THE minute they arrived in the Daily Echo’s Richmond Hill building they could hear the ghostly whirrings of our longdeparted presses. Apparently.

Marilyn Jenkins, especially, experienced flashes of ‘men in aprons and flat caps’.

Is that what happens, then, when spirits are near?

“I get flashes and I can’t connect the images at the beginning but when we start to talk it all comes together, I get pictures like just now,” says Marilyn.

Bob Collins feels shivers and nausea whereas Jade Haverson can experience ‘pictures in my head’.

“I can tell that something’s around, you feel really tense and it just drains you,” she says.

So much so that sometimes, Bob says, she can just fall to the floor.

Isn’t this a nuisance?

“It’s quite exhilarating, actually,” says Jade. “You’re scared at the time but when you look back it’s like; ‘I want to do that again’.”

She believes that ghosts can be spirits that have remained behind and usually for a reason.

“I wouldn’t say they are all bad, poltergeists can be bad, they are made out to be bad, but some of them are like kindred spirits.”

Jade admits to feeling really tearful after a visit to what must be Dorset’s Most Haunted (the ruined Knowlton Church near Wimborne) and during a visit to a church at Alum Chine: “Something passed through me and I started crying but when I moved out of that spot it just stopped.”

Thirty years ago if you’d said all this you would have been regarded as bonkers. But times have changed and the paranormal is a multi-million pound industry.

Bob, who has been told at a Spiritualist church that he has ‘the gift’, reckons it all kicked off here with the TV show Britain’s Most Haunted, whereas Marilyn’s belief is that: “In the past people were scared to say they believed in it all because of ridicule. It’s more in the open now, people are more open about what they feel and sense.”

Certainly they are quite happy to discuss their ghost-hunting escapades, and to show the images garnered on these nocturnal trips.

They’ve seen ‘black shadows’, smelled ‘hay and manure’ at Knowlton, witnessed strange, ‘mist-like’ entities in buildings, and during a visit to a supposedly haunted location near Rhinefield House in the New Forest, Jade spotted something which she managed to snap on her camera and which she says looks like a bloodhound.

“My mum was doing research and said something about a bloodhound being in that area there so we zoomed into one of the pictures and it looked exactly like a bloodhound,” she says.

Then there was the time Marilyn’s camera brought up an image of ‘a face’ and hasn’t worked since. “It’s under a year old but when I switch it on it just closes back down.”

And the occasion Bob returned home from an expedition, sat down to have a cup of coffee and realised: “I had scratches all down my arm.”

Some nights he’ll be sitting down and get the feeling that ‘someone wants to come in’. “But I just try and block it out when I want to go to sleep.”

Like all paranormalists they are in search of the undeniable image that nails once and for all the existence of ghosts. But it’s a bit difficult as they don’t have all the equipment: “We’d love a night-vision camera and an electro-magnetic field detector,” says Bob.

That doesn’t stop them being pleased with the images they’ve produced, which include the strange mist and a selection of orbs, said to be manifestations of ghosts, which present as spheres of bright light.

Theirs were taken with a flash in the dark at Bob’s friend’s house in Boscombe.

“When the orbs were around I felt really sick,” he says.

As the nights draw in they are particularly keen to find more indoor locations to investigate and hope that kind-hearted Echo readers might offer up their own haunted properties for them to visit.

“It does get very cold out there and we do have an issue with not all of us having transport so we can’t always get very far,” admits Marilyn.

It would be very easy to dismiss their pastime as ridiculous or pointless but their own take is hard to disagree with.

“We’re keen to prove what we’ve seen and experienced but we’re always aware there could be another explanation,” says Marilyn.

“In the end, it’s a harmless interest.”

What happened when we investigated the Daily Echo building

TO test their powers of paranormal detection, I invite them to venture
into the bowels of the Bournemouth Daily Echo’s Richmond Hill building which was built nearly 80 years ago.

The PIT are fascinated by the warren of rooms and corridors.

In the basement I lead them to a store-room where they get ‘feelings’.
I lead them along a subterranean corridor parallel with Richmond Hill.

As we go lower still, into complete darkness, they all complain of feeling
hot. On their left side only.

“My face feels very warm,” says Marilyn.

“There’s definitely a feeling here,” says Bob. He also complains of a
burning feeling on his left arm.

This is interesting as I am told later that the fire service used to use the
area for training – but I don’t know how true that is and we have just
switched our central heating on.

More interestingly a reporter who used to use the area for music
practise claimed to have once seen a pair of disembodied feet down there.

And a former caretaker tells the tale of kicking a can along this corridor...
and his horror when it rolled straight back towards him.

Medium and ghost-detective Marion Goodfellow experienced the
presence of “a tall, big-built man,” when she investigated the building
for us in 2004.

“He’s just surrounding me with coldness,” she said.

A ‘ghostly mist’ is said to periodically invade the building and another
rumour is of a ‘grey lady’, perhaps a remnant of the time part of our
building was a theatre, who is reported to stalk the former compositing room.

Finally I ask a former compositor about the type of attire they wore in olden times.

“It was aprons,” he confirms...