I hunted for ghosts in Bodmin Jail with ‘Most Haunted’ star Richard Felix

Two men standing in a room in a prison. The walls are thick and made with real stone. The man on the left wears a black shirt with a cream blazer, and the man on the right has long hair and is wearing a purple and black striped top
-Credit: (Image: Bodmin Jail)


Recently, CornwallLive's spook correspondent P M Buchan visited one of Bodmin Jail’s infamous After Dark sessions featuring guest host Richard Felix. Richard is best known for his role in Living TV’s ‘Most Haunted’ and is renowned as one of the UK’s best-known paranormal historians.

Billed as “one of the UK’s most haunted historical sites”, Bodmin Jail was built in 1779 and remained active until being officially decommissioned and closed in 1927. Thousands of inmates passed through its walls while the jail was operational, with at least 55 people executed by hanging on the site and over a century of reported ghost sightings in and around the building.

Paranormal investigations and ghost hunts have taken place regularly at the site of Bodmin Jail since the 1980s, but delve further into the jail’s history and you’ll find recorded seances and attempts by Victorians to contact the dead there as far back as the late 1800s, while executions were still taking place in the building.

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Passing through many hands in the time since its original closure, Bodmin Jail relaunched in 2021 with a new hotel and visitor attraction that aims to keep the story of the jail and the people who walked through its halls alive for future generations.

During the day, visitors can experience the jail’s Dark Walk, an immersive visitor attraction experience that’s probably the most fun you can have in Cornwall when you’re not at the beach. But by night, every Friday and Saturday people travel from miles around to attend Bodmin Jail After Dark sessions, which run from 9:30pm until 2am and give the opportunity to use paranormal investigation equipment to explore the jail with the lights out and investigate supernatural phenomena.

Last month, in a one-off event, After Dark included guest host Richard Felix, a paranormal historian who appeared on over 120 episodes of the television series ‘Most Haunted’, which first aired between 2002 and 2010, spawning a live show and multiple spinoffs, influencing generations of modern ghost hunters.

A woman holding a skull in her hands. It's very dark and not much can be seen. The figure of another person appears to be emerging from the left
Bodmin Jail's After Dark sessions are not for the faint-hearted -Credit:Bodmin Jail

Bodmin Jail advertised the night’s After Dark with the question “Is Bodmin Jail haunted?” and that was exactly what I hoped to find out when I arrived on Saturday night. The evening began with a talk from Richard titled ‘What is a ghost?’

An entertaining speaker, Richard rattled through theories ranging from the advent of Christianity and the fear of punishment in the afterlife creating the conditions that have led 2000 years of spirits to hang around in our world rather than crossing over to the other side, all the way through to the Stone Tapes theory that many of what we perceive as hauntings are nothing more than residual memories recorded in the fabric of the buildings we inhabit. That was interesting enough, but we had to wait until afterwards to hear Richard answer the question he gets asked around the country.

Was Derek Acorah a fake? The British psychic Acorah, who passed away in 2020, was best known for his role as a medium on ‘Most Haunted’ until controversy struck in 2005 during an episode that was coincidentally filmed at Bodmin Jail, when Acorah claimed to have been possessed by a spirit who had been fabricated by another crew member to catch him out. Acorah left the show under allegations of fakery but continued to host supernatural events and seances over a career that included a stint on Celebrity Big Brother in 2017.

“Was Derek Acorah a fake?” Richard said. “No. He became the country’s most famous medium and was paid well for his work. Television companies said to him, give us ghosts, so he gave them ghosts.”

When After Dark at Bodmin Jail began, a team of paranormal hosts (real people, not ghosts) took us deep into the jail, introducing us to a range of new and old ghost-hunting methods, then sorted us into groups and turned off the lights, leaving us to begin our investigations.

From battery-powered K-II meters, which are designed to light up when they detect electromagnetic fields, to classic Ouija boards where a group of people place their fingers on a planchette that is used to spell out messages, we were given all kinds of different tools to help us contact the dead. Although there are apparently a lot of repeat offenders who return regularly and bring their own equipment, everybody in the group I started in was there for the first time, so there was a lot of initial self-consciousness as we made a start.

I spent a lot of time wandering alone in the dark and exploring former cells, failing to get the hang of dowsing rods and feeling spooked as genuine bats flew past my face in confined spaces.

Our first session, in the old Naval Ward, was a bit of a bust, but when the group came together again, we heard that Richard Felix had led a session in another area of the jail using an upturned glass on a tabletop as a primitive form of Ouija board and made contact with the mother of one of the participants. We didn’t see it, but the people who had been present seemed moved by what had happened.

At around 1am I sat with three strangers in almost complete darkness and used a Ouija board to answer yes/no questions, which started falteringly but became more convincing as we progressed. K-II meters in the room lit up whenever the planchette moved around the board, as we interrogated what seemed to be the spirit of a child brought into the jail when his mother committed a crime, never to leave.

Asking questions aloud and having them answered on the Ouija board was a fascinating experience, but not one that convinced me that Bodmin Jail is haunted or that we spoke to the other side. Whether we unconsciously moved the planchette to answer our own questions, or whether the board acted as a conduit for messages from another plane, I couldn’t think of a meaningful question to ask or a good reason why I was disturbing the peace of the dead.

What surprised me the most about my night in Bodmin Jail was how passionate, enthusiastic and respectful the people working there were. Carl Slaughter and Maddie, the Paranormal Wardens, were hugely knowledgeable about the former occupants of the jail, and when I spoke to one of the other attendees about this, he agreed that “The staff were fantastic, they brought great fun and energy and never pushed us to believe in ghosts.”

Which is ironic, because the K-II meters consistently lit up and all of the equipment became more active whenever Maddie was present … Meeting one of the stars of ‘Most Haunted’ was great fun and Richard Felix’s talks touched on some of the incredible stories that he picks up on his travels to haunted houses around the world, but the staff at Bodmin Jail were what held the event together and made it such a great night. The event didn’t persuade me about the existence of ghosts one way or the other, but I enjoyed spending a night alone in the dark trying to answer the question.

P M Buchan is a writer whose stories have featured in Rue Morgue, Kerrang!, and Starburst. He writes about horror, dark art and the occult here.