Most haunted: The Polar Bear (From Bridgwater Mercury)

Most haunted: The Polar Bear

12:40pm Wednesday 29th April 2009 in News

TWO weeks ago the Mercury reported on haunted happenings in the Polar Bear Fish Bar, in St John Street, Bridgwater.

Since then the shop has been inundated with calls from national press and television crews across the country.

But your Mercury went one step further than the rest - sending fearless investigative reporter James Beal to spend a night at the chippy with a paranormal expert, in an attempt to track down the spooky spirit.

Read on…but don't have nightmares.

GHOSTBUSTERS had Bill Murray, Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis, Poltergeist had a four-foot tall fuzzy-haired medium - but at the Polar Bear Fish Shop in Bridgwater, I had Chris Adams, a paranormal expert of six years.

Together with shop owner Carla Richards, and shop workers Sam Hill and Mandy Stone, this crack team got to work using a raft of gadgets - three CCTV cameras wired up to a laptop, a USB digital temperature recorder, an EMF frequency measurer, a voice recorder and a camcorder.

We started off by asking questions to the dark, watching for the lights on the frequency machine to flicker.

“Show us you're here,” said Carla. Silence. “SHOW US YOU'RE HERE”, she demanded. A loud crack whipped through the room, causing us all to leap from our seats.

Laughter filled the room seconds later - when we realised a fly had got too close to the chippy's fly zapper.

All of our tests were proving fruitless, until at 1am, something happened which even our unflappable expert struggled to explain.

One of our cameras was trained on a Greek “eye”, a small round badge shaped object on the wall, bought by Carla.

The Polar Bear staff say a past owner of the shop, who was Greek, died above the shop - and they claim the eye keeps moving off the wall and onto the floor.

All of a sudden, on the CCTV camera, lines kept appearing below the eye, as if pulling it downwards.

During a genuinely eerie period of about 15 minutes the black line, only visible on the camera, kept appearing and yo-yoing off the base of the eye.

During the remaining hours, more tests brought slight moaning noises, mysterious drops in temperature and footsteps.

At one point, Carla was positive the ghost was holding her hand.

By the time I left the Polar Bear things had calmed, but there were certainly things about the night I found hard to explain.

After the fright night, Chris called me to report his findings.

He put the black lines on the eye down to the camera attempting to focus - but then produced a snap of an eerie white shape he had taken, next to the back door of the chippy.

He said: “I took a couple of pictures here but this was the only one that was like it. The figure looks like a monk to me.

“After the other night, I do believe the shop has some paranormal activity.”

Is it the chip shop ghost? YOU decide.

Consider this reporter seriously spooked.