Some reported hearing children crying or screaming. Others claimed they sensed a presence, heard phantom footsteps or felt something touch them. Braithwaite spoke to many of them and says the striking thing is that while most paranormal reports are fleeting, corner-of-the-eye experiences, the strange events in the Tapestry Room typically lasted from 20 minutes to an hour.

Braithwaite and his colleagues have checked out the room with what they believe is the most sensitive system ever used for this purpose. It consists of two magnetometers that can detect magnetic fields as weak as 0.5 nanoteslas, in three directions, 250 times per second.

After investigating many different areas, the team found the most complex fields coming from the Tapestry Room. They homed in on an iron mesh supporting the mattress, which strongly distorts local background magnetic fields. Crucially, if someone lies in the bed and turns from side to side, they jostle the mesh, causing the field near the pillows to fluctuate wildly, in a way that is similar in magnitude and complexity to the fields in Persinger's experiments. "It's highly complex, varying considerably across space and time," says Braithwaite, who described the results last month at a conference held at Muncaster Castle by UK-Skeptics.
When you lie in the bed and turn over, the magnetic fields fluctuate wildly

So might these fields have contributed to some of the spooky experiences in the Tapestry Room? Braithwaite aims to test this by reproducing them in a customised room, and to that end he's teaming up with Chris French, who studies anomalistic psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

French has experience in frightening people in the name of science. In 2005, his team created a dimly lit, featureless white room where people could be exposed to simple sine-wave magnetic fields and low-frequency sound waves, which have also been linked with ghostly experiences (New Scientist, 26 July 2003, p 30).

One at a time, 80 or so volunteers were sent into the room, where they spent 50 minutes, subjected to either the magnetic fields, infrasound, both or neither. For ethical reasons they had to be told beforehand that they might experience some odd sensations, but were given no further details.

More than 90 per cent of participants reported unusual sensations, including feeling detached from their bodies and hearing ticking sounds. About 20 per cent reported sensing a presence, while nearly 10 per cent reported terror.

Disappointingly, however, the volunteers were just as likely to report odd sensations regardless of whether the magnetic fields and infrasound were switched on. In other words, they just got spooked by being shut in the eerie room. "If you say to suggestible people, you might experience something weird in here, some of them will," says French.

He has not given up, however; he and Braithwaite plan to test whether the more complex magnetic fields produced by the Tapestry Room bed frame will do the trick. They hope to secure funding to rig a new room with concealed coils that can generate such complex fields.

They will also attempt to quantify the relative importance of different psychological factors that spook people by adding other ingredients like drafts, sinister paintings and creepy furniture.

I can certainly vouch for the importance of atmosphere. When it came to my own stay in the Tapestry Room, I'm afraid to say it got the better of me: in the end, I couldn't bear being in there alone so I invited over my partner, who was staying nearby.

Bolstered by his company, my fears dwindled. We heard no wailing children nor sensed anything supernatural. Jester Tom Skelton seemed to be out of town for the night, and that was just fine by me.

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