The Cage St Osyth: Media Frenzy or a Haunting to be taken Very Seriously?

Presented by: London Fortean Society

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0	LONDON: The Bell
P	Wednesday 25th October, 2017
N	7:45pm

Event information

The Cage in St Osyth, Essex is a haunted medieval prison that has recently hit the headlines. “Essex\'s most haunted house: Could you last a night?” asked Essex Live. “A retired policeman claims to have captured a picture of a ghost carrying the body of a witch on a stretcher” spluttered the Mail Online.

The Cage was the local holding cell whose prisoners included the ‘Witch’ Ursula Kemp who was held captive there prior to her trial and hanging in Chelmsford. But Ursula may haunt the cage still.

This modern-day case particularly involved one woman, Vanessa Mitchell, who felt after several years of phenomena she could neither live there or responsibly let it for residential purposes. She rented it to paranormal groups for investigations.

John Fraser has completed a detailed report on this haunting with collected witness testimony from over two dozen local people and investigators. This talk discusses his findings and the truth of the phenomena behind the national headlines.

John Fraser is a member of the Council of the Society for Psychical Research, and has been’ Vice Chair Investigations’ of the Ghost Club – the two oldest groups in the country that study the subject. His topics of study have been as varied as hypnotic regressions and vampire folklore, as well as more conventional paranormal research.

His 2010 ‘Ghost Hunting, a Survivors Guide’ was one of the first UK books published about the subject since it re-popularisation by TV. Since 2015 John has been working on an extended project of witness testimony regarding the well-publicised phenomena occurring at The Cage in St Osyth Essex, also assessing the validity of witness testimony in spontaneous ‘paranormal ‘cases.