Spooks take over after joke at club.
By Janet Martin.
A spooky practical joke at a Shropshire night club has sparked off a ghostly aftermath of hauntings and happenings. Now terrified staff are refusing to stay overnight at the Deja Vu Club – a converted chapel with a graveyard outside the back door – in Green End, Whitchurch. Ash trays and glasses have flown off the bar, the club smoke machine set itself off without any power source and several people have experienced an eerie presence.
The haunted happenings started the day after staff played a sophisticated April Fool’s Day prank on a nervous colleague – wiring the premises with twine to create a ghostly illusion of breaking glasses, swinging baskets and banging doors. The next night the joke started to turn sour when disco equipment started up after the power had been switched off. Since then strange noises, events and presences have been a regular occurrence.
The club owners called in a medium – the wife of a member of staff – to try to pinpoint the source of the hauntings but she gave the premises the all-clear.
Assistant manager, Andy Mitchell, discovered later that the chapel had been converted to a club 50 years ago this month and he hopes the ghostly chain of events will end today – the last day of April. But he fears the practical joke could have provoked a longer lasting ghostly revenge. “I would like to think there is some logical reason for all this. I would imagine that we are all suffering from some kind of group hysteria. But we have since discovered that workmen very quickly stopped work when they started to move grave stones in the graveyard at the back some time ago and there have been a few unexplained incidents in the past here. I am quite sceptical about this kind of thing but I would never stop here overnight now and nor would any of the other staff. We all travel home every night. We are pretty shaken up by the whole thing,” Mr Mitchell said.
Shropshire Star, 30th April 1987.