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Sightings of a spooky black-eyed child reported in the Sunday Mercury have sparked worldwide interest. MIKE LOCKLEY joins paranormal investigators at night on the spectre’s Cannock Chase haunts.

Once the banshee wind had stopped howling through trees stripped bark-bare by autumn.

Once the cameras’ spirit white lights had dimmed, allowing insects trapped within the walls of their beams to dizzy dance to freedom.

Once October’s sodden dogs had stopped tormenting a bloated, blood moon with their protests...

The chilling truth tingled my skin like a stale nettle sting.

Something unearthly, at best odd, at worst sinister and certainly out-of-kilter with our understanding of life and death has seeped from the heather-cloaked soil of Cannock Chase, the Staffordshire wilderness that has long been a byword for all things paranormal.

Sightings here have ranged from UFOs to big cats, from the Black Country’s own Bigfoot to the black-eyed child, an anaemic waif who limps the dirt-track veins of this untamed landscape.

As a reporter, I have worked the pine tree-studded patch since 1975, recording its sordid recent history of murder, suicide, occult rituals and orgies. The pull-ins and hidden lanes remain popular haunts for thrill-seekers.

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But I have always laughed at the warnings from drinkers in the White Lion, Littleton Arms and The Horns.

“Wouldn’t catch me up there,” they’d stay while shuffling dominoes. “I saw something once, wouldn’t go there again at night”.

Or “Speak to Bernie about what happened when he went night-fishing.”

I laughed off the folklore. I wrote about it, but scratch the surface of all that purple prose, and readers would discover a smirk.

But in the ink-black of Saturday night on Cannock Chase, I had second thoughts.

For whatever reason – perhaps the sleeping patchwork of coal seams that once turned this area’s tough breed of working class men into troglodytes – something sinister, something long separated from the here and now, has oozed to the surface.

I know. Thanks to paranormal investigator Don Philips, a buzzsaw of raw energy who, like Uri Geller four decades before, has allowed scientists to pore over his unique talents and emerged with reputation untarnished, I have something.

Geller bends spoons; Philips, an unlikely medium with bear-like build and oil-slick Elvis quiff, captures souls.

Thanks to Philips, a man who converses with the “other side” as if chatting to a dotty, deaf elderly relatives – “You’re very faint, sweetheart. Know you’re trying hard and thanks for that, but...” – I have voices.

Voices captured on digital recorders scrubbed clean beforehand and scrutinised by investigators.

Before Saturday night’s spiritual stakeout of Britain’s most baffling badlands, I would have read those words with, at best, disbelief, at worst with world-weary disinterest.







Before you do the same, listen to the voices, caught on Don’s recorders.

Listen to the words “Goodnight, God bless”, rising above the static.

If it’s shtick, it’s a ghostly gimmick that boffins have, as yet, failed to debunk. Ditto Steve Mera, parapsychologist and chairman of Manchester’s Association of Paranormal Investigators and Training, who has failed to find fault despite a battery of tests.

Steve, up on the Chase with us, has made a living from sifting frauds from phantoms, his CV including a stint as X Files investigator for the Richard and Judy show. In 31 years he has dismissed all but eight of his investigations as hokum.

“Not enough,” he readily admits. And not a single photograph has passed the paranormal test.

Yet Philips, from Leicester, and his tapes remain a conundrum.

“Don is getting communication from someone, somewhere,” the 48-year-old admitted. “He is getting vocal communication.”

Pointedly, Steve is not yet prepared to say from where.

He will, however, stick his neck out sufficiently to concede: “It’s about evidence, replicated evidence, even after several scientific experiments carried out that would cripple some of the best hoaxes out there.

“I have found myself using a word recently that I never use to describe my thoughts –I’m simply perplexed.”

On the Chase, Philips, weighed down by a battery of cameras and recorders, hit the ground running.

“I’m buzzing,” he announced. “I’m not finding them, they’re finding me. They’re people like us and, like us, they want some respect.”

His technique is a simple blend of hi-tech and hauntings. Clutching recorders like Colt 45s, he barks a question into the night air, then plays back the ghostly responses struggling to clear a spitting prison of static.







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Among believers, the activity is dubbed Electronic Voice Phenomena. Among non-believers, it is pareidolia – presented with a wall of incoherent noise, the brain will scramble the cackles and hisses into words.

“I’ve discounted that,” said Steve. “We’ve played Don’s tape to three people and they’ve picked out the same name. With pareidolia, they should all hear different words.”

One truism shone through Saturday’s nocturnal safari of the spirit world. The cult of the Black Eyed Child is harder to explain rationally than the sightings, and photos, of the demon infant.

In the claustrophobic darkness, we stumbled across no fewer than three individuals searching for the spectre.

“Excuse me,” trilled an elderly woman. “Is this where they’ve seen the ghosts?”

“Don’t worry about me,” she shouted, picking her way through the potholed pathway, “I’m used to chatting to the spirits.”

So is Philips.







At the German Cemetery, last resting place for hundreds of Nazi soldiers, he captured the rattle of chains and a voice that identified itself as Frederick.

Sixth Sense shtick? If so, it was an audio sleight of hand that still has me searching for answers.

Then there was the final farewell, whispered on the wind as I retreated down the dirt track.

The excited investigator rang the next day to announce: “The Chase is haunted. Of that I have no doubt.”

I still have, but those doubts have diminished considerably. One thing’s for certain. Cannock Chase has spawned a collective sense of awe, a realisation by thousands of people that science does not have all the answers.

Gripped by a fresh belief in the unbelievable, crowds are embarking on bizarre paranormal pilgrimages.

The undead are in demand like never before – and they may just have found a voice in Don Philips.





