to Adrian.

“We have done experiments in the past with these orbs and a lot of them are digital photography” he said.

“High humidity will give you droplets of water which will reflect on a digital camera and dust will do the same thing, but what we’ve got here are solid orbs which are huge.

“A lot of people will say it’s a trick of the digital camera, but we know that the latest digital cameras have got a certain amount of leaves on the shutters as they close. [This means] you’ll get 50 pence shaped orbs and triangular and diamond orbs, due to the camera clipping the image as it’s reflected back, but what we’re getting here are orbs with texture that are almost like human cells and I’ve never been able to replicate it.

“If we see something on camera we always try to replicate it” he added, “and if you can replicate it there’s a natural cause for it, and if you can’t, you need to investigate it further.”

During my trip to Twinwood I heard about strange silhouettes, footsteps, one sided conversations and floating orbs. But is this really paranormal activity? Well, people can believe what they like, but Adrian also revealed that some of his experiences have been verified by historians. He told me more about this, but first it was important to explain the difference between a ghost and a spirit.

“Ghosts and spirits are totally different” revealed Adrian

“A ghost is a recording of an event trapped in a building. If you hear somebody walking down a passageway, it’s because at one time somebody did walk down that passageway and you’re hearing that sound. It’s recorded and you can’t interact with a recording. It’s just like watching the TV [a replay of an event].

“When you’re talking about spirits it’s similar, but a spirit will interact with a human being. I’ve noticed over the years that it’s very rare to get spirit activity, it’s usually in somebody’s home and it’s usually a family member coming back to help them. But here we’ve got a mixture of everything, it’s a very unusual place.”

The general explanation is that the orbs are the spirits of the people that worked at Twinwood, but if they are just the start of spirit manifestation, how can that be? Adrian explained.

“These people worked here during the war and, if you think about the time span, they would be dying now. You can go back to exactly the place you want to be and if you loved a place enough, you would go back.

“You also have to think at what’s been happening at Twinwood in recent years” he added.

“When you start altering a place you get a lot of spirit activity, it’s as if they are saying we don’t like what you’re doing. But as work has progressed here, the spirit activity has gone down. it hasn’t disappeared, but it’s gone down almost to an approval level. It’s like they like what’s happening here!”

This is a lovely thought, but you have to ask how Adrian could possibly know this. And he admits that it’s a difficult concept to accept.

“People say it’s a load of rubbish and I quite understand their viewpoint” he said, “everybody’s entitled to their opinion, but over the years I have personally experienced ghosts and spirits and I know they exist. But I can’t prove it to someone else, you have to experience it yourself to understand it. Just saying it to somebody it sounds very unbelievable, I understand that.

“I believe that science will prove the existence of recordings and people’s ability to imprint themselves in the atmosphere and this will be answered in my life time. But what will never be answered is the fact that you can be contacted by spirits because it’s a very personal thing.”

And to prove his point Adrian went onto explain how things that he has experienced during his investigations have been verified by historians.

“I didn’t know about Twinwood or the RAF and you can’t get hold of personal records” he said, “but I heard a female voice and she gave me numbers, dates, her name and the people she died with. Then we went through the records and it was spot on. People might say that I must have read that somewhere and it was in my subconscious. It’s possible but I couldn’t have got her personal records.

Image captured in Aviation Museum corridor

It turned out that this woman was in the last mid-air collision at Cranfield, an accident which claimed the lives of eight people.

Since then, Adrian has been able to track down the relatives of the victims, which has led him to understand why he might have been visited by a spirit.

“We found the pilot’s brother” revealed Adrian, “who then donated his brother’s DFC to the museum and then died a couple of weeks later.

“This makes me believe that when you’re contacted by a spirit, it’s for a purpose” he continued, “and I believe that was the reason behind this. Although she [this woman] contacted me instead of the pilot, she still pointed me in the right direction to get that medal here for him. I think that’s what it was about and when you get something like that happen it’s very rewarding.”  

Whatever you believe it seems that there is a lot going on at Twinwood, and when talking about it in a freezing cold office at the Aviation museum you do start to get the jitters. I became convinced that there might be reflections in the display cabinets that really shouldn’t be there! And as Adrian revealed – I wouldn’t have been the first to think so!

“On the first overnight vigil we were down by the glass cabinets in the museum” he began, “and they’ve got an engine from a crashed aircraft down there behind the displays.

“I heard a noise from the back of the room and I swung round and took a photograph. We were all wearing black because it’s the best way to take photographs in places where you’ve got reflective glass, so if you see something that’s got white cuffs and collars, you know it’s not one of you - and there was a chap sitting behind the display cabinet on top of the engine.

“I’ve got a photo of it, and we know it wasn’t one of us and he wasn’t there when we went to look!”