Season II - The First Event - Southrun 9
Saturday 22nd November 2003
See Route Details for
Southrun Haunted
Download
Haunted, Video Footage,
10Mb AVI / Div X 5
Music from the video
Running Back to You
Performed by and Copyright Steve Diment
We started with a little rain, but luckily the rain moved on and the mist and fog set in making our run so much more atmospheric. This is the first Southrun that has had a change in format. We started at the Cotswold Heritage Centre in Northleach. With everyone ready we head off into the countryside B Roads. Just 5 minutes in, with three of us at the front of the run, stopped in the middle of nowhere, we had lost the rest of the pack. Concerned after around ten minutes, with a quiet road the rest caught up, we found out later a mistake was made at the Roman Villa turning, very easily done. Continuing onwards, the roads were amazingly quiet allowing us to pick up a fair pace but carefully avoiding the wildlife, which seemed unaffected by our presence in the area.
Pushing further into the deeper country side of the Cotswolds, I myself take a sharp wrong turning and join further back in the pack but got to follow the black Excel and had the pleasure of listening to the glorious V8 Sport 350
Esprit which growled in front of the Excel. Furthering on, the mist and fog crept in on some of the A and B roads as we approached Woodchester and Nympsfield. The family of sharp hair pin bends didn’t seem to bother our line of sports cars giving us all a view of the others as they either passed on the hair pin bend below or passing on the one above.
The fog on final stretch towards Woodchester mansion quickly got thicker adding to the build up of the atmosphere, especially so as we entered the gates to the vast landscape and driveway to the mansion.
I decided to test the one-mile driveway down to the mansion and sacrifice my own car and driving ability before anyone else attempted the trip. I entered the driveway passing the other Lotus owners in the top car park as you will see in the video with my brother Steve in the passenger seat. The drive way slowly descends downwards as if we were submersing into the unknown as the fog came in through the tree lined gothic driveway to the mansion.
The road was bumpy and dirty but at no point did the Elise bottom out although it was like steering on a stream of mud. We arrived at the mansion as it appeared through the final bend. Everything was fine but with no signal on my mobile phone to inform the others to come down or jump in the mini bus, it was time to head back up. As we arrived back up at the top car park, everyone seemed to be looking at me as if to stare the words “we aren’t taking our cars down there”. On getting out of the Elise, I could see why, it looked like an Elise 49, except with a blue top and a pebble dashed mud lower half. Four Lotus owners did decide to brave it back down including myself, which was one of two Azure Elise, the real Elise 49 and the Esprit Sport 350 with the mini bus with the rest of the group down to the mansion.
The mansion was cold and dark. Once we finished taking our Lotus and mansion pictures, our tour guides split us into two groups and took us around describing the history of this amazing unfinished and mysterious masterpiece. The further the tour went on, the darker it came until eventually as we entered the second and third floor of the inner room, we became reliant on torches and night vision camcorder. At one point we were using a stair case in complete darkness, and with few torches I attempted my decent using just the camcorder screen alone, which made me realise why they have so much trouble on the Most Haunted programme when they enter similar completely dark rooms. See the video footage to get a feel for the tour.
Eventually returning to the downstairs area and the main room for food and drink we joined up with the other tour group and a log fire.
Full marks to our volunteer tour guides for providing a nice insight on their own time and during the hours of darkness, which made the evening so much more eventful for us. Eventually most headed off in two groups for the mini bus ride up.
I’m sure some of you are wondering if anything strange happened being that it is an apparently haunted location. Our tour guide in our group did tell us of a figure that people do see in one of the windows from the court yard, though they believe her visits are related to a time before the mansion was built, but we didn’t see her. I did at one point aim my camera from an upstairs window down to an outside location and thought I may have seen a figure, but I think this was a trick of the light and will have to review the footage. Tony (VVTli Celica), his full charged batteries for his digital camera were prematurely drained when we entered the mansion. For those of you who know the strange happenings I had while planning this run, well, a little of it happened on the actual run which was strange. Rick had also e-mailed me some of his still pictures from his camera shortly after the run. These showed plenty of Orbs, these are unexplained light anomalies. I will publish these soon along with some extra video footage. Other than that, not a lot so far, but I will be watching the video footage properly and see if anything turns up.
I’d like to thank all of you for coming along. I’ve had some positive response so far for this event and I hope you enjoyed it. Please let me know what you liked, what you didn’t and I can get to thinking about what the next run will be and if another is worth doing. I certainly enjoyed the run, it was different. A big thank you to Wendy at the Mansion who unfortunately couldn’t make it due to being away, but who entrusted us at the mansion and of course to the completely voluntary tour guides and their knowledge, along with Andy the Caretaker who bravely lives at the back of the mansion. Thanks to my brother (the driving instructor!) for being my passenger, navigator and for letting us have the music for the main video for Southrun 9. We mustn’t forget Craig Tomes (Honda S2000) for whom without we wouldn’t have had the route and took me out a month before to get this put together and create another stunner. I suppose we should also thank the Cotswold Heritage Centre who still unknowingly let us use their car park at the start.
Will I do another Haunted style run? This is really up to you, it doesn’t mean the next one will be, but whether you attended Haunted or whether you missed this one and would like to do another, please let me know, if I get enough feed back, I’ll research for another location, and may be we can do something a little more involved.
I hope to see you all at the next.
Craig D.
