The ancient town of Saffron Walden still holds many memories of the past. One of these is ‘The Maltings’, a 600-year-old building with old oak beams, uneven floors and a mediaeval courtyard garden. It is also said to house some more permanent residents, who like to make their presence known from time to time. The house is said to be haunted by a woman that fell to her untimely death by accident, due to her husband lifting up floorboards. Footsteps have been heard and recorded ascending an iron staircase. Strange thing is, there is no longer an iron staircase in the house. Dark shadows, other unexplained noises and spirit children have also been witnessed here. There is a door that closes on it’s own, an alleged haunted cellar and previous investigations have uncovered supposed links with Oliver Cromwell.

This old oak building with its uneven floors, obstructing beams and low ceilings certainly did the trick when it came to disorientating visitors. The walk around with medium John Crowdey brought about much interesting information, however without a historian and considering there is little written history about the building it was impossible to verify how much, if any, was accurate. I lead the first vigil in the glorious Sackhoist room, with its outstanding beamed roof and crooked wooden floors. The hour was in the most part quite, exchanging stories and theories of the paranormal, however one team member did experience a drop in temperature when he called out for a sign. Near the end of the vigil a loud metallic noise was also heard by all, as if something had knocked against the radiator, however attempts to receive a repeat of this were in vain. My second vigil took me into the cellar, which was naturally more foreboding with its damp walls and musty odour. Unfortunately the only interesting occurrence was when using the dowsing rods, as they appeared to always move sharply inwards over one particular location (which we surmised could have been a well at one time) but remained aligned everywhere else in the room. Vigil number 3 took place in the Lounge where we attempted both a table tipping experiment and also glass divination. The table tipping was unsuccessful, however glass divination proved to be more interesting as the glass did appear to move. The suggestion was made that we had contacted the spirit guide of one of the team members, however I remain sceptical about this form of experiment as it is impossible to conclusively exclude the possibility that one or more of the team are either voluntarily or involuntarily moving the glass. Leaving the team to continue their experiments I chose on a short solo vigil in the Men's Washroom where John had earlier suggested that activity was likely. After spending 10 minutes asking out for a sign, the only response I received was a constant taping noise, which after investigation proved only to be dripping water coming from one of the toilet cisterns. Finally for the last vigil I returned again to the cellar with another team to see if we could get more success than before. Unfortunately I experienced nothing remotely unusual apart from the occasional cold spot, although one of the team did suggest they had made contact with an energy. She described in some detail her impressions of a scared, sweaty man who had been hung for deeds possibly relating to money or gold. Interestingly this did tally with similar information given to me by our medium John, which to my knowledge was only shared between the two of us. This obviously doesn't prove that anything paranormal had occurred, however the coincidence in detail did strike me as particularly interesting.