Who you gonna call? Sheffield Paranormal Investigations!

Twenty years ago, Sheffield Paranormal Investigations was in its undeniable heyday. Founded in 2002 by Brenda Diskin, the group had grown from a team of six to more than 200 in just two years. In the rarefied world of those interested in the other-worldly, it had a “very good reputation,” Diskin claims, pointing out they were often the first investigators invited into Yorkshire’s most allegedly haunted buildings, such as Castle Howard in York. “I think that’s because we always honoured and respected the property and would give the owner full reports of what we found, including whether we thought a lot of it was imaginary or debatable,” she says. Several pages on the group’s extremely retro-looking website warn prospective ghost-hunters that they have a “no drinks, no drugs policy on all their investigations”. 

Diskin, a 75-year-old medium who lives in Parson Cross, regrets that this does have to be mentioned. “I’m disappointed in a lot of the things that go on these days,” she tells me. “People don’t show respect for the actual work.” It’s not that she’s a stick in the mud — if she was investigating a pub, she wouldn’t bat an eye at someone ordering a single pint beforehand. But too much more than that would not only “cloud your judgement when picking up sensitive information” from the other side, it would also invalidate the group’s insurance if someone tripped on the uneven stairs of an old building. “Obviously I don’t mind people having fun — but there’s a time for fun and a time for sitting down and listening and seeing what you pick up on.”

And, over the years, the wealth of investigation reports on the group’s website suggests they’ve picked up on quite a lot. Take their trip to the Abbeydale Picture House in 2005, when Brenda and her son Mike, another accomplished medium, felt the presence of a young woman “dressed in 1930s-style clothing” near the old dressing room. “Apparently, an actress had committed suicide in this area,” the report on their website notes. At first, I assume this must be a mistake — after all, the Abbeydale Picture House was a cinema, not a theatre. But further research reveals Sheffield’s “Picture Palace” once offered “cine-variety” shows, in which variety acts performed between short films, albeit only until 1930. Also present that night was the shade of Lionel, a young boy brought to the Picture House as a birthday treat, who fell on the steps and hit his head on the balcony. “Although this did not kill him, he died later as a result of his injuries,” the report reveals.

I also discover that the group isn’t afraid to poke fun at itself, despite Diskin’s stern words about respecting the work. The report describes how, just as she was about to slip into a hypnotic trance to channel a spirit, a man appeared and announced that he was “Jack from the Abbeydale Picture House,” before disappearing down the stairs to the lower auditorium. “Everyone stared at each other thinking that they had just seen their first full manifestation of spirit,” the report reads. “Carl went to investigate and returned to tell us that it was actually a living person who was to do with the Abbeydale group.”

The Halloween special is now something of a Tribune tradition — a task that has always previously fallen to our founder Dan Hayes. See his piece last year on Cakin’ Night, the Halloween alternative once celebrated on the “wild and windy western fringes of Sheffield,” or his article on the alleged “most haunted road in Britain”: the Stocksbridge bypass. However, as Dan himself points out, one city can only harbour a finite number of spooky sites and tales. Thus, to up the ante this year, I wanted to talk to a professional.

For example, it’s accepted common knowledge that the National Emergency Services Museum is one of the city’s most haunted buildings. According to a Sheffield Guide article, it is plagued by spectral prisoners from when it was a Victorian police station, plus “spirit dogs brushing up against visitor’s legs and even a spook that tries to grope ladies”. The veil between this world and the next is reportedly so threadbare in the building that it’s become a neat little money-spinner for the museum, which offers paranormal investigation groups the chance to hire the place overnight for a minimum of £400. 

Diskin, however, clearly considers its reputation a bit overblown. She claims her group only picked up “bits and pieces” during their visit — there’s not even a report of this trip on the website. “To be quite honest,” she says, “it was not as active as we thought it would be.”

But, as you’d expect from The Tribune, it seems Dan’s reporting on the paranormal activity of Stocksbridge bypass had far more legitimacy. While Sheffield Paranormal Investigations doesn’t appear to have ever formally assessed the road, Diskin does reveal this is where she accidentally “scared the life out of” her partner and the group’s co-founder, Mick Timmins, less than a week after they began dating. “We were sat in the car and apparently I turned to him and I looked different and was speaking in a man’s voice,” she recalls. “He didn’t even know I was a medium when we first met, so it must have been a bit unnerving, although he’s still here 22 years later.” 

So where, in her professional opinion, can boast the dubious honour of being the most haunted place in Sheffield? Diskin gives the question some thought and then, to my amazement, suggests a building in which I have spent a considerable chunk of time, reporting on people allegedly pushed to the brink by malicious presences and nearly losing my own mind in the process. 

Of course, the sinister forces described by many residents of Middlewood Lodge — once the administrative building of a Victorian mental asylum in Hillsborough, now 38 upmarket flats — were not ghosts, but rather their fellow leaseholders. However, given Diskin insists it is “obviously one of the most active” spots she has ever visited, perhaps the schism dividing this gated community is merely a symptom of a deeper supernatural unease. Diskin describes visiting one flat where tenants who had paid six months rent in advance abruptly moved out after just one. “The woman got held down on the bed and her partner, who was quite a big man, couldn’t pull her up,” she claims.

For the sceptics among our readers, allow me to lay out Diskin’s psychic credentials — her “clairvoyant vitae”, if you will. While she only became a full-time medium in 1996 after she was made redundant, Diskin has been making money from her innate gift since was just 15 years old, when she gave her first one-on-one reading. (Her first “platform work” — getting on stage before a crowd and giving out messages from the spirit world to random audience members — took place only a year later.) She tells me she knew from a young age that she had a connection to the dead but that it was only when she got to school and was bullied by the other children that she realised this was considered abnormal. “I was probably three or four years old when I said something to one of my mum’s friends about a lady with one leg shorter than the other wishing her ‘happy birthday’ for tomorrow,” she recalls. “It turned out it was her mother.”

Diskin is certain that both her mother and grandmother shared her psychic abilities, but seemingly never sought to share their gift with others. Though she says she was never actively “discouraged” from embracing her own ability, she notes that UK citizens could technically still be tried for witchcraft up until the 1950s and feels this is why her mother kept her own brushes with the supernatural “very much behind locked doors”. When her young child naively passed on messages from the dead, Diskin suggests, “it was kind of her worst nightmare”. 

A teenage Diskin, however, was desperate to know more, which is why she followed an advertisement in a specialist magazine about the supernatural to a coven of witches in west London, where she grew up. “They did teach me some little bits and pieces, but not the sort of things I really wanted to know about. They were more interested in the witchcraft side of things, like worshipping deities,” she says. “The reason I left is because — obviously we were quite naive in those days — and they suggested we dance naked round a bonfire. That was it, I was gone.” But through another ad, Diskin then found the Rayners Lane Spiritualist Church, a group who met in an old Scout’s Hut and took her under their collective wing, encouraging her to take her talents to the stage. 

I’d been under the impression that a link to the dead must be a pretty difficult relationship to navigate at times. After all, it’s hard to make a good impression on a first date if your suitor’s dead grandmother keeps haranguing you to pass on where she hid the heirloom jewellery. However, Diskin surprises me by revealing that she’s able to keep a professional distance from those who have departed the mortal realm the vast majority of the time. “I only allow anything to come through when I’m in work mode,” she says. “Obviously, occasionally things do slip through but very, very rarely — there’s got to be a real reason for it.” 

When Diskin talks about “work mode,” she’s not referring to some kind of heightened state of consciousness — “going into a trance is something I only do at certain times,” she explains — but literally to the periods she’s in her billable hours. Even the process of inducing a trance seems to involve far less occult pageantry than I had been imagining. “It’s done with deep breathing and relaxation skills,” Diskin explains, in the patient tone of a primary school teacher dealing with an over-excitable child.

What also surprises me is Diskin’s belief that she’s never once received a message from one of her own loved ones. “I’ve had a lot of people pass, far too many over the years, and I’ve not had anything from any of them,” she says. Indeed, the only time a spirit tried to communicate a message to her through another medium, it seems they got the supernatural version of a wrong number. “This lady said ‘I’ve got your dad here, he’s this, this and this,’” Diskin recalls. “And I said ‘he’s not my dad but, if he’s going spare, I’ll have him’.” 

Then again, she muses that it’s possible one of her relatives has tried to get in touch, but simply done it so subtly that she’s written them off as her imagination playing tricks on her. “To be quite honest, I’m probably the worst Doubting Thomas out there,” she claims. While the reports on the group’s website give off the impression that Diskin is constantly swimming upstream against a deluge of apparitions — unable to even turn a corner without bumping into the victim of a tragic fire — she says that, after all these years and “many hundreds of investigations,” she’s only encountered a handful of instances “where we could say without a doubt that it was something supernatural”.

Diskin is keen to point out that psychic abilities are not a necessity when it comes to paranormal investigations. “A lot of people that go out and do them don’t actually have any known psychic abilities,” she says. Her partner Timmins, for example, claims to be “about as psychic as a brick wall” and even he has “seen things” on their expeditions. “But it’s nice to have a medium with you sometimes,” she adds, “because they can pick up things that aren’t seen.” 

Those without the gift have to rely on technology and, fortunately, there is a whole host of tools specially designed to help weed out presences from the beyond. The essentials include night-vision cameras to spot spectral apparitions, digital recorders to capture EVP or “electronic voice phenomena”, thermometers to note sudden cold spots and — most famously — EMF meters to measure the electro-magnetic fields allegedly emitted by the departed. (Diskin claims that she also gives these off when she enters into a trance.)

When she goes to investigate a building, Diskin always brings a “techie” with her — someone who will set up the various pieces of equipment and also guard them against anyone trying to manipulate their finds. This is, she admits, an unfortunate occupational hazard of investigating the paranormal. “People do try and fabricate things,” she says, disappointedly. “At the end of the day, you want it to be as real as possible, so you don’t want people shaking bits of cloth and making dust so you have orbs everywhere.”

While some people mislead deliberately, she notes there are also some that are simply too suggestible for their own good. For example, she and Timmins hosted a Halloween event several years ago at the Concord Sports Centre, during which they told a number of ghost stories, both real and fabricated. “One of the people there decided that the ghost story we made up was real because they were convinced they saw that particular ghost,” she says, laughing. “So now the Concord is haunted by an imaginary ghost.”

But if you fancy joining the group and trying your hand at it, there’s bad news.  Sheffield Paranormal Investigations has gone from a group that once boasted hundreds of professional and amateur ghost-hunters to one that is as dead as the subjects of its investigations. Diskin is focusing on her career as a medium for the minute and says the site remains up as a reference only, although she’s not ruled out the idea of resuming the group’s work in future. 

In the end, what killed it was not the hijinks of the deceased but — surprise, surprise — the bad behaviour of the living. “People started taking liberties,” Diskin says, clearly unwilling to raise these disagreements from their grave by divulging too many specific details. “It all got a bit political.”