Storyteller: Some of our hotels don’t only have spirits at the bar!

Over the years, I have been invited to take my group to investigate allegedly haunted hotels in Torquay, and we have come up with some rather interesting results.
The other week I took David Hammond with me to revisit some of them, with a view to recording our findings for our South Devon Folklore section, on his Thursday morning Riviera FM radio show.
In the hope of uncovering some further details, I invited my friend, Christine, who is a sensitive, to join us, and as she wasn’t with us on our previous visits, what she came up with, not only confirmed some of the information we had unearthed, but, in certain cases, added significant layers to them.
On our way down to the seafront, we first passed what used to be known as Oscars. At one time, the then owner attended our Monday night meetings, and, after telling us about some odd experiences that had been reported there, she invited us to see if we could help her identify what or who was haunting her property.
Several of us visited the hotel, and as we were exploring the rooms, one of the sensitives picked up on a spirit entity still present in one of the bedrooms. She was able to strike up a conversation with him, during which he relayed his tragic tale, how he had been injured during the Second World War, and had returned home suffering from PTSD.
Having relied upon his parents to take care of him, once they both sadly passed, he felt all alone and unloved in the world. In a state of deep depression, he had booked himself into a hotel in Torquay, the scene of many happy holiday memories with his beloved parents, and proceeded to walk down to the seafront.
Our friend had picked up his spirit quite strongly, and together we were able to follow the route he had taken. Once we reached the beach, she sensed the troubled soul standing there looking out to sea. He had then walked into the water, and never came out.
As we stood outside the same hotel, I had asked Christine if she could pick anything up. She said she was aware of a swirling energy, sensing something unruly and chaotic. It was only after my mention of PTSD during the recording of my story, that she was reminded of a previous investigation, she herself had carried out, in a house where the son of the owner had suffered from a similar affliction, and she had picked up on the same energy pattern. Could this indicate that the spirit of our troubled soldier, still resides in what was once known as Oscars Hotel?
For several years, I was involved in psychic events that were held in various locations throughout Torquay, including The English Riviera Centre, The Grand, The Belgrave Hotel, and, latterly, The Rainbow.
It was here that I was invited to carry out a ghost hunt, to see if any spirits still resided there as unpaying guests. Whilst a Psychic Fayre was held in the bar and ballroom areas, I led those that were interested, around the twisty corridors, to see what we could add to the base line findings that members of my group had already made on previous visits.
My job was then to report back anything of interest, to the assembled guests, as part of the evenings “entertainment “. We turned up several places that were quite active. One of them was the indoor swimming pool area, where a male presence had been picked up on quite frequently. It turned out that, in the recent past, a male guest had gotten into difficulties there and drowned.
The ballroom area gave some of the sensitives present, images of nurses, men in uniforms and sick people in hospital beds. A bit of research had shown the fact that, during the war, many large buildings in Torbay, such as Oldway Mansion and the hotels, had been requisitioned by the MOD to be used as makeshift hospitals, for the injured and the dying, as they returned from the fighting.
We even got to visit one of the neighbouring hotels, that had reports of unusual activity centred around some basement storage areas, which had been used as a mortuary during that same time period. Our recent visit revealed that this ballroom area has since been converted into more guest rooms. I would love to know if those guests are still troubled by nurses and wounded soldiers during their stay.
The most fascinating finding from our investigations, and the most disturbing, came from one of the upper levels, and involved an old staircase. Standing at the top, many people reported smelling smoke. Others felt there had once been a fire there, that had involved fatalities.
More details were gradually added, until we came up with a scenario where the upper floor had once been used as a nursery. During this fire, one of the nannies had tried to flee clutching a child, had fallen down the stairs, and both had perished in the flames.
As yet, my research hasn’t found any evidence of such a tragic event, but it is certainly true that these large hotels were once summer holiday homes for wealthy families from the big cities, who would move their households to the seaside for the season, and would have the servants, including nannies and their charges, stowed away on the upper floors.
I was hoping that Christine might be able to corroborate details of this story during our recent visit, and she didn’t disappoint. Having been given permission to wander the public areas of the hotel by the staff, I eventually managed to locate the relevant staircase, and I set Christine to work.
After a while she became interested in one of the rooms on the top floor. Sadly, it was locked, so we couldn’t get her any closer, but from outside she could see a gentleman, in period dress, taking a match from a small matchbox, striking it, and setting fire to some pieces of paper, then just letting then fall. He didn’t make any attempt to extinguish the flames.
Although she couldn’t smell any smoke, Christine did pick up on a distressed female presence that she associated with the resulting fire. This latest evidence, that the fatal fire might have been started deliberately, sheds a whole new light on the history of the building, and I feel more detailed research is needed. Hopefully, I will have more to report in due course.