Otherworld North East Research Society Journal 01 | Page 46

Otherworld North East

jumped at the chance. On Friday 20th January 2006 I visited the Museum and met with
Keith, the site manager, who kindly showed me around, told me more of the recent
sightings in the buildings and showed me various strange photographs that had been
taken there since they started looking seriously into the alleged hauntings of the place.
He told me that a number of apparitions had been seen in the various buildings of the
museum, usually dressed like World War 2 airmen, though there had been at least one
sighting on the site of a man dressed in First World War garb, the latter having been seen
and talked to by a young boy on his visit to the museum with his gran. One memorable
sighting, he said, was when an elderly lady came to visit the museum and told the staff
that she’d had a very informative discussion with a young man when walking around - a
young man dressed in an airforce uniform from the 1940s. Keith also went on to tell me
of a number of visits by spiritualist mediums to the place, and told me a number of them
had sensed spirits within the place, as well as ‘tied’ to certain of the museum exhibits,
including an old engine in Hangar 2 that reputedly had a number of spirits attached to it
that would set off an electromagnetic field meter. It also seemed that other investigation
groups had encountered an aggressive spirit in one of the hangars that frequently threw
stones at them.
Naturally, all this seemed too good to be true, so the investigation date was set for the
following week - especially after I checked the digital photographs I took during the
walkaround and found one with a very peculiar mist anomaly on it!
The site, then called Hylton, first opened in 1916 as a flight station for B-Flight of No. 36
Squadron, and became known as Usworth in 1918 when it was used by A-Flight. On the
13th of June the next year the site became disused and remained so until March 17th 1930
- in the intervening time the only use for Usworth was as a base for Alan Cobham’s Flying

44