Ghost stories from The True Crime Museum in Hastings, East Sussex, as the museum celebrates 10 years in business

SussexWorld

The True Crime Museum, which is on Hastings seafront, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. In this video, curator Joel Griggs talks about some of the spooky goings-on that have taken place over that 10 year period at the museum.

Transcript

00:00Welcome to the True Crime Museum, set here in the caves at White Rock on the seafront

00:08at Hastings, where we've had a number of strange and paranormal experiences, not least of all

00:13one that happened to me very, very early on, about 10 years ago when we first opened.

00:18And I was here on my own, opening up the museum, looking at a few maintenance issues, of which

00:23there are many, given our setting in these caves.

00:28And I was in the office and I had one eye on the CCTV and was trying to fix some electrics

00:36or something like that, and stopped what I was doing and gazed at the CCTV screen and

00:42swore blind that I saw this figure very confidently walking from the back door, the fire escape

00:49of the pub, through this door here, into the museum.

00:54And it was quite sort of crouched, quite large figure and walked, as I say, very confidently

00:58as if they knew the place.

01:01And I ran in through the main doors and said, hello, can I help you?

01:04And I was quite sort of anxious because obviously all our stuff was in here and I didn't want

01:09anything disturbed or stolen.

01:11And there was nobody here, I checked everywhere and there couldn't have been somebody who'd

01:18come in and then got out before I'd got in here.

01:22And I'm not really a big believer in these things, but it really, really shook me up

01:26to the point where I went and stood on the pavement waiting for another member of staff.

01:32I still think about it.

01:33We didn't look back on the CCTV.

01:35I didn't really want to because I spend quite a lot of time in here on my own opening up

01:40and I thought just if I did see something, it might even freak me out.

01:43So there's no kind of verification for it, but it still shakes me up thinking about it.

01:53There was another occasion, I think we've been open two or three years, when we had

01:59a couple of visitors come along quite early in the morning, they were two nurses from

02:04the local hospital, Conquest Hospital, up the road.

02:08And they came in, they went over to the death chamber, they were in a very, very short time

02:14and they came running out to reception, really, really agitated and very, very disturbed.

02:21I thought that they'd had a bad experience in the museum and were going to ask for a

02:25refund, but far from it.

02:27They'd actually gone on over to one of our exhibits and seen Louis Lefebvre, we have

02:32a skull here of a French criminal who was executed by guillotine in the early 1900s.

02:39And they both swore blind and were quite adamant that he had spoken to them and said, invite

02:45me home, invite me back to your flat.

02:49And they seemed very rational, and as I say, I'm not a particular believer in this kind

02:54of thing, but they were completely adamant and they left shortly thereafter and they

02:59were quite articulate in what they thought had happened.

03:11We have paranormal groups who come to the museum and do investigations generally overnight

03:17and they book the museum and they tell us that they have a lot of activity going on.

03:23There's one particular instance where over here they took a photograph and they found

03:27a figure looming over them.

03:29They bring all sorts of equipment in, which is apparently meant to detect the presence

03:36of spirits and ghosts or whatever they're looking for and I suppose you'd expect it

03:42to be quite active.

03:43It's a very old site and lots has gone on here.

03:47It was a brewery before we opened as a museum and there's been various deaths occurred in

03:54and around back in the day.

03:57So yeah, quite an active place for ghosts and the paranormal.

04:03I'm not sure I believe entirely in the paranormal, but whatever your beliefs, there have been

04:08some very, very strange and unexplained events happening at the True Crime Museum, so come

04:14along and make your own mind up.

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