Blaenllyfni old School
Caerau
Bridgend
Fri 22nd October 2010
Initial contact
The team were contacted by an E mail from Emma, a member of Caerau Development trust in Maesteg, Bridgend. Emma and her manager Matthew, had been trying to set up a psychic investigation at their base, an old school (Blaenllyfni junior and infant school) as a local interest fund raising event. She said that they had been let down by another investigation team, and wondered if we would be interested in standing in. We discussed this among our team members and decided to agree to us holding an investigation there.
History of the School
The old Blaenllynfi school was bulilt in 1895, and originally consisted of 3 seperate buildings.
These buildings at first only held classrooms, and the children had to walk 400 yards to another building every dinner time. It was thought it would be a good idea that the three buildings were joined together, and so the work was carried out in 1980, to make the school a complete unit of 2 large halls, class rooms, kitchen and a Headmasters office.
The School since closed, has now been taken over by Caerau Development Trust, turning it into a community hub to help bring services back to the local area.
Matthew Davies the Project Manager said “We decided to contact Unexplained Wales to investigate the School and buildings after a few things were felt, heard and seen, that nobody could explain. These events were experienced not just by us, but by teachers who had worked in the school in the past”
It was arranged to hold the investigation on Friday 22 October 2010, running from approximately 9.00pm to 12.00am.
Emma told us that the event would be open to the public, with tickets sold at £3.00. Emma told us that there may be 40 or so tickets sold. We told her to limit the tickets to 30 maximum., as we thought that such a large group could be too unwieldy to manage.
We sent a copy of our rules of conduct for them to consider, and a Paranormal report form for them to fill in (which was not to be opened by us until after the event).
Because of the distance, we hoped to arrive at the venue around 8.00pm, which would give us time to set up, have a recce of the site and decide on the course of events. As luck would have it, we arrived around 8.45, due to traffic difficulties and getting lost when we were almost there.
Investigation team
The team consisted of - Archie, Wayne, Graham, Ken, Carole, Aileen. Laura (Aileen's daughter) and Jane.
After the introductions, Emma said she had arranged a room next to their office that we could use as a hub for the night, and that there would be 22 people attending. We laid out the equipment and set up two laptops that we could use to download the pictures that everyone took.
We had the usual equipment – video-cams with night vision ability, EMF meters, a K2 EMF meter (recently purchased from the States), personal digital cameras, voice recorders, infra red thermometer and a normal ambient digital temperature meter, dowsing rods and a couple of motion detectors.
Initial preparations
We had decided that it would be important to keep the public attendees occupied, so Ken and myself made some extra dowsing rods (8 sets) for the group to try out. I also took 10 extra note pads and pens for them to write down anything that they experienced.
It had already been decided that I would begin the night with a presentation. Due to our late start, we thought that we should get on with the nights events. We gathered in the large hall and I introduced the team, I explained some of the things that we hoped to achieve, and showed them the basics of the equipment we would be using. I also explained our code of conduct that we expected everyone to abide by, I also asked if we could have permission to download any pictures taken by the people there, for possible inclusion on the website, and finished by saying that there were no certainties or guarantees that we would find anything by the end of the night (this wasn't to be the case as it turned out).
Wayne then did a demonstration of dowsing using the rods, and explained that we had bought some spare sets for them to try, which they did.
The investigation
There was a large room directly off the hall, and we decided to set up some 'locked off' objects in there. We set up two lines of coins on a table, the coins were from varying era's, to see if they would get any response, then we set up 3 conkers on strings, suspended between two chairs, we also set up a tray with marbles sitting on a thin layer of flour (we thought these might be good idea as we were in an old school) I then set up a motion detector to watch the objects, and locked the room.
