I’ve been so distracted by Credo’s release over the last year that I had completely forgotten to finish off the story of one of our most haunted locations! So here it is…. (If you didn’t see the earlier parts then you can find them here PART ONE and PART TWO
But we weren’t defeated just yet. We still resolved to shoot in there, so we put together a small crew and arranged to shoot a full camera test in the house. We were going to be shooting on the Viper Filmstream camera, a new digital format that hadn’t been used for feature filmmaking before. We needed to see how it would perform on location, specifically this location.
So, a few weeks later, we returned to the house on a Saturday morning with ten willing volunteers and over half a million quid’s worth of equipment. And yes, both Toni and I were a little nervous that “he” might make his presence known. We were insured up to our eyeballs but someone later told me that insurance complanies can refuse to pay out if there is a suggestion of paranormal activity involved in any damages!
We started in the basement and did a few standard horror shots of a girl creeping along the passageway and into the room with the hooks in the ceiling! We moved from room to room to see how it would photograph on this digital system.
I have to say, no one felt spooked at all. Maybe it was because of the movie lights pouring in through the windows and the fact that we were all gathered together. We moved upstairs after lunch and grabbed a load of shots using no lights at all, just to check the camera’s exposure range. Before we knew it, the sun had sunk over Marble Arch and the day was over. And what’s more, nothing untoward had happened.
But as the crew packed up and headed home or to the local pub, Toni and I found ourselves overnight prisoners of The Lodge. The problem was that our equipment insurers had insisted the kit was guarded at all times and as it was Saturday night it couldn’t be returned until Monday morning. So a volunteer was required to sit with the kit over the next thirty-six hours and guess who that would be! Very quickly, the high spirits and excitement of the day’s shoot evaporated. As the darkness and silence once more fell on the house, Toni and I took refuge on the top floor with just our torches to ward off any evil spirits!
We didn’t get much sleep that night as we listened to creaks and groans echoing through the house. It’s a very old house, so I guess it moves an awful lot. But our imaginations were racing with every eerie sound, but nothing physically happened to us. My father insisted on taking over for a couple of hours to give us a break and rejoin the land of the living for a couple of hours. He’d bury himself in a book he was very much into while we were gone. When we returned, however, we found him pacing the hallway by the front door waiting for us to come back. His face was white as a sheet and his eyes were out on stalks. He wished us luck and squeezed past us out onto the street. The door slammed behind him and once again we found ourselves alone in the house, preparing for another fear-filled night.
It was probably only because our senses were razor sharp due to our nervousness, but the house sounded even more restless that night. More than that, it sounded impatient, as though it was getting ready to “do” something. Toni and I didn’t sleep a wink that night and we both regretted the EVP session we had conducted a couple of weeks prior. What had we been thinking? Rather than settling the angry spirit, we seemed to have provoked it.
At first light we were both standing on the pavement waiting for the lighting and grip companies to come and pick up their kit. We didn’t want to spend another unnecessary minute in that place if we could help it. Once they had come and gone, we locked the house up and vowed never to return. There was no way we were going to put the health and safety of our cast and crew at risk just for the sake of a film. Even though we couldn’t specifically explain why, we both just had a very, very bad feeling about the place.
And so, it was with a sense of relief that we continued our search for our movie location. Even though we wanted a “haunted” house, we didn’t want one that was really haunted! We eventually came upon two fantastic buildings that we could make out was one enormous building by using some simple editing techniques.
But little did we know that once we took up occupation of these buildings, the production would be plagued with some truly terrifying events. We really should have known better!
To be continued…
