Downtown ghost on the graveyard shift.
Cleaner spooked by case of the moving ashtrays.
By Sue Corbett.
Radio chiefs have called in a ghost buster to their Downtown station. Things have been going bump in the night – not to mention during the day – at the Newtownards based DTR. The latest in a series of ghostly happenings has been branded the ‘moving ashtrays incident’ by staff there.
“It happened just shortly after 7am as I was tidying around the boardroom as usual,” cleaner Sally Graham told Sunday Life. “I’d placed two ashtrays on either side of a pile of coasters and then moved to the other end of the room to polish over there. I heard a clatter and thought someone had come into the room. I turned around and saw the two ashtrays on top of each other. It really spooked me.”
But that’s just one event in a long list of ghost stories reported by Downtown staff. Others include: Hearing a woman’s screams when no-one else was in the building; A ghostly hand being run over the top of one presenter’s head in an empty corridor; Cats affectionately known as “the Downtown cats” mysteriously disappearing at 3pm every afternoon and not returning until darkness falls; A deathly coldness, lasting just a few seconds, in the recording studio, despite the heat being at full blast; Mysterious knocking at doors in the dead of night; A face seen at the security hut window, yet disappearing immediately.
“Almost everyone has a story to tell. It’s really spooky,” said presenter, Jackie Flavella. “I will never forget the night I was walking down the corridor alone in the early hours of the morning when I felt a hand run over the top of my head. On another occasion, a presenter had to recover his composure when the studio went really cold and he had a really strange feeling of someone else being in there too. A technician admitted to being so frightened by an unexplained feeling that he ran up the corridor and locked the door.”
Locals close to Downtown’s radio station say that the studios are built on the site of the old gallows and graveyard. And in a bid to discover more about the haunting experiences, DTR bosses have asked ghost investigator, Joanne Braniff, to pay them a visit. Joanne will be in the studio with Candy Devine next Monday night at 10pm for a special programme about the ghostly phenomenon.
Downtown cleaner, Sally Graham says she was spooked early one morning by two ashtrays moving when nobody was near them.
Sunday Life, 1st February 1998.