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.
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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.