Our Story

One might wonder why we wanted to become paranormal investigators. Had we had our own experiences in the past or were we just jumping on the paranormal bandwagon?

Before Eleanor and I met we had always singularly been aware of strange inexplicable occurrences going on but, as is our policy at PICOUK we will not include anything we have felt on this website. I will however say that in my late teens I was accurately able to predict the colour of cars passing in front of my parent’s house and could predict when girls I fancied were about to leave home and casually bump into them. I guess in this day and age that would be classed as some form of psychic stalking. Eleanor as a child had the usual ‘imaginary’ friend and was persuaded by her parents that she had an over active imagination and she would be locked up if the nonsense persisted.

Our joint experiences started after we purchased our present property, a small terraced house in the middle of Derby dating back to the late 1800’s. Often, items will disappear only to turn up again on the dining table weeks or months later. As there are only the two of us living here and no one else has keys to the property we have still after many years no rational explanation for these occurrences.

Some years ago we attached a cupboard to the wall in the back room. As the cupboard was to be used to hold glassware and full decanters, it was firmly attached to the wall using Rawlbolts, each of which would quite happily support even my bulky frame. One morning we came down stairs to what appeared to be a total disaster. There were two gaping holes in the wall where the cupboard had been as though the cupboard had been physically ripped from the wall. The cupboard itself was stood on the floor with the two Rawlbolts protruding from the back. We grabbed some towels to prevent any spillage on the carpet and a box to put the larger pieces of broken glass into and prepared to survey the damage. However, when the cupboard doors were opened we were amazed. Not only was there nothing spilt and nothing broken but also all the glassware and decanters were all still stood upright and didn’t appear to have moved. 

We would be the first to admit that this could have been a freak accident but after lengthy repairs to the wall and wallpaper the cupboard was refitted to the wall. About a month later, we once more came down to find the cupboard stood on the floor. Once again there were gaping holes in the wall and once again the contents were unspilt, undamaged and unmoved. The odds on this happening twice make winning the lottery seem like a cinch but over the years we have yet to come anywhere close. We have never attempted to attach anything to this wall since then.

Over the last couple of years with the increase of paranormal programming on our televisions and later our being part of a paranormal investigation team we have noted yet another phenomenon. Around the time of a paranormal programme being shown on television or before or after a paranormal investigation one of our clocks displays the wrong time or date. This may not sound particularly strange but the clock is radio controlled and is accurate to something like one second in a thousand years. Now it would be easy to explain this by saying it was caused by a poor signal or failing battery. However, there has neither been any new paranormal programmes nor any paranormal investigations conducted over the last two months and the batteries have not been changed since the clock was purchased. The clock has maintained the exact time throughout. During one of our investigations at Derby Gaol we took the clock with us to see if there would be any effect. About one hour into the investigation the clock was found to be one hour out and remained so for the rest of the night.

Although from our experiences we have no concrete evidence of the existence of the paranormal we sincerely feel that the number of outlandish coincidences we have experienced in our home make it difficult for us to ignore.

Chris Thompson