Formerly the home of Victorian inventor Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, Bude Castle is now a heritage centre with exhibition galleries, an archive with research facilities, an education room, shop and a restaurant.
This extraordinary Victorian Castle was built by Sir Goldsworthy Gurney in 1830 and with its breathtaking views to the breakwater and Chapel Rock and over Summerleaze Beach to the sea beyond..... It had all the makings of a great investigation.
Our investigation started around 10:30pm in the Willoughby Gallery located on the first floor, adjacent to what is now the resturant kitchen. The last remaining staff where finishing up and making alot of background noise rendering our digital voice recorders utterley useless and because we where on a restricted time schedule this proved to be very disapointing.
We relocated to the ground floor and cellar area, where we split into 2 smaller groups of 3 per team and headed to both locations simultaneously. The cellar again proved to be very noisy with its heating system running which echoed throughout both parts of the cellar. We where reduced to taking only digital photographs and recording on our mobile hand-held night vision camera's again to no avail.
What had promised to be a great investigation was quikly turning into an investigators nightmare with the buildings acoustics being similar to that of a biscuit tin. Once again we relocated back to the first floor with the knowledge that all staff where now gone. Keeping to our smaller two teams we setup 2 seperate vigils in the exhibition rooms.
Armed with our digital camera's, night vision camcorders and digital voice recorders, we did an EVP session and after about 20 minutes of nothing out of the ordinary happening we decided to call it a wrap about 02:30am.
Feeling very deflated we headed off hoping that we had caught something with all the data that we had collected and maybe, just maybe we wouldn't feel soo bad.
This was not to be, we went over all our evidence, with no paranormal activity at all. This has to be one of our most frustrating investigations to date, but like the old saying goes "some you win & some you lose" with that in mind, maybe one day we will return to Bude Castle and even the score?