The Wardrobe is now a military museum called The Rifles (Berkshire and Wiltshire) Museum and is situated in Salisbury’s Cathedral Close. There are thousands of artefacts on display and in the reserve collection relating to wars in and including Afghanistan, China, the Crimea, South Africa and the First and Second World Wars. The first residence was one of the canons [clergymen] who served the Cathedral, the Wardrobe later passed into the hands of the Bishop of Salisbury. It is probable that use as a storehouse and administrative base for the Bishop’s household that led to its name of The Wardrobe, a title first recorded in 1543. In 1568 the Bishop exchanged it with the Dean and Chapter for a more convenient building and it was then let to a series of non-clerical tenants. During their occupation it underwent many alterations. King Charles II, who stayed in Salisbury to escape the plague in 1665, housed his servants here and it is the ghost of one of these, a ‘grey lady’, who died of influenza who has been seen sitting in the corner of the ‘Regimental Room’. A Cavalier, a recent sighting, moves around the building, he is possibly a poltergeist as staff members have reported items such as documents as having being moved or even lost. The first tenant following renovations in 1830 was Dr John Grove. His daughter Henrietta married James Hussey, a local JP. The house remained in the Hussey family until James and Henrietta’s daughter Margaret died there in 1941 at the age of 90 and her ghost has been seen in the Regimental Room. After use in the Second World War as a hostel of the Auxiliary Territorial Service it was rented in 1945 by the Diocesan Training College for Schoolmistresses to provide accommodation for students and staff. This use continued until 1969. The building then remained empty for some years until it became today’s’ museum.

The Wardrobe presented a unique opportunity to investigate a building which was not so much historical in its own right, but filled with historical artefacts which have been in the hands of hundreds of individuals spanning centuries of conflict and warfare. Rifles, swords, pistols and uniforms were among the many exhibitions of items used in combat in all of the most significant battles in recent history. For those who believe that not only places, but items themselves, can carry spiritual signatures, this could surely be an opportunity of a lifetime. Set in the delightful surroundings of Salisbury Cathedral we made our way into the Rifles Museum to be surrounded by paintings of warfare, mannequins suited out in military uniforms and every possible artefact imaginable. We were also joined by a reporter and photographer from the Daily Telegraph who were there to report on our investigation and to experience a paranormal tour first hand. My first duties for the night were to survey the various vigil areas for suitable locations to setup our experiments. One in particular which would bring rewards before the end of the night was an isolated corridor at the back of the Regimental Room where we had setup base camp. It had been suggested that this area held a certain trepidation for people and may have a presence associated with it, and owing to the fact that it could only be accessed via the Regimental Room I chose this for a locked off motion sensor and dictaphone experiment. The voice recorder was set to auto-sound activation, which means that it would only start to record when it registered voices or sounds nearby.

After the usual workshops and walk around we embarked upon the first vigil of the night, where I was joined for the duration of the investigation by reporter Ian and John Crowdey, our medium for the event. We began in the Library, which had already brought some interesting experiences earlier in the night when we demonstrated a divination experiment with the planchette for our guests from the Telegraph. During this initial foray we managed to make contact with a supposed worker from the building which resulted in some automatic writing, mainly random lines, circles, and what appeared to be the initial M. Prior to this however we did experience some knocking sounds for a few minutes coming from the back of the room which appeared natural at first, but suddenly stopped. We were unable to account for what had caused these sounds, assuming it to be the window, but there was no wind outside and the windows and shutters appeared perfectly secure. We therefore had high hopes for our first vigil, hoping to repeat the phenomena from earlier in the night. In fact it was a relatively quiet hour, with only some slight movements from the Planchette.

We then changed the format of the night slightly as John decided to get everybody together in the Regimental Room to conduct a group séance. Prior to this we conducted a remote viewing experiment with the teams, as I had earlier hidden an object from the museum in a secret location. The idea was for the teams to relax and focus their energies on what this object might be and where it had been hidden. Unfortunately, but expectedly, nobody came close to guessing either - it was the hand of a mannequin, hidden behind a painting on the ground floor. After this short diversion John started the group séance and invited any spirit energies to come forward and make themselves known. The session brought about experiences for some of the group, mainly unquantifiable feelings and temperature changes, but nothing of real significance.

Our third vigil took place in the Attic room where the spirit of a female is supposed to reside who is unhappy with the mess and clutter and is known to move objects in protest of this. John took the team into the middle room where most of the activity is supposed to take place, while Ian and I sat in the main room sharing stories and generally relaxing in the hope that something might choose to catch our attention for once. Although John and his team did get some responses to glass divination and table tipping, Ian and I had a pleasantly uninterrupted hour. This brought us to the final vigil of the night in the ground floor exhibition room, a labyrinth of display cases and mannequins. We had setup a table along the back corridor and the team began with glass divination where they thought they had made contact with the artist of a painting on display on the stairs. This was actually significant due to the fact that our session took place next to a stuffed dog, which was the actual dog from the painting who had served in one of the overseas conflicts and had been later presented as a gift to Queen Victoria. Following this I separated the group into different sections of the exhibition to cover as much of the ground floor as possible. Upon asking out for signs of activity there were unfortunately no responses, and from there the night slowly came to a end.

This had been an intriguing investigation, and a privilege to spend my time surrounded by such history. The night however had not come to a complete end as I went to the locked off corridor to retrieve the voice recorder and motion sensors. The sensors had not been triggered all night, so it was just time to check if the dictaphone had recorded anything - and to my surprise over 2 minutes of footage was displayed. This was certainly something to spend some time investigating before we left, so I played back the footage. The initial segment was a recording of me setting up the device and closing the door behind me. The timing for this was approximately 9.15 which was during John's workshop. At 14 seconds you can hear the recorder cut out, and then begin recording again, although the device does not mark the exact time of this. The recorder continuously records up until exactly 2 minutes on the display (106 seconds) revealing a clear, repetitive but equally random knocking sound. It was here that we needed to try and replicate this and understand all possibilities of the source. We managed to discount movement from the Regimental Room, or floors above or below as the sound was clear and crisp and definitely coming from the corridor area. Also had our movements in other parts of the building caused this then there should have been more than 100 seconds of footage. We tried replicating this by banging on the adjoining wall, knocking on the windows, playing with the door handle (which had been blocked off by a chair so that nobody would go near it) and even pulling out the pictures so that they swung back against the wall - nothing even came close. It was then that Ian noticed a larger picture in the adjoining narrow room only a few feet from where the recorder had been placed on the floor, and when he pulled it out and let it flick back against the wall we heard the sound which was on the recorder. I then proceeded to re-record the sound so we could have a comparison for the original recording and on playback we managed to exactly replicate the footage. We had to pull the picture frame away from the wall by roughly an inch and then let it knock back to repeat the sound, and our first plan was to see if we could make the picture shake enough by natural means to replicate this. We banged on the walls directly behind the picture but there was virtually no movement. For this sound to be replicated we physically had to pull the picture away from the wall, and for this to happen continuously for over 100 seconds was something of a mystery. Of course this is by no means proof of any paranormal activity, however it is certainly worthy of further investigation. Click here to listen to the footage and decide for yourself.