"In her trance-like state she told me there had been a murder just outside our door..."

There have been tales, just recently, of bumps – and not just during the night – at Unicorn House. For those of us who worked there when it was home to the Chichester Observer it’s hardly surprising. My recollection was that it was a building of strange cold zones, of strange sounds and of the ghost that sent me hurtling out the door.

It’s odd the things we pride ourselves on, isn’t it. I used to think of myself as utterly rational, Oxford PhD and all that. Getting stabbed a few years ago certainly shook that up; but maybe the shaking truly started during our Unicorn House years and the disquieting tales, sensations and feelings that insistently stacked up during our stay. I often used to joke that we were the only newspaper with ghost writers, but breaking the habit of a lifetime, I never managed to find my own joke terribly funny.

We moved into the building in the mid 1990s when the Chichester Observer left its old home in South Street, and to be honest, things felt odd from the start. Confirmation came unexpectedly when one morning our receptionist called me down and said ‘Hey Phil, this sounds like more like a story than an advert.’ In our front office there was a medium who was wanting to advertise her psychic gifts.

I invited her inside and took her upstairs into the editorial department. There I invited her to tell me what she sensed. And goodness she sensed rather a lot. She quickly went into a trance-like state. She started swaying slightly and started writing in an old fashioned script. Before long I found myself witness to a conversation she was having with someone who clearly had a secret he wanted to keep. Bear in mind, I was only hearing half the conversation, the half the medium was speaking. But it was clear she was encouraging someone to divulge something. It was equally clear he wouldn’t.

What you need to know was that Unicorn House is a former pub which had been rebuilt in the 1930s on the site of an inn that had been there for hundreds of years – facts which made sense of what the medium told me once she returned to the here and now. She told me she had been in conversation with the pub’s landlord from the 1920s and that there was something odd about him. She had the distinct impression that he was hiding something, possibly in the cellar. He was shifty, he was evasive, he was holding back. She also told me that there had been a murder outside the door many, many years ago, someone beaten to death, she said. The medium sensed the violence. It still hovered there – and inside the building. She went on to tell me that there was something damaging in the atmosphere, something that would lead to illness and depression for the staff who worked there unless we threw open all the windows and scattered freshly cut flowers all around the building. I remember smirking rather cheaply, thinking that that was hardly likely to happen in a busy newspaper office.

These were remarkable revelations and I remember thinking to myself that no, I really didn't believe that the medium had done extensive research on the building before coming in, just in the hope that she would get to speak to a reporter. It just didn't seem likely. And yet the oddest thing, when I looked it all into it all further, it turned out that she was chillingly spot on. Next to the office there lived a lovely Chichester man, a man I remember with huge affection, a man who was devoted to the task of indexing the Chichester Observer in its earliest years. Sadly he never completed it, but he was always worth a chat. He was a historian by the name of Peter Parish and I went scurrying to him as soon as the medium had left. Peter was surprised at what I told him. His researches had revealed rumours that the landlord in the 1920s had been running guns for the IRA. Could this have been the secret in the landlord’s cellar? Even more chillingly, Peter told me that someone had indeed been beaten to death outside the door to the building in late Victorian times. Even as Peter was telling me this, I remained absolutely convinced: our medium was not someone who had done her homework in the hope of impressing. It seemed to me that we were absolutely in the realms of the inexplicable.

And so it emerged as more and more incidents stacked up in that building. One of our photographers used to tell me that she regularly heard a child crying on the stairs. One of our most level-headed reporters was reduced to a quivering wreck one night when the supernatural intervened. He was alone in the office and just about to head back to our Portsmouth office taking a pile of papers with him. Needing a wee, he placed the papers on the table in our main office and popped to the loo. When he returned, the papers were still in a neat pile but were on the floor. His feet barely touched the ground as he left the premises.

Peter told me more and more about the building. He remained sceptical but interested and told me that our editorial department – an oval-shaped building with a proper sprung dance floor on the first floor – was actually the drinking lounge in the days during the war when the building was the pub of choice for the RAF officers stationed at Tangmere nearby. He floated the suggestion that that very room, where we sat, was possibly the last place that some of these young men were ever happy and relaxed before meeting their death. You might argue, he said, that it made sense that if they were going to come back to anywhere they should come back to here. Who knows…

But despite it all, I insisted I didn't believe a word of it, probably more in the hope that nothing creepy should ever happen to me. And yet it did. One morning, a morning I will never forget. It was a Friday, possibly about 2010 or 2011, I'm not sure, but I got into the office very early and was at my desk by 7am, anxious to get cracking before the phones went mad and the day crashed in. I was sitting there, absorbed in what I was doing, completely focused. And then suddenly the temperature dropped. It sounds the worst possible cliché of ghost stories, but there was a chill that came from nowhere and almost as I realised it, I heard a voice on the other side of the room say simply and very calmly ‘What are you doing.’ And I write that without a question mark because it was not said as a question. I don't know whether it was a female voice or a male voice. It was a neutral voice. All I knew was that somehow it was not part of my world. And that it was not asking a question. It certainly didn't want an answer from me. I froze. Everything went colder still.

I sat there for a few seconds and then I did decent thing, the obvious thing, the thing any self-respecting chap would do. I legged it – which meant the slightly humbling experience of hovering outside on the doorstep for 20 minutes until a colleague arrived. As we wandered in (strength in numbers, you see) I told him what had happened. He said “I thought you looked a bit pale, Phil.” But I couldn’t actually say I had been terrified. Hugely unsettled, certainly. But not terrified. And the reason was because I had felt no connection to that voice. It wasn’t addressing me. It was as if it had been trapped in time, possibly trapped in a loop, but not trapped in my time. Another time. A distant time. I don’t know where it came from. I just knew that I didn’t want to be in the room there with it…

My brother, a consultant psychiatrist, was having none of it. “Phil, mate, you fell asleep. Just for a split second. That’s when you heard it.” The trouble is that I know I didn’t. I know I was wide awake. I know I was absolutely alone. And I know I heard that voice…