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Gayle also taught us the art of dowsing and, using her pendulum technique, we found the site of an old well. Until now, hotel staff knew it was somewhere in the grounds but they had never been able to locate it.

It was eye-opening stuff. Stuff I used to laugh at.

The medium took us around the house and its grounds, with some startling results. In the so-called 'most haunted room', Room 15, she picked up on a woman called Isabelle and her child who had died in a fire at the hall many years ago.

Gayle showed us where she said Isabelle was standing with the little girl.

Sure enough, our Electro-Magnetic Frequency reader - a device which measures electrical energy and is believed by some to detect energy from ghosts - went off the scale at the spot where the mother and daughter were 'standing'.

Inexplicable. To us, at least.

And strange things did happen over the investigation.

I commandeered a few Ouija boards and we 'contacted' a girl who spoke in poor English, and a man from Hock who had visited the hall in Elizabethan times. And the dates and the story he gave us all checked out.

The glass also went crazy when one 'entity' told us to go, and at one point there was only my finger on the glass as it whizzed around the table at breakneck speed.

I certainly wasn't pushing it, so I was puzzled and a little unnerved.

Enthusiasts would say the glass was possessed; sceptics would say it was a collective hallucination. Either way, I have no clue.

During the seance some of us complained of hot flushes, cold blasts, numbness down one side and murmerings in our ears. Tricks of the mind, or proof of ghosts?

We heard bangs upstairs where there was only a vacant attic and, at one stage, night porter Shaun O'Keefe, who has many strange tales to tell, alerted us when all of the fuses in half of the hotel blew. On inspection, however, we could find nothing but darkness.

Noises also escaped from a boarded-up room where no one has set foot for centuries.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't scared - all of our nerves were jangling - but it was also exciting and perplexing.

At about 3am in the pitch black around the back of the hotel, a bat screeched past my ear and I ran screaming back towards the hall.

It was one of those nights - fun, puzzling, exhilarating and pretty spooky at times. We wrapped up at first light.

I still don't know what I believe.

I'm not bold enough to say I definitely experienced the unnatural - but I'm certainly not naive enough to say I didn't.