10 Oct The Haunted Airfield
THE HAUNTED AIRFIELD
The world war two airfield known as R.A.F. Bircham Newton in rural England, has long been a Mecca for both students of the paranormal, and spiritualist mediums arriving on a mission to help and heal.
The part of the airfield where even skeptics hear voices, and old aircraft noises on a regular basis, is actually on what are now the tennis courts, and it is here most paranormal activity occurs.
So it was here that we focused our main attentions.
Such things as the setting up of machinery and the gadgetry of the paranormal, inevitably attracts attention, and soon we had the obligatory bunch of
“Mickey takers”, with the usual jokes that was probably older than they were.
The words of Horace Walpole came to mind: ”The world is a comedy for those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel” and it was into the world of feelings that we were to trespass.
Ghosts fall roughly into two categories, there were those who were just the emotions of long ago impressed into the ether, and like mindless recordings doing the same round time after time, year after year, and those that were alive to their surroundings but trapped in time, and it was these that we wished to communicate with, to see why they would accept no mediums help to pass on to their correct sphere.
In order to gain a verifiable record for posterity, we had with us the paraphernalia of the E.V.P specialist. Plus some M.O.D scanning devices not normally available to investigators, which meant we could snatch whole conversations from the past.
Electronic Voice Phenomena, or EVP is the means with tape recorders, and some small metallic amplifiers, S.T.R. conductors, kilner screen and sound plates, to regain sounds lost in the past, on a recording. The government consistently denies using mediums and psychics during world war two, but due to the negligence of Winston Churchill, whole intelligence departments were run by soviet agents and a lot of their material on the contributions made by British psychics has been available from Soviet files, thanks to people like Vasili Mitrikhin, Oleg Bzorski Oleg Kalugin and others.
In fact the British agent Peter Wright of “Spy catcher” fame, spoke of the possibilities of E.V.P or reclaiming voices of the dead from the British embassy roof during the troubles in Cyprus. He also experimented from his home in Essex, this man a great British patriot, was cheated out of his pension by the very government he served, while the soviet defector Anatole Vrinisky has described him as an electronics genius and one greatly feared in Moscow.
However, we stood about for quite some time on the windy tennis courts, and the shouts and comments of the dead airmen, both amazed us, and gave explanation of why these men would not go to gods allotted place for them, until they had their say.
One airman acted as spokes man for the others all gave their names and rank,
he said there were many airmen gathered here, which really shook me, and I wondered the reasons why this could be so. Steve an old hand in these areas, who listened hard as held the sound plates began to weep and was shaking visibly.
With an emotional voice the airman told us that these bomber crews had been targeting not enemy soldiers but, dormitory towns, where German soldiers wives and families lived, these towns were largely undefended against attack, for surely there would be no need to defend them, and Winston Churchill ordered not the German army, but the families of German soldiers to be mass fire bombed.
Again, it was Churchill who refused to allow Germany offers to surrender since 1941, he and his sponsors wanted only complete destruction, they called this many times, “total war”.
This airman’s spirit then said one cold, lonely and noisy bombing run, he suddenly found himself with other British airmen, in a pushing throng of women and children, making for a large staircase that arose up to quite where he could not see, but saw a mother trying to carry two injured children, and on offering to carry one was shocked to see and smell, the child’s burned flesh, it was at this point that he realized that although he spoke no German, he could understand every word spoken, and on turning to his air colleagues, he suddenly knew they were all dead.
Gone was any feeling of enemies for all helped each other to reach the stair. But almost all the British airmen decided to remain behind. These men are both trapped and guilt ridden, they plead for their voices to be heard, they see themselves as war criminals, they signed up to fight soldiers, not the wives and children of soldiers, and need some degree of closure, their anger after all these years is still palpable.
Asked if they wish for help to progress on, almost to a man they do not, one man with a Scots accent, said it is justice for the dead for which they wait, and please to tell their families they were all O. K.
We read together for them the address of Canon Henry Scott –Holland, once dean of St. Paul’s:
“Death is nothing at all, I have only slipped away into the next room, I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other that we are still.
Call me by my old familiar name; speak to me in the easy way you always used.
Put no difference into your tone; wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow…
what is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near just around the corner,
All is well.”
Further reading; Falsehoods in wartime by A. Ponsonby
Churchill’s war-David Irving
From admiral to cabin boy by Barry Domville
Was the wartime bombing of civilians, a necessity or a crime? A.C Grayling
The Nameless War –captain Archibald Maule Ramsey
Unfortunately the Churchill papers have been so altered and sanitized as to be virtually worthless.
T. Stokes 2002