THERE was a ghoulish shock in store for Gazette cameraman John Myers when he downloaded photographs taken during a ghost hunt at the famously haunted Red Lion pub in Avebury.

One of his photographs taken of a mirror in the pub restaurant shows a gruesome reflection of a bald, pale faced man streaked with blood.

The photographer was unable to explain how his digital Nikon camera had captured the reflection when there was no-one even faintly resembling the man in the building.

Mr Myers had gone to the Red Lion on Saturday to cover a vigil by a group of supernatural investigators. He remained with them for some time and while in the pub restaurant, where the lights were turned off, he took random pictures.

The cameraman said: "I was just taking random shots around the room to see if I could pick up any orbs or anything."

The "orbs" he was referring to are little balls of light occasionally spotted by ghost hunters and sometimes seen and photographed near crop circles.

He didn't get around to downloading his photographs until two days later when he made the gruesome discovery of the face. Pub landlord Richard Bounds' first reaction to the photograph was: "Bloody hell."

Mr Bounds said: "There was a guy murdered here hundreds of years ago apparently, the original owner.

"It's said that he hid peasants in the cellars but then double crossed them. He was murdered so perhaps it's him."

Mr Bounds said there had been a number of recent spooky happenings in the pub included one his staff feeling somebody touch her. "This happened two or three weeks ago and she was scared rigid," said the licensee.

He said he had never seen anything like the Gazette picture before and added: "It's very bizarre."

Mr Myers was not the only one to pick up unexplained sightings during the vigil by the Swindon-based group, Paranormal Site Investigators.

Organiser Dave Wood said: "Several of us saw strange lights and we did catch some orbs of light on our cameras. Three or four of us picked up the presence of a child or children in one of the upstairs bedrooms and the staff said there had been reports of ghosts of children seen in this bedroom before."

In the cellar, said Mr Wood, some of the psychic investigators taking part in the vigil picked up the presence of a man acting violently with a knife.

He said: "We discovered subsequently from talking to the staff that a man had been murdered in the cellar with a knife several hundred years ago."

While one group was in the cellar a bottle-top remover that had been fixed to the bar on the ground floor was hurled down the stairs. "That brought a couple of blood-curdling screams from our group," said Mr Wood.

One spook who did not put in an appearance for the investigators was the pub's most famous ghost of all, Florrie.

She is said to be the ghost of a woman murdered by her soldier husband when he returned home from the Civil War and found she had been unfaithful.

When former Blue Peter presenter Yvett Fielding went to the pub to film an episode of the TV series Most Haunted she ran from one of the rooms screaming after "something" touched her hair.

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